Elena Ray
Nature, Amazon, shamaness, blood mysteries, adventuress, huntress, lover of wilderness, lady of the beasts, Artemis
Adrasteia was also an epithet applied to Rhea herself, to Cybele, and to Ananke, as her daughter. These four were especially associated with the dispensation of rewards and punishments.
Adrasteia was also the name of a mountain goddess, worshiped in Hellenized Phrygia (north-western Turkey), perhaps derived from a local Anatolian mountain goddess. Her name is inscribed in Greece from around 400 BC as a defender of the righteous.
Nature, Amazon, shamaness, blood mysteries, adventuress, huntress, lover of wilderness, lady of the beasts, Artemis
Adrasteia was also an epithet applied to Rhea herself, to Cybele, and to Ananke, as her daughter. These four were especially associated with the dispensation of rewards and punishments.
Adrasteia was also the name of a mountain goddess, worshiped in Hellenized Phrygia (north-western Turkey), perhaps derived from a local Anatolian mountain goddess. Her name is inscribed in Greece from around 400 BC as a defender of the righteous.
https://www.ancient.eu/image/8783/bust-of-goddess-cybele-from-gordium/
https://www.ancient.eu/image/12799/phyrigian-goddess-cybele-ankara/
https://www.ancient.eu/image/3623/cybele/
https://www.ancient.eu/image/12799/phyrigian-goddess-cybele-ankara/
https://www.ancient.eu/image/3623/cybele/
https://ionamiller2017.weebly.com/mythic-forms.html
MYTHOLOGICAL STUDIES
"Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature." --Marsilio Ficino
"Open the door of the soul so that in your order and in your sense can flow the dark currents of chaos. Marry chaos with what is ordered and give life to the divine child, to the superior sense that is beyond sense and nonsense." -C.G.Jung, red book
MYTHOLOGICAL STUDIES
"Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature." --Marsilio Ficino
"Open the door of the soul so that in your order and in your sense can flow the dark currents of chaos. Marry chaos with what is ordered and give life to the divine child, to the superior sense that is beyond sense and nonsense." -C.G.Jung, red book
Göbekli Tepe, engraving of a female person from layer II (photo Dieter Johannes, DAI); a female figure in a squatting position (likely giving birth) but with a most peculiar mushroom-ic head. This is interpreted as a representation of the creative Earth goddess.
Erich Neumann: Theorist of the Great Mother
arion 13.3 winter 2006
CAMILLE PAGLIA
The ancient Great Mother was a dangerously dual figure, both benevolent and terrifying, like the Hindu goddess Kali. Neumann saw this clearly, but Campbell and the goddess’feminist boosters did not: they sanitized and simplified, stripping away the goddess’ troublesome residue of the archaic and barbaric. Neumann cited and praised Bachofen’s pioneering work in prehistory but was careful to note that the latter’s idea of matriarchy (as Neumann puts it in The Great Mother) must be “understood psychologically rather than sociologically.” While quoting Bachofen in The Origins and History of Consciousness, Neumann insists that the matriarchal stage“refers to a structural layer and not to any historical epoch.” https://www.bu.edu/arion/files/2010/03/Paglia-Great-Mother1.pdf
Psilocybe semilanceata, commonly known as the liberty cap, is a species of fungus which ..... Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Ukraine and Pakistan.
Jung’s first use of the term 'collective unconscious' appears in Symbols of Transformation (Jung, 1912, CW, 5, p. 177n), what he initially referred to as a “supra‐individual universality” (p. 177), “the archaic heritage of humanity” (p. 178), the birth of “spirit” (p. 413). Here Jung makes a bold claim: spirit (Geist) comes from a collective unconscious and appears as archetypes, both as “primordial images” and “primary forms” (p. 413). In his Foreword to the 4th Swiss Edition, Jung concludes that “The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years … from the perennial rhizome … the root matter” of the unconscious, “the mother of all things” (p. xxiv). In other words, mind and its contents come from a preontological substrate that conditions the coming into being of all psychological events up to our current times.
Erich Neumann: Theorist of the Great Mother
arion 13.3 winter 2006
CAMILLE PAGLIA
The ancient Great Mother was a dangerously dual figure, both benevolent and terrifying, like the Hindu goddess Kali. Neumann saw this clearly, but Campbell and the goddess’feminist boosters did not: they sanitized and simplified, stripping away the goddess’ troublesome residue of the archaic and barbaric. Neumann cited and praised Bachofen’s pioneering work in prehistory but was careful to note that the latter’s idea of matriarchy (as Neumann puts it in The Great Mother) must be “understood psychologically rather than sociologically.” While quoting Bachofen in The Origins and History of Consciousness, Neumann insists that the matriarchal stage“refers to a structural layer and not to any historical epoch.” https://www.bu.edu/arion/files/2010/03/Paglia-Great-Mother1.pdf
Psilocybe semilanceata, commonly known as the liberty cap, is a species of fungus which ..... Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Ukraine and Pakistan.
Jung’s first use of the term 'collective unconscious' appears in Symbols of Transformation (Jung, 1912, CW, 5, p. 177n), what he initially referred to as a “supra‐individual universality” (p. 177), “the archaic heritage of humanity” (p. 178), the birth of “spirit” (p. 413). Here Jung makes a bold claim: spirit (Geist) comes from a collective unconscious and appears as archetypes, both as “primordial images” and “primary forms” (p. 413). In his Foreword to the 4th Swiss Edition, Jung concludes that “The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years … from the perennial rhizome … the root matter” of the unconscious, “the mother of all things” (p. xxiv). In other words, mind and its contents come from a preontological substrate that conditions the coming into being of all psychological events up to our current times.
Maternal Ancestors
They are the ancient mothers
in the distance not buried
lord of days and enigmas
guardians of the fires
invoked deities
regenerate moons
trees of life
pomegranates blood beans
and seeds of heroes
soothsayers and warriors
invoked deities
they live with us
mothers of mothers
eagles eagles
master of alphabets
oracle narrators
keepers of dreams
and secrets seers titled
invoke deities.
--Carla Collesei Billi, cit. In Mara Forghieri, Dark Mothers, Vivarium Library.
They are the ancient mothers
in the distance not buried
lord of days and enigmas
guardians of the fires
invoked deities
regenerate moons
trees of life
pomegranates blood beans
and seeds of heroes
soothsayers and warriors
invoked deities
they live with us
mothers of mothers
eagles eagles
master of alphabets
oracle narrators
keepers of dreams
and secrets seers titled
invoke deities.
--Carla Collesei Billi, cit. In Mara Forghieri, Dark Mothers, Vivarium Library.
While the lion also often manifests as a symbol of male power, as in the Egyptian Sphinx with a man’s head and a lion’s body, it frequently assumes female form, as a lioness, as in the above example of the Sphinx of the Oedipus myth. Four significant goddesses, sometimes mother, sometimes anima figures, come to mind: Inanna, Durga, Cybele, and Sekhmet, lioness goddesses of ancient Mesopotamia, India, Anatolia, and Egypt, respectively.
Cybele, a mother goddess from Anatolia, sits on a throne flanked by two lionesses. She is reputed to have sprung from the earth. She loves the god, Atis, and drives him to such madness that he castrates himself and dies. She is most famous for her priests, who reputedly castrated themselves in a wild trance while worshipping her (Morford & Lenardon, 2003, pp.179, 364), and for her initiates, who were washed in the blood of a sacrificed bull and thereby born into a new life (Morford & Lenardon, 2003, pp.180, 364). According to Morford and Lenardon, the myth “depicts the destruction of the subordinate male in the grip of the eternal and all-dominating female, through whom resurrection and new life may be attained” (2003, p.180).
https://www.academia.edu/1229474/The_Phrygian_Background_of_Kybele?email_work_card=title
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230105515_5
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers."
-John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (21 Apr 1838-1914)
It's not what you intend it for but where that instinct comes from.
-John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (21 Apr 1838-1914)
It's not what you intend it for but where that instinct comes from.
KYBELE: WILD AT HEART
Body of Images; Wilderness of Soul
by Iona Miller, (c)2019
Sing to me O Muse, clear voiced daughter of great Zeus,
Of the mother of all gods and of all men.
In the din of rattles and drums and in the sound of pipes
she delights. In the howl of wolves and the roar of glaring lions, in resounding mountains and wooded glands she finds her joy
(Homeric Hymn 14).
Body of Images; Wilderness of Soul
by Iona Miller, (c)2019
Sing to me O Muse, clear voiced daughter of great Zeus,
Of the mother of all gods and of all men.
In the din of rattles and drums and in the sound of pipes
she delights. In the howl of wolves and the roar of glaring lions, in resounding mountains and wooded glands she finds her joy
(Homeric Hymn 14).
A GODDESS OF THE WILD THINGS
BODY OF IMAGES
“The soul is not an object, but a way of knowing objects.”
-James Hillman
“It is as if we did not know, or else continually forgot, that everything of which we are conscious is an image, and that image is psyche.” -C.G. Jung, Commentary on "The Secret of the Golden Flower." CW 13, p.50.
“Meaning is what we give to the image. Significance is what the image gives to us(egos). The archetype’s inherence in the image gives body to the image, the fecundity of carrying and giving birth to insights. The more we articulate its shape the less we need interpret.” -James Hillman, Egalitarian Typologies and the Perception of the Unique,p. 32
Jung introduced the notion that archetypes, ancient gods and goddesses, are dynamic patterns that eternally operate in our lives and our world. They are the primal driving forces of humanity and nature. Their metaphysical influence pervades the whole spectrum of domains from cosmic to subatomic. Theirs is the fabric that weaves Above and Below together, seamlessly, as a holographic whole.
Our worldviews, basic assumptions about the way the world is, are grounded and sustained with mythic patterns which condition our beliefs, thoughts, feelings and actions. Personal mythology is a vibrant infrastructure that informs your life, consciously or unconsciously. Fixed patterns of belief and behavior function as trances.
Living mythically means becoming aware of our personal and collective origins. Their articulation opens up new experiential space. These forms structure our awareness; in them we find the root cause of our difficulties and our healing. Solutions to intrapersonal conflict is a first step toward solving global conflict.
Ralph Waldo Emerson described power as residing in "the moment of transition from a past to a new state." Empowerment is effected through the act of transition. It is embedded in numerous subtle gradations of trance as ways of knowing and being. The goal of ecstatic transport, as in Tantra, is possession by the goddess.
By directing our attention both inwardly and outwardly, we connect with the eternal source of wisdom and our intuition comes to the fore. There is an inherent process of changing from the inside out. The deepest self transforms downline faculties such as beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior, as well as psychosomatic condition. Thus, resilience can be seen as the ability to dynamically change at the most fundamental level toward a more adaptive way of being in the world.
We can develop a sense of wholeness on all three levels of identity: 1). the egoic, an adaptive cohesive sense of self identity with and yet separate from the world; 2). the existential, an egoic state requiring a more coherent sense of our individuated state within the human condition; and 3). the transpersonal, which transcends the egoic, existential identities into a heightened awareness of essential unity with all human beings, living things, and perhaps the cosmos.
Panpsychism, in philosophy, is either the view that all parts of matter involve mind, or the more holistic view that the whole universe is an organism that possesses a mind (see pandeism and panentheism). A stronger and more ambitious view than animism or hylozoism, all things are alive. Panpsychism believes constituent parts of matter are composed of some form of mind and are sentient.
Psychologist Rollo May suggests that it is the loss of our primary mythic narrative that has created the widening existential void that is crippling Western Civilization. “Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home, and one would indeed clutch for other cultures to find some place at some time a ‘mythic womb.’”
Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche. Dr. May suggests myths are “involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings.” According to Jung, “They are the psychic life of the primitive tribe, which immediately falls to pieces and decays when it loses its mythological heritage, like a man who has lost his soul.”
Marsilio Ficino said, "Creation is a more excellent act than illumination." Whatever we make of our lives — hopefully something soulful — matters more than our bare understanding and illumination."
James Hillman (2006) observes, the ideas advanced in this thesis about interconnections with the wider world of nature have been perhaps “repressed” but have still continued to exist throughout the history of Western thought:
"It is affirmed in differing ways in Plato, the Stoics, Plotinus, and in Jewish and Christian mystics; it appears splendidly in the Renaissance psychology of Marsilio Ficino, in Swedenborg; it is revered in Mariology, Sophianic devotion, in the Shekinah. We find notions of it in German and British Romantics and American Transcendentalists; in philosophers of various sorts of panpsychism from Leibniz through Pierce, Schiller, Whitehead, and Harshorne . . .
Anima mundi reappears in further guises as ‘the collective unconscious’ in Jung, as physiognomic character in the Gestalt psychology of Koffka and Kohler, in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, of van den Berg, . . . and of course, ever and again in the great poets, specifically of this century in Yeats and Rilke, Williams and Stevens." (pp. 47-48)"
Any time in the wilds of Earth now brings solace, without which we lose our psychological and spiritual footing as the ongoing litany of loss, corruption, degradation, aggression, death and trauma that is the daily news assaults us all. It is in nature, and loving nature with all our hearts on a daily basis, where we find the equanimity necessary to continue walking forward into our increasingly broken world.
"Even if the recollection of mythology is perhaps the single most characteristic move shared by all 'archetypalists', the myths themselves are understood as metaphors—never as transcendental metaphysics whose categories are divine figures. ... Myths do not ground, they open." [James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account. Dallas: Spring, 1983, p. 20]
Hermann Hesse, Sometimes; translated by Robert Bly
Ancient relief of Mother Cybele and her son Attis at the Museo Archeologico in Venice. Attis wears the Phrygian "Liberty Cap" symbolizing the Soma mushroom.
Kybele 2020
ARTEMIS EPHESUS & CYBELE
by Iona Miller, (c)2019
THE WILD FEMININE &
PRIMORDIAL LIFE CYCLE
Infancy, Childhood, Maturity, & Age
by Iona Miller, (c)2019
THE WILD FEMININE &
PRIMORDIAL LIFE CYCLE
Infancy, Childhood, Maturity, & Age
Go to the Phrygian shrine of Cybele, to her groves
Where the voice of cymbals sounds, the tambourines rattle,
Where the Phrygian piper sings with the deep curved pipe,
Where Maenads wearing ivy throw back their heads,
Where they practice the sacred rites with sharp yells.
Where they flutter around the goddess’s cohort:
It is there we must go with our rapid dances.
–Catullus, Poem 63 (circa 60 BCE)
Both the name and the visual image of the Phrygian goddess first appear in central Anatolia (modern Turkey), during the early first millennium BCE and spread from there, first to the Greek cities on the west coast of Anatolia, and then to mainland Greece and to Greek cities in the western Mediterranean. The goddess's cult was imported into Rome at the end of the third century BCE, where she became an important figure in Roman religion.
Anacharsis the Scythian philosopher was killed by his brother Saulius while he was performing sacrifice to the goddess Cybele.
The imaginal activity of the ancients had a mythological dimension. Many of the supernatural figures and mythological events which appear in later religious traditions, were probably discoveries of the Stone Age. For millennia Mother Earth gave birth by herself, through parthenogenesis. Born from the Earth, humans returned there when they died.
Both Jung and Hillman agree that the soul's goal often has less to do with life than death which may be part of its aim. The death mother is nature's shadow. If we can understanding this consciousness, as well as the forms of the world in their manifestation, then we have taken a step forward that allows us to restore consciousness by giving it back its true dimension.
Agrarian cultures developed notions of circular time and cosmic cycles, a new orientation to both inner and outer life. Settled life organizes the "world" differently from a nomadic life, according to the seed cycle of death rebirth, earth and sky, periodic renewal. The mystery of birth, death, and rebirth is the rhythm of vegetation and its mythological dramas, including mythical themes of gods who die and return to life, the cosmic cycle of chthonian fertility and life/death/postexistence.
Root metaphors of neolithic culture include: 1) Cults of the dead and of fertility, 2) the "mystery" of vegetation. 3) hope of a postexistence. 4) A cosmology, a "center of the world" and inhabited space as an imago mundi.
" Every change in the course of our lives is a metaphor for death and rebirth, it's a passage from the narrow. And every death and every birth is, in turn, a metaphor for love. Everything is image, reflection, echo of an original love. Giving yourself to that love is the mission of our soul. [...] Making soul is to be on the side of dreams, shadows, ancestors, diseases, understood as a call of love of the soul, and death, which is love. Making soul is to stand on the side of the daimon, the invisible side of things, the other side of the Great Threshold. To make soul is to be with the images of the soul, with the eidola, the gods, and from there, from that perspective, look to the me and its needs. To make soul is to be in the sacred, in the ability to be and pleasure, in fire, in Tapas, in psychic warmth, in the bliss of which this being is a source. The best way to start the day
Selene Calloni Williams, James Hillman. The path of "making soul" and deep ecology
Selene Calloni Williams, James Hillman. The path of "making soul" and deep ecology
Homeric Hymn 14 to the Mother of the Gods (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C7th to 4th B.C.) : "[The Meter Theon] is well-pleased with the sound of rattles and of timbrels, with the voice of flutes and the outcry of wolves and bright-eyes lions, with echoing hills and wooded coombes."
Pindar, Dithyrambs Heracles the Bold (trans. Sandys) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) : "In the adorable presence of the mighty Meter Theon (Mother of the Gods), the prelude is the whirling of timbrels; there is also the ringing of rattles, and the torch that blazeth beneath the glowing pine-trees. There, too, are the loudly sounding laments of the Naides, and there the frenzied shouts of dancers are aroused, with the thong that tosseth the neck on high."
Stesichorus, Fragment 59 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric III) (C7th to 6th B.C.) : "An ox-eating lion came to the cave-mouth; with the flat of his hand he struck the great timbrel he was carrying, and the whole cave rang with the din: the forest beast could not abide the holy booming of Kybele and raced quickly up the forested mountain, afraid of the goddess' half-woman servant [i.e. a eunuch priest]--who hung up [as a dedication] for Rheia these garments and yellow locks.
Telestes, Frag 810 (from Athenaeus, Scholars at Dinner) (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric V) (C5th B.C.) : "The first to sing to the pipes the Phrygian tune of the Mater Oreias (Mountain Mother) beside the mixing-bowls of the Greeks were the companions of Pelops." [N.B. Pelops was a mythological Lydian prince who won the throne of Elis and the Peloponnese.]
Greek Lyric V Anonymous, Fragments 1030 (from Hephaestion, Handbook on Metres) (trans. Campbell) (Greek lyric B.C.) : "Gallai [eunuch priests] of the Meter Oreias (Mountain Mother), thyrsos-loving, racing, by whom instruments and bronze cymbals are clashed."
Aristophanes, Birds 737 ff (trans. O'Neill) (Greek comedy C5th to 4th B.C.) :
"The mighty choirs who extol Kybele on the mountain tops."
Plato, Euthydemus 277 (trans. Lamb) (Greek philosopher C4th B.C.) :
"Like the celebrants of the Korybantic rites, when they perform the enthronement of the person whom they are about to initiate. There, as you know, if you have been through it, they have dancing and merrymaking."
Plato, Ion : "Sokrates: The Korybantian revellers [of the Meter Theon] when they dance are not in their right mind ... by divine inspiration and by possession; just as the Korybantian revellers too have a quick perception of that strain only which is appropriated to the god by whom they are possessed, and have plenty of dances and words for that, but take no heed of any other."
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3. 33 (trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) : "He [the young god Dionysos] went to Kybela in Phrygia. There he was purified by Rhea and taught the mystic rites of initiation, after which he received from her his gear and set out eagerly through Thrake [where he introduced the orgiastic cult]."
Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 1. 1076 ff (trans. Rieu) (Greek epic C3rd B.C.) : "[The Argonauts celebrate the orgies of the Meter Theon on Mt Didymnos near Kyzikos in Mysia :] Standing in the woods, there was an ancient vine with a massive trunk withered to the roots. They cut this down to make a sacred image of the Mountain Goddess; and when Argos had skillfully shaped it, they set it up on a rocky eminence under the shelter some tall oaks, the highest trees that grow, and made an altar of small stones near by. Then, crowned with oak-leaved, they began the sacrificial rites, invoking the Meter Dindymene (Mother of Mt Dindymos), most worshipful, who dwells in Phrygia; and with her, Titias and Kyllenos. For these two are singled out as dispensers of doom and assessors to the Meter Idaia (Mother of Mt Ida) . . .Jason, pouring libations on the blazing sacrifice, earnestly besought the goddess to send the stormy winds elsewhere. At the same time, by command of Orpheus, the younger men in full armour moved round in a high-stepping dance, beating their shields with their swords to drown the ill-omened cries that came up from the city, where the people were still wailing for their king [i.e. Kyzikos, king of the Doliones, who was accidentally killed by the Argonauts]. This is why the Phrygians to this day propitiate Rhea with the tambourine and drum. The goddess they invoked observed the flawless sacrifice with pleasure."
Callimachus, Iambi Fragment 193 (trans. Trypanis) (Greek poet C3rd B.C.) :
"Tossing my hair to honour Kybele to the sound of the Phrygian flute or in trailing robe, alas! To mourn Adonis [i.e. Attis], the slave of the goddess."
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 5. 49. 1 - 6 (trans. Oldfather) (Greek historian C1st B.C.) : "The wedding of Kadmos and Harmonia was the first, we are told, for which the gods provided the marriage-feast, and Demeter, becoming enamored of Iasion, presented him with the fruit of the corn . . . [and] Elektra [queen of Samothrake, presented as a wedding gift] the sacred rites of the Megale Meter Theon (Great Mother of the Gods), as she is called, together with cymbals and kettledrums and the instruments of the ritual . ..
Pindar, Dithyrambs Heracles the Bold (trans. Sandys) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) : "In the adorable presence of the mighty Meter Theon (Mother of the Gods), the prelude is the whirling of timbrels; there is also the ringing of rattles, and the torch that blazeth beneath the glowing pine-trees. There, too, are the loudly sounding laments of the Naides, and there the frenzied shouts of dancers are aroused, with the thong that tosseth the neck on high."
Stesichorus, Fragment 59 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric III) (C7th to 6th B.C.) : "An ox-eating lion came to the cave-mouth; with the flat of his hand he struck the great timbrel he was carrying, and the whole cave rang with the din: the forest beast could not abide the holy booming of Kybele and raced quickly up the forested mountain, afraid of the goddess' half-woman servant [i.e. a eunuch priest]--who hung up [as a dedication] for Rheia these garments and yellow locks.
Telestes, Frag 810 (from Athenaeus, Scholars at Dinner) (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric V) (C5th B.C.) : "The first to sing to the pipes the Phrygian tune of the Mater Oreias (Mountain Mother) beside the mixing-bowls of the Greeks were the companions of Pelops." [N.B. Pelops was a mythological Lydian prince who won the throne of Elis and the Peloponnese.]
Greek Lyric V Anonymous, Fragments 1030 (from Hephaestion, Handbook on Metres) (trans. Campbell) (Greek lyric B.C.) : "Gallai [eunuch priests] of the Meter Oreias (Mountain Mother), thyrsos-loving, racing, by whom instruments and bronze cymbals are clashed."
Aristophanes, Birds 737 ff (trans. O'Neill) (Greek comedy C5th to 4th B.C.) :
"The mighty choirs who extol Kybele on the mountain tops."
Plato, Euthydemus 277 (trans. Lamb) (Greek philosopher C4th B.C.) :
"Like the celebrants of the Korybantic rites, when they perform the enthronement of the person whom they are about to initiate. There, as you know, if you have been through it, they have dancing and merrymaking."
Plato, Ion : "Sokrates: The Korybantian revellers [of the Meter Theon] when they dance are not in their right mind ... by divine inspiration and by possession; just as the Korybantian revellers too have a quick perception of that strain only which is appropriated to the god by whom they are possessed, and have plenty of dances and words for that, but take no heed of any other."
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3. 33 (trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) : "He [the young god Dionysos] went to Kybela in Phrygia. There he was purified by Rhea and taught the mystic rites of initiation, after which he received from her his gear and set out eagerly through Thrake [where he introduced the orgiastic cult]."
Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 1. 1076 ff (trans. Rieu) (Greek epic C3rd B.C.) : "[The Argonauts celebrate the orgies of the Meter Theon on Mt Didymnos near Kyzikos in Mysia :] Standing in the woods, there was an ancient vine with a massive trunk withered to the roots. They cut this down to make a sacred image of the Mountain Goddess; and when Argos had skillfully shaped it, they set it up on a rocky eminence under the shelter some tall oaks, the highest trees that grow, and made an altar of small stones near by. Then, crowned with oak-leaved, they began the sacrificial rites, invoking the Meter Dindymene (Mother of Mt Dindymos), most worshipful, who dwells in Phrygia; and with her, Titias and Kyllenos. For these two are singled out as dispensers of doom and assessors to the Meter Idaia (Mother of Mt Ida) . . .Jason, pouring libations on the blazing sacrifice, earnestly besought the goddess to send the stormy winds elsewhere. At the same time, by command of Orpheus, the younger men in full armour moved round in a high-stepping dance, beating their shields with their swords to drown the ill-omened cries that came up from the city, where the people were still wailing for their king [i.e. Kyzikos, king of the Doliones, who was accidentally killed by the Argonauts]. This is why the Phrygians to this day propitiate Rhea with the tambourine and drum. The goddess they invoked observed the flawless sacrifice with pleasure."
Callimachus, Iambi Fragment 193 (trans. Trypanis) (Greek poet C3rd B.C.) :
"Tossing my hair to honour Kybele to the sound of the Phrygian flute or in trailing robe, alas! To mourn Adonis [i.e. Attis], the slave of the goddess."
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 5. 49. 1 - 6 (trans. Oldfather) (Greek historian C1st B.C.) : "The wedding of Kadmos and Harmonia was the first, we are told, for which the gods provided the marriage-feast, and Demeter, becoming enamored of Iasion, presented him with the fruit of the corn . . . [and] Elektra [queen of Samothrake, presented as a wedding gift] the sacred rites of the Megale Meter Theon (Great Mother of the Gods), as she is called, together with cymbals and kettledrums and the instruments of the ritual . ..
The eroded rock-statue of "Mother of the Gods" at Mount Sipylus. ( Public Domain )
In the 2nd century AD, the geographer Pausanias attests to a Magnesian (Lydian) cult to "the mother of the gods", whose image was carved into a rock-spur of Mount Sipylus. This was believed to be the oldest image of the goddess, and was attributed to the legendary Broteas.[10] At Pessinos in Phrygia, the mother goddess—identified by the Greeks as Cybele—took the form of an unshaped stone of black meteoric iron,[11] and may have been associated with or identical to Agdistis, Pessinos' mountain deity.[12] This was the aniconic stone that was removed to Rome in 204 BC. --Wikipedia
The Black Madonna is the manifestation of God in Matter -- the healing power of Earth. At this time of huge global upheaval "Our Lady of the Dark Forest", the Black Madonna is appearing in many dreams and body/soul rhythms, perhaps even genetic memory which is embodied in our structure. Like the virgin forest, she is full of the seeds of possibility, utterly in touch with nature. At the point of wounding, the Black Madonna may appear in our dreams and take the rejected soul in her arms and rock her with her head against her heart. This “Black Madonna” archetype symbolizes the matriarchal soul, and it is related to the fate of the earth itself. It also represents our own virginal souls subject to the experiential sorrows of embodiment, dying into soul. It has alchemical overtones:
So what is the rose in the fire all about? It is about perceiving the soul's suffering in the fire of physical pain and passion. It is about the anguish of spirit descending into physical limitations and opaque matter ascending toward spiritual aspirations and the conflict of those two opposing realms producing consciousness in the soul, which belongs to both time and timelessness. It is about perceiving light in matter. Most of us try to let our bodies and psyches function instinctively until we are ravaged by disease or neurosis. Then we realize that the body/psyche cannot function naturally in the concrete, concretized world in which we live.
In the 2nd century AD, the geographer Pausanias attests to a Magnesian (Lydian) cult to "the mother of the gods", whose image was carved into a rock-spur of Mount Sipylus. This was believed to be the oldest image of the goddess, and was attributed to the legendary Broteas.[10] At Pessinos in Phrygia, the mother goddess—identified by the Greeks as Cybele—took the form of an unshaped stone of black meteoric iron,[11] and may have been associated with or identical to Agdistis, Pessinos' mountain deity.[12] This was the aniconic stone that was removed to Rome in 204 BC. --Wikipedia
The Black Madonna is the manifestation of God in Matter -- the healing power of Earth. At this time of huge global upheaval "Our Lady of the Dark Forest", the Black Madonna is appearing in many dreams and body/soul rhythms, perhaps even genetic memory which is embodied in our structure. Like the virgin forest, she is full of the seeds of possibility, utterly in touch with nature. At the point of wounding, the Black Madonna may appear in our dreams and take the rejected soul in her arms and rock her with her head against her heart. This “Black Madonna” archetype symbolizes the matriarchal soul, and it is related to the fate of the earth itself. It also represents our own virginal souls subject to the experiential sorrows of embodiment, dying into soul. It has alchemical overtones:
So what is the rose in the fire all about? It is about perceiving the soul's suffering in the fire of physical pain and passion. It is about the anguish of spirit descending into physical limitations and opaque matter ascending toward spiritual aspirations and the conflict of those two opposing realms producing consciousness in the soul, which belongs to both time and timelessness. It is about perceiving light in matter. Most of us try to let our bodies and psyches function instinctively until we are ravaged by disease or neurosis. Then we realize that the body/psyche cannot function naturally in the concrete, concretized world in which we live.
Primary Imagination, Nonlocal Consciousness, Entanglement, Mysteries of Collective Transformation, Mother Worship, Nature Worship, Meteorite Worship, Amanita Muscaria, Alchemosexuality, Sacramental Ecstasy, Ecosexual, Erotic Theology, Orgiastic Rites, Non-Binary Gender, Eunuch Priests, Magical Imagination, Transformative Substances, Mother Complex, Liminal Forces, Self-Initiation, Interoception, Shamanic Trance & Ecstasy, Multiple Simultaneous Realities, Invisible Light, Dissociation, Autopoeisis, Maternal Enmeshment, Germinal Image, Role-fluidity, Forest Loss, Hypnogogia, Sovereign Authority, Paranormal Romance, Wild Hunt, Transplanted Ideas, Transgressive States of Consciousness, Epochal Shift, Pluripresence, Primordial Androgyne, Twilight State
Transliminality
Dimensions of Character Visionary Geography Conserving the Imaginal Mind Forest Life-Bestowing Principle Wild Darkness Mother Mycelium Knowing by Feeling Wild Mind Dark Sky Archaic Roots Sanctuaries of Silence Prehistory Anatolian Mysteries Seed Ideas Perceptual Hypnosis Way of Devotion Life Force Psychogeographical Exploration Ecosophy |
The Moonlit Path
Ecosexuality Primal Nature Goddess Double-Bind The Dark Queen Dissociative Disorder Dark Flow Dark Mater Deep Forest Protecting Souls & Guarding the Dead Evolving Archetypal Matrix "The Breath of Cybele" Meeting the God-Plant The Enduring Virgin Mother The Ultimate Trance State Untamable Eternal Virgin Divine Madness Meteorite Prehistory is Trans-historical |
Tempel/Altar of Kybele, around 700BC. City of Midas/Turkey.
"Miriam Roberts Dexter, in her paper "Ancient Felines and the Great-Goddess in Anatolia: Kubaba and Cybele," traced the iconography of the Anatolian Great Mother goddess (known as Cybele in Classical times) as far back as Göbekli Tepe. A "display" sort of female figure, dating to ca. 8,000 BCE, was found carved on rock in an area between pillars containing depictions of felines. The Great Mother always appears as a woman with lions throughout Her depictions from 8,000 BCE to 500 CE. A sculpture of Her with Her lions was found at Çatalhöyük dated to ca. 6,200 BCE. The discovery of the felines-and-woman sculpture at Göbekli Tepe pushes the origin of this iconography back another 1,800 years." https://johanna-hypatia.livejournal.com/148281.html
https://www.academia.edu/220990/Ancient_Felines_and_the_Great-Goddess_in_Anatolia_Kubaba_and_Cybele
https://www.academia.edu/220990/Ancient_Felines_and_the_Great-Goddess_in_Anatolia_Kubaba_and_Cybele
Photo by Yair Haklai
INTRODUCTION
'In order to be effective, truth must penetrate like an arrow. And that is likely to hurt.' -Wei Wu Wei.
Pursuit of the following far-ranging tropes are what the self-authenticating Kybele mythos brings up for me, as well as what can be provoked and invoked in the reader. Immersion in myth creates reality. Symbols and images are the currents of consciousness.
Many of our beliefs and concept creep are unconscious mythic forces at work in our daily lives. We can intentionally build a soulful relationship between our conscious and unconscious being, including the narrative field.
Archetypal psychology is influenced by Jung and Hillman's Classical Greek, Renaissance, and Romantic ideas. First and foremost, this is my offering to Kybele, and imaginal matriarchies -- a narrative of healing fiction about female spiritual and political power -- more about what human life could be like, than about what it was like.
Gnosis is the nature of psyche. Expression creates being, connecting with emergent mind and life-force. Ideas stimulate the imagination. Our primary language is myth. Used persuasively, it provides the transpersonal meaning of a larger context. There are patterns to the kinds of qualities we experience, including excesses and compulsions.
Writing is a journey into the unknown, a leap into the abyss. We can explore the psyche in a kind of archaeological excavation without ransacking the past for inspiration by re-visioning our relationship with nature, our creative energy flow, our reflective and projective nature--an aesthetics beyond art. Psyche is self-realized soul, the penetrating reality of the Soul.
Psyche participates in reading or writing, and experience. Alternative perspectives are based on differing underlying philosophical convictions. The process of writing itself is a soul-making activity. Revelation of the inner sense of words opens their interdimensionality. I don't presume to teach you anything but I can share my world with you.
This essay is a long-form discussion of many interrelated aspects. Our challenge is to recognize the many levels of interwoven unconscious influence. It attempts to conjure fresh images and fluid perceptions, as no story can be reduced to an archetype. Things as they present themselves are images, not pre-existing concepts or dogmatic categories.
Psychology is a non-linear domain. The unconscious finds its voice. It's ours to wrestle with. Myths just are, self-existing, autonomous and alive, present in the way we are. Embodied narrative intelligence is somatic incarnation serving as transformers of cosmic-material and mental experiences of embodied somatic sentience.
"When an archetype appears in a dream ~ in a fantasy, or in life ~ it always brings with it a certain influence or power by virtue of which it either exercises a numinous or fascinating effect ~ or impels to action." (Jung, CW 7)
The mythopoetic orientation reflects a vibrant experiential sense of the concrete and the abstract, the immanent and the transcendent, and the visible and ineffable at once in the sacral lived world. Metaphors open us up with associative power.
Myth is a common unifying principle. Myth permeates our understanding of our past, present and potential. Myth is a conceptual schemata embodying core metaphysical concepts and moral wisdom. Myths do cultural work. In myth-building any words or symbols can be modified from their original meanings to suit their new roles in a matrix of varied forms.
Paracelsus suggests, "The imagination acts in a similar manner in the soul, and calls forms of life into existence. The spirit is the master, imagination the tool, and the body is the sculptural material." Such open-ended creative potential encodes an infinite variety of mythological interpretations, not just one. The god-image describes stages of human experience with the autonomous psyche.
Non-factual and non-historical, myths don't explain anything, but they deepen, tantalize, enliven, interest, delight, even confuse, or provoke. They cannot be proven. Psychic Realism is a perspective on interpretive metapsychology.
The voice of Psyche includes an approach to the numinous through unconscious communication, unconscious perception and archetypal enactments, an entrainment and synchronization inexorably entwined in psyche’s dance, that manifests archetypal dynamics in matter. The polytheism of the ancient world is one step removed from animism in the linkage between the god and devotee.
The past, present, and future collapse into a timeless moment where distinctions between conscious and unconscious intent express as an ongoing pattern -- active engagement in lived experience, unconscious communications and ways to create meaningful responses to them.
Our ethical and aesthetic consciousness realizes we carry things which may be unconscious and be sensitive to that presence and our souls and what we exile to the hinterlands. No city or world are external to soul.
In the city of Ephesus, Artemis reigned not only as Queen of Heaven, but also as Mother, Healer and Savior.
"Artemis Ephesia was expressively viewed as a goddess of fertility and protection. Some of the titles of worship for Artemis include:Philomeirax, Friend of Young Girls, Paidotrophos, Nurse of Children, Orsilokhia, Helper of Childbirth, and Hêmerasia, She who Soothes. The epithets served as foundations on which the people of Ephesus were able to adapt Artemis into the realm of Kybele, Magna Mater, the Mother Goddess that ruled this area from archaic times and through the early Hellenistic period. Artemis of Ephesus was a significantly different goddess than the Greek Artemis. At the core of the worship of Artemis Ephesia was entrenched belief in her position as fertility goddess, and Mother to her people." (Carla Ionescu 2016)
Mythopoesis appears to be a fractal-imaginal dynamic. Embodied mythopoesis means "myth-making", the highest form of story-telling, a psychological archetype and cognitive frame -- the complex dramatic architecture of stories. Images exist at multiple scales.
We must always rotate a concept to accommodate the unique psychic context of diverse listeners and synergistic praxis. How does mediation between gods and world occur? How do we encounter the gods in our existence and recognize the presence of divine powers in empirical reality? We don't invent myth. Phenomenological dramatization emerges autonomously from our encounters with depth. Images arise from the flux of nature.
Marshall McLuhan says that "thematic variation' in storytelling has replaced 'narrative continuity'...Transmedia Storytelling is important to the way we interact and communicate. We’ll explore the anatomy of story and the importance of developing a contemporary narrative that can help us expand our narrative into a storyworld with multiple facets of participatory design.
We enter the realm of psyche by 'becoming' images. James Hillman suggests more than making archetypes conscious. Imagination becomes a meeting place between the conscious and unconscious by entering the metaphor of the archetype, through which our soul is deepened by tending and attending to it. Soul operates through artistic being to overcome differences between the physical and symbolic. It potentiates the gamut of feelings and sensations from the most poetical to the physical.
No theory conforms to its own standards. Our archetypal journey is to the foreign lands of the unconscious, with inner evolutionary impulses. Images and our interactions with them (whether these are scholarly, mythopoetic, ritualistic, or actively imaginal) are psyche. Her story somehow becomes our own, the fate of place that takes us from void to containing vessel.
Metamodern is is a category created to describe some recent developments in art, literature and cinema, a proposed set of developments in philosophy, aesthetics, and culture. Worldviews evolve from modern to postmodern to post-postmodern with its soulful, aesthetic, poetic Romantic approach.
Modernism is pre-systemic; based on individual liberty, including economic liberty, and the values necessary for achieving personal and economic success. Postmodernism is a worldview that takes a systemic view that divides the world into oppressed and oppressors. It reacts (and over-reacts) against modernism. Depth psychology could be called postmodern in its intricacies. Arguably, Archetypal Psychology is post-postmodern.
A post-postmodern or integral worldview is based on a meta-systemic view that is integral emergent, learning-focused, and looks at the world as a self-organizing set of systems that come together in a marriage of love and freedom. An integral vision has positive roles for -- and seeks to integrate positive aspects of -- tribal instincts, traditional values, individual success stories, and a healthy pluralism.
Mythic or sacred imagination has true inspirational and initiatory power. It rises above the banal inasmuch as it is able to access the sacred transpersonal, mythopoetic dimension, serving as a path of spiritual transcendence, and even self-initiation.
Images invite our consideration as manifestations of soul, as myth and poetry. Care of the soul is cultivating and tending images. The realm of heart is the realm of soul that links us to the life force. The energizing force of the new Romanticism is that it promotes humanity against the forward progress of science and the rise of scientism.
Tensions between the primal connection to nature and scientific institutional power have led to a cultural reawakening – a sort of Romantic revivalism. Scientific inquiry fails to fully construct a complete picture of nature, as theories of everything continue to fail. Science is exploited into dystopian realities fraught with neo-eugenics through gene engineering and unequal access to drugs and medical care.
Mythopoesis means "myth-making" that integrates traditional mythological themes and archetypes into contemporary fiction. "To be sane, we must recognize our beliefs as fictions." (Hillman)
Myth-making could be considered the highest form of human pastime, story-telling dreams and fantasy, epic, meaning, and archetype. Metaphorical psyche-based images play through, transform, and enrich our experience with deeper understanding and broader knowing. More fully expressed lives are inwardly richer.
Vermeulen and van den Akker described metamodernism as a "structure of feeling" that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism like "a pendulum swinging between…innumerable poles". According to Kim Levin, writing in ARTnews, this oscillation "must embrace doubt, as well as hope and melancholy, sincerity and irony, affect and apathy, the personal and the political, and technology and techne." (Wikipedia)
The aesthetic is a departure and perpetuation of modern and post-modern aesthetics, a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond them. They defy well established schemes of modernist and post-modernist aesthetics, in search for a more sensible and, arguably, sustainable way to express the present.
“…we see what our idea lets us see. The evidence we gather in support of a hypothesis and the rhetoric we use to argue it are already part of the archetypal constellation we are in…both role and idea are archetypally governed.” Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, 126
Turner proposed metamodernism as "the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons," and concluded with a call to "go forth and oscillate." Wiki
Authors claim that modernist and post-modernist aesthetics are no more able to interpret our present and that seemingly incompatible features of the two systems can coexist side 'by'side in today's culture! the word Metamodernism features the prefix meta-, meaning +beyond, and relates with metaxis, used by Plato to describe the condition of in-betweenness. Metamodernist aesthetic is not a mere Hegelian synthesis of the two previous systems, but stands in between the two! In practice, metamodernist sensibility cuts through the post-modernist morass of contemporary culture by restoring some modernist tools.
Metamodernism is the dominant cultural logic of contemporary modernity. Metamodernism is characterised by interest in the mythological and archetypal. It can be grasped as a generational attempt to surpass postmodernism and a general Romantic response to our present, crisis-ridden moment.
Images move us outward into alternative visions of reality, recreation of the outer world and transformation within the imaginal. Slowly a response begins to come, finding voice through us, That daimon is a voice of the anima mundi, and there is no division between the little inner voices and the total world of the soul. Loss of soul is disconnectedness from what matters most.
In other words, it is this soul that speaks through me and through all of us. K. Levin (2012) says, “the postmodern culture of relativism, irony, and pastiche" is over, having been replaced by a post-ideological condition that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling.
https://books.google.com/books?id=zGjADAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=,james+hillman+dionysus&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwigq8H7q9TnAhWStZ4KHbJoCqwQuwUwAHoECAYQBw#v=onepage&q=%2Cjames%20hillman%20dionysus&f=false Remembering Dionysus: Revisioning psychology and literature in C.G. Jung and hillman...By Susan Rowland the dismembering influence of Dionysus, a god closely associated with revitalization through disorder.
Alchemy of The Heart: The Sacred Marriage of Dionysos & AriadneBy A. Marina Aguilar https://books.google.com/books?id=pWpCDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_book_similarbooks#v=onepage&q&f=false
'In order to be effective, truth must penetrate like an arrow. And that is likely to hurt.' -Wei Wu Wei.
Pursuit of the following far-ranging tropes are what the self-authenticating Kybele mythos brings up for me, as well as what can be provoked and invoked in the reader. Immersion in myth creates reality. Symbols and images are the currents of consciousness.
Many of our beliefs and concept creep are unconscious mythic forces at work in our daily lives. We can intentionally build a soulful relationship between our conscious and unconscious being, including the narrative field.
Archetypal psychology is influenced by Jung and Hillman's Classical Greek, Renaissance, and Romantic ideas. First and foremost, this is my offering to Kybele, and imaginal matriarchies -- a narrative of healing fiction about female spiritual and political power -- more about what human life could be like, than about what it was like.
Gnosis is the nature of psyche. Expression creates being, connecting with emergent mind and life-force. Ideas stimulate the imagination. Our primary language is myth. Used persuasively, it provides the transpersonal meaning of a larger context. There are patterns to the kinds of qualities we experience, including excesses and compulsions.
Writing is a journey into the unknown, a leap into the abyss. We can explore the psyche in a kind of archaeological excavation without ransacking the past for inspiration by re-visioning our relationship with nature, our creative energy flow, our reflective and projective nature--an aesthetics beyond art. Psyche is self-realized soul, the penetrating reality of the Soul.
Psyche participates in reading or writing, and experience. Alternative perspectives are based on differing underlying philosophical convictions. The process of writing itself is a soul-making activity. Revelation of the inner sense of words opens their interdimensionality. I don't presume to teach you anything but I can share my world with you.
This essay is a long-form discussion of many interrelated aspects. Our challenge is to recognize the many levels of interwoven unconscious influence. It attempts to conjure fresh images and fluid perceptions, as no story can be reduced to an archetype. Things as they present themselves are images, not pre-existing concepts or dogmatic categories.
Psychology is a non-linear domain. The unconscious finds its voice. It's ours to wrestle with. Myths just are, self-existing, autonomous and alive, present in the way we are. Embodied narrative intelligence is somatic incarnation serving as transformers of cosmic-material and mental experiences of embodied somatic sentience.
"When an archetype appears in a dream ~ in a fantasy, or in life ~ it always brings with it a certain influence or power by virtue of which it either exercises a numinous or fascinating effect ~ or impels to action." (Jung, CW 7)
The mythopoetic orientation reflects a vibrant experiential sense of the concrete and the abstract, the immanent and the transcendent, and the visible and ineffable at once in the sacral lived world. Metaphors open us up with associative power.
Myth is a common unifying principle. Myth permeates our understanding of our past, present and potential. Myth is a conceptual schemata embodying core metaphysical concepts and moral wisdom. Myths do cultural work. In myth-building any words or symbols can be modified from their original meanings to suit their new roles in a matrix of varied forms.
Paracelsus suggests, "The imagination acts in a similar manner in the soul, and calls forms of life into existence. The spirit is the master, imagination the tool, and the body is the sculptural material." Such open-ended creative potential encodes an infinite variety of mythological interpretations, not just one. The god-image describes stages of human experience with the autonomous psyche.
Non-factual and non-historical, myths don't explain anything, but they deepen, tantalize, enliven, interest, delight, even confuse, or provoke. They cannot be proven. Psychic Realism is a perspective on interpretive metapsychology.
The voice of Psyche includes an approach to the numinous through unconscious communication, unconscious perception and archetypal enactments, an entrainment and synchronization inexorably entwined in psyche’s dance, that manifests archetypal dynamics in matter. The polytheism of the ancient world is one step removed from animism in the linkage between the god and devotee.
The past, present, and future collapse into a timeless moment where distinctions between conscious and unconscious intent express as an ongoing pattern -- active engagement in lived experience, unconscious communications and ways to create meaningful responses to them.
Our ethical and aesthetic consciousness realizes we carry things which may be unconscious and be sensitive to that presence and our souls and what we exile to the hinterlands. No city or world are external to soul.
In the city of Ephesus, Artemis reigned not only as Queen of Heaven, but also as Mother, Healer and Savior.
"Artemis Ephesia was expressively viewed as a goddess of fertility and protection. Some of the titles of worship for Artemis include:Philomeirax, Friend of Young Girls, Paidotrophos, Nurse of Children, Orsilokhia, Helper of Childbirth, and Hêmerasia, She who Soothes. The epithets served as foundations on which the people of Ephesus were able to adapt Artemis into the realm of Kybele, Magna Mater, the Mother Goddess that ruled this area from archaic times and through the early Hellenistic period. Artemis of Ephesus was a significantly different goddess than the Greek Artemis. At the core of the worship of Artemis Ephesia was entrenched belief in her position as fertility goddess, and Mother to her people." (Carla Ionescu 2016)
Mythopoesis appears to be a fractal-imaginal dynamic. Embodied mythopoesis means "myth-making", the highest form of story-telling, a psychological archetype and cognitive frame -- the complex dramatic architecture of stories. Images exist at multiple scales.
We must always rotate a concept to accommodate the unique psychic context of diverse listeners and synergistic praxis. How does mediation between gods and world occur? How do we encounter the gods in our existence and recognize the presence of divine powers in empirical reality? We don't invent myth. Phenomenological dramatization emerges autonomously from our encounters with depth. Images arise from the flux of nature.
Marshall McLuhan says that "thematic variation' in storytelling has replaced 'narrative continuity'...Transmedia Storytelling is important to the way we interact and communicate. We’ll explore the anatomy of story and the importance of developing a contemporary narrative that can help us expand our narrative into a storyworld with multiple facets of participatory design.
We enter the realm of psyche by 'becoming' images. James Hillman suggests more than making archetypes conscious. Imagination becomes a meeting place between the conscious and unconscious by entering the metaphor of the archetype, through which our soul is deepened by tending and attending to it. Soul operates through artistic being to overcome differences between the physical and symbolic. It potentiates the gamut of feelings and sensations from the most poetical to the physical.
No theory conforms to its own standards. Our archetypal journey is to the foreign lands of the unconscious, with inner evolutionary impulses. Images and our interactions with them (whether these are scholarly, mythopoetic, ritualistic, or actively imaginal) are psyche. Her story somehow becomes our own, the fate of place that takes us from void to containing vessel.
Metamodern is is a category created to describe some recent developments in art, literature and cinema, a proposed set of developments in philosophy, aesthetics, and culture. Worldviews evolve from modern to postmodern to post-postmodern with its soulful, aesthetic, poetic Romantic approach.
Modernism is pre-systemic; based on individual liberty, including economic liberty, and the values necessary for achieving personal and economic success. Postmodernism is a worldview that takes a systemic view that divides the world into oppressed and oppressors. It reacts (and over-reacts) against modernism. Depth psychology could be called postmodern in its intricacies. Arguably, Archetypal Psychology is post-postmodern.
A post-postmodern or integral worldview is based on a meta-systemic view that is integral emergent, learning-focused, and looks at the world as a self-organizing set of systems that come together in a marriage of love and freedom. An integral vision has positive roles for -- and seeks to integrate positive aspects of -- tribal instincts, traditional values, individual success stories, and a healthy pluralism.
Mythic or sacred imagination has true inspirational and initiatory power. It rises above the banal inasmuch as it is able to access the sacred transpersonal, mythopoetic dimension, serving as a path of spiritual transcendence, and even self-initiation.
Images invite our consideration as manifestations of soul, as myth and poetry. Care of the soul is cultivating and tending images. The realm of heart is the realm of soul that links us to the life force. The energizing force of the new Romanticism is that it promotes humanity against the forward progress of science and the rise of scientism.
Tensions between the primal connection to nature and scientific institutional power have led to a cultural reawakening – a sort of Romantic revivalism. Scientific inquiry fails to fully construct a complete picture of nature, as theories of everything continue to fail. Science is exploited into dystopian realities fraught with neo-eugenics through gene engineering and unequal access to drugs and medical care.
Mythopoesis means "myth-making" that integrates traditional mythological themes and archetypes into contemporary fiction. "To be sane, we must recognize our beliefs as fictions." (Hillman)
Myth-making could be considered the highest form of human pastime, story-telling dreams and fantasy, epic, meaning, and archetype. Metaphorical psyche-based images play through, transform, and enrich our experience with deeper understanding and broader knowing. More fully expressed lives are inwardly richer.
Vermeulen and van den Akker described metamodernism as a "structure of feeling" that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism like "a pendulum swinging between…innumerable poles". According to Kim Levin, writing in ARTnews, this oscillation "must embrace doubt, as well as hope and melancholy, sincerity and irony, affect and apathy, the personal and the political, and technology and techne." (Wikipedia)
The aesthetic is a departure and perpetuation of modern and post-modern aesthetics, a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond them. They defy well established schemes of modernist and post-modernist aesthetics, in search for a more sensible and, arguably, sustainable way to express the present.
“…we see what our idea lets us see. The evidence we gather in support of a hypothesis and the rhetoric we use to argue it are already part of the archetypal constellation we are in…both role and idea are archetypally governed.” Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, 126
Turner proposed metamodernism as "the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons," and concluded with a call to "go forth and oscillate." Wiki
Authors claim that modernist and post-modernist aesthetics are no more able to interpret our present and that seemingly incompatible features of the two systems can coexist side 'by'side in today's culture! the word Metamodernism features the prefix meta-, meaning +beyond, and relates with metaxis, used by Plato to describe the condition of in-betweenness. Metamodernist aesthetic is not a mere Hegelian synthesis of the two previous systems, but stands in between the two! In practice, metamodernist sensibility cuts through the post-modernist morass of contemporary culture by restoring some modernist tools.
Metamodernism is the dominant cultural logic of contemporary modernity. Metamodernism is characterised by interest in the mythological and archetypal. It can be grasped as a generational attempt to surpass postmodernism and a general Romantic response to our present, crisis-ridden moment.
Images move us outward into alternative visions of reality, recreation of the outer world and transformation within the imaginal. Slowly a response begins to come, finding voice through us, That daimon is a voice of the anima mundi, and there is no division between the little inner voices and the total world of the soul. Loss of soul is disconnectedness from what matters most.
In other words, it is this soul that speaks through me and through all of us. K. Levin (2012) says, “the postmodern culture of relativism, irony, and pastiche" is over, having been replaced by a post-ideological condition that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling.
https://books.google.com/books?id=zGjADAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=,james+hillman+dionysus&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwigq8H7q9TnAhWStZ4KHbJoCqwQuwUwAHoECAYQBw#v=onepage&q=%2Cjames%20hillman%20dionysus&f=false Remembering Dionysus: Revisioning psychology and literature in C.G. Jung and hillman...By Susan Rowland the dismembering influence of Dionysus, a god closely associated with revitalization through disorder.
Alchemy of The Heart: The Sacred Marriage of Dionysos & AriadneBy A. Marina Aguilar https://books.google.com/books?id=pWpCDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_book_similarbooks#v=onepage&q&f=false
Ljubomir Popović
"We are the somatic reflection of the images that inhabit us, not only of our personal images but of those images that live in us since the night of time. These images guide us to that " elsewhere " that is not another " imaginally transcendent and countervailing place, but is the place of the here and now and then. Bateson calls it the place "Where Angels hesitate". It's the place of our presence and our Being. Images guide us there, to embody the full potential and possibility of our Being-in the-world." Eldo Stellucci
12 December 1913, Liber Novus, Jung Enters the Cave
“The spirit of the depths opened my eyes and I caught a glimpse of the inner things, the world of my soul, the many-formed and changing…. I stand in black dirt up to my ankles in a dark cave. Shadows sweep over me. I am seized by fear, but I know I must go in. I crawl through a narrow crack in the rock and reach an inner cave whose bottom is covered with black water. But beyond this I catch a glimpse of a luminous red stone which I must reach. I wade through the muddy water. The cave is full of the frightful noise of shrieking voices. I take the stone, it covers a dark opening in the rock. I hold the stone in my hand, peering around inquiringly.
do not want to listen to the voices, they keep me away. But I want to know. Here something wants to be uttered. I place my ear to the opening. I hear the flow of underground waters. I see the bloody head of a man on the dark stream. Someone wounded, someone slain floats there. I take in this image for a long time, shuddering. I see a large black scarab floating past on the dark stream. In the deepest reach of the stream shines a red sun, radiating through the dark water. There I see—and a terror seizes me--small serpents on the dark rock walls, striving toward the depths, where the sun shines. A thousand serpents crowd around, veiling the sun. Deep night falls. A red stream of blood, thick red blood springs up, surging for a long time, then ebbing. I am seized by fear. What did I see?” ...The first time I should say I reached a depth of about one thousand feet, but this time it was a cosmic depth. It was like going to the moon, or like the feeling of descent into empty space.”
"We are the somatic reflection of the images that inhabit us, not only of our personal images but of those images that live in us since the night of time. These images guide us to that " elsewhere " that is not another " imaginally transcendent and countervailing place, but is the place of the here and now and then. Bateson calls it the place "Where Angels hesitate". It's the place of our presence and our Being. Images guide us there, to embody the full potential and possibility of our Being-in the-world." Eldo Stellucci
12 December 1913, Liber Novus, Jung Enters the Cave
“The spirit of the depths opened my eyes and I caught a glimpse of the inner things, the world of my soul, the many-formed and changing…. I stand in black dirt up to my ankles in a dark cave. Shadows sweep over me. I am seized by fear, but I know I must go in. I crawl through a narrow crack in the rock and reach an inner cave whose bottom is covered with black water. But beyond this I catch a glimpse of a luminous red stone which I must reach. I wade through the muddy water. The cave is full of the frightful noise of shrieking voices. I take the stone, it covers a dark opening in the rock. I hold the stone in my hand, peering around inquiringly.
do not want to listen to the voices, they keep me away. But I want to know. Here something wants to be uttered. I place my ear to the opening. I hear the flow of underground waters. I see the bloody head of a man on the dark stream. Someone wounded, someone slain floats there. I take in this image for a long time, shuddering. I see a large black scarab floating past on the dark stream. In the deepest reach of the stream shines a red sun, radiating through the dark water. There I see—and a terror seizes me--small serpents on the dark rock walls, striving toward the depths, where the sun shines. A thousand serpents crowd around, veiling the sun. Deep night falls. A red stream of blood, thick red blood springs up, surging for a long time, then ebbing. I am seized by fear. What did I see?” ...The first time I should say I reached a depth of about one thousand feet, but this time it was a cosmic depth. It was like going to the moon, or like the feeling of descent into empty space.”
. https://books.google.com/books?id=R_fq8ZinbOIC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=falseJung and Ecopsychology: The Dairy Farmer's Guide to the Universe ..., Volume 1By Dennis L. Merritt
https://www.bu.edu/arion/files/2010/03/Paglia-Great-Mother1.pdf paglia
https://transversal.at/transversal/0507/rolnik/enThe Body’s Contagious Memory Lygia Clark’s Return to the Museum Suely Rolnik
Ralph Ellis says, "the standard iconography of Mithras is astrological.... Mithra -- in his Phrygian cap as worn by Attis, the French Marianne, and even the Smurfs -- is an accurate depiction of Orion, who is slaying the Bull of Heaven (ie: killing Taurus, the constellation next door). Orion is the ring-master of the precessional zodiac, keeping the houses of the zodiac in order, and in 1750 BC Taurus had to be killed to allow the Great Month of Aries to arise. And this is what this scene depicts - the ending of the Great Month of Taurus."
https://www.bu.edu/arion/files/2010/03/Paglia-Great-Mother1.pdf paglia
https://transversal.at/transversal/0507/rolnik/enThe Body’s Contagious Memory Lygia Clark’s Return to the Museum Suely Rolnik
Ralph Ellis says, "the standard iconography of Mithras is astrological.... Mithra -- in his Phrygian cap as worn by Attis, the French Marianne, and even the Smurfs -- is an accurate depiction of Orion, who is slaying the Bull of Heaven (ie: killing Taurus, the constellation next door). Orion is the ring-master of the precessional zodiac, keeping the houses of the zodiac in order, and in 1750 BC Taurus had to be killed to allow the Great Month of Aries to arise. And this is what this scene depicts - the ending of the Great Month of Taurus."
I am the Triple Mother of Life, the mistress of all of the elements, the original Being, the Sovereign of Light and Darkness, the Queen of the Dead, to whom no God is not subject. I rule the starry skies. the boisterous green seas, the many--colored earth with all its peoples, the dark subterrene caves. I have names innumerable. In Phrygia I am Cybele; in Phoenicia, Ashtaroth; in Egypt, Isis; in Crete Rhea; in Athens Athena; in the Caucasus 'The Bird-Headed Mother'...Agdistis, Mariamne, Hekate, Hera. --Graves, The Golden Fleece
KYBELE: THE WILD FEMININE
A Wilderness of Soul
Iona Miller, (c)2020
Where do you stand? What is around and beneath you?
Is it solid ground or pavement; is it earthen or synthetic?
Is there magic in the land there? Is it powerful, wild, or tame?
Is its energy flowing through you? Does it effect your magic?
Soil is more than mere matter; it contains spirit -- the place where you live. Can we recover the wild sacred?
“Deep inside us is a wilderness. We call it the unconscious because we can’t control it fully, so we can’t will to create what we want from it. The collective unconscious is a great wild region where we can get in touch with the source of life.” (C.G. Jung).
The earth is a nourishing vegetative soul, collected from the plants that germinate and grow from it. Animals are born from it, so consider the earth an enormous animal that also has intelligence and is thus a god? Why not say that the earth is a partial animal that belongs to the universal animal? Earth doesn't receive inaginal consistency from outside by virtue of a foreign soul but embodies its own soul -- Anima Mundi.
Dimensions of Character
Which metaphor do we use for the universe? Why?
Kosmos originally was an aesthetic idea of divine generation, the domain of each polytheistic god establishing the right placing of things, adorned in the beauty of an ordered arrangement. Our calling is to tend soul, relate with the numinous, and engage the autonomous image.
"When we do enter that forest, we enter the domain of the Wild Mother (i.e., the chthonic unconscious, the thoroughly chaotic and undifferentiated domain of Eros). We encounter both mythical beasts and domesticated animals, demons of every sort and description, and eventually the positive and negative aspects of sexuakity. As we emerge from each encounter, we are impressed with the living reality of the archetypes -- entities in the depths of the psyche that seem not only to be alive and enduring, but also marked by something approaching consciousness."
Jung ’s “three essential aspects of the mother are: 1) her cherishing and nourishing goodness, 2) her orgiastic emotionality, and 3) her Stygian depths” (¶158). These are “paradoxical” aspects of the “loving and terrible mother.”
Kybele, a wildly sacred earth, expressed the conscious outlook of her age. She had ritual, acoustic, corporal, and dramaturgical form. When the goddess was a Queen Bee, honey was a sacred elixir.
Animals taught us what to eat, what was medicine, how to dig, weave, and hunt--how to clear a way through dark forests, the trepidation of the unknown. Humans learned from nature that stones roll downhill. Birds wove, probed and pounded.
We were taught by nature how it could be mastered. "Reconnecting to the animal means getting to a more sensitive, more artful and more humorous place in the psyche." (James Hillman, Thomas Moore (2013). “The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire”, p.295, Routledge)
We are claimed by myths and invite story into our lives as tributaries that lead us to the bigger river of nourishing essential truths. Their spirits walk with us through the gorges and steep cliffs on indigo nights of deep song. Devotion means a theological interpretation of myth, a philosophy of pagan religion with a pagan perspective.
To speak of today's revitalized psychic terrain meaningfully, we need a new vocabulary. Transliminality, "going beyond the threshold", is a psychological trait involving hypersensitivity to psychological material (including ideation, imagery, affect, and perception) originating in the unconscious or the external world.
Beliefs are dissociative systems, critical lynch-pins. Unless we consciously work with our beliefs, especially the dissociated ones, our unconscious beliefs will win out over our desired thoughts every time. As we follow our beliefs, symptoms, or pathologies to meet our needs, we naturally and necessarily disconnect and dissociate part of our awareness to some degree.
In the process, we may also dissociate our awareness of destructive or limiting patterns that interfere with or outright control our lives, especially the most challenging, difficult ones – those that are embarrassing, hurtful, fearful, or otherwise overwhelming or unbearably damaging to us or our lives. It isn’t a conscious process, but it means our lives are determined by our beliefs, whether or not we actually chose them for ourselves.
It includes transmission of information across the threshold from the unconscious into consciousness. It links with increased likelihood of belief in paranormal phenomena, creativity, mystical experience, manic episodes, hyperaesthesia, and dreamworld or liminal experiences.
We experience sacred landscapes in a way similar to our experience of numinous dreams. We dive into the pools of our unconscious. We are the hunters and philosophers of our own landscape. We constantly imagine ourselves into being.
Kosmos
"Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination." - Gaston Bachelard (1994, p. xxxvi)
Kosmos did not mean a collective, generalized, abstract whole. It did not mean universe, one whole. "Where spirit lifts asking for detachment and transcendence, concern with the soul immerses us in immanence." (James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis)
Cosmos as vast, vague, empty, far-out and distant is not the Greek plural sense of the world and its immediate aesthetic experience. The aesthetic experience and its 'meaning' are identical. The imaginal symbolizes the process. Self-understanding is an imaginative act in which “each image is its own beginning, its own end, healed by and in itself...” (Healing Fiction, p.80).
In Crete, Cyble was worshipped as Rhea. "In shamanism the profound drummings are contexts for the magic of healing...If one could see things in this way, then it would be in her drumming rhythms that Rhea is mother to so many Gods, being in her way Grand rather than Great, as were Athena, Aphrodite, Hera and Artemis. Ever close to the titanic, even loving it in Kronos, Rhea does not totally identify with either Demeter or Hades, life or death, ego or self, persona or archetype. Her deeper sense of timing dances between these beats. Her way seems to acknowledge inflation without succumbing."
Rhea stands at the threshold of consciousness, the mouth of the cave to the Underworld, beating softly but rhythmically on her drum. There is a rhythm to the psyche. It is this rhythm that we try to catch in the therapy process. "How can we not use the names of Gods without presumption, without puffing up our ideas mythologically, without overstating some mortal sense of things, without beginning to feel that we know something? Is it not always a danger signal of soul when something Grand seems Great?
"Rhea...encourages us to see in the images, not literal identifications, neither some actual "this" nor a really real "that," but the rhythm between "this" and "that", between ego and self, between persona and archetype. These betweens take one deep into the beatings drummed in underworlds of soul....."Godlikeness," in the context of Rhea's mythos, may seem more Grand than Great. Her perspective, though it be divine, focuses less on some "God" and more on a poetizing "likeness."
"What is given us are images and the images are archetypal. They are images of Gods. Soul's task is to let the variety of imaginal experience in life become metaphor, listening for the likenesses." The unconscious reflects ongoing experience and dynamics, and expresses formerly unavailable emergent emotional and psychological potentials.
The kingdom of mothers is chtonic, infernal, deep: it is the kingdom of life donated and nourished, and its opposite of death. Mephistofeles in Faust says, 'Don't access the Mothers kingdom without caution.'
He meant do not to enter the ancestral-primordial without caution, without reverential respect, with stupid pretentious arrogance.
All the ancient mothers of the world and humanity are wonderful and terrible, all lead us to our darkest roots: Artemis protects and at the same time sows cruel death for all; Kali dance on piles of corpses with her skull necklace Orgiastic and without remorse, the power of life and death is inherent in those who offer the first, but could choose any moment the second. The great mother was fruitful womb and vagina-toothed, hungry for blood.
"There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death." --Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan, Dune
Visionary Geography
Kosmos always implied ethical and aesthetic qualities such as becoming, decency, honor, credibility, fittingness. Cosmic imagination is the conservative and creative ocean of the infinite that we consider analogous in character to our own imagining, the self-creative life of the soul.
Earth's green essence is self-organizing biological wisdom. Imagination augments physical reality. The key is immersion, participation, and involvement in the mythopoetic imagination--poetic, theatrical, oneric, and magical.
This lies within the archetypal 'ground' itself; it lies within us. We give meaning to things, and on that basis create the rigid and fluid world. This ground is not a place or substance, but a field of potentiality, of creative play, of consciousness. We differentiate ourselves from the unconscious field by personification and engaging them consciously.
A system of affinity allows more intimate interaction. The mother is the center of the child's universe. All pain is birth pain -- brutal beauty. The mother goddess Cybele implied association with caverns, mountains, wild animals, and the cult of Dionysus, whom Cybele is said to have cured and initiated.
Ritual liminality always implies the re-incorporation of the liminar into social structure. The two other forms of liminality are outsiderhood and marginality. Unlike ritual liminality, outsiderhood and marginality usually are semi-permanent or permanent forms of anti-structural existence, which means that the re-incorporation of the liminar (i.e. the outsider or marginal) back into structure is often difficult, impossible or unwanted.
Entanglement means, "interpenetration, overlapping plot," from entangled photons forming a light field, phonons entangled forming a field of energetic sound, to entangled atoms forming molecules. We are entangled with water by the chemical reaction, representing a new "water" that has organic properties, Life's entanglement of life forms creates new and complex forms, generating biodiversity.
It is synonymous with internal ecology, the body of the informing creative deity and that body is the cavern of mystery, the womb of creation embodying the elements -- the insight and wisdom of our bodyminds. Such a conceptual dimension involves emotional and spiritual energies intrinsic to the evolution of universe.
12 December 1913, Liber Novus, Jung Enters the Cave
“The spirit of the depths opened my eyes and I caught a glimpse of the inner things, the world of my soul, the many-formed and changing…. I stand in black dirt up to my ankles in a dark cave. Shadows sweep over me. I am seized by fear, but I know I must go in. I crawl through a narrow crack in the rock and reach an inner cave whose bottom is covered with black water. But beyond this I catch a glimpse of a luminous red stone which I must reach. I wade through the muddy water. The cave is full of the frightful noise of shrieking voices. I take the stone, it covers a dark opening in the rock. I hold the stone in my hand, peering around inquiringly.
I do not want to listen to the voices, they keep me away. But I want to know. Here something wants to be uttered. I place my ear to the opening. I hear the flow of underground waters. I see the bloody head of a man on the dark stream. Someone wounded, someone slain floats there. I take in this image for a long time, shuddering. I see a large black scarab floating past on the dark stream. In the deepest reach of the stream shines a red sun, radiating through the dark water. There I see—and a terror seizes me--small serpents on the dark rock walls, striving toward the depths, where the sun shines. A thousand serpents crowd around, veiling the sun. Deep night falls. A red stream of blood, thick red blood springs up, surging for a long time, then ebbing. I am seized by fear. What did I see?” ...The first time I should say I reached a depth of about one thousand feet, but this time it was a cosmic depth. It was like going to the moon, or like the feeling of descent into empty space.”
"We are the somatic reflection of the images that inhabit us, not only of our personal images but of those images that live in us since the night of time. These images guide us to that " elsewhere " that is not another " imaginally transcendent and countervailing place, but is the place of the here and now and then. Bateson calls it the place "Where Angels hesitate". It's the place of our presence and our Being. Images guide us there, to embody the full potential and possibility of our Being-in the-world." Eldo Stellucci
We descend into the world that is under the world. In order to be an ancestor, a benefactor, a conservator and a mentor, you must have knowledge of the shadows, being trained by the dead (from the past, which have become invisible and yet continue to reinvigorate our life with their influence).
This unformed consciousness--which we often mistake for death-- is really the essence of our vitality and life force. It is the energy we can use to recreate ourselves in every instant of time. It reaches our awareness through dreams and the flow of our imagination.
The "Dead" return as ancestors, especially in times of crisis, when we feel lost. Then the dead "is", by offering a deeper knowledge and support. They have already fallen, they know the sinkhole; their extraordinary resources.
They do not need to come back literally in the form of voices and visions, because they are already palpable in anything that tends to take us down, on any occasion we do not live up to. They are the gravitational force of the psyche.
Myths call imaginative powers gods. In a world of imagination, the relationship between humans and the plant/animal world was a first love. A poetic exchange of energetic relationships manifests authentic nature between our internal and external terrains, blending with the seasons. The natural world is alive with animals’ spirits. An inexplicable connection can only be explained by the presence of such spirits.
We seek a vital and authentic life, the bedrock of reality underneath all social masks, emotional possession, and self-deception. It is a dangerous descent that resonates metaphorically with a dark and terrifying passage into the limbo of our own vulnerability, into the netherworld of the belly of the earth. The bottom drops out of our vertical cosmos. We recover what the world has denied, repressed, and forgotten in our dreams.
If we can detect footprints on the path, we might learn the stories of those who have gone before and in this way lighten the load. We reconnect with the roots of our being using our instinctual nature to engage the unconscious.
We may uncover the pattern that connects us to the past and to the future when the path to transcendence reverses itself in more than a regressive retreat into ancient levels of awareness. But it means sitting in the fire of our own fears and suffering while honoring soul's perspective.
This is the base note of our psychopoetic life song. This psychological awakening is a spiritual initiation that potentially restores meaning to life. Instead of psychological concepts, they appear as high-impact mythological images, the "mythological unconscious" testing our ability to endure and discover integrity in depth. The path leads through the ghost-lands of the unconscious, undead aspects of personality. It illuminates the darkest layer of the inherited personality structure and the daimonic.
Our mythopoetic instinct arises to create myth, to see the patterns and the beauty, within it. Jung called them archetypes or 'numinous imperatives.' Archetypes, as liminal entities are numinous or “spiritual,” if “magical” is too strong a word. Magic is inherent in our instinctual roots. The 'supernatural' or netherworld is the truly chaotic world of the collective unconscious.
Reflected in panpsychism, Psyche fosters the deliteralization of life. Animism informed all life as the worldview that animals, plants, and inanimate objects—possess a soul or spiritual essence. As Plotinus said, "The stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment on the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other; as has been said: "Everything breathes together."
According to Joseph Campbell, "Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. It tells you what the experience is." Awareness of the realm of myth, poetry, image, dreams, and meaning is the realization of the imaginal. Exploration crosses boundaries.
Hillman suggests, "The moment we say something is “what happened” we’re announcing, “This is the myth I no longer see as a myth. This is the myth that I can’t see through.” In ancient times no one had decided what was 'real.' So, in primordial awareness the boundaries of real and unreal, outside and inside remain fluid.
Erich Neumann said, "...the creative process takes place not under the crushing rays of the sun, but in the cold reflected light of the moon, when great is the darkness of the unconscious: the night and not the day is the time of procreation. It belongs to the darkness and silence, the secret, the silence and being veiled."
Mythical figures are not as allegories, not just personified images, but modes of reflection. Kybele is bathed in the Light and concealed by it; she is a multifaceted brilliant Solitaire. Thus she alludes to her virgin nature, that sense of wholeness within oneself, which is the source of wisdom.
She is a love with all kinds of creative possibilities. She is the secret powers of nature, Sophia, Shakti, Shekinah. This archetype has reverberated down through history as the sublime matriarch, the Great Mother. This Beloved of the soul calls us to partnership, sustains, and advances our creativity in the existential world.
This wisdom is deep ecology which reveals the way of living in balance through intuition and self-emptying. She is the natural Light of the Soul--illumination. Beauty is inherent and essential to soul. We perceive her reflection as sheen and luster, her play of light, rather than the light of consciousness.
Hillman insists, "One cannot mirror if one too easily flows; and one cannot mirror everything, but only what one can receive and to which one is solidly present within the limits of one’s own borders. Mirroring is not blank receptivity; it requires focusing.” (Alchemical Psychology)
She is the possibility of bringing creative ideas to birth, to manifestation. She contemplates the possibility of various manifestations. The matriarchies of ancient times reflected societies intimately in touch with seasonal cycles and natural rhythms. We all yearn for "the mother." “We are all born from a female colossus," says Erich Neumann who called the first stage of psychic development “matriarchal”.
The Mystery of existence persists, the experiential necessity of being. We orient in terms of metaphors and mythical knowing. The wild lives at the margins of civilization in our abandon, passion, and delight, the unmediated wild of imagination. Nothing in nature is beyond the reach of imagination.
Reality is seen as various perspectives, or in other words, as so much imagination. Imagination takes on a new status of existing, and becomes reality. All our ways of seeing are imaginal, even our attempts to see without and beyond imagination. (Avens , 1980).
All “reality” starts in direct experience. Meeting the wild, we make new, ever-more refined, evolving answers to open-ended questions. We are immersed in imaginal flux. The original medicine arose from nature and will never change.
“Psyche” is Greek for soul, life, and breath; so psyche is Nature itself. Jung reminds us “nature is not matter only, she is also spirit,” -- the Great Mother. If we repress nature, animals, creative fantasy, and the “inferior” or primitive side of humans, we depreciate the earth and lose our connection with nature and divinity.
This quest for 'self' is the yearning for 'soul' and the healing power of nature. Jung believed when we touch nature we get clean, that natural life is the “nourishing soil of the soul."
We confuse a secondary conceptual Nature with Nature as it is actually perceived, notions of ordinary experience. We have difficulty believing that all existents are psychical. The imaginal is not dialectical nor analytical. The cure is getting back to Experience -- psychical life.
Conserving the Imaginal
The highest experience isn't content universals. but Imaginals, living archai. Kybele appears as recursive generations of exactly what we don't know--the recursive complexity of millions of years. She is the metapresentation of all reflective modes of thought, the fluidity of multiple drafts of consciousness.
Intense and extensive qualities fill the imaginal. Lived intensity determines the extensity of our imaginal experiences. Emphasizing particular relationships, or elements largely determines the nature of the "reality" we experience.
Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno said the World Soul “illumines the universe and directs nature in producing her species in the right way.” She is the magical world of creative mystery.
Qualitative transformation dominates the cosmic process. Rather than mechanical, conservative/creative imagination is psychical. akin to the merely reproductive and constructive creativity we know in ourselves.
When we save this phenomena by returning events to their divine archai, we conserve the Kosmos in which we live -- its beauty, nature, and creation in all its variety. We participate in the realization of events as reflected images of the imaginal world -- the creative habit of nature.
With a particular paradigm, we can create a reality from expectations, even without conscious intent to do so. We are being called to explore the cosmos itself as an interface between flow and consciousness. Myths model the most comprehensive metaphors, for the realization of liberating alternatives. The meaning in life is inherent in the archetypal experience of myth -- the consciousness and content of cosmic imagination.
Sovereignty is all about the land, creating and shaping the land that shapes us. The creative process acts like nature in all its forms, being closely related to how things grow and the energetic basis of transformation. Life in all its realness is broken, messy, vivid, and alive.
The deepest patterns of psyche, the archai, are the fundamental fantasies animating all life. The Nature archetype is ancient, vast and pervasive. Every other archetype in the human psyche comes out of it or is connected to it, including the Great Mother or feminine archetypes, and Great Father masculine archetypes and the Androgynous.
The root principles are beyond being, beyond life, without historical existence beyond time, development, evolution, and understanding. Repetition, Rhythm & Memory Anaphora and epistrophe move the emotions with rhythm and implant memory with the phrases and clauses they repeat. They emphasize effectively because they are in emphatic locations naturally: first and last positions in clauses.
Symbols awaken our consciousness to a new awareness of the inner meaning of life and reality itself as a configuration, a rhythm, beat, tempo, held within the bounds of its form by that god which is its measure, only presented in its manifestations. We must read it in relation to multiple parameters, and in multiple places.
It is a universal life force that has both physical form (earth, seas, mountains, etc.) and psychological power (it activates both instinctual and spiritual drives). If we deepen our forms of interaction with nature, we make it more immersive, a dynamic psychoid reality.
This force majeure is the archetypal nature of life that shapes us. Jung said, "You see, the archetype is a force. It has an autonomy, and it can suddenly seize you. It is like a seizure."
The creative process begins with a 'total seizure'. Divergent and intuitive thinking is supported by analytical thinking, increased creative imagination, narrative ability, imaginative immersion, episodic imagination, and perspective taking or unconscious styles of belief. Creative capacity is more closely related to absorption than hypnotizability. This mood is an inclusive qualitative whole, but experiences of nature are not unified. We are penetrated by all the elements.
Myth is too beautiful to be true, but it can be a healing fiction. An experiential communion takes place in the infrastructure of nature and our nature that is the most fully realized aesthetic, spiritual, and creative expression. Ideas well up spontaneously. We only need to stop compulsively stupefying ourselves with distractions of all kinds and be honest with ourselves.
The 'alchemosexual' nature, a metaphysical first principle, fuses human, animal, vegetable, and mineral nature. This is the penetrating and recptive nature of androgynous mystery, masculine and feminine, male and female, life-death. Some accept and others reject this primordial, metaphysical, spiritual, and basic physical nature of primordial mankind including the rituals, ceremonies, images, and practices implied, hypo- or hyper-arousal of the limbic system.
This holy oneness is the highest human function shrouded in the mystery that our human nature is inseparable from Great Nature, an “emergence” of form from the hidden depth and the androgyny of death. We are meant to be here, as part of this greater whole. Our path spans the spectrum of culture and instinct, remembrance through landmarks and milestones in a context that attends to psyche.
We dissolve in the mysterious ground of being, the sublime wellspring of creativity. Enduring psychospiritual transformation needs to be grounded in “somatic transfiguration.” In humanity's emerging consciousness somewhere between the darkness of imagination and physical mazes, deep caverns seem like uterine spaces or living, breathing internal cavities that snake for miles. Caves -- the original temples -- were worshiped and feared as the center of the earth with miles of crumbling tunnels and steep precipitous drop offs multiple-stories deep.
The lunar 'ground' is a fathomless depth. Humankind has journeyed deep into them and used these dark and treacherous labyrinths of tortured and twisting passages with seemingly bottomless pits, to live, to hide, to explore, and to worship with pilgrimage, art, and rituals.
With its flickering fires, smoky caverns, and hidden dangers the cave gave rise to mythic and archetypal recollections and dreams of ancestral spirits. But all who descend into the underworld do so at their own risk. Initiatory passageways and vertical shafts have dangerous hand and footholds etched in lava and ice, and studded with magical curtains, spires, crystals and inscriptions.
Caves represent the deep impenetrable strata of the "maternal unconscious", re-entry into the containing womb of the Mother, an ancient motif of death and rebirth. This grave is a subterranean temple and nocturnal rites of passage, the flow of underground waters,, and all the ferocious beasts and treasures the caverns of the psychic underworld conceal.
"A meaningful katabasis into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge is for the restoration of the whole person. The dead become an imaginal presence, "the growing understood as descent in the world, becoming useful to it and contributing to form, requires that it is descend in the world that is under the world. To be an ancestor, a benefactor, a conservative and a mentor you must have knowledge of the shadows, being trained "from the dead" (from past things, which have become invisible and however continue to vivify our life with their influence). The "Dead" return as ancestors, especially in moments of crisis, when we feel lost. Then the dead "yes", offering a deeper knowledge and support. Having already fallen, they know the chasms; there their extraordinary resources. They don't need to come back literally in the form of voices and visions, because they are already palpable in anything tends to jump down, on any occasion we are not up to. They are the gravity force of the psyche." (James Hillman)
The Greek word for 'revealed' actually means 'reappear,' like rivers and streams that flow underground and spring forth again. The course remains invisible until it reappears to sight. Creative environmental function includes experiencing a sense of beauty and compassion, supporting and serving life and nature with nature-assisted expressions.
The mind goes still as primal awareness expands into wholeness. Something without physical form shines forth from the hidden world in that very moment. These luminous experiences, true works of art, drive us onward in the Quest. We are struck with divine inspiration and the passion to see it through to completion. Sensuous cognition of beauty is a revelation, an astonishment.
Aesthetic arrest blows apart the illusory differences between the sacred and the profane. Touching nature we are touched by it. We are inspired in the A-ha moment, utterly dissolved in the momentary ego-death that blows apart illusory nature.
Hillman describes aisthesis as “a breathing in or taking in of the world, the gasp, the ‘aha,’ the ‘uh’ of the breath in wonder, shock, amazement, an aesthetic response to the image (eidolon) presented. . . . Images arrest. They stop us, bring us to a standstill . . . the flow of time is invaded by the timeless.” (The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World)
This aesthetic experience is an act of surrender that is an epiphany. It makes us gasp for air and sparks a cascade of pleasure. We are connected to beauty and wholeness. Creativity is a force of human nature that defines our spirit. We know what it means to exist rooted in the mysterious creative ground of being.
Soul is made by narrating events in terms of myth, the metaphoric and symbolic dimensions of our experience. Poetics brings the archetypal into participation with the mundane by tending the currents of life. The alchemist in us is an imaginative variation of our mundane character through which some of us come to recognize our life story. Our enlivened art speaks to our depths, a direct way of knowing -- experience-based knowledge.
"Meaning to life... I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that the life experiences that we have on the purely physical plane will have resonances within that are those of our own innermost being and reality.....And so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive, that’s what it’s all finally about, and that’s what these clues help us to find within ourselves." ~Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss
The gods found, ground, establish, and substantiate reality. The return to primordial origins is fundamental to all mythologies -- expressing a spontaneous regression to the ground that pierces through the world of appearances to 'reality', to immediacy. We experience our own origins through a kind of identity, through countless beings before and after oneself as the germ of infinity.
Our journey re-unfolds those same images which stream out of the ground, out of the abyss. Soul-making differentiates this middle ground. In this way we are "grounding" ourselves. James Hillman romantically imagines, "If you feel yourself to be nature, no different from it, then you simply are like a tree or squirrel in the tree, and you move along without an attitude of one kind or another." Under the spell of the sensuous a wild ethic arises.
When we dive down to our own foundations we find the world of our common divine origin. Ceremony translates the mythological value into an act. Ritual gives us focus, a sacred space where we step out of time to consciously enact a psychological process that life forces us to undertake anyway. This willing engagement suffuses us with the power and strength of the ancient archetype.
The world of the ancestors is a subterranean storehouse of everything that grows and comes to birth. We get to know ecopsychological thinking by immersion in nonhuman nature as we move along in a world that preexists our vision and prolongs itself beyond our vision, behind a curved horizon. Such mystical experiences are either initiated by, or transfigure, or integrate the body into the natural landscape.
They reveal an underlying unity and the interconnectedness of all phenomena, a sudden flash of animistic insight, electrical tingling, numinous light, internal radiance, of experiences of transcendence and connection to the natural world. The body lives and moves but psyche is the relational network.
We extend deep into matter, then into energy, and primordial ground, the primordial mind. The psyche, the generating breath of the universe, plays a role as primordial as that of matter, energy, and spacetime. It is a forest of symbols and meaning watching and waiting for us -- a mythology worth living for -- living in a shared world as a spiritual practice.
A Wilderness of Soul
Iona Miller, (c)2020
Where do you stand? What is around and beneath you?
Is it solid ground or pavement; is it earthen or synthetic?
Is there magic in the land there? Is it powerful, wild, or tame?
Is its energy flowing through you? Does it effect your magic?
Soil is more than mere matter; it contains spirit -- the place where you live. Can we recover the wild sacred?
“Deep inside us is a wilderness. We call it the unconscious because we can’t control it fully, so we can’t will to create what we want from it. The collective unconscious is a great wild region where we can get in touch with the source of life.” (C.G. Jung).
The earth is a nourishing vegetative soul, collected from the plants that germinate and grow from it. Animals are born from it, so consider the earth an enormous animal that also has intelligence and is thus a god? Why not say that the earth is a partial animal that belongs to the universal animal? Earth doesn't receive inaginal consistency from outside by virtue of a foreign soul but embodies its own soul -- Anima Mundi.
Dimensions of Character
Which metaphor do we use for the universe? Why?
Kosmos originally was an aesthetic idea of divine generation, the domain of each polytheistic god establishing the right placing of things, adorned in the beauty of an ordered arrangement. Our calling is to tend soul, relate with the numinous, and engage the autonomous image.
"When we do enter that forest, we enter the domain of the Wild Mother (i.e., the chthonic unconscious, the thoroughly chaotic and undifferentiated domain of Eros). We encounter both mythical beasts and domesticated animals, demons of every sort and description, and eventually the positive and negative aspects of sexuakity. As we emerge from each encounter, we are impressed with the living reality of the archetypes -- entities in the depths of the psyche that seem not only to be alive and enduring, but also marked by something approaching consciousness."
Jung ’s “three essential aspects of the mother are: 1) her cherishing and nourishing goodness, 2) her orgiastic emotionality, and 3) her Stygian depths” (¶158). These are “paradoxical” aspects of the “loving and terrible mother.”
Kybele, a wildly sacred earth, expressed the conscious outlook of her age. She had ritual, acoustic, corporal, and dramaturgical form. When the goddess was a Queen Bee, honey was a sacred elixir.
Animals taught us what to eat, what was medicine, how to dig, weave, and hunt--how to clear a way through dark forests, the trepidation of the unknown. Humans learned from nature that stones roll downhill. Birds wove, probed and pounded.
We were taught by nature how it could be mastered. "Reconnecting to the animal means getting to a more sensitive, more artful and more humorous place in the psyche." (James Hillman, Thomas Moore (2013). “The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire”, p.295, Routledge)
We are claimed by myths and invite story into our lives as tributaries that lead us to the bigger river of nourishing essential truths. Their spirits walk with us through the gorges and steep cliffs on indigo nights of deep song. Devotion means a theological interpretation of myth, a philosophy of pagan religion with a pagan perspective.
To speak of today's revitalized psychic terrain meaningfully, we need a new vocabulary. Transliminality, "going beyond the threshold", is a psychological trait involving hypersensitivity to psychological material (including ideation, imagery, affect, and perception) originating in the unconscious or the external world.
Beliefs are dissociative systems, critical lynch-pins. Unless we consciously work with our beliefs, especially the dissociated ones, our unconscious beliefs will win out over our desired thoughts every time. As we follow our beliefs, symptoms, or pathologies to meet our needs, we naturally and necessarily disconnect and dissociate part of our awareness to some degree.
In the process, we may also dissociate our awareness of destructive or limiting patterns that interfere with or outright control our lives, especially the most challenging, difficult ones – those that are embarrassing, hurtful, fearful, or otherwise overwhelming or unbearably damaging to us or our lives. It isn’t a conscious process, but it means our lives are determined by our beliefs, whether or not we actually chose them for ourselves.
It includes transmission of information across the threshold from the unconscious into consciousness. It links with increased likelihood of belief in paranormal phenomena, creativity, mystical experience, manic episodes, hyperaesthesia, and dreamworld or liminal experiences.
We experience sacred landscapes in a way similar to our experience of numinous dreams. We dive into the pools of our unconscious. We are the hunters and philosophers of our own landscape. We constantly imagine ourselves into being.
Kosmos
"Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination." - Gaston Bachelard (1994, p. xxxvi)
Kosmos did not mean a collective, generalized, abstract whole. It did not mean universe, one whole. "Where spirit lifts asking for detachment and transcendence, concern with the soul immerses us in immanence." (James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis)
Cosmos as vast, vague, empty, far-out and distant is not the Greek plural sense of the world and its immediate aesthetic experience. The aesthetic experience and its 'meaning' are identical. The imaginal symbolizes the process. Self-understanding is an imaginative act in which “each image is its own beginning, its own end, healed by and in itself...” (Healing Fiction, p.80).
In Crete, Cyble was worshipped as Rhea. "In shamanism the profound drummings are contexts for the magic of healing...If one could see things in this way, then it would be in her drumming rhythms that Rhea is mother to so many Gods, being in her way Grand rather than Great, as were Athena, Aphrodite, Hera and Artemis. Ever close to the titanic, even loving it in Kronos, Rhea does not totally identify with either Demeter or Hades, life or death, ego or self, persona or archetype. Her deeper sense of timing dances between these beats. Her way seems to acknowledge inflation without succumbing."
Rhea stands at the threshold of consciousness, the mouth of the cave to the Underworld, beating softly but rhythmically on her drum. There is a rhythm to the psyche. It is this rhythm that we try to catch in the therapy process. "How can we not use the names of Gods without presumption, without puffing up our ideas mythologically, without overstating some mortal sense of things, without beginning to feel that we know something? Is it not always a danger signal of soul when something Grand seems Great?
"Rhea...encourages us to see in the images, not literal identifications, neither some actual "this" nor a really real "that," but the rhythm between "this" and "that", between ego and self, between persona and archetype. These betweens take one deep into the beatings drummed in underworlds of soul....."Godlikeness," in the context of Rhea's mythos, may seem more Grand than Great. Her perspective, though it be divine, focuses less on some "God" and more on a poetizing "likeness."
"What is given us are images and the images are archetypal. They are images of Gods. Soul's task is to let the variety of imaginal experience in life become metaphor, listening for the likenesses." The unconscious reflects ongoing experience and dynamics, and expresses formerly unavailable emergent emotional and psychological potentials.
The kingdom of mothers is chtonic, infernal, deep: it is the kingdom of life donated and nourished, and its opposite of death. Mephistofeles in Faust says, 'Don't access the Mothers kingdom without caution.'
He meant do not to enter the ancestral-primordial without caution, without reverential respect, with stupid pretentious arrogance.
All the ancient mothers of the world and humanity are wonderful and terrible, all lead us to our darkest roots: Artemis protects and at the same time sows cruel death for all; Kali dance on piles of corpses with her skull necklace Orgiastic and without remorse, the power of life and death is inherent in those who offer the first, but could choose any moment the second. The great mother was fruitful womb and vagina-toothed, hungry for blood.
"There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death." --Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan, Dune
Visionary Geography
Kosmos always implied ethical and aesthetic qualities such as becoming, decency, honor, credibility, fittingness. Cosmic imagination is the conservative and creative ocean of the infinite that we consider analogous in character to our own imagining, the self-creative life of the soul.
Earth's green essence is self-organizing biological wisdom. Imagination augments physical reality. The key is immersion, participation, and involvement in the mythopoetic imagination--poetic, theatrical, oneric, and magical.
This lies within the archetypal 'ground' itself; it lies within us. We give meaning to things, and on that basis create the rigid and fluid world. This ground is not a place or substance, but a field of potentiality, of creative play, of consciousness. We differentiate ourselves from the unconscious field by personification and engaging them consciously.
A system of affinity allows more intimate interaction. The mother is the center of the child's universe. All pain is birth pain -- brutal beauty. The mother goddess Cybele implied association with caverns, mountains, wild animals, and the cult of Dionysus, whom Cybele is said to have cured and initiated.
Ritual liminality always implies the re-incorporation of the liminar into social structure. The two other forms of liminality are outsiderhood and marginality. Unlike ritual liminality, outsiderhood and marginality usually are semi-permanent or permanent forms of anti-structural existence, which means that the re-incorporation of the liminar (i.e. the outsider or marginal) back into structure is often difficult, impossible or unwanted.
Entanglement means, "interpenetration, overlapping plot," from entangled photons forming a light field, phonons entangled forming a field of energetic sound, to entangled atoms forming molecules. We are entangled with water by the chemical reaction, representing a new "water" that has organic properties, Life's entanglement of life forms creates new and complex forms, generating biodiversity.
It is synonymous with internal ecology, the body of the informing creative deity and that body is the cavern of mystery, the womb of creation embodying the elements -- the insight and wisdom of our bodyminds. Such a conceptual dimension involves emotional and spiritual energies intrinsic to the evolution of universe.
12 December 1913, Liber Novus, Jung Enters the Cave
“The spirit of the depths opened my eyes and I caught a glimpse of the inner things, the world of my soul, the many-formed and changing…. I stand in black dirt up to my ankles in a dark cave. Shadows sweep over me. I am seized by fear, but I know I must go in. I crawl through a narrow crack in the rock and reach an inner cave whose bottom is covered with black water. But beyond this I catch a glimpse of a luminous red stone which I must reach. I wade through the muddy water. The cave is full of the frightful noise of shrieking voices. I take the stone, it covers a dark opening in the rock. I hold the stone in my hand, peering around inquiringly.
I do not want to listen to the voices, they keep me away. But I want to know. Here something wants to be uttered. I place my ear to the opening. I hear the flow of underground waters. I see the bloody head of a man on the dark stream. Someone wounded, someone slain floats there. I take in this image for a long time, shuddering. I see a large black scarab floating past on the dark stream. In the deepest reach of the stream shines a red sun, radiating through the dark water. There I see—and a terror seizes me--small serpents on the dark rock walls, striving toward the depths, where the sun shines. A thousand serpents crowd around, veiling the sun. Deep night falls. A red stream of blood, thick red blood springs up, surging for a long time, then ebbing. I am seized by fear. What did I see?” ...The first time I should say I reached a depth of about one thousand feet, but this time it was a cosmic depth. It was like going to the moon, or like the feeling of descent into empty space.”
"We are the somatic reflection of the images that inhabit us, not only of our personal images but of those images that live in us since the night of time. These images guide us to that " elsewhere " that is not another " imaginally transcendent and countervailing place, but is the place of the here and now and then. Bateson calls it the place "Where Angels hesitate". It's the place of our presence and our Being. Images guide us there, to embody the full potential and possibility of our Being-in the-world." Eldo Stellucci
We descend into the world that is under the world. In order to be an ancestor, a benefactor, a conservator and a mentor, you must have knowledge of the shadows, being trained by the dead (from the past, which have become invisible and yet continue to reinvigorate our life with their influence).
This unformed consciousness--which we often mistake for death-- is really the essence of our vitality and life force. It is the energy we can use to recreate ourselves in every instant of time. It reaches our awareness through dreams and the flow of our imagination.
The "Dead" return as ancestors, especially in times of crisis, when we feel lost. Then the dead "is", by offering a deeper knowledge and support. They have already fallen, they know the sinkhole; their extraordinary resources.
They do not need to come back literally in the form of voices and visions, because they are already palpable in anything that tends to take us down, on any occasion we do not live up to. They are the gravitational force of the psyche.
Myths call imaginative powers gods. In a world of imagination, the relationship between humans and the plant/animal world was a first love. A poetic exchange of energetic relationships manifests authentic nature between our internal and external terrains, blending with the seasons. The natural world is alive with animals’ spirits. An inexplicable connection can only be explained by the presence of such spirits.
We seek a vital and authentic life, the bedrock of reality underneath all social masks, emotional possession, and self-deception. It is a dangerous descent that resonates metaphorically with a dark and terrifying passage into the limbo of our own vulnerability, into the netherworld of the belly of the earth. The bottom drops out of our vertical cosmos. We recover what the world has denied, repressed, and forgotten in our dreams.
If we can detect footprints on the path, we might learn the stories of those who have gone before and in this way lighten the load. We reconnect with the roots of our being using our instinctual nature to engage the unconscious.
We may uncover the pattern that connects us to the past and to the future when the path to transcendence reverses itself in more than a regressive retreat into ancient levels of awareness. But it means sitting in the fire of our own fears and suffering while honoring soul's perspective.
This is the base note of our psychopoetic life song. This psychological awakening is a spiritual initiation that potentially restores meaning to life. Instead of psychological concepts, they appear as high-impact mythological images, the "mythological unconscious" testing our ability to endure and discover integrity in depth. The path leads through the ghost-lands of the unconscious, undead aspects of personality. It illuminates the darkest layer of the inherited personality structure and the daimonic.
Our mythopoetic instinct arises to create myth, to see the patterns and the beauty, within it. Jung called them archetypes or 'numinous imperatives.' Archetypes, as liminal entities are numinous or “spiritual,” if “magical” is too strong a word. Magic is inherent in our instinctual roots. The 'supernatural' or netherworld is the truly chaotic world of the collective unconscious.
Reflected in panpsychism, Psyche fosters the deliteralization of life. Animism informed all life as the worldview that animals, plants, and inanimate objects—possess a soul or spiritual essence. As Plotinus said, "The stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment on the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other; as has been said: "Everything breathes together."
According to Joseph Campbell, "Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. It tells you what the experience is." Awareness of the realm of myth, poetry, image, dreams, and meaning is the realization of the imaginal. Exploration crosses boundaries.
Hillman suggests, "The moment we say something is “what happened” we’re announcing, “This is the myth I no longer see as a myth. This is the myth that I can’t see through.” In ancient times no one had decided what was 'real.' So, in primordial awareness the boundaries of real and unreal, outside and inside remain fluid.
Erich Neumann said, "...the creative process takes place not under the crushing rays of the sun, but in the cold reflected light of the moon, when great is the darkness of the unconscious: the night and not the day is the time of procreation. It belongs to the darkness and silence, the secret, the silence and being veiled."
Mythical figures are not as allegories, not just personified images, but modes of reflection. Kybele is bathed in the Light and concealed by it; she is a multifaceted brilliant Solitaire. Thus she alludes to her virgin nature, that sense of wholeness within oneself, which is the source of wisdom.
She is a love with all kinds of creative possibilities. She is the secret powers of nature, Sophia, Shakti, Shekinah. This archetype has reverberated down through history as the sublime matriarch, the Great Mother. This Beloved of the soul calls us to partnership, sustains, and advances our creativity in the existential world.
This wisdom is deep ecology which reveals the way of living in balance through intuition and self-emptying. She is the natural Light of the Soul--illumination. Beauty is inherent and essential to soul. We perceive her reflection as sheen and luster, her play of light, rather than the light of consciousness.
Hillman insists, "One cannot mirror if one too easily flows; and one cannot mirror everything, but only what one can receive and to which one is solidly present within the limits of one’s own borders. Mirroring is not blank receptivity; it requires focusing.” (Alchemical Psychology)
She is the possibility of bringing creative ideas to birth, to manifestation. She contemplates the possibility of various manifestations. The matriarchies of ancient times reflected societies intimately in touch with seasonal cycles and natural rhythms. We all yearn for "the mother." “We are all born from a female colossus," says Erich Neumann who called the first stage of psychic development “matriarchal”.
The Mystery of existence persists, the experiential necessity of being. We orient in terms of metaphors and mythical knowing. The wild lives at the margins of civilization in our abandon, passion, and delight, the unmediated wild of imagination. Nothing in nature is beyond the reach of imagination.
Reality is seen as various perspectives, or in other words, as so much imagination. Imagination takes on a new status of existing, and becomes reality. All our ways of seeing are imaginal, even our attempts to see without and beyond imagination. (Avens , 1980).
All “reality” starts in direct experience. Meeting the wild, we make new, ever-more refined, evolving answers to open-ended questions. We are immersed in imaginal flux. The original medicine arose from nature and will never change.
“Psyche” is Greek for soul, life, and breath; so psyche is Nature itself. Jung reminds us “nature is not matter only, she is also spirit,” -- the Great Mother. If we repress nature, animals, creative fantasy, and the “inferior” or primitive side of humans, we depreciate the earth and lose our connection with nature and divinity.
This quest for 'self' is the yearning for 'soul' and the healing power of nature. Jung believed when we touch nature we get clean, that natural life is the “nourishing soil of the soul."
We confuse a secondary conceptual Nature with Nature as it is actually perceived, notions of ordinary experience. We have difficulty believing that all existents are psychical. The imaginal is not dialectical nor analytical. The cure is getting back to Experience -- psychical life.
Conserving the Imaginal
The highest experience isn't content universals. but Imaginals, living archai. Kybele appears as recursive generations of exactly what we don't know--the recursive complexity of millions of years. She is the metapresentation of all reflective modes of thought, the fluidity of multiple drafts of consciousness.
Intense and extensive qualities fill the imaginal. Lived intensity determines the extensity of our imaginal experiences. Emphasizing particular relationships, or elements largely determines the nature of the "reality" we experience.
Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno said the World Soul “illumines the universe and directs nature in producing her species in the right way.” She is the magical world of creative mystery.
Qualitative transformation dominates the cosmic process. Rather than mechanical, conservative/creative imagination is psychical. akin to the merely reproductive and constructive creativity we know in ourselves.
When we save this phenomena by returning events to their divine archai, we conserve the Kosmos in which we live -- its beauty, nature, and creation in all its variety. We participate in the realization of events as reflected images of the imaginal world -- the creative habit of nature.
With a particular paradigm, we can create a reality from expectations, even without conscious intent to do so. We are being called to explore the cosmos itself as an interface between flow and consciousness. Myths model the most comprehensive metaphors, for the realization of liberating alternatives. The meaning in life is inherent in the archetypal experience of myth -- the consciousness and content of cosmic imagination.
Sovereignty is all about the land, creating and shaping the land that shapes us. The creative process acts like nature in all its forms, being closely related to how things grow and the energetic basis of transformation. Life in all its realness is broken, messy, vivid, and alive.
The deepest patterns of psyche, the archai, are the fundamental fantasies animating all life. The Nature archetype is ancient, vast and pervasive. Every other archetype in the human psyche comes out of it or is connected to it, including the Great Mother or feminine archetypes, and Great Father masculine archetypes and the Androgynous.
The root principles are beyond being, beyond life, without historical existence beyond time, development, evolution, and understanding. Repetition, Rhythm & Memory Anaphora and epistrophe move the emotions with rhythm and implant memory with the phrases and clauses they repeat. They emphasize effectively because they are in emphatic locations naturally: first and last positions in clauses.
Symbols awaken our consciousness to a new awareness of the inner meaning of life and reality itself as a configuration, a rhythm, beat, tempo, held within the bounds of its form by that god which is its measure, only presented in its manifestations. We must read it in relation to multiple parameters, and in multiple places.
It is a universal life force that has both physical form (earth, seas, mountains, etc.) and psychological power (it activates both instinctual and spiritual drives). If we deepen our forms of interaction with nature, we make it more immersive, a dynamic psychoid reality.
This force majeure is the archetypal nature of life that shapes us. Jung said, "You see, the archetype is a force. It has an autonomy, and it can suddenly seize you. It is like a seizure."
The creative process begins with a 'total seizure'. Divergent and intuitive thinking is supported by analytical thinking, increased creative imagination, narrative ability, imaginative immersion, episodic imagination, and perspective taking or unconscious styles of belief. Creative capacity is more closely related to absorption than hypnotizability. This mood is an inclusive qualitative whole, but experiences of nature are not unified. We are penetrated by all the elements.
Myth is too beautiful to be true, but it can be a healing fiction. An experiential communion takes place in the infrastructure of nature and our nature that is the most fully realized aesthetic, spiritual, and creative expression. Ideas well up spontaneously. We only need to stop compulsively stupefying ourselves with distractions of all kinds and be honest with ourselves.
The 'alchemosexual' nature, a metaphysical first principle, fuses human, animal, vegetable, and mineral nature. This is the penetrating and recptive nature of androgynous mystery, masculine and feminine, male and female, life-death. Some accept and others reject this primordial, metaphysical, spiritual, and basic physical nature of primordial mankind including the rituals, ceremonies, images, and practices implied, hypo- or hyper-arousal of the limbic system.
This holy oneness is the highest human function shrouded in the mystery that our human nature is inseparable from Great Nature, an “emergence” of form from the hidden depth and the androgyny of death. We are meant to be here, as part of this greater whole. Our path spans the spectrum of culture and instinct, remembrance through landmarks and milestones in a context that attends to psyche.
We dissolve in the mysterious ground of being, the sublime wellspring of creativity. Enduring psychospiritual transformation needs to be grounded in “somatic transfiguration.” In humanity's emerging consciousness somewhere between the darkness of imagination and physical mazes, deep caverns seem like uterine spaces or living, breathing internal cavities that snake for miles. Caves -- the original temples -- were worshiped and feared as the center of the earth with miles of crumbling tunnels and steep precipitous drop offs multiple-stories deep.
The lunar 'ground' is a fathomless depth. Humankind has journeyed deep into them and used these dark and treacherous labyrinths of tortured and twisting passages with seemingly bottomless pits, to live, to hide, to explore, and to worship with pilgrimage, art, and rituals.
With its flickering fires, smoky caverns, and hidden dangers the cave gave rise to mythic and archetypal recollections and dreams of ancestral spirits. But all who descend into the underworld do so at their own risk. Initiatory passageways and vertical shafts have dangerous hand and footholds etched in lava and ice, and studded with magical curtains, spires, crystals and inscriptions.
Caves represent the deep impenetrable strata of the "maternal unconscious", re-entry into the containing womb of the Mother, an ancient motif of death and rebirth. This grave is a subterranean temple and nocturnal rites of passage, the flow of underground waters,, and all the ferocious beasts and treasures the caverns of the psychic underworld conceal.
"A meaningful katabasis into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge is for the restoration of the whole person. The dead become an imaginal presence, "the growing understood as descent in the world, becoming useful to it and contributing to form, requires that it is descend in the world that is under the world. To be an ancestor, a benefactor, a conservative and a mentor you must have knowledge of the shadows, being trained "from the dead" (from past things, which have become invisible and however continue to vivify our life with their influence). The "Dead" return as ancestors, especially in moments of crisis, when we feel lost. Then the dead "yes", offering a deeper knowledge and support. Having already fallen, they know the chasms; there their extraordinary resources. They don't need to come back literally in the form of voices and visions, because they are already palpable in anything tends to jump down, on any occasion we are not up to. They are the gravity force of the psyche." (James Hillman)
The Greek word for 'revealed' actually means 'reappear,' like rivers and streams that flow underground and spring forth again. The course remains invisible until it reappears to sight. Creative environmental function includes experiencing a sense of beauty and compassion, supporting and serving life and nature with nature-assisted expressions.
The mind goes still as primal awareness expands into wholeness. Something without physical form shines forth from the hidden world in that very moment. These luminous experiences, true works of art, drive us onward in the Quest. We are struck with divine inspiration and the passion to see it through to completion. Sensuous cognition of beauty is a revelation, an astonishment.
Aesthetic arrest blows apart the illusory differences between the sacred and the profane. Touching nature we are touched by it. We are inspired in the A-ha moment, utterly dissolved in the momentary ego-death that blows apart illusory nature.
Hillman describes aisthesis as “a breathing in or taking in of the world, the gasp, the ‘aha,’ the ‘uh’ of the breath in wonder, shock, amazement, an aesthetic response to the image (eidolon) presented. . . . Images arrest. They stop us, bring us to a standstill . . . the flow of time is invaded by the timeless.” (The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World)
This aesthetic experience is an act of surrender that is an epiphany. It makes us gasp for air and sparks a cascade of pleasure. We are connected to beauty and wholeness. Creativity is a force of human nature that defines our spirit. We know what it means to exist rooted in the mysterious creative ground of being.
Soul is made by narrating events in terms of myth, the metaphoric and symbolic dimensions of our experience. Poetics brings the archetypal into participation with the mundane by tending the currents of life. The alchemist in us is an imaginative variation of our mundane character through which some of us come to recognize our life story. Our enlivened art speaks to our depths, a direct way of knowing -- experience-based knowledge.
"Meaning to life... I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that the life experiences that we have on the purely physical plane will have resonances within that are those of our own innermost being and reality.....And so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive, that’s what it’s all finally about, and that’s what these clues help us to find within ourselves." ~Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss
The gods found, ground, establish, and substantiate reality. The return to primordial origins is fundamental to all mythologies -- expressing a spontaneous regression to the ground that pierces through the world of appearances to 'reality', to immediacy. We experience our own origins through a kind of identity, through countless beings before and after oneself as the germ of infinity.
Our journey re-unfolds those same images which stream out of the ground, out of the abyss. Soul-making differentiates this middle ground. In this way we are "grounding" ourselves. James Hillman romantically imagines, "If you feel yourself to be nature, no different from it, then you simply are like a tree or squirrel in the tree, and you move along without an attitude of one kind or another." Under the spell of the sensuous a wild ethic arises.
When we dive down to our own foundations we find the world of our common divine origin. Ceremony translates the mythological value into an act. Ritual gives us focus, a sacred space where we step out of time to consciously enact a psychological process that life forces us to undertake anyway. This willing engagement suffuses us with the power and strength of the ancient archetype.
The world of the ancestors is a subterranean storehouse of everything that grows and comes to birth. We get to know ecopsychological thinking by immersion in nonhuman nature as we move along in a world that preexists our vision and prolongs itself beyond our vision, behind a curved horizon. Such mystical experiences are either initiated by, or transfigure, or integrate the body into the natural landscape.
They reveal an underlying unity and the interconnectedness of all phenomena, a sudden flash of animistic insight, electrical tingling, numinous light, internal radiance, of experiences of transcendence and connection to the natural world. The body lives and moves but psyche is the relational network.
We extend deep into matter, then into energy, and primordial ground, the primordial mind. The psyche, the generating breath of the universe, plays a role as primordial as that of matter, energy, and spacetime. It is a forest of symbols and meaning watching and waiting for us -- a mythology worth living for -- living in a shared world as a spiritual practice.
Mind Forest
“This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.” (DH Lawrence)
All historical eras have their metaphors for the universe. Each new era brings fresh insights into the nature of the physical world, an imaginal response to complexities and ambiguities.
We brave the tortuous windings and turnings of the paths ahead, the bears and the bees, wild honey. Honey is art. All that the smell of honey comes only where the walls are crumbling. Where is our bear family, our timeless animal grace.
Auditory archetypes meant survival: the ability to pay attention to features of the auditory world that signaled safe, unsafe, or changing habitats. Storage of images became the imagination. Jung (1947/1954b) said careful aesthetic elaboration of a psychic event is its meaning (p. 205).
James Hillman (1979) also related hearing to an archetypally feminine receptivity, yin, lunar. Hillman described listening as involving a more passive awareness, “a receptive consciousness” where “we receive the other as if he were music.”
An image begins to make sense as its significance is intuited. Ultimately, the aim is to discover what the image wants and allow that to guide. Visions are like memory and healing, but probabilistic until we realize and integrate them.
Hillman (1979) thought at least two senses are needed for grasping an image: “We see-through our hearing and listen-into our seeing” (p. 130). We project our imagos either in the form of spirits, or as magical potencies projected upon living people (magicians, priestess, gods, etc.).
Wind, thunder, rushing water, birdsong, rustling bushes, and approaching footsteps alerted us to the occurrence and approximate location of out-of-sight events, distance, movement, and direction. It may may have been key to the evolutionary development of human imagination, the naked beauty of existence.
Kybele is a metaphor for the primordial androgyny of the wild creative divine and that shimmers within humankind. She informs what is going on now in psychic reality. The unconscious is like a wild animal in its natural environment. This is shown in her priestly companions.
"Dionysus is the abyss of impassioned dissolution, where all human distinctions are merged in the animal divinity of the primordial psyche—a blissful and terrible experience." (Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, pg. 90.) Dionysus has been corresponded with a bi-sexual consciousness. This is a god who is primordially united with his own femininity.
Hillman suggests that "Dionysus is mainly a god of women. Though he is male and phallic, there is no misogyny in this structure of consciousness because it is not divided from its own femininity. The change that is indicated by Dionysus is one where female is not added to or integrated by male; rather, the image shows an androgynous consciousness, where male and female are primordially united."
Bisexuality here implies the internal mingling of male and female, active and passive, life and death. This does not come about through "will" but through acceptance. Dionysus maintains his undivided state by not being too analytical (Apollonic). His style is to synthesize. He intimates a polytheistic approach to psychology which recognizes and embraces many archetypal perspectives.
"Bisexual consciousness here means also the experience of psyche in all matter, the fantasy in everything literal, and the literal too, as fantasy; it means a world undivided into spirit and matter, imaginal and real, body and consciousness, mad and insane. ... hysterical attempts at incarnation through symptoms, an erotic compulsion toward soul-making." (Hillman, Dream and the Underworld)
Earth Altar
The forest is a temple of hunting, survival, and desire, a cathedral where light dances through the canopy. How do we remain in touch with the true rhythms of the land? The altar is the Earth, the environmental and ecosophical concept of the creative function, engaging and responding to the world in which we find ourselves, Such poiesis is creating, inhabiting and nourishing our space, the world we make together.
The sacred place, the center of transformation, has always been a refuge from the laws of the temporal world. Sacred space is the visionary gateway which opens communication with the transcendental reality of the divine through conscious ritual contact with the realm of the sacred.
The landscape of the spirit-journey in shamanic trance is populated by good and evil spirits and the souls of the deceased and yet-to-be-born. It is the place where mountains speak and the skeletal Grandmother points out which plants to eat when the dry season lasts too long. In this form, shamanism is everywhere in the old ways of humans.
Here, as Jung states, "man is no longer a distinct individual but his mind widens out and merges into the mind of mankind--not the conscious mind, but the unconscious mind of mankind, where we are all the same." (Jung: Analytical Psychology, 1968, Vintage, p. 46).
William Blake said,"Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age."
Who is Kybele in our consciousness today? We are fundamentally tied to and grounded in nature. We learn to "stand our ground" in the deep interiority of the psychological field with new vigor.
She is the universal veil which encloses and incorporates the Mysteries. It is a membrane that ruptures as the fruiting body grows.The image says everything and dictates all that follows. You just stay true to the image.
Indigenous mind is at the root of nonconscious understanding, accurate knowledge of the universe, including Precession. Ancient time is related to distance. The ancients tapped the information field underlying the material structures of the universe and read the living heart of the cosmos, subquantal, subliminal, subconscious, autonomic, reflexive, amorphous cognition, the nonrepresentational activity of the psyche (Arieti, 1976).
They ask, “What does the land want? What does the river want? What does the wolf want? What does the forest want?" The sky, the sun, the moon, the wind, the trees, beasts, and ancestors are holy beings. They are always watching, and have needs and interests entangled with our own. Kybele is the wisdom of the ancient forest, mysteries hidden deep within the earth, and clouded peaks.
Living Oneness
Our psyches are entwined with the wild gods -- the immense intelligence of the Others that reside in our bodies, experienced through immersion in Earth’s wild psyche. In radical acts of wild imagination, we might encounter the terrestrial intelligence of Earth. We listen receptively to the Council of the Wild Gods, We embrace the invitation to our species to occupy a vital, imaginative, enriching niche in the community of life.
Reich tells us that, "No great poet or writer. no great thinker or artist has ever escaped from this deep and ultimate awareness of being somehow and somewhere rooted in nature at large." (Cosmic Superimposition, trans. Higgins and Pol, 1973, p.280).
Unthought describes nonconscious mental and neuronal processes which are invisible and essential to the primary consciousness which they allow to function. This interactive system is always in transition, processing complex and subtle patterns.
Broad environmental scanning goes on outside of conscious awareness. In the felt presence of the sacred, every act is a ceremony arising from a ceremonial aesthetic. ‘This here’ is present, felt more because it isn’t seen.
We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible. The ineffable god defies gender assignment. We bring life to ceremony. Worldview conditions perceptual structure. Soul is demanding because it wants us to turn our whole worldview upside down.
We might characterize Kybele's perspective as a dynamic, interconnective, self-referential cosmic web, a field concept, where everything is connected. In this holistic worldview "the whole universe appears as a dynamic web of inseparable energy patterns." (Capra).
The existence of any one of us is profoundly mysterious. Birth remains as enigmatic as death, even though we know the mechanisms of generation. Soul means the authenticity that speaks to us from the depths within. Once we did not exist, then life took root in the depths of darkness.
'Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.' (C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces)
It is hard to comprehend our transition from nonexistence to existence. We emerge into existence gradually in and from the mother's womb, as consciousness emerges from the deep ground of the unconscious. It defies our comprehension.
Our early forms of memory are tacit, practical, and emotional -- the coherent unself-consciousness of a wild animal, engaged, entangled, and enmeshed with the world in the 'eternal present' and its transformative potential. Extreme environments evoke our animal nature.
Infancy and childhood are formative for us, and yet we can remember little about them. We are left in the dark about fundamental features of our own personalities. Much of our emotional lives lies beyond our reach. We are destined to forget much of our early life, while it still lives on within us, including birth trauma.
The huntress is in imaginal pursuit of the concealed and mysterious, valued for its own sake. Kybele's wilderness is imaginative, imagistic and emotional. The autonomous image itself makes soul. What is the psyche, the soul? Jung says soul is the archetype of life itself. Imagination is its own ground. The Presence of myth adds 'being' and 'consciousness' to human meaning.
Pathos appeals to emotion, related to the words pathetic, sympathy and empathy. We can experience the world with all the depth and insight imagination allows. Simply seeing it is enlivening. The myths remain the same but our relationship to them and the nature of things changes with strange stirrings.
The earth we've forgotten falls into the unconscious, but she never ceases to call to “rebirth” and a “remembering” as the basis for a renaissance. As we learn to relate with her, the wild woman becomes conscious to us as a deferential co-creative bond, a new attitude of relatedness as a transcendent function. We may experience her, as Jung describes:
“What, on a lower level, had led to the wildest conflicts and to panicky outbursts of emotion, now looks like a storm in the valley seen from the mountaintop. This does not mean that the storm is robbed of its reality, but instead of being in it one is above it.” (C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies)
Life-Bestowing Principle
The Mother, the cosmic womb, is the primordial fact of life, the ability to create life and the formation of personal experience, an invisible gravitational force. Mother is Mor/More in Pashto, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, and Mere in French as well as Banusi and Wazir Pashto.. She personifies the multifaceted human soul, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, the wisdom of the wild.
This invisible world is as real as the microphysical world. We are provoked to reach beyond what we know to be real and enter into unfamiliar terrain. This transcendence can shift who we believe ourselves to be, where our bodies begin and end, what we are to each other, and who we are ultimately capable of being.
Fantasy is always creating reality with no intentionality of heroic dimensional conquest, the ground we stand on is pulling us forward. History is just a spider web of time in space. Our dreams are closer to the roots of our being than daily waking events. Where we feel at home is the place from which we draw our strength.
Soul is made and unmade in the world every day, beyond dogmas and demiurges, a shift in the fundamental way we see the world. More than observers, we are part of the animistic world of all living things, unfolding together in a living cosmos on which we are fully present. Disenchantment shuts us down, whereas enchantment opens us to full participation in the world of wonder and awe, transparency and mystery.
"You have several, up to six, or perhaps more [Souls], and at times a soul can leave you and wander away in the night and get lost, and in the morning you discover that you have lost a soul, not the soul, but a soul, a part of yourself, a part of your personality." (CG Jung, Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process, Pg 85)
“This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.” (DH Lawrence)
All historical eras have their metaphors for the universe. Each new era brings fresh insights into the nature of the physical world, an imaginal response to complexities and ambiguities.
We brave the tortuous windings and turnings of the paths ahead, the bears and the bees, wild honey. Honey is art. All that the smell of honey comes only where the walls are crumbling. Where is our bear family, our timeless animal grace.
Auditory archetypes meant survival: the ability to pay attention to features of the auditory world that signaled safe, unsafe, or changing habitats. Storage of images became the imagination. Jung (1947/1954b) said careful aesthetic elaboration of a psychic event is its meaning (p. 205).
James Hillman (1979) also related hearing to an archetypally feminine receptivity, yin, lunar. Hillman described listening as involving a more passive awareness, “a receptive consciousness” where “we receive the other as if he were music.”
An image begins to make sense as its significance is intuited. Ultimately, the aim is to discover what the image wants and allow that to guide. Visions are like memory and healing, but probabilistic until we realize and integrate them.
Hillman (1979) thought at least two senses are needed for grasping an image: “We see-through our hearing and listen-into our seeing” (p. 130). We project our imagos either in the form of spirits, or as magical potencies projected upon living people (magicians, priestess, gods, etc.).
Wind, thunder, rushing water, birdsong, rustling bushes, and approaching footsteps alerted us to the occurrence and approximate location of out-of-sight events, distance, movement, and direction. It may may have been key to the evolutionary development of human imagination, the naked beauty of existence.
Kybele is a metaphor for the primordial androgyny of the wild creative divine and that shimmers within humankind. She informs what is going on now in psychic reality. The unconscious is like a wild animal in its natural environment. This is shown in her priestly companions.
"Dionysus is the abyss of impassioned dissolution, where all human distinctions are merged in the animal divinity of the primordial psyche—a blissful and terrible experience." (Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, pg. 90.) Dionysus has been corresponded with a bi-sexual consciousness. This is a god who is primordially united with his own femininity.
Hillman suggests that "Dionysus is mainly a god of women. Though he is male and phallic, there is no misogyny in this structure of consciousness because it is not divided from its own femininity. The change that is indicated by Dionysus is one where female is not added to or integrated by male; rather, the image shows an androgynous consciousness, where male and female are primordially united."
Bisexuality here implies the internal mingling of male and female, active and passive, life and death. This does not come about through "will" but through acceptance. Dionysus maintains his undivided state by not being too analytical (Apollonic). His style is to synthesize. He intimates a polytheistic approach to psychology which recognizes and embraces many archetypal perspectives.
"Bisexual consciousness here means also the experience of psyche in all matter, the fantasy in everything literal, and the literal too, as fantasy; it means a world undivided into spirit and matter, imaginal and real, body and consciousness, mad and insane. ... hysterical attempts at incarnation through symptoms, an erotic compulsion toward soul-making." (Hillman, Dream and the Underworld)
Earth Altar
The forest is a temple of hunting, survival, and desire, a cathedral where light dances through the canopy. How do we remain in touch with the true rhythms of the land? The altar is the Earth, the environmental and ecosophical concept of the creative function, engaging and responding to the world in which we find ourselves, Such poiesis is creating, inhabiting and nourishing our space, the world we make together.
The sacred place, the center of transformation, has always been a refuge from the laws of the temporal world. Sacred space is the visionary gateway which opens communication with the transcendental reality of the divine through conscious ritual contact with the realm of the sacred.
The landscape of the spirit-journey in shamanic trance is populated by good and evil spirits and the souls of the deceased and yet-to-be-born. It is the place where mountains speak and the skeletal Grandmother points out which plants to eat when the dry season lasts too long. In this form, shamanism is everywhere in the old ways of humans.
Here, as Jung states, "man is no longer a distinct individual but his mind widens out and merges into the mind of mankind--not the conscious mind, but the unconscious mind of mankind, where we are all the same." (Jung: Analytical Psychology, 1968, Vintage, p. 46).
William Blake said,"Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age."
Who is Kybele in our consciousness today? We are fundamentally tied to and grounded in nature. We learn to "stand our ground" in the deep interiority of the psychological field with new vigor.
She is the universal veil which encloses and incorporates the Mysteries. It is a membrane that ruptures as the fruiting body grows.The image says everything and dictates all that follows. You just stay true to the image.
Indigenous mind is at the root of nonconscious understanding, accurate knowledge of the universe, including Precession. Ancient time is related to distance. The ancients tapped the information field underlying the material structures of the universe and read the living heart of the cosmos, subquantal, subliminal, subconscious, autonomic, reflexive, amorphous cognition, the nonrepresentational activity of the psyche (Arieti, 1976).
They ask, “What does the land want? What does the river want? What does the wolf want? What does the forest want?" The sky, the sun, the moon, the wind, the trees, beasts, and ancestors are holy beings. They are always watching, and have needs and interests entangled with our own. Kybele is the wisdom of the ancient forest, mysteries hidden deep within the earth, and clouded peaks.
Living Oneness
Our psyches are entwined with the wild gods -- the immense intelligence of the Others that reside in our bodies, experienced through immersion in Earth’s wild psyche. In radical acts of wild imagination, we might encounter the terrestrial intelligence of Earth. We listen receptively to the Council of the Wild Gods, We embrace the invitation to our species to occupy a vital, imaginative, enriching niche in the community of life.
Reich tells us that, "No great poet or writer. no great thinker or artist has ever escaped from this deep and ultimate awareness of being somehow and somewhere rooted in nature at large." (Cosmic Superimposition, trans. Higgins and Pol, 1973, p.280).
Unthought describes nonconscious mental and neuronal processes which are invisible and essential to the primary consciousness which they allow to function. This interactive system is always in transition, processing complex and subtle patterns.
Broad environmental scanning goes on outside of conscious awareness. In the felt presence of the sacred, every act is a ceremony arising from a ceremonial aesthetic. ‘This here’ is present, felt more because it isn’t seen.
We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible. The ineffable god defies gender assignment. We bring life to ceremony. Worldview conditions perceptual structure. Soul is demanding because it wants us to turn our whole worldview upside down.
We might characterize Kybele's perspective as a dynamic, interconnective, self-referential cosmic web, a field concept, where everything is connected. In this holistic worldview "the whole universe appears as a dynamic web of inseparable energy patterns." (Capra).
The existence of any one of us is profoundly mysterious. Birth remains as enigmatic as death, even though we know the mechanisms of generation. Soul means the authenticity that speaks to us from the depths within. Once we did not exist, then life took root in the depths of darkness.
'Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.' (C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces)
It is hard to comprehend our transition from nonexistence to existence. We emerge into existence gradually in and from the mother's womb, as consciousness emerges from the deep ground of the unconscious. It defies our comprehension.
Our early forms of memory are tacit, practical, and emotional -- the coherent unself-consciousness of a wild animal, engaged, entangled, and enmeshed with the world in the 'eternal present' and its transformative potential. Extreme environments evoke our animal nature.
Infancy and childhood are formative for us, and yet we can remember little about them. We are left in the dark about fundamental features of our own personalities. Much of our emotional lives lies beyond our reach. We are destined to forget much of our early life, while it still lives on within us, including birth trauma.
The huntress is in imaginal pursuit of the concealed and mysterious, valued for its own sake. Kybele's wilderness is imaginative, imagistic and emotional. The autonomous image itself makes soul. What is the psyche, the soul? Jung says soul is the archetype of life itself. Imagination is its own ground. The Presence of myth adds 'being' and 'consciousness' to human meaning.
Pathos appeals to emotion, related to the words pathetic, sympathy and empathy. We can experience the world with all the depth and insight imagination allows. Simply seeing it is enlivening. The myths remain the same but our relationship to them and the nature of things changes with strange stirrings.
The earth we've forgotten falls into the unconscious, but she never ceases to call to “rebirth” and a “remembering” as the basis for a renaissance. As we learn to relate with her, the wild woman becomes conscious to us as a deferential co-creative bond, a new attitude of relatedness as a transcendent function. We may experience her, as Jung describes:
“What, on a lower level, had led to the wildest conflicts and to panicky outbursts of emotion, now looks like a storm in the valley seen from the mountaintop. This does not mean that the storm is robbed of its reality, but instead of being in it one is above it.” (C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies)
Life-Bestowing Principle
The Mother, the cosmic womb, is the primordial fact of life, the ability to create life and the formation of personal experience, an invisible gravitational force. Mother is Mor/More in Pashto, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, and Mere in French as well as Banusi and Wazir Pashto.. She personifies the multifaceted human soul, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, the wisdom of the wild.
This invisible world is as real as the microphysical world. We are provoked to reach beyond what we know to be real and enter into unfamiliar terrain. This transcendence can shift who we believe ourselves to be, where our bodies begin and end, what we are to each other, and who we are ultimately capable of being.
Fantasy is always creating reality with no intentionality of heroic dimensional conquest, the ground we stand on is pulling us forward. History is just a spider web of time in space. Our dreams are closer to the roots of our being than daily waking events. Where we feel at home is the place from which we draw our strength.
Soul is made and unmade in the world every day, beyond dogmas and demiurges, a shift in the fundamental way we see the world. More than observers, we are part of the animistic world of all living things, unfolding together in a living cosmos on which we are fully present. Disenchantment shuts us down, whereas enchantment opens us to full participation in the world of wonder and awe, transparency and mystery.
"You have several, up to six, or perhaps more [Souls], and at times a soul can leave you and wander away in the night and get lost, and in the morning you discover that you have lost a soul, not the soul, but a soul, a part of yourself, a part of your personality." (CG Jung, Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process, Pg 85)
Wild At Heart
The essential feminine, this wild darkness, the virgin forest -- the sensuous fantastic -- lights our way in the imaginal perspective of an ensouled world. Kybele is the autonomous fantasy maker that animates imagination of visible and invisible worlds and the seething excitation of instincts. We can tend and attend to the inner wilds, the symbolic language of nature, wandering through the imagery-infused world.
Kybele is the sole and original parent and our wild creativity. The throbbing heart of creation acts through its own center. The darkness of the depths, suffused with self-generated light, is also called spiritual Nature, Anima Mundi, or soul that exists in an invisible state as Primary Imagination, infused throughout the cosmos animated by collective soul.
Campbell said, “The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” (A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living)
Ritualized movement and silence speaks volumes, reverberating with future frequencies, opening interiority and ecstatic communion -- a kaleidoscopic fusion of the senses, the inverted articulation of attunement to reverberating echos. In active sensing we actively coordinate movement with the information we want to sense and find, integration of sensory and motor information, learning in a concrete way.
We return in mystery to the embrace of the goddess, the wild feminine, committed to the wildness within. The Virgin of Conception was the original sacrificial virgin, psychoactive buds of cannabis, burned as a sacred offering to the Goddess. She doesn't enter us, but emerges from deep within perception as action, something elemental.
The secret is inside the creation and based in nature and our own intrinsic nature, bringing more of the unconscious and mythic into consciousness through the mothering path of awakening. Life pours forth from itself.
Interconnectivity manifests in our deep psychic bond with the earth, its creatures and plants, and the cosmos as a whole. Evidence of this interrelationship arises in our personal lives in dream images and synchronicities, and in the powerful and visceral sense of engagement we feel with the natural world.
Our instincts include our paradoxical capacity for creation/destruction, our hunger for connective interdependence/independence, and sovereignty -- consciously engaging the instinctual realm. Repressed, they return with eruption of compulsion and obsession, archetypal possession not differentiation.
Perception is more than external input, It is modulated by what we’re doing at any given time, a mixing of multisensory and movement binding, the way that we move through the world, movement as part of cognition.
Death is integral to life. We understand that the nature of life in the world is about becoming. "It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live according to nature," said Marcus Aurelius. The ultimate nature of death is the final transition from becoming and the differentiation of consciousness to nondifferentiation and ultimate being.
Wild Darkness
Kybele gives voices to mute places, a marriage of trees, rocks, and starry sky. Narrative gives a grounded sense of self. The margins are the center of the imagination. Reflecting her own cavernous interiority, she transforms inhospitable, harsh terrains into inviting primordial parks and riverbeds flowing with the imaginal. We yearn to float downstream; reverie moves us forward. Landscape is a provocateur.
To see the beauty we must stop, breathe and absorb into the moment, the only reality we all really have. Some cultures create zoomorphic figures and geometric patterns to transform the vast land into a highly symbolic, ritual and social-cultural landscape. She speaks for their unspeakable immensity that reminds us we are truly small.
Liminal places connect outside with inside across all experiential domains. Wandering off the path of hypermodernity, we are arrested, trapped in her magically woven web of poetic resonance. There is a synergetic relation between landscape, instinct and imagination that rekindles all as a unified field that is the mycelial root of sacred places of heart and mind.
Relationships are the poetry of life and connecting with the land. Kybele is the earth from which we grow, our connection to dreams, the animal realm, our ancestors, and deep unconscious. She is the dust under our feet beyond those areas of origin that can be mapped, giving place a face in the present.
What is this invisible ground whose image we carry in our souls where spiritual ideals merge with worldly realities? Isn’t it always right here, right now everywhere always, forever? The contextual background, the invisible environment, is the fundamental ground from which both mind and matter emerge, the luminous absolute space of reality beyond the mere absence of energy/matter. The radiant ground is the fundamental source.
Psyche expresses the nature of things, including our own nature. Jung claimed, "every soil has its secret, of which we carry an unconscious image in our souls: a relationship of spirit to body and of body to earth." -
CW XVIII
Jung said, "The body is the original animal condition, we are all animals in body, and so we have to have an animal psychology in order to be able to live in it. […] Since we have a body it is indispensable that we exist also as an animal.”
The animal is the instinctual level of the psyche. Hillman notes, "Our dreams recover what the world forgets. Forgotten pagan polytheism breeds in animal forms. In those animals are the ancient Gods:... The old Gods are still there in our dreams... The animals may go on like Gods, alive and well and unforgotten, in the ikons of our dreams and in the vital obsessions of complexes and symptoms..."
The animal within is a guide. Dream animals behave in unusual ways and can even talk as they do in fairy tales. The path, track, or trail of an animal can be followed. They may appear at crucial 'soul junctures,' validating our direction, choices, and path.
According to Jungian analyst Dennis L. Merritt: "To be truly human, Jung believed, and to reach our unique potential, we have to be in relationship to animals. This is both an outer relationship to animals and an intimate relationship with the collective unconscious, coming to terms with the animal in our inheritance."
We can respond consciously to such animal spirits as we do to land, weather, and seasons of the soul. This bedrock of archaic psyche is the germinal image of images, a generative matrix, personification and inflection of deep universal principles.
Autogenesis
The primordial androgyne is the bisexual instrument of her own fertility. The ancient Chinese imagined the ‘womb’ as an internal body part found in men and women alike. Among other works, Hŏ Chun cites the Precious Mirror to analyze his concept of the androgynous, menstruating womb.
In Kabbalah, the life breath, pure unconditioned awareness, functions as “seed” and the earth is the aspect of the “womb". In Tibet, Womb Breathing is rooted in the Vajrayana Buddhist meditation method called vase breathing (bum chung in Tibetan) of vital energy. The empty womb encompasses pure potential. https://player.vimeo.com/video/17011448
We all share the ordeal of the womb. This dangerously dual figure, the animal soul in the human psyche, is more of a structural layer of the psyche than a historical epoch.
Ancient philosophers and Jungians call this personified image-making faculty the Anima Mundi or World Soul. Soul, emotive source, or the imaginal realm, is the ‘Mother of all possibilities.’
Mythic figures provide the poetic characteristics of our thought, feeling, and action, and natural phenomena. Universal archetypal images of natural phenomena present faces that speak to the imagining soul.
Hillman says, "the movement from mother to anima represents this shift in perspective from naturalistic to psychological understanding." Soul comes into relationship with universals.
We emulate her when we conceive the spiritual "birth," without the organ of biological conception. Nature was once fully spirit and matter, lumen naturae, the scintillating luminosity of Nature itself. Spirit is the soul of objects, its psychic aspects. Our souls are owner of our body, not the reverse. We are encompassed with images in the imaginal field.
"The hiddeness and invisibility of an image lies not in the fact that it contains something apart from its appearance, but in its ‘multiple ambiguity of meanings.’ The sensual qualities of an image – form, color, texture – are not copied from objects and they replace reality as in visions or hallucinations. To put it paradoxically, images are real precisely because they do not correspond to anything in the so-called outer or objective world of our ordinary experience...hallucination pertains to perceptions, whereas images pertain to imagination." (Avens).
We have a kind of spontaneous knowledge that does not rest on observation or inference of our own mental states, but of what we are doing, what is actually happening out there in the world. Archaic humans knew how to converse with soul -- the natural mind with its evolving emotional experience and our species' collective wisdom, and numinous symbols.
Consciousness does not mean individual awareness. Interacting interdependently with/within different levels of reality, this framework conceptualizes universal consciousness as a fundamental part of reality/universe that complements physical potentialities and brings them to actual physical states.
The larger concept includes the personal unconscious and collective mind, conscious and unconscious -- the union of the serpent (subconscious) with the eagle, hawk, and other predatory birds (super conscious). Consciousness is the bottomless pit of the indivisible whole. It means the world. In the most inclusive sense it is cosmic consciousness.
The mind's nature is primordial awareness, practiced by mystics and sages from time immemorial. We retain memories as superpositions of possibilities. Both we and the entire universe also retain memory as dynamic structure. The whole body is memory.
Our individual life stories can be unfolded as an ecopsychological exercise as complex as a lustrous meadow. Ernst Cassirer (1944) suggested, "Symbolic memory is the process by which man not only repeats his past experience but also reconstructs this experience. Imagination becomes a necessary element of true recollection". (p. 52)
The Mother dominated the earliest epochs of the discovery of the sacred, fostering a symbolic attitude toward objective meaning inherently found in nature. Early serpent religions were about death, rebirth, and resurrection. The revelation was of interior meaning of the cosmos and soul of nature as anima mundi or World Soul -- a range of themes, impulses, and drives.
Nature is intelligent and has its own language, including the dark inheritance of the human mind passed down from generation to generation -- a formative principle of instinctive power. Psyche is underworld, says Hillman, the place where there is existence without body and form and vitality. Nietzsche proclaimed, “All pain is birth pain.” We all experience the compulsion of birth pangs.
The following far-ranging tropes are what the Kybele mythos brings up for me, as well as what can be provoked and invoked in the reader. Writing is a journey into the unknown, a leap into the abyss. We can explore the psyche in a kind of archaeological excavation without ransacking the past for inspiration, re-visioning our relationship with nature.
This essay is a long-form discussion of many interrelated aspects. Our challenge is recognize the many levels of interwoven unconscious influence. It attempts to conjure fresh images and perceptions, as no story can be reduced to an archetype. Marshall McLuhan says that "thematic variation' in storytelling has replaced 'narrative continuity'..."
No theory conforms to its own standards. Our archetypal journey is to the foreign lands of the unconscious, Images and our interactions with them (whether these interactions are scholarly, mythopoetic, ritualistic, or actively imaginal) are psyche. Her story somehow becomes our own, the fate of place that takes us from void to containing vessel.
Myth weaves together the energies of life in a symbolic dramatization of embodied instincts and archetypes. Ritual enactment is psychic structuring. If one version fails we switch to another story, equally believable. We have an inherent capacity to reinterpret stories. Stories have the power to change and adapt under re-examination. The original wild and savage cult adapted to urban life and concerns.
We all propagate myths about self, others, and world. The most historically successful myths are not objectively true, requiring a cognitive leap. Truth value and beliefs can be far-fetched, apart from suffering, ethics, and morality. With metaphors, we avoid mind's tendency to take fantastically rich ideas and turn them into hard, concrete, absolutist truth claims.
Hellenism recognizes that things are complex and unknown, a wider space for our actual psychic natures. First we become aware of myth, then begin labeling mythic aspects, then realize it permeates our being and mythic realization of cosmos. Images and our interactions with them are psyche. Nature's language is ineffable, appearing in signs.
Hillman notes, "We may also conclude that the creative as instinct cannot be limited to the few, to geniuses and artists. This would be again to confuse the artistic with the creative. If it is a basic instinct along with hunger and sexuality, activity and reflection, then, like these, it is given to all."
We tune in to Kybele's phenomenon and engage it through lived experience and twilight consciousness, unsought imagistic insights. Ours is a body of images, myth, and action. They autonomously express themselves as impulses and images from the interior psyche, and as events and situations in the external world. We reflect on the essential themes and describe rites and interrelationships through the art of association and writing.
Life patterns and life metaphors provide continuity through recurring symbolic themes and motifs that appear in our life and in our metaphor landscapes and imaginal geography. We obviously benefit from nature's positive impact on our psychological and physical well-being.
“At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked. Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world's and the psyche's hinterland.” Carl G. Jung, MDR
The 'land' is our psychophysical basis, earth-soul-body; human is humus. Phrygia was the cradleland of Kybele, which spread to Ionia, Greece, and Rome. The soul of nature became the soul of the city. "Of course you should not look away from history. I am not suggesting to look away from it, but to look below it. Look into geography and into the land," says Hillman.
Sacred land is who we are, the motherland of many dreams. We are directly connected to beauty and wholeness. We know what it means to exist rooted in the mysterious creative ground of being. We are all the land in this sense. The transpersonal is immanent to our physical being -- not only tied to the land or matter, the land supports us, as the body supports the transpersonal.
Hillman suggested, "turning the attention into land and landscape: into mountains, rivers, forests, deserts, jungles. Again: place and aesthetic sense. Geography is much deeper than History—it is there where you can find the richest archetypal images. You should look for the animal soul that is rooted in nature."
The archetypal couple, the parent images of the unconscious (Sol and Luna), represent the spiritual and chthonic nature of the hierosgamos, the sacred union of unconscious wholeness -- the undiscovered country.
The image stream or imaginal process is our primary experience and permeates and conditions all facets of human life. We tend to take the background noise of the constant imaginal flux of the stream of consciousness for granted.
We rarely focus our conscious awareness on this imaginal wellspring, but sometimes it intrudes on consciousness during our gaps in awareness – day dreaming, fantasies, reverie, lacunae, inspiration, discovery, if we but listen instinctively and respond to the initiatory call.
Exploration of the soul or mindfield is possible through imagination. The dynamic mindscape underlies our beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Imagination is both a realm or domain of experience and a human faculty.
Images come in from the outside through our senses, and are also produced autonomously from the unconscious as a perpetual multisensory narrative of experience, immediate though often metaphorical in nature. Meaningful signals or mental forms emerge from the amorphous background.
The term "no man's land" expresses a profound truth: the earth does not belong to us -- if anything, we belong to the earth and the sky. In the syzygy, the archetypal couple symbolize the moment when heaven and earth come together, creating the Holy Union. The Sacred Marriage, hierosgamos is consummated. The Navajo say, "the earth is my mother, and the sky is my father."
These metaphors guide our decisions, nudge us along through the silent forest of our life path, the self-immersed condition. Beyond primitivism, the initiatory myth is a way of confronting the dark of nature with a return to no longer being separated from the creation. The symbolic process of transformation begins in chaos and ends with the birth of the new personality.
Among other things, Kybele is the neolithic prototype of the goddess of the wild hunt, leading the ancestral dead, the ghosts of deep memory, and blessing the land with her dark ecology. She still guides our path into the netherworld of the primordial unconscious, a return to the state of naked awareness, mystery, and awe.
A complex system of mountain and ancestor worship etched meaning into the mountain terrain of those subject to the same landscape, the source of a power which is to be awed and revered. Stories of the inseparable mountain and ancestors were one, passed down through the generations. Tesla notes, “Our entire biological system, the brain, the Earth itself, work on the same frequencies.”
An interconnected web between history, landscape, and culture formed that mirrors that of fungi, plants, creatures, and root systems of the dark ecology -- the mycology of consciousness, the social location of psychedelic mysticism. Sacred mountains and mushrooms shared roles as places of revelation and transformation -- places where we magically conceive ourselves through self-conceptualization and self-cultivation.
Mother Mycelium
We all come from one genus -- consciousness, sentience. Mycorrhizae are symbiotic relationships that form between fungi and plants. The fungi colonize the root system of a host plant and shares information. The closer we come to the deep core of any archetypal experience the more the numinous effect increases, as a confrontation with a power not of this world but the more-than-human world.
"The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth. . . For the root matter is the mother of all things." (C.G. Jung, CW 18, Page xxv).
The field becomes the focus. We learn to lean into the field and feel its chaos without imposing premature order. The field is a paradox of fusion and distance, an impossible simultaneity. We need to practice seeing the field, as well as seeing into and through it with full-bodied feeling. It is known only by experiential perception, not interpretation.
The everyday processes of living in the conscious mind usually succeed in compartmentalizing off the preconscious from our awareness. Psychic gifts can come under the service of self-destructive impulses. But occasionally, the upwelling of the preconscious area, unconditioned belonging in the world, erupts like molten magma from the mantle of the earth.
Knowing By Feeling
The unconscious is the "wilderness" of body and world. Nature is an environmental trigger igniting altered states of consciousness, like nature-mystic merging, "oceanic," or "peak-experience." They give us the exaltation, a primordial grace, of standing on a high mountain and gaining for a minute the awesome glory of a grand vista.
Mountain peaks express the shared connection of supernatural power, fertility and protection between the sacred mountain, the gods, and the dead. Our wild embodied nature is lured not only by others but by landscapes, trees, forests, and seascapes, fecund wonders as well as ideas, poetry, art, and music. Non-ordinary perception evolves through kinesthetic perception. We are somatically aroused, seduced and captivated by the animate world.
Our wild self knows what is being said by nonhuman flora and fauna. We see the sacred in nature through the radiant consciousness of the "otherness" of natural things. This is the simplest, most common form of illumination -- overpowering apprehension of the Infinite, life imminent in all living things.
Walls between the visible and the invisible grow thin, and the Eternal seemed to break through into the world with a higher order of reality. This awareness: is so intangible, it strikes like a thunderclap.
Awe is captivating and immersive, engaging us more with our external world and less with ourselves. We sense the presence of something “larger than ourselves.” The wildwood births physical manifestations of mythological archetypes drawn from the subconscious minds of those who enter.
Our wild self is instinctively, emotionally, viscerally, and sensuously crazy about creation and enchanted by all things and possibilities with earth-infused vivacity. It calms the chaos of the transition and allows the new self to emerge as a living reality, intuited kinship with all animated creatures. We have to maintain faith in the process. Movement from the timeless into temporal existence is a creative passage.
With a sense of containment within a higher dimensional field, the opposites reconcile and new potential is created. The fusional field is invisible to normal perception but contains a welter of unprocessed information. The fusional complex is an archetypal pattern that organizes life between the known and the unknown.
The holographic metaphor extends to a fundamental description of the universe and our electromagnetic embedding within that greater field. We rarely attend to the deep experiential field we experience with the other in our bodies.
The archetypal force of restoration and self-empowerment, as genuine needs of the psyche, appears as a synesthetic image. Archetypal presence is met with our most particularized devotion. It is the nightside depth of our worldview, who we are before we even think about who we are, our psychosomatic being, our genealogy, the relational field, and cosmic field of the whole. We are centrally involved in the cosmic process.
We seek a vital and authentic life, the bedrock of reality underneath all social masks, emotional possession, and self-deception. It is a dangerous descent that resonates metaphorically with a dark and terrifying passage into the limbo of our own vulnerability, into the netherworld of the belly of the earth. The bottom drops out of our vertical cosmos.
We recover what the world has denied, repressed, and forgotten in our dreams through depth perception. This is the base note of our psychopoetic life song. This psychological awakening is a spiritual initiation that potentially restores meaning to life.
Instead of psychological concepts, engagement appears as high-impact mythological images, the "mythological unconscious" testing our ability to endure and discover integrity in depth. The path leads through the ghost-lands of the unconscious, undead aspects of personality. It illuminates the darkest layer of the inherited personality structure and the daimonic.
We confront the pitiless monsters of archetypal Grief, Loss, Cares, Diseases, Age, Dread, Hunger, Want, Death, Toil, Sleep, Catastrophe, War, and Discord. Our demons are the instinctual impulses and unconscious complexes that overcome and possess us. But it means sitting in the fire of our own fears and suffering while honoring soul's perspective.
We feel the unity of our human being as lived experience. We are endowed with a density that is lived or felt as the stratum of our existence, subject to accident, suffering, and death. It is neither objectively objective or subjective, yet mysterious and intimate. The body is our physical environment and vehicle of our openness. Genealogy can inform us that there are things within us different than we already thought.
The Clan Mother or divine Ancestress is chthonic. The word comes from "chthōn," which means "earth" in Greek, associated with things that dwell in or under the earth; chthonic sensuality and visions of chthonic initiation -- the wilderness of emotion and sexuality. The primal woman reminds us we can return back to the Indigenous, that ancient part of ourselves hidden within us, anytime.
Her favored beasts and companions, felines and canines, wolves and wild dogs, are keystone predators. They urge us to ask not what does forest do for these regulator species, but what do top predators do for the forests, which still cover a third of the world. Removing predators leads to deterioration of diversity and the whole system, downgrading the ecosystem.
In her first form, she ruled the wild -- space, place, and landscape. Paleolithic hunters sought supernatural help from the hunting goddess. She is a wild woman archetype embodied within us. Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes her as the instinctual nature of women, "a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing."
"Mother of the Gods," "Mountain Mother," Matar Kubileya is a transcendent helper/healer. She is wise and quietly gives us breath, trust, and inner peace with her indomitable spirit, manifesting in the world through the medium of creative force.
“Mother Night is the quintessential medial woman, the woman who can walk in two worlds … 'the one who knows' and who can reveal solid ways of living and unleashing creative life in both worlds.”
She is "the generative power of the goodness of the core self—that is, all creativity and understanding that lies out of sight in darkness—often called the unconscious." Mistress of mountains and springs, her Phrygian cult monuments were carved from living rock faces. Her cosmogonic face was of black meteoric stone.
Wild Mind
Does a wild mind call for a field guide to the psyche, a grove full if ancient trees, the circuits of the stars, or deep crumbling cave arched beneath a mighty mountain? The Chaldean Oracles suggested nature "commands fate", referring to its ensoulment.
How can we fully embody our multifaceted wild minds, commit ourselves to the largest, soul-infused story we’re capable of living, and serve the greater Earth community -- the relationship between our human psyche and the rest of nature? Kybele has meant different things in different epochs.
Psyche is in the world, not just in ourselves. It's in our loves, in our personal and collective lives, just as much as our culture and nature. The gods and ourselves, in interstitial space (tissue space), are in the world, also present as in-scapes of our imaginations.
Divesting enculturation we learn to see in the dark through her eyes, through imaginal sight, through inner and outer wilderness vision quests or trance journeys that revitalize and re-enchant us. Arguably, soul is an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person's fate.
Planetary poetics reveal what it means to be in an undisturbed place. True listening to the earth equalizes each sound's value. Every place has a sound that connects us back to the land. Silence is the Presence of everything in the natural acoustic system, undisturbed. Acoustic space nurtures our nature, says Gordon Hempton.
“...there is a fundamental frequency for each habitat” — a tonal quality that shapes the sense of place and the quality of presence. What emerges is the embodied awareness that silence, like the art of sculpture, is the removal of excess material so that the true form — of one’s consciousness, of the world, of life itself — can be revealed."
Psychobiologists link the vagal pathway to hormones outside the brain and neurotransmitters inside the brain that lock in memory of emotional or stressful events. (Rachel Adelson)
The vagus nerve is connected with the posterior wall of the external auditory canal, the lower part of the eardrum’s membrane, and in the stirrup muscle of the middle ear. Then, it descends down to the lower internal organs regulating functions in the pharynx, larynx, thorax and abdomen. So, stimulating the ear means stimulating all the vital vegetative internal organs.
Sound vibrations significantly impact all areas of the body linked by this important nerve, resonating very close to it in the eardrums. Most cranial nerves are either directly or indirectly connected with the ear. Long and sustained sounds sooth and relax (parasympathetic response) us; sharp and abrupt sounds trigger alertness and alarm (sympathetic response).
Auditory stimulation of the vagus nerve can lead to reduced activity of the limbic system. It is located on both sides of the thalamus, including the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, the amygdala, and other nearby areas.
It is a primary factor in our emotional life and the formation of memories. It has been called, "the "missing link" between the hormone epinephrine outside the brain and the neurotransmitter norepinephrine inside the brain." https://www.apa.org/monitor/apr04/vagus
Dark Sky
We live in a creative universe articulated by natural philosophy, indigenous traditions, and evolutionary cosmology. We can enter deep conversations with rivers, creatures, and stone or pass through magical gateways into our unique role within the Great Work, called from within. We live simultaneously in both an external environment and internal environment, soil and soul.
A nature-based map guides us into a landscape from which emerge extraordinary gifts of our own true nature, joy, sensuality and renewal. The dragons of self-deception, the darkest challenges pull us away from under-valuating or over-valuing our own—and others—psychic contents. Transformative instructions from soul to psyche emerge from bearing and unlocking the mystery.
Godforms are comprehensible forms of divine dynamic energy -- an image of god in a mirror. Metaphorically they describe styles of knowing, or how we know what we know and what its like. Functionally they affect our spirituality, ideas, emotions, and behavior, bridging the generational and geographical gap.
We seek soulmaking through emergent and extended experience of the processes of life. When they accumulate and integrate, renewal or rebirth gives birth to the soul. We cannot truly say where our psyche ends and that of the earth begins. Evocative landscapes help us inhabit the moment. Rumi said, "Maybe you are searching amongst the branches for what only appears in the roots.“
The lumen naturae, the light of nature is the quintessence, dwelling in our hearts. as an intuitive apprehension of the facts, a kind of illumination of our own experience of nature. The universal and scintillating force of the light of nature carries spirit within it, the source of mystical knowledge.
As in physics, fields are more important than specific points or locales. Fields cause a force to be exerted over a distance where no physical stuff causing that force to be exerted. Psyche is an imaginal field, a "dark sky," through which archetypal energies ripple. Blessings flow when the goddess appears.
Myths enchant the soul. We are the carriers of human nature. We all contribute to the formation of the universe through our action and suffering. The unconscious is an inherently mystical, erotic, and transformational dimension.
Hillman claims, "My fantasies and symptoms put me in my place. ... No longer is it a matter of where they belong – to which God – but where I belong, at which altar I may leave myself, within which myth my suffering will turn into a devotion."
Resilience
The Medial Woman is a dominant force in the psyche, a psychically substantive quality that can only be found in the depths.. She represents the strong-sighted and deep-hearted self who lives simultaneously in our ordinary world of light and the world and the hidden depths of the Soul and our potential.
She lives on the border between realities, mediating the depths of the collective unconscious to those around her, and dives deeply into her own unconscious, willing to experience and explore the unknown contents, whatever they are (Estes).
Imagination is inherent to thinking, willing, and being, revitalizing feminine power. The unique wild and wise self emerges from the realm of mystery, dreams, and shadow. That double worldview sees through both the eyes of soul and ego. We can draw on that deep insight to engage psyche.
We create our truth in the act of putting it together. We become participants in the cosmogony. As living principles, gods continue to incarnate both in us and in the world around us in ways that elude rigidly theistic understandings. The world is psyche's stage.
The ancient cult practices of Kybele were not uniform and remain obscure. Modern reconstructions can only re-imagine them. Images are complex, rich, and subtle with textures, tempo, tone, and rhythm. She is not only the ability to see through things, but to see through to the roots of things coming up through the surface of interbeing.
Hillman says in "Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic?", reprinted in the Uniform Editions Vol. 1: "Myths have no 'authorized version' ... Myths are best authorized on the authority of their teller. ... Myth allows many versions; myth contains many versions; myth requires many versions." (153).
Consciousness does not evolve in a linear, sequential way. In transparency, both darkness and light are present as a sort of twilight vision. Such polymorphous images speak for themselves, aligning and synchronizing contextual levels.
"This wild teacher, wild mother, wild mentor supports our inner and outer lives no matter what... The old knowing is long overdue. It is no accident that the pristine wildness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild natures fades."
“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” “Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered...” Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
The mythic present, the ever-present primordial origin and core of all being, reinvents itself every day. "Overwhelming" experiences provide stories for a planet in transition where sacred and profane interpenetrate permutations of energy, form, and narrative. We discover it when we strip away the overburden that conceals or veils it. We don't know what the true story is unless we engage it directly, shifting our view of reality.
Campbell says, "The imagery of myth, therefore, can never be a direct presentation of the total secret of the human species, but only the function of an attitude, the reflex of a stance, a life pose, a way of playing the game. And where the rules or forms of such play are abandoned, mythology dissolves — and, with mythology, life." (The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, p. 131).
We offer sufficient imaginal space for the image to reflect itself with level upon level of imaginal context, from historical, to aesthetic, and personal. Inner and outer liminal spaces contextualize self-transformation. We stand in awe before nature and numinosity, a vast and sublime force of mystery, magic, and sacred landscape.
Art is a medium of intuition and revelation of the emotional immediacy of deep unconscious engagement and the multiplication of imagistic 'offspring.'
"The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the [wo]man who is its vehicle. The creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment." -C.G. Jung
Nocturnal Hunt
Artemis-Kybele was the goddess of the nocturnal hunt. Her's is the landscape of fear. "Goddess of the Night", "Lady of the Beast", "Woodland Goddess". Multicultural variations were informed by Anatolian and Greek culture, which was exposed to Kybele from the early Bronze age, assimilating the bee and palm goddess.
Jung said: "… in the honey, the ‘sweetness of earths’, we can easily recognize the balsam of life that permeates all living, budding, and growing things. It expresses, psychologically, the joy of life and the life urge which overcome and eliminate everything dark and inhibiting. Where spring-like joy and expectation reign, spirit can embrace nature and nature, spirit." (CW 14, p. 490)
Our immediate relationship with the world and its psychic topography is inherently imaginal. Kybele's keywords are connected to the earth: grounded, path, dug up, digging, or water that bubbles up, gushing, a deep spring or well. Experience helps us map psyche's unknown terrain and states of consciousness, its extraordinary ecology, and spirits of place-- sense of place, groundedness, and connection.
"Our mapmaking changes the very terrain, and terrain in turn changes our map. Maps, mapmakers, and terrains whirl around each other like the vortex in a river which expresses the whole." (Briggs and Peat, Looking Glass Universe)
The essential feminine, this wild darkness, the virgin forest -- the sensuous fantastic -- lights our way in the imaginal perspective of an ensouled world. Kybele is the autonomous fantasy maker that animates imagination of visible and invisible worlds and the seething excitation of instincts. We can tend and attend to the inner wilds, the symbolic language of nature, wandering through the imagery-infused world.
Kybele is the sole and original parent and our wild creativity. The throbbing heart of creation acts through its own center. The darkness of the depths, suffused with self-generated light, is also called spiritual Nature, Anima Mundi, or soul that exists in an invisible state as Primary Imagination, infused throughout the cosmos animated by collective soul.
Campbell said, “The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” (A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living)
Ritualized movement and silence speaks volumes, reverberating with future frequencies, opening interiority and ecstatic communion -- a kaleidoscopic fusion of the senses, the inverted articulation of attunement to reverberating echos. In active sensing we actively coordinate movement with the information we want to sense and find, integration of sensory and motor information, learning in a concrete way.
We return in mystery to the embrace of the goddess, the wild feminine, committed to the wildness within. The Virgin of Conception was the original sacrificial virgin, psychoactive buds of cannabis, burned as a sacred offering to the Goddess. She doesn't enter us, but emerges from deep within perception as action, something elemental.
The secret is inside the creation and based in nature and our own intrinsic nature, bringing more of the unconscious and mythic into consciousness through the mothering path of awakening. Life pours forth from itself.
Interconnectivity manifests in our deep psychic bond with the earth, its creatures and plants, and the cosmos as a whole. Evidence of this interrelationship arises in our personal lives in dream images and synchronicities, and in the powerful and visceral sense of engagement we feel with the natural world.
Our instincts include our paradoxical capacity for creation/destruction, our hunger for connective interdependence/independence, and sovereignty -- consciously engaging the instinctual realm. Repressed, they return with eruption of compulsion and obsession, archetypal possession not differentiation.
Perception is more than external input, It is modulated by what we’re doing at any given time, a mixing of multisensory and movement binding, the way that we move through the world, movement as part of cognition.
Death is integral to life. We understand that the nature of life in the world is about becoming. "It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live according to nature," said Marcus Aurelius. The ultimate nature of death is the final transition from becoming and the differentiation of consciousness to nondifferentiation and ultimate being.
Wild Darkness
Kybele gives voices to mute places, a marriage of trees, rocks, and starry sky. Narrative gives a grounded sense of self. The margins are the center of the imagination. Reflecting her own cavernous interiority, she transforms inhospitable, harsh terrains into inviting primordial parks and riverbeds flowing with the imaginal. We yearn to float downstream; reverie moves us forward. Landscape is a provocateur.
To see the beauty we must stop, breathe and absorb into the moment, the only reality we all really have. Some cultures create zoomorphic figures and geometric patterns to transform the vast land into a highly symbolic, ritual and social-cultural landscape. She speaks for their unspeakable immensity that reminds us we are truly small.
Liminal places connect outside with inside across all experiential domains. Wandering off the path of hypermodernity, we are arrested, trapped in her magically woven web of poetic resonance. There is a synergetic relation between landscape, instinct and imagination that rekindles all as a unified field that is the mycelial root of sacred places of heart and mind.
Relationships are the poetry of life and connecting with the land. Kybele is the earth from which we grow, our connection to dreams, the animal realm, our ancestors, and deep unconscious. She is the dust under our feet beyond those areas of origin that can be mapped, giving place a face in the present.
What is this invisible ground whose image we carry in our souls where spiritual ideals merge with worldly realities? Isn’t it always right here, right now everywhere always, forever? The contextual background, the invisible environment, is the fundamental ground from which both mind and matter emerge, the luminous absolute space of reality beyond the mere absence of energy/matter. The radiant ground is the fundamental source.
Psyche expresses the nature of things, including our own nature. Jung claimed, "every soil has its secret, of which we carry an unconscious image in our souls: a relationship of spirit to body and of body to earth." -
CW XVIII
Jung said, "The body is the original animal condition, we are all animals in body, and so we have to have an animal psychology in order to be able to live in it. […] Since we have a body it is indispensable that we exist also as an animal.”
The animal is the instinctual level of the psyche. Hillman notes, "Our dreams recover what the world forgets. Forgotten pagan polytheism breeds in animal forms. In those animals are the ancient Gods:... The old Gods are still there in our dreams... The animals may go on like Gods, alive and well and unforgotten, in the ikons of our dreams and in the vital obsessions of complexes and symptoms..."
The animal within is a guide. Dream animals behave in unusual ways and can even talk as they do in fairy tales. The path, track, or trail of an animal can be followed. They may appear at crucial 'soul junctures,' validating our direction, choices, and path.
According to Jungian analyst Dennis L. Merritt: "To be truly human, Jung believed, and to reach our unique potential, we have to be in relationship to animals. This is both an outer relationship to animals and an intimate relationship with the collective unconscious, coming to terms with the animal in our inheritance."
We can respond consciously to such animal spirits as we do to land, weather, and seasons of the soul. This bedrock of archaic psyche is the germinal image of images, a generative matrix, personification and inflection of deep universal principles.
Autogenesis
The primordial androgyne is the bisexual instrument of her own fertility. The ancient Chinese imagined the ‘womb’ as an internal body part found in men and women alike. Among other works, Hŏ Chun cites the Precious Mirror to analyze his concept of the androgynous, menstruating womb.
In Kabbalah, the life breath, pure unconditioned awareness, functions as “seed” and the earth is the aspect of the “womb". In Tibet, Womb Breathing is rooted in the Vajrayana Buddhist meditation method called vase breathing (bum chung in Tibetan) of vital energy. The empty womb encompasses pure potential. https://player.vimeo.com/video/17011448
We all share the ordeal of the womb. This dangerously dual figure, the animal soul in the human psyche, is more of a structural layer of the psyche than a historical epoch.
Ancient philosophers and Jungians call this personified image-making faculty the Anima Mundi or World Soul. Soul, emotive source, or the imaginal realm, is the ‘Mother of all possibilities.’
Mythic figures provide the poetic characteristics of our thought, feeling, and action, and natural phenomena. Universal archetypal images of natural phenomena present faces that speak to the imagining soul.
Hillman says, "the movement from mother to anima represents this shift in perspective from naturalistic to psychological understanding." Soul comes into relationship with universals.
We emulate her when we conceive the spiritual "birth," without the organ of biological conception. Nature was once fully spirit and matter, lumen naturae, the scintillating luminosity of Nature itself. Spirit is the soul of objects, its psychic aspects. Our souls are owner of our body, not the reverse. We are encompassed with images in the imaginal field.
"The hiddeness and invisibility of an image lies not in the fact that it contains something apart from its appearance, but in its ‘multiple ambiguity of meanings.’ The sensual qualities of an image – form, color, texture – are not copied from objects and they replace reality as in visions or hallucinations. To put it paradoxically, images are real precisely because they do not correspond to anything in the so-called outer or objective world of our ordinary experience...hallucination pertains to perceptions, whereas images pertain to imagination." (Avens).
We have a kind of spontaneous knowledge that does not rest on observation or inference of our own mental states, but of what we are doing, what is actually happening out there in the world. Archaic humans knew how to converse with soul -- the natural mind with its evolving emotional experience and our species' collective wisdom, and numinous symbols.
Consciousness does not mean individual awareness. Interacting interdependently with/within different levels of reality, this framework conceptualizes universal consciousness as a fundamental part of reality/universe that complements physical potentialities and brings them to actual physical states.
The larger concept includes the personal unconscious and collective mind, conscious and unconscious -- the union of the serpent (subconscious) with the eagle, hawk, and other predatory birds (super conscious). Consciousness is the bottomless pit of the indivisible whole. It means the world. In the most inclusive sense it is cosmic consciousness.
The mind's nature is primordial awareness, practiced by mystics and sages from time immemorial. We retain memories as superpositions of possibilities. Both we and the entire universe also retain memory as dynamic structure. The whole body is memory.
Our individual life stories can be unfolded as an ecopsychological exercise as complex as a lustrous meadow. Ernst Cassirer (1944) suggested, "Symbolic memory is the process by which man not only repeats his past experience but also reconstructs this experience. Imagination becomes a necessary element of true recollection". (p. 52)
The Mother dominated the earliest epochs of the discovery of the sacred, fostering a symbolic attitude toward objective meaning inherently found in nature. Early serpent religions were about death, rebirth, and resurrection. The revelation was of interior meaning of the cosmos and soul of nature as anima mundi or World Soul -- a range of themes, impulses, and drives.
Nature is intelligent and has its own language, including the dark inheritance of the human mind passed down from generation to generation -- a formative principle of instinctive power. Psyche is underworld, says Hillman, the place where there is existence without body and form and vitality. Nietzsche proclaimed, “All pain is birth pain.” We all experience the compulsion of birth pangs.
The following far-ranging tropes are what the Kybele mythos brings up for me, as well as what can be provoked and invoked in the reader. Writing is a journey into the unknown, a leap into the abyss. We can explore the psyche in a kind of archaeological excavation without ransacking the past for inspiration, re-visioning our relationship with nature.
This essay is a long-form discussion of many interrelated aspects. Our challenge is recognize the many levels of interwoven unconscious influence. It attempts to conjure fresh images and perceptions, as no story can be reduced to an archetype. Marshall McLuhan says that "thematic variation' in storytelling has replaced 'narrative continuity'..."
No theory conforms to its own standards. Our archetypal journey is to the foreign lands of the unconscious, Images and our interactions with them (whether these interactions are scholarly, mythopoetic, ritualistic, or actively imaginal) are psyche. Her story somehow becomes our own, the fate of place that takes us from void to containing vessel.
Myth weaves together the energies of life in a symbolic dramatization of embodied instincts and archetypes. Ritual enactment is psychic structuring. If one version fails we switch to another story, equally believable. We have an inherent capacity to reinterpret stories. Stories have the power to change and adapt under re-examination. The original wild and savage cult adapted to urban life and concerns.
We all propagate myths about self, others, and world. The most historically successful myths are not objectively true, requiring a cognitive leap. Truth value and beliefs can be far-fetched, apart from suffering, ethics, and morality. With metaphors, we avoid mind's tendency to take fantastically rich ideas and turn them into hard, concrete, absolutist truth claims.
Hellenism recognizes that things are complex and unknown, a wider space for our actual psychic natures. First we become aware of myth, then begin labeling mythic aspects, then realize it permeates our being and mythic realization of cosmos. Images and our interactions with them are psyche. Nature's language is ineffable, appearing in signs.
Hillman notes, "We may also conclude that the creative as instinct cannot be limited to the few, to geniuses and artists. This would be again to confuse the artistic with the creative. If it is a basic instinct along with hunger and sexuality, activity and reflection, then, like these, it is given to all."
We tune in to Kybele's phenomenon and engage it through lived experience and twilight consciousness, unsought imagistic insights. Ours is a body of images, myth, and action. They autonomously express themselves as impulses and images from the interior psyche, and as events and situations in the external world. We reflect on the essential themes and describe rites and interrelationships through the art of association and writing.
Life patterns and life metaphors provide continuity through recurring symbolic themes and motifs that appear in our life and in our metaphor landscapes and imaginal geography. We obviously benefit from nature's positive impact on our psychological and physical well-being.
“At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked. Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world's and the psyche's hinterland.” Carl G. Jung, MDR
The 'land' is our psychophysical basis, earth-soul-body; human is humus. Phrygia was the cradleland of Kybele, which spread to Ionia, Greece, and Rome. The soul of nature became the soul of the city. "Of course you should not look away from history. I am not suggesting to look away from it, but to look below it. Look into geography and into the land," says Hillman.
Sacred land is who we are, the motherland of many dreams. We are directly connected to beauty and wholeness. We know what it means to exist rooted in the mysterious creative ground of being. We are all the land in this sense. The transpersonal is immanent to our physical being -- not only tied to the land or matter, the land supports us, as the body supports the transpersonal.
Hillman suggested, "turning the attention into land and landscape: into mountains, rivers, forests, deserts, jungles. Again: place and aesthetic sense. Geography is much deeper than History—it is there where you can find the richest archetypal images. You should look for the animal soul that is rooted in nature."
The archetypal couple, the parent images of the unconscious (Sol and Luna), represent the spiritual and chthonic nature of the hierosgamos, the sacred union of unconscious wholeness -- the undiscovered country.
The image stream or imaginal process is our primary experience and permeates and conditions all facets of human life. We tend to take the background noise of the constant imaginal flux of the stream of consciousness for granted.
We rarely focus our conscious awareness on this imaginal wellspring, but sometimes it intrudes on consciousness during our gaps in awareness – day dreaming, fantasies, reverie, lacunae, inspiration, discovery, if we but listen instinctively and respond to the initiatory call.
Exploration of the soul or mindfield is possible through imagination. The dynamic mindscape underlies our beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Imagination is both a realm or domain of experience and a human faculty.
Images come in from the outside through our senses, and are also produced autonomously from the unconscious as a perpetual multisensory narrative of experience, immediate though often metaphorical in nature. Meaningful signals or mental forms emerge from the amorphous background.
The term "no man's land" expresses a profound truth: the earth does not belong to us -- if anything, we belong to the earth and the sky. In the syzygy, the archetypal couple symbolize the moment when heaven and earth come together, creating the Holy Union. The Sacred Marriage, hierosgamos is consummated. The Navajo say, "the earth is my mother, and the sky is my father."
These metaphors guide our decisions, nudge us along through the silent forest of our life path, the self-immersed condition. Beyond primitivism, the initiatory myth is a way of confronting the dark of nature with a return to no longer being separated from the creation. The symbolic process of transformation begins in chaos and ends with the birth of the new personality.
Among other things, Kybele is the neolithic prototype of the goddess of the wild hunt, leading the ancestral dead, the ghosts of deep memory, and blessing the land with her dark ecology. She still guides our path into the netherworld of the primordial unconscious, a return to the state of naked awareness, mystery, and awe.
A complex system of mountain and ancestor worship etched meaning into the mountain terrain of those subject to the same landscape, the source of a power which is to be awed and revered. Stories of the inseparable mountain and ancestors were one, passed down through the generations. Tesla notes, “Our entire biological system, the brain, the Earth itself, work on the same frequencies.”
An interconnected web between history, landscape, and culture formed that mirrors that of fungi, plants, creatures, and root systems of the dark ecology -- the mycology of consciousness, the social location of psychedelic mysticism. Sacred mountains and mushrooms shared roles as places of revelation and transformation -- places where we magically conceive ourselves through self-conceptualization and self-cultivation.
Mother Mycelium
We all come from one genus -- consciousness, sentience. Mycorrhizae are symbiotic relationships that form between fungi and plants. The fungi colonize the root system of a host plant and shares information. The closer we come to the deep core of any archetypal experience the more the numinous effect increases, as a confrontation with a power not of this world but the more-than-human world.
"The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth. . . For the root matter is the mother of all things." (C.G. Jung, CW 18, Page xxv).
The field becomes the focus. We learn to lean into the field and feel its chaos without imposing premature order. The field is a paradox of fusion and distance, an impossible simultaneity. We need to practice seeing the field, as well as seeing into and through it with full-bodied feeling. It is known only by experiential perception, not interpretation.
The everyday processes of living in the conscious mind usually succeed in compartmentalizing off the preconscious from our awareness. Psychic gifts can come under the service of self-destructive impulses. But occasionally, the upwelling of the preconscious area, unconditioned belonging in the world, erupts like molten magma from the mantle of the earth.
Knowing By Feeling
The unconscious is the "wilderness" of body and world. Nature is an environmental trigger igniting altered states of consciousness, like nature-mystic merging, "oceanic," or "peak-experience." They give us the exaltation, a primordial grace, of standing on a high mountain and gaining for a minute the awesome glory of a grand vista.
Mountain peaks express the shared connection of supernatural power, fertility and protection between the sacred mountain, the gods, and the dead. Our wild embodied nature is lured not only by others but by landscapes, trees, forests, and seascapes, fecund wonders as well as ideas, poetry, art, and music. Non-ordinary perception evolves through kinesthetic perception. We are somatically aroused, seduced and captivated by the animate world.
Our wild self knows what is being said by nonhuman flora and fauna. We see the sacred in nature through the radiant consciousness of the "otherness" of natural things. This is the simplest, most common form of illumination -- overpowering apprehension of the Infinite, life imminent in all living things.
Walls between the visible and the invisible grow thin, and the Eternal seemed to break through into the world with a higher order of reality. This awareness: is so intangible, it strikes like a thunderclap.
Awe is captivating and immersive, engaging us more with our external world and less with ourselves. We sense the presence of something “larger than ourselves.” The wildwood births physical manifestations of mythological archetypes drawn from the subconscious minds of those who enter.
Our wild self is instinctively, emotionally, viscerally, and sensuously crazy about creation and enchanted by all things and possibilities with earth-infused vivacity. It calms the chaos of the transition and allows the new self to emerge as a living reality, intuited kinship with all animated creatures. We have to maintain faith in the process. Movement from the timeless into temporal existence is a creative passage.
With a sense of containment within a higher dimensional field, the opposites reconcile and new potential is created. The fusional field is invisible to normal perception but contains a welter of unprocessed information. The fusional complex is an archetypal pattern that organizes life between the known and the unknown.
The holographic metaphor extends to a fundamental description of the universe and our electromagnetic embedding within that greater field. We rarely attend to the deep experiential field we experience with the other in our bodies.
The archetypal force of restoration and self-empowerment, as genuine needs of the psyche, appears as a synesthetic image. Archetypal presence is met with our most particularized devotion. It is the nightside depth of our worldview, who we are before we even think about who we are, our psychosomatic being, our genealogy, the relational field, and cosmic field of the whole. We are centrally involved in the cosmic process.
We seek a vital and authentic life, the bedrock of reality underneath all social masks, emotional possession, and self-deception. It is a dangerous descent that resonates metaphorically with a dark and terrifying passage into the limbo of our own vulnerability, into the netherworld of the belly of the earth. The bottom drops out of our vertical cosmos.
We recover what the world has denied, repressed, and forgotten in our dreams through depth perception. This is the base note of our psychopoetic life song. This psychological awakening is a spiritual initiation that potentially restores meaning to life.
Instead of psychological concepts, engagement appears as high-impact mythological images, the "mythological unconscious" testing our ability to endure and discover integrity in depth. The path leads through the ghost-lands of the unconscious, undead aspects of personality. It illuminates the darkest layer of the inherited personality structure and the daimonic.
We confront the pitiless monsters of archetypal Grief, Loss, Cares, Diseases, Age, Dread, Hunger, Want, Death, Toil, Sleep, Catastrophe, War, and Discord. Our demons are the instinctual impulses and unconscious complexes that overcome and possess us. But it means sitting in the fire of our own fears and suffering while honoring soul's perspective.
We feel the unity of our human being as lived experience. We are endowed with a density that is lived or felt as the stratum of our existence, subject to accident, suffering, and death. It is neither objectively objective or subjective, yet mysterious and intimate. The body is our physical environment and vehicle of our openness. Genealogy can inform us that there are things within us different than we already thought.
The Clan Mother or divine Ancestress is chthonic. The word comes from "chthōn," which means "earth" in Greek, associated with things that dwell in or under the earth; chthonic sensuality and visions of chthonic initiation -- the wilderness of emotion and sexuality. The primal woman reminds us we can return back to the Indigenous, that ancient part of ourselves hidden within us, anytime.
Her favored beasts and companions, felines and canines, wolves and wild dogs, are keystone predators. They urge us to ask not what does forest do for these regulator species, but what do top predators do for the forests, which still cover a third of the world. Removing predators leads to deterioration of diversity and the whole system, downgrading the ecosystem.
In her first form, she ruled the wild -- space, place, and landscape. Paleolithic hunters sought supernatural help from the hunting goddess. She is a wild woman archetype embodied within us. Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes her as the instinctual nature of women, "a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing."
"Mother of the Gods," "Mountain Mother," Matar Kubileya is a transcendent helper/healer. She is wise and quietly gives us breath, trust, and inner peace with her indomitable spirit, manifesting in the world through the medium of creative force.
“Mother Night is the quintessential medial woman, the woman who can walk in two worlds … 'the one who knows' and who can reveal solid ways of living and unleashing creative life in both worlds.”
She is "the generative power of the goodness of the core self—that is, all creativity and understanding that lies out of sight in darkness—often called the unconscious." Mistress of mountains and springs, her Phrygian cult monuments were carved from living rock faces. Her cosmogonic face was of black meteoric stone.
Wild Mind
Does a wild mind call for a field guide to the psyche, a grove full if ancient trees, the circuits of the stars, or deep crumbling cave arched beneath a mighty mountain? The Chaldean Oracles suggested nature "commands fate", referring to its ensoulment.
How can we fully embody our multifaceted wild minds, commit ourselves to the largest, soul-infused story we’re capable of living, and serve the greater Earth community -- the relationship between our human psyche and the rest of nature? Kybele has meant different things in different epochs.
Psyche is in the world, not just in ourselves. It's in our loves, in our personal and collective lives, just as much as our culture and nature. The gods and ourselves, in interstitial space (tissue space), are in the world, also present as in-scapes of our imaginations.
Divesting enculturation we learn to see in the dark through her eyes, through imaginal sight, through inner and outer wilderness vision quests or trance journeys that revitalize and re-enchant us. Arguably, soul is an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person's fate.
Planetary poetics reveal what it means to be in an undisturbed place. True listening to the earth equalizes each sound's value. Every place has a sound that connects us back to the land. Silence is the Presence of everything in the natural acoustic system, undisturbed. Acoustic space nurtures our nature, says Gordon Hempton.
“...there is a fundamental frequency for each habitat” — a tonal quality that shapes the sense of place and the quality of presence. What emerges is the embodied awareness that silence, like the art of sculpture, is the removal of excess material so that the true form — of one’s consciousness, of the world, of life itself — can be revealed."
Psychobiologists link the vagal pathway to hormones outside the brain and neurotransmitters inside the brain that lock in memory of emotional or stressful events. (Rachel Adelson)
The vagus nerve is connected with the posterior wall of the external auditory canal, the lower part of the eardrum’s membrane, and in the stirrup muscle of the middle ear. Then, it descends down to the lower internal organs regulating functions in the pharynx, larynx, thorax and abdomen. So, stimulating the ear means stimulating all the vital vegetative internal organs.
Sound vibrations significantly impact all areas of the body linked by this important nerve, resonating very close to it in the eardrums. Most cranial nerves are either directly or indirectly connected with the ear. Long and sustained sounds sooth and relax (parasympathetic response) us; sharp and abrupt sounds trigger alertness and alarm (sympathetic response).
Auditory stimulation of the vagus nerve can lead to reduced activity of the limbic system. It is located on both sides of the thalamus, including the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, the amygdala, and other nearby areas.
It is a primary factor in our emotional life and the formation of memories. It has been called, "the "missing link" between the hormone epinephrine outside the brain and the neurotransmitter norepinephrine inside the brain." https://www.apa.org/monitor/apr04/vagus
Dark Sky
We live in a creative universe articulated by natural philosophy, indigenous traditions, and evolutionary cosmology. We can enter deep conversations with rivers, creatures, and stone or pass through magical gateways into our unique role within the Great Work, called from within. We live simultaneously in both an external environment and internal environment, soil and soul.
A nature-based map guides us into a landscape from which emerge extraordinary gifts of our own true nature, joy, sensuality and renewal. The dragons of self-deception, the darkest challenges pull us away from under-valuating or over-valuing our own—and others—psychic contents. Transformative instructions from soul to psyche emerge from bearing and unlocking the mystery.
Godforms are comprehensible forms of divine dynamic energy -- an image of god in a mirror. Metaphorically they describe styles of knowing, or how we know what we know and what its like. Functionally they affect our spirituality, ideas, emotions, and behavior, bridging the generational and geographical gap.
We seek soulmaking through emergent and extended experience of the processes of life. When they accumulate and integrate, renewal or rebirth gives birth to the soul. We cannot truly say where our psyche ends and that of the earth begins. Evocative landscapes help us inhabit the moment. Rumi said, "Maybe you are searching amongst the branches for what only appears in the roots.“
The lumen naturae, the light of nature is the quintessence, dwelling in our hearts. as an intuitive apprehension of the facts, a kind of illumination of our own experience of nature. The universal and scintillating force of the light of nature carries spirit within it, the source of mystical knowledge.
As in physics, fields are more important than specific points or locales. Fields cause a force to be exerted over a distance where no physical stuff causing that force to be exerted. Psyche is an imaginal field, a "dark sky," through which archetypal energies ripple. Blessings flow when the goddess appears.
Myths enchant the soul. We are the carriers of human nature. We all contribute to the formation of the universe through our action and suffering. The unconscious is an inherently mystical, erotic, and transformational dimension.
Hillman claims, "My fantasies and symptoms put me in my place. ... No longer is it a matter of where they belong – to which God – but where I belong, at which altar I may leave myself, within which myth my suffering will turn into a devotion."
Resilience
The Medial Woman is a dominant force in the psyche, a psychically substantive quality that can only be found in the depths.. She represents the strong-sighted and deep-hearted self who lives simultaneously in our ordinary world of light and the world and the hidden depths of the Soul and our potential.
She lives on the border between realities, mediating the depths of the collective unconscious to those around her, and dives deeply into her own unconscious, willing to experience and explore the unknown contents, whatever they are (Estes).
Imagination is inherent to thinking, willing, and being, revitalizing feminine power. The unique wild and wise self emerges from the realm of mystery, dreams, and shadow. That double worldview sees through both the eyes of soul and ego. We can draw on that deep insight to engage psyche.
We create our truth in the act of putting it together. We become participants in the cosmogony. As living principles, gods continue to incarnate both in us and in the world around us in ways that elude rigidly theistic understandings. The world is psyche's stage.
The ancient cult practices of Kybele were not uniform and remain obscure. Modern reconstructions can only re-imagine them. Images are complex, rich, and subtle with textures, tempo, tone, and rhythm. She is not only the ability to see through things, but to see through to the roots of things coming up through the surface of interbeing.
Hillman says in "Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic?", reprinted in the Uniform Editions Vol. 1: "Myths have no 'authorized version' ... Myths are best authorized on the authority of their teller. ... Myth allows many versions; myth contains many versions; myth requires many versions." (153).
Consciousness does not evolve in a linear, sequential way. In transparency, both darkness and light are present as a sort of twilight vision. Such polymorphous images speak for themselves, aligning and synchronizing contextual levels.
"This wild teacher, wild mother, wild mentor supports our inner and outer lives no matter what... The old knowing is long overdue. It is no accident that the pristine wildness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild natures fades."
“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” “Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered...” Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
The mythic present, the ever-present primordial origin and core of all being, reinvents itself every day. "Overwhelming" experiences provide stories for a planet in transition where sacred and profane interpenetrate permutations of energy, form, and narrative. We discover it when we strip away the overburden that conceals or veils it. We don't know what the true story is unless we engage it directly, shifting our view of reality.
Campbell says, "The imagery of myth, therefore, can never be a direct presentation of the total secret of the human species, but only the function of an attitude, the reflex of a stance, a life pose, a way of playing the game. And where the rules or forms of such play are abandoned, mythology dissolves — and, with mythology, life." (The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, p. 131).
We offer sufficient imaginal space for the image to reflect itself with level upon level of imaginal context, from historical, to aesthetic, and personal. Inner and outer liminal spaces contextualize self-transformation. We stand in awe before nature and numinosity, a vast and sublime force of mystery, magic, and sacred landscape.
Art is a medium of intuition and revelation of the emotional immediacy of deep unconscious engagement and the multiplication of imagistic 'offspring.'
"The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the [wo]man who is its vehicle. The creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment." -C.G. Jung
Nocturnal Hunt
Artemis-Kybele was the goddess of the nocturnal hunt. Her's is the landscape of fear. "Goddess of the Night", "Lady of the Beast", "Woodland Goddess". Multicultural variations were informed by Anatolian and Greek culture, which was exposed to Kybele from the early Bronze age, assimilating the bee and palm goddess.
Jung said: "… in the honey, the ‘sweetness of earths’, we can easily recognize the balsam of life that permeates all living, budding, and growing things. It expresses, psychologically, the joy of life and the life urge which overcome and eliminate everything dark and inhibiting. Where spring-like joy and expectation reign, spirit can embrace nature and nature, spirit." (CW 14, p. 490)
Our immediate relationship with the world and its psychic topography is inherently imaginal. Kybele's keywords are connected to the earth: grounded, path, dug up, digging, or water that bubbles up, gushing, a deep spring or well. Experience helps us map psyche's unknown terrain and states of consciousness, its extraordinary ecology, and spirits of place-- sense of place, groundedness, and connection.
"Our mapmaking changes the very terrain, and terrain in turn changes our map. Maps, mapmakers, and terrains whirl around each other like the vortex in a river which expresses the whole." (Briggs and Peat, Looking Glass Universe)
Civilizing Force
She became a goddess who mediated between the civilized city and wild nature and wide open spaces. The tension appears in the constricted regalia of the Ephesian goddess with animals on her dress.
The undefined but prominent feature described as breasts, eggs, bee's eggs, or bull's testicles are protuberances are reassertions of the Anatolian goddess in the Ephesian cult image of power and offerings, symbolized by outstretched arms.
Reitfeld (2014) suggests they are hanging fruit, rather than Amazonian breasts or Egyptian or Minoan bull testicles. Demeter was festooned with the first fruits of harvest. But over time these features rise up the iconic figure symbolizing nurturance, associated with the personal goddess Isis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTJ-HR_gEwc
"her image cannot be confined to a limited set of explanations, but that Artemis Ephesia was a figure in constant flux, with interpretations dependent on the particular time period and audience viewing it. Second, personal religious perspectives are investigated in relation to the image and the cult of Artemis in general, providing a counterbalance to many modern studies more focused on the political and social aspects of her cult.The third section investigates Artemis Ephesia in relation to the city's sacred geography, creating a more contextually discerning view of how her belief system permeated the daily lives of the Ephesians through examining what they left behind in the material culture. Finally, the fourth section examines how understandings of Artemis Ephesia changed with the spread of Christianity, explaining how this Ephesian goddess eventually succumbed to the forces of this new religious perspective, but also noting how some aspects survived even within this new context. Ultimately, Artemis Ephesia is revealed as a goddess of protection, the sacred space of her precinct understood as a place of asylum for individuals seeking refuge; a bank for those wishing to secure their material wealth, and a shrine for virgins desiring to protect their chastity. By extension of the Via Sacra, her role as protective mother moved beyond the Temple of Artemis to the city itself. Along with the images of Artemis, the Ephesian letters carried her perceived magical protective powers even further, all along the shores of the Mediterranean and even to the very ends of the Greco-Roman world."
As Artemis is personalized she is personalized and takes emotional care of individuals, like Isis. The Ephesian letters (grammata), sacred words were an inclusive magical formula of the 4th-5th C. They were used to protect, care for others, moving fate to one's favor, childbirth, love, and katabasis or protection from death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephesia_Grammata
Ancient Greek magical formulas were inscribed on the cult image of Artemis in Ephesus and later associated with Hekate. In marriage, a priest encircled the couple who invoked the magical powers against evil spirits and promoted protection, good health, and fertility.
She typically wears a crown of city walls, symbols of her sovereignty and divinity, garments, and accessories that are intricate and rich in symbolism -- garlands of acorns, seeds, ad nuts or a zodiac. Artemis’s zodiacal garland seems to signify that she possessed an authority and power superior to cosmic forces and astrological fate. Accordingly, in one inscription she is called “the Queen of the Cosmos”; in another, she is called a “Heavenly God”.
We can practice myth-tending through contemplation, active imagination, dreamwork, attention to synchronicity, or cultivating an archetypal eye, as well as ritual and devotion. The reality includes hot, painful, unconscious, complex emotions.
Myth and dream allow emotional subjectivity and associative unconscious imagery to arise. Natural symbols are experiential generators, ever-deepening states of experience. They are transformed by transplanted ideas from intercultural contact.
We need the ancient wisdom, the oldest stories - whispered from the depths of natural wisdom older than humanity. In these mythic times, we face the urgent task of attempting to identify the character and content of any new, emerging myth, images of the sacred in the process of creation with fiery sharp clawing pain.
Myth is here and now, surfacing stories and buried complexes songs of ancestors, disembodied voices, and elemental beings -- unbridled relations with all life --evolutionary ancestral memories. The dead become an imaginal presence. We can just let their stories be with us. love with us. The indigenous primordial roots of rebirth and renewal are recombinant visionary mythology.
One’s imagination is a powerful, ecological organ of knowing, especially when
enhanced by myth. The imagination reaches beyond the reasoning mind and allows
us to converse with the creative powers of nature. We all, like have a
double nature—mortal and immortal elements. Our mortality resides in an entangled,
sense-perceiving, physical world. The inner world is where our immortal elements
reside, connecting us to the world of the sacred, and helping us evolve toward a
better, more collaborative humanity. These immortal elements take us from death
to life. When we experience and integrate the invisible aspects of our nature, and
begin to live in harmony with our soul and the soul of the world, we experience the
divinity of nature from where meaning flows, thereby enriching our life. Human
and nonhuman nature is interconnected and inseparable. If we remain open, we
discover that nonhuman nature has the capacity to expose and spiritually nourish
our individual nature, creating a cascade that transforms our personal landscape.
Additionally, this creates an opportunity for humanity to gain a reverence for the
sacredness of creation and an awareness or understanding of the importance of
protecting and living in harmony with the planet’s ecosystems.
(Ida Covi, Immanence Journal)
Kybele is the matrix of myth and metaphysics, even life that is not the way we know it. The Mother embraces all life, just as nature cannot be said to be inherently good or evil but the paradox that the dark and the light side are mutually implicated expressions of a single energy.
Her devotion touches the deepest motivations of our hearts, the liberation and freedom of the spirit, of the ring dance. The world psyche is embedded in mythic characterizations, mytho-poetic visionary dimensions.
As the newborn is connected to the mother via a serpentine umbilical cord, in archaic times, snakes were the umbilical cord connecting humanity to earth, symbol of the mystery of life. Even the environment is a consequence of the numinosity of the image which intensifies it in return. Without light pollution, the view of the pristine sky demonstrates clearly that we are in space.
She became a goddess who mediated between the civilized city and wild nature and wide open spaces. The tension appears in the constricted regalia of the Ephesian goddess with animals on her dress.
The undefined but prominent feature described as breasts, eggs, bee's eggs, or bull's testicles are protuberances are reassertions of the Anatolian goddess in the Ephesian cult image of power and offerings, symbolized by outstretched arms.
Reitfeld (2014) suggests they are hanging fruit, rather than Amazonian breasts or Egyptian or Minoan bull testicles. Demeter was festooned with the first fruits of harvest. But over time these features rise up the iconic figure symbolizing nurturance, associated with the personal goddess Isis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTJ-HR_gEwc
"her image cannot be confined to a limited set of explanations, but that Artemis Ephesia was a figure in constant flux, with interpretations dependent on the particular time period and audience viewing it. Second, personal religious perspectives are investigated in relation to the image and the cult of Artemis in general, providing a counterbalance to many modern studies more focused on the political and social aspects of her cult.The third section investigates Artemis Ephesia in relation to the city's sacred geography, creating a more contextually discerning view of how her belief system permeated the daily lives of the Ephesians through examining what they left behind in the material culture. Finally, the fourth section examines how understandings of Artemis Ephesia changed with the spread of Christianity, explaining how this Ephesian goddess eventually succumbed to the forces of this new religious perspective, but also noting how some aspects survived even within this new context. Ultimately, Artemis Ephesia is revealed as a goddess of protection, the sacred space of her precinct understood as a place of asylum for individuals seeking refuge; a bank for those wishing to secure their material wealth, and a shrine for virgins desiring to protect their chastity. By extension of the Via Sacra, her role as protective mother moved beyond the Temple of Artemis to the city itself. Along with the images of Artemis, the Ephesian letters carried her perceived magical protective powers even further, all along the shores of the Mediterranean and even to the very ends of the Greco-Roman world."
As Artemis is personalized she is personalized and takes emotional care of individuals, like Isis. The Ephesian letters (grammata), sacred words were an inclusive magical formula of the 4th-5th C. They were used to protect, care for others, moving fate to one's favor, childbirth, love, and katabasis or protection from death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephesia_Grammata
Ancient Greek magical formulas were inscribed on the cult image of Artemis in Ephesus and later associated with Hekate. In marriage, a priest encircled the couple who invoked the magical powers against evil spirits and promoted protection, good health, and fertility.
She typically wears a crown of city walls, symbols of her sovereignty and divinity, garments, and accessories that are intricate and rich in symbolism -- garlands of acorns, seeds, ad nuts or a zodiac. Artemis’s zodiacal garland seems to signify that she possessed an authority and power superior to cosmic forces and astrological fate. Accordingly, in one inscription she is called “the Queen of the Cosmos”; in another, she is called a “Heavenly God”.
We can practice myth-tending through contemplation, active imagination, dreamwork, attention to synchronicity, or cultivating an archetypal eye, as well as ritual and devotion. The reality includes hot, painful, unconscious, complex emotions.
Myth and dream allow emotional subjectivity and associative unconscious imagery to arise. Natural symbols are experiential generators, ever-deepening states of experience. They are transformed by transplanted ideas from intercultural contact.
We need the ancient wisdom, the oldest stories - whispered from the depths of natural wisdom older than humanity. In these mythic times, we face the urgent task of attempting to identify the character and content of any new, emerging myth, images of the sacred in the process of creation with fiery sharp clawing pain.
Myth is here and now, surfacing stories and buried complexes songs of ancestors, disembodied voices, and elemental beings -- unbridled relations with all life --evolutionary ancestral memories. The dead become an imaginal presence. We can just let their stories be with us. love with us. The indigenous primordial roots of rebirth and renewal are recombinant visionary mythology.
One’s imagination is a powerful, ecological organ of knowing, especially when
enhanced by myth. The imagination reaches beyond the reasoning mind and allows
us to converse with the creative powers of nature. We all, like have a
double nature—mortal and immortal elements. Our mortality resides in an entangled,
sense-perceiving, physical world. The inner world is where our immortal elements
reside, connecting us to the world of the sacred, and helping us evolve toward a
better, more collaborative humanity. These immortal elements take us from death
to life. When we experience and integrate the invisible aspects of our nature, and
begin to live in harmony with our soul and the soul of the world, we experience the
divinity of nature from where meaning flows, thereby enriching our life. Human
and nonhuman nature is interconnected and inseparable. If we remain open, we
discover that nonhuman nature has the capacity to expose and spiritually nourish
our individual nature, creating a cascade that transforms our personal landscape.
Additionally, this creates an opportunity for humanity to gain a reverence for the
sacredness of creation and an awareness or understanding of the importance of
protecting and living in harmony with the planet’s ecosystems.
(Ida Covi, Immanence Journal)
Kybele is the matrix of myth and metaphysics, even life that is not the way we know it. The Mother embraces all life, just as nature cannot be said to be inherently good or evil but the paradox that the dark and the light side are mutually implicated expressions of a single energy.
Her devotion touches the deepest motivations of our hearts, the liberation and freedom of the spirit, of the ring dance. The world psyche is embedded in mythic characterizations, mytho-poetic visionary dimensions.
As the newborn is connected to the mother via a serpentine umbilical cord, in archaic times, snakes were the umbilical cord connecting humanity to earth, symbol of the mystery of life. Even the environment is a consequence of the numinosity of the image which intensifies it in return. Without light pollution, the view of the pristine sky demonstrates clearly that we are in space.
Kybele Meter, Ephasus; Cybele, Naples
Archaic Roots
Imagine yourself waking through untrammeled forest in ancient times, when thoughts receded into the direct experience of a world enlivened by direct experience of an utterly wild living landscape. By pale moonlight the ancient woods were shadowy and indistinct with multifaceted nature.
Pine trees were sacred to Attis. Clay images, fragments of tree or black fir-idols and phallic votives have been found at the important sacred groves, suggesting the severed members of Kybele and Attis. Their mushroom analogs which flourish under those pines, a co-evolution of psyche and place. Unfettered and wild, she is the forest -- nature’s expressive powers of vegetative growth.
"The root is the mysterious tree, it is the subterranean, inverted tree. For the root, the darkest earth—like the pond, but without the pond—is also a mirror, a strange opaque mirror which doubles every aerial reality with a subterranean image." (Gaston Bachelard)
A complex knot of feelings and impulses arises including nostalgia for union with the mother, the way things were before. They are echoed in the enchanted landscape and incidents that arise through it, confirming that felt-sense of an ancient state of consciousness. The connection is renewed with oneself, primordial nature, the ecosphere and constellations of ancestral memories. Every place is a different energetic setting.
Walking toward a sacred grove, the elemental wood, everything in it is alive and watching and whispering with the movement of the trees and the breezes all around, and geomagnetic currents. All are gestures of a god -- a mote of sunlight, the flight of a bee or butterfly, the scurry of a deer, murmur of water, the flash of lightning, and crack of thunder.
Our perspective becomes an imaginative relationship to the world. We tune our animal senses to the sensible terrain. Even invisible electromagnetism and an unidentified substratum through which all the forms of the world appear and disappear. Electromagnetism is the life breath of matter, the appearance in consciousness of the universe.
Such affinities with forces and forms of nature were not symbols, but were the goddess. Whole dimensions of images lie glistening in the dark unknown, refined by millennia, all meant to happen and speaking volumes -- each a portent of punishment or reward, warning or premonition that entered consciousness.
"Images are primary psychic realities. In experience, itself, everything begins with images." (On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, trans. with preface and introduction by Colette Gaudin. Spring Publications: Dallas, 1987, p. 84 [Original in French, 1960].)
The face of the myth was a meteorite. Even stones embodied the most absolute and deep experience - the experience of the eternal, which we realize in moments when we feel immortal. Kybele's oldest image was black meteoric stone, a venerated stone from the heavens, full of life and the unrestrained exploding forces of nature and creativity.
Such evocative images and sonic references became the basis of the unfolding Mysteries, sought in the shelter of caves that automatically internalized consciousness, returning it from the far horizons of complex rhythms and cycles. The heart-cave is the chambers of the heart. The initiate marries the goddess with a sacred meal. Raw and intense cave experiences soon make believers out of followers.
Kybele mediates the known and unknown, civilized and wild, life and death, as a goddess of transitions, mysteries, sensuous adventure and the landscape of eternity. Only a world of soul offers intimacy and coherent resonance to help us see and know the thought of the heart, as if in a mirror.
In ancient times the night sky was a dazzling Mystery, a source of power and wisdom, an alchemical mirror. The rebirth of consciousness from the pregnant darkness is fostered by a connection to the deeper current of life, those mysteries that give life form and meaning.
Archetypes, as liminal entities are numinous or “spiritual,” if “magical” is too strong a word. Magic is inherent in our instinctual roots. The 'supernatural' or netherworld is the truly chaotic world of the collective unconscious. In that "in between" place we can access who we are at the heart of it all, grasping symbols by the power of the heart.
Kybele worship began in Asia Minor and spread west to Greece and Rome. bridging the abyss between mind and matter with transfers of imagery. Her cult ethos developed in Phyrgia, but when her iconography was Hellenized then Romanized, a different visual version of goddess changed the actual practice.
But we can imagine her as a series of superimposed images, outside of time, without first and last, progression or regression. Her co-temporaneous soul history is unbound by linear development and includes many relationships. She gave birth to Dionysus, who shares her non-binary traits, the Dionysian female principle of chaos (nature), and the Phrygian orgiastic cult of Dionysos-Sabazios.
She incorporates the goddesses she absorbed or reiterated through amalgamations via intercultural exchange -- Agdistis, Rhea, Kubaba, Artemis, Upis, Hekate, Demeter, Inanna, Isis, Mary, and others. Kybele and Attis mirror Ishtar and Tammuz, as well as Isis and Osiris.
A polytheistic approach includes all perspectives. In early Ephesus, two proximate shrines to the Anatolian Great Mother and Artemis were merged or assimilated into one temple of a Virgin Mother, the Artemision. She was the most reknown Mediterranean goddess.
In the Cyprian cult of Artemis-Kybele, priestesses danced around the sacred tree, holding hands and circumabulating. Encircling processions mimiced the movement of heavenly bodies in ecstatic dance with its own tempo and pace.
Such expressive aspiration was a union with the goddess. Loss of consciousness to trance led to indwelling by the divine spirit and the body became divine as abode of the goddess. The orgiastic form of ritual limping dance was performed in great emergencies as an appeal.
Perhaps this sacred dance arose from an archaic ritual, "the running round," to purify newborn infants. Such encircling processions of devotion and consecration also took place around altars and city walls, sacred trees and springs, sanctifying all within it. Encirclement of the altar is an act of consecration.
She is the "Guardian of the Gateways," "Mother of the Plants," --metaphors of a growing soil and soul and resurrection. All the life that is here began originally in plants.
Joseph Campbell said in The Hero with Thousand Faces, "Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be—if we are to experience long survival—a continuous 'recurrence of birth' ('palingenesia') to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death." (p. 11-12)
Destructive and creative powers culminate in autonomous forces that guide the psychic personality, awakening psyche to spontaneous activity beyond personal will. We regain access to the sources of psychic life and healing.
Sanctuaries of Silence
We can ask, 'In what images are the major emotional ideas reborn?'. “We exist in relation to three things,” a Duhalar shaman told photographer Hamid Sardar, “the forest, wild animals, and our ancestor spirits. Once we lose the connection to these things, we invite demons to take hold of our destiny.” From “Ancient Companions: The Last of the Reindeer People” (Spring 2018 issue).
Iterations of Kybele's worship have mystical, cosmological, and sociological functions, such as the mysteries of initiation. Like fractals, the images are self-similar. Corresponding symbols and imagery are the fractal expressions of archetypes. So we can think of archetypes as higher-dimensional fractals, a living psychic presence in their own right.
Symbolic imagination emerges from human engagement with transhuman, social, and material environment. In some instances, god is a trauma that creates us in its image. This view is rooted in a phenomenological perspective that sees psychic life as emergent from embodied action in the world.
Jung proposed that that “the structure of the mind is emergent from embodied engagement in a social and material environment.” The world is an active participant in the emergence of the mind, a realm of
eternal presence, that requires our engagement in the elemental darkness. Our subjective universe becomes universal when it includes all potential experience and all other consciousness.
Migrations of butterflies connect the entire world. Concrete experiences unify us with environmental stimulus before we even think about it. We feel scared, excited, desirous;, adrenaline floods our system, the heart beats like a drum. As environmental collapse looms, we’ve never known so much about life on earth — how extraordinary and intricate it all is, and how loose the boundary where “it” ends and “we” begin, says Dr. Monica Gagliano. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/style/can-plants-talk.html
We have to sacrifice something of ourselves in order to endure being penetrated by the emotional reality of the other. This sacrifice is of one’s own security, the narcissism of self sufficiency. It lays bear your dependence, your vulnerability and incompleteness. The getting naked of ‘letting in’ is very different from the armored resolve of ‘letting go’, or its addictive cousin, ‘giving up’. It involves renouncing the desire to be normal and then the wish to be the author of oneself, not to mention the omnipotence of having the answer to everything.
Her appearance marks the return of the great long-gone, embracing Nature, divinity, underworld, and human world as one. Artemis means 'immortal truth.' She is a redeemer who confers immortality through an encounter with timelessness and a sense of redemption. Her iconic bow is a metaphor of holding the dynamic tensions of opposites.
Her primal image is one of rocky and forested peaks that our eye follows until they recede far into the distance, perhaps to the cave of the rift in the Milky Way. The sounds of such heights are the breath of nature that breathes in the transition of earth and sky which is without borders.
We coexist with lost worlds. Such beauty takes our breath away, moving it with the open-air in a transport of expanding awareness. We thank the land and respect that we live on the skin of a dear being, a living being that beats beauty in her rhythms.
The waters murmur with the voices of our ancestors, alive with our dreams. "Toni Morrison writes, ‘All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.’ Back to the body of earth, of flesh, back to the mouth, the throat, back to the womb, back to the heart, to its blood, back to our grief, back back back to when we were more than we have lately become.”
Earth breathes, sweats and quakes. It births zillions of organisms that ceaselessly devour, transfigure and replenish its air, water and rock. Air becomes breath. Her breath describes an image of a universe that continually alternates between periods of expansion and contraction, the creative flux of the Void, the fluid unity of life. We flow within it, and it flows through us.
The early universe rang with the sound of countless cosmic bells, which filled the primordial darkness with ripples like the surface of a pond pounded by stones, like the striking of tambourines. The wave fronts later served as spawning grounds for galaxies.
The material of our earliest cultural myths is the material of our lives, our bodies and our deepest, most profound experiences. And the first experience for anybody is the mother: what Jung called the “participation mystique.” To be in tune with the universe as the child is in tune with the mother’s body “is the principal function of mythology,” according to Campbell.
Woman is the center and continuer of nature, of life. “The first object of a subject is, therefore, the mother. The child knows no other. The whole conception of Eros, of libido, is for a return to the mother. And the child is immediately ready for that: Mother as environment, child as creature.” The child knows exactly what to do and this is all pre- linguistic. (Gurevich https://popular-archaeology.com/article/forgotten-wisdom-of-the-chauvet-cave/)
Sooner or later, the image comes alive and begins to
move and do things independent of intention. The deity for instance may
begin dancing in flames, or flying through a cloud-filled sky. If the eidetic image is a two dimensional mandala, the mandala may become a tunnel and one may find oneself whizzing down the tunnel into other perceptual experiences. Depending upon the intensity of concentration, we may become totally absorbed in the moving imagery and lose the sense of a separate Watcher.
How do we reconcile the familiar depiction of her as primeval Anatolian goddess, Mistress of the Hunt in Greek myth, with her civic identity revered as Mother, Healer, and Queen, by the Ephesians?
“In a world devastated by human interaction and natural disaster—from clearcutting and fracking to extreme weather and urban sprawl—creating art, ritual, and even joy in wounded places is essential to our collective healing. Trebbe Johnson argues that we need new methods for coping with these losses and invites readers to reconsider what constitutes “worthwhile action.” -- tools for community engagement—ceremony, vigil, apology, and the creation of art with on-site materials—show us how we can find beauty in these places and discover new sources of meaning and community.”
Unconditioned Consciousness
The world "out there" is a living presence, a relational web of associations -- a body of images. Both fluidity and permeability apply to the “inner” and “outer” landscapes of the ancient world. We glimpse it in the hypnogogic state -- in the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic mundus imaginalis.
Campbell describes how the gates of metamorphosis lead to a perilous path of initiation and encounter with the mother-mistress,-bride goddess. We also meet the absent, unattainable, withholding, aggressive, cloying, forbidding, punishing mother.
When we consciously or unconsciously make the perilous descent into the darkness of the spiritual labyrinth of our own psyche, we enter a landscape of symbolic figures that dissolve, transform and transmute our infantile images of a personal past. We may dream of caves or cavernous places, serpents or climbing a mountain.
Primordial knowing is a mind-world correspondence system -- an ancient aesthetic. Today, in physics the descent drops below the quantum level into the nonmanifest virtual domain -- the abyss of subspace. The impulse to create and to create images mirrors the divine impulse. The germ of what comes later is rooted in the earlier.
Ancestor worship was a central theme as the earliest concepts of religion developed among Paleolithic cultures. Today, we can experience conscious intergenerational transmission, and unconscious transgenerational transmission. Collective trauma and nurturing moves through generational lineages.
In the quest for the ultimate “source” of life, the clan would look back to its own origins for the mythological framework in which to understand the origins of all life. In these Upper Paleolithic societies, where the mother may have been regarded as the sole parent of the family, ancestor worship was the basis of sacred ritual.
They recognized that “First” woman was the creator of all human life, of all life in general. The clan had an image of their most ancient, primal female ancestor. They deified and revered that image as the Divine Ancestress. We are revitalized in bearing witness to nature’s mastery of the self-renewal so essential for the human spirit over the long run.
The ancients used caves for ceremonies of symbolic birth and regeneration, the curative magic of their springs, and as entrances to the underworld. As symbols of life, death, and transformation, caves were sacred places used for the exploration and manipulation of inner landscapes.
Prehistory
To enter into a sacred cave was to re-enter the place of cosmic and material birth. To reemerge from the cave was to be reborn into the living world. The Neo-Platonist philosopher Porphyry claimed, “Before there were temples, all religious rites took place in caves.”
https://popular-archaeology.com/article/forgotten-wisdom-of-the-chauvet-cave/
Cave bears were associated with the cycles of life and the sacred feminine. Hibernating bears represented the three-fold sacred experience (life, death and rebirth). The Cave Bear returns to the “womb” of the earth to be “reborn” each spring. The image of a mother bear protecting her cub mirrored the fierce power of the sacred feminine.
The mythological aspect of the bear image was sacred to Artemis or Diana. Cultural mythologist Barbara Walker claims, “Ursel means ‘She-Bear’ in the guise of Ursa Major, the Great Bear (Big Dipper), whose constellation circles the pole star without disappearing into the sea.”
She was both ruler of the stars and Protectress of the axis mundi: the Pole of the World. Marked in the heavens by the Pole Star (at the center of the small circle delineated by the constellation Ursa Major) the axis mundi is among the oldest mythological symbols of prehistory. This mother-tree, “world-supporting” tree or pole was female. In these archaic myths, this tree is called “birth-giving,” and “fruit- or milk- producing.”
The source of unborn souls gives birth to the new primal woman in the new universe after the present cycle ends. The spring at the tree’s root is a fountain of wisdom or the life-giving fluid which may be compared to the “wise blood” of the Mother — feminine life source (menstrual blood).
This cosmic “Tree” is a symbol of the body of the Great Mother from which all light and life emerges. Her body is the sacred place of emergence: the abyss of primeval chaos from which the divine light first appears. She is the ground of our being, symbol of both our divine and animal selves.
The ancients believed that Artemis Calliste, the She-Bear, ruled all the stars until Zeus usurped her place. The Huntress aspect of Artemis was another form of the destroying Crone or waning moon. “In her capacity as a hunting Goddess,” claims author and Goddess practitioner Zsuzsanna Budapest, “Artemis is the classical Greek version of the Lady of the Beasts who appears in art all the way back to the Neolithic Age and as Mother of the Animals in shamanic practice.”
The images of the Cave Bear suggest a close connection to the both the biological and astrological origins of the Goddess cult. Here we see the Goddess associated with both the cycles of time (birth, life, death and rebirth) as well as with the notions of eternity and transcendence.
She extends a ferocious, protective power over all forms of life that depend on her for their very existence. Prehistoric people pictured the “Little Bear” (The Little Dipper) within the circle of the Great She-Bear as her “son/consort.” He represented the life force that emanated out of her and was forever under her protection, influence and care.
As protectors of the sacred feminine, lions ruled the hunt and were protectors of the Goddess’ flocks and herds. He is aggressive only in her service and with her “permission.” The cycle continues into perpetuity. The violence allowed only to establish and maintain balance and to provide for the community. Cave lions are totems of masculine power that stand in obedient service to the Divine Mother.
Cave lions depict several aspects of their religious function in the mythology of prehistory. In India and the Near East, the usual animal-mount of the goddess was the lion and in the mythological art of the Hittite, the goddess stands poised on the lion, nursing her child. The image of a lion as the guardian/protector of the Great Goddess was ubiquitous in prehistoric mythological traditions.
The primal experience is an emotional state we share with other animals, undifferentiated but unquestionably real. We enter life in a highly emotional, potentially chaotic state. At this primal level of emotional awareness, emotions are conscious and experienced as a heightened internal energy level and physical sensations that cannot be put into words or controlled.
Primordial awareness is the void, the archetypal wilderness. The void is the source of all information and energy. This 'stateless state', is the source of the universe, and everything in the world. Nature is the all-powerful and the ever-present countenance of divine reality.
Anatolian Mysteries
Hellenism was a spiritual melting pot. As the unattainable hermaphrodite Magna Mater, Kybele was honored as Mother of the Gods and Mother of Plants over 10,000 years of remembering and modifying the story with seed ideas.
Cultures evolve through widening imagination. Soul is not an essence but an imaginative perspective. Her soulful essence can enliven and inhabit anything. All her mythic forms are coextensive, her foundational
characteristics..
Devotion, imagination, magic and ritual are ways of occupying psyche. So is "second sight," which more accurately could be called first sight, direct perception infused with imagination, ongoing subconscious processes that continuously influence us. Critical "first sight" is an immediate initial contact with information not otherwise presented to our known senses.
An archetypal approach should not estrange us from mundane reality. To 'see through' the archetype, to work with the aim of seeing into the archetypal is no small task, so it calls for courage. Our work and devotion asks us to become permeable and thereby impossibly close to ourselves, to the world, to all life.
It should facilitate a stronger, more complex, and more active involvement with it -- an archaic or unconscious retrieval. Subliminal primes or incidental stimuli impinge upon us and influence us in myriad ways, though we remain unaware of this nonlocal extrasensory information and its influence.
They lead us to experience related things more quickly and more emotionally than we otherwise would. We retrieve information on an unconscious level, recognizing and bringing it into our conscious mind. This implicit form of remembering is referred to as relational memory. The brain is encoding the perceptual associations consolidating new memories.
Unconscious retrieval of relational memory also involves the hippocampus. Research suggests synergistic interactions between conscious and unconscious relational memories in a common, cohesive hippocampal-neocortical memory space. (Colella, et al)
Activity in the hippocampus closely correlates with eye movements associated with retrieval of relational memories, even in the absence of conscious awareness. Implicit and explicit memory retrieval also correlate with distinct brain activation patterns. The subliminal becomes supraliminal.
A body is an animated form of information that naturally arises in the world. A body-based self-image arises in emotional relationship to the images of other things that appear in the world. The nature of the self-concept only arises with emotional relationships, as images are held in mental imagination.
Soul and the divine are united by the archetypal image in the imagination where the spiritual world has an objective reality. This is nature's theater of consciousness which always presents a point of view. We cannot grasp myth because it is transhuman with human attributes and interactions.
All points of view are equivalent only in empty space. Imagination is a divine body that lives within us all in primordial images and the visionary events of the soul. It creates a sympathetic life, open to beauty, ecstasy, and transcendence.
She wears the Crown of Sovereignty. In On the Crown (330 BC) Demosthenes identifies attes as "a ritual cry shouted by followers of mystic rites." In their joint cult, the chief priest is called Attis. The priests externalize the masculine spirit in Kybele, characterized by their excessive enthusiasm or manic zeal, patterns of instinctual behavior like those in animals.
She is virgin, meaning not sexual chastity, but sexual independence, sometimes even transgression -- a nonbinary porousness between masculine and feminine -- the polysemous 'them, depending on the identity we want to honor. She has an emotional possessive effect, a bedazzlement of consciousness that becomes blind to its own stance.
The gods lack any moral perspective, but reveal the variety of dimensions, the many voices, there are to the soul's perspective. Our personal compulsions connect to the divine. You have to understand the domain you are in to launch a successful search.
Kybele is mantic, oracular. In her cosmic womb we learn to open up, sense the dark matter world, and negotiate with darkness, what Jung called "the eternally fruitful climes of the soul." We embrace her glorious and inglorious passions as we embrace the image, a surrender in service to the gods; imagining into the archetypal energies of the goddess and her style of consciousness.
Living myths change with location, culture, and time, just as panpsychism grew out of animism -- the imagery of dark and luminous, fluid, electric, richly textured imagery with deep and saturated colors. It is populated by figures known and unknown that form a network of complex, entangled relationships, offering passing flashes of potential futures..
The wind has a thousand voices: the voice of soft twisting of leaves, the bending of branches, the hollowness of valleys. It voices rock walls and carries the echoes to ears that have nothing else to hear but the sounds of the world being carried on a breeze. (S.K. Abbott)
This is the most ancient conception of psyche, the belief that nature is alive with spirits and things with “souls.” That experience goes “all the way down” into submicroscopic nature. Panpsychism views the mentality of objects as a subset of universal qualities, not in terms of human consciousness. If humans and non-humans are enminded, we can know the universe more intimately, compassionately, and ecologically.
Because Kybele originates in the pre-literate era, there are many versions of her myth. Which of them are true? All of them are real -- the archaic. classical, and imperial --though they vary in key features as oral traditions do. Is she earth, or is she metaphor? Both.
Imagination is fundamental to psychic realty. Hillman suggests, "the identity of opposites mean the simultaneous perception by the perspectives of life and death, the natural and the psychic."
The lived experience of psyche helps us place a vivid personal experience within a universal cosmology, finding our place in relation to the Gods by personifying, pathologizing, and psychologizing cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates.
We can potentiate emergence of repressed material and traumas from the personal unconscious. Alterations of body image and increased awareness of bodily regions, activation of healing archetypal symbolism, and experiences of a mystical or cosmic character are root images.
The value of an image endows it with the widest, richest, and deepest possible significance, exciting the imagination, conjuring other images from myth, evoking emotion, gaining complexity and poetic depth. Events themselves are images which portray their own meaning and metaphorical value, so require no interpretation.
An archetypal approach holds the tension between the phenomena and its essential or archetypal nature, the archetypal image. Irrational stories of implausible events are silly stories to some, truths to others. We generate seed ideas when our narrative is stuck. We choose and nurture the reflections that come out of those moments to craft our personal narratives.
We instinctively sense that groves are natural sanctuaries. There is a doorway to eternity beneath Kybele's pines -- a consciousness related to cycles, illumined only by the moon. Even today, things look different from the unconscious which yearns for the pagan world. We generate modern variations on mythemes. Dim or dappled light pours in endless variations from the voids of the high forest canopy.
The dark androgynous goddess had a wide and wild range of behaviors and identities. Her cult face was a black meteorite. Very few meteorites will not attract a magnet. Plato thought the electromagnetic property of magnetic lodestone was a primordial life-force imagining it had the intellect to converse with iron (Ida N. 2015). We can explore the depths of that shewstone, a magical mirror, for many ancient and modern correlations.
We leave their veracity to each reader’s judgment without fictionalizing anthropology. The Anatolian Mysteries were conducted by priestesses and priests. Certain aspects of the perceived Universe are magnified, while others settle in the background, germinal images seeding thought and being.
"Magical practices are the projections of psychic events which, in cases like these, exert a counter influence on the soul and act like a kind of enchantment of one's own personality. That is to say, by means of these concrete performances the attention, or better said, the interest, is brought back to an inner sacred domain which is the source and goal of the soul. This inner domain contains the unity of life and consciousness which, though once possessed, has been lost and must now be found again." (C.G. Jung/Secret of the Golden Flower)
The main value of ritual is for the soul. It is a method of organizing an experience. It lends grace and style to action. It helps conjure a frame of mind conducive to the experience desired. The purpose of ritual is an end in itself.
Whenever we perform a mind-altering experiment, we perform an act of magic. Rituals are used to "program" a religious awakening. They are also used to overcome our random pre-programmed cultural narrowness concerning the value of an inner psychic life.
Ritual is a conscious or unconscious imitation of a Numinous Element (or godform) in the life of the aspirant. It is the outward or visible form of contact, or an epiphany with, an inward or spiritual grace. It is essentially a metaphorical expression of creative imagination.
"The distinction between concrete and literal, so important to alchemy, is the essential distinction in ritual. The ritual of theater, of religion, of loving, and of play require concrete actions which are never what they literally seem to be. Ritual offers a primary mode of pathologizing, of deliteralizing events and seeing them as we "perform" them. As we go into a ritual, the soul of our actions "comes out"; or to ritualize a literal action, we "put soul into it."...Ritual brings together action idea into an enactment." (James Hillman/Re-Visioning Psychology)
Perceptual Hypnosis
A spiritual phenomena, perceptual hypnosis tends toward expanded awareness, focused attention, enhanced somatic and emotional flow, and lack of self-consciousness. Music is a way to contact the ancestors and call up their presence. The tonal field of music amplifies holographic forms as they are experienced. From time to time the goddess seems to come, generating a deep emotional sense of awe, fascination, and mystery.
Don’t try to figure out what you’re listening to. Just listen. Don’t try to figure our what you’re listening to. Around you is a universe of sound. Just listen. Sound is only the movement of air at your eardrums. Just listen. After a while it may get hard to tell if you’re listening or you’re being listened, or who’s listening; to what, or what’s listening to whom–or who’s listening to whom and what’s listening to what. Just listen.
While you’re listening, notice the pressure of gravity on your body. Feel how it tugs at your feet and your legs and your wrists. Feel how the pressure of gravity pulls at your shoulders and your back and your neck and your head. Feel how it is on your muscles. sometimes you are aware of gravity in one part of your body, and sometimes in another, and then your awareness shifts to another part, or perhaps moves back to the first place again. So that it forms an endless cycle, endlessly moving, endlessly changing, always different, yet always recurring as your attention moves over your body.
Just feel the gravity. Just feel it.
While you’re feeling the gravity, notice how your skin feels.
Areas of warmth, and of cold. Perhaps a slight breeze blowing across your skin. Feelings of touch. Maybe a momentary sense of pain. Perhaps some tickle. Maybe some sexual sensation. This also forms an endless cycle, endlessly moving, endlessly changing, always recurring, but never the same.
And notice how your attention fluctuates over your whole body, so that sometimes you are aware of it in one part and sometimes in another. Don’t try to identify with these sensations. Just sense it.
Notice how some times you breathe deeply, and some times not so deeply. Sometimes you might even stop breathing for a few seconds, then your breathing starts again. Your breathing, too, is an endless cycle, endlessly changing, endlessly recurring, always different, never the same, but always repeating itself. Don’t identify with your breathing. Just breathe.
Notice how sometimes when the air goes through your nostrils you are or aren't aware of scents and odors, and at other times you aren’t aware of them. This, too, varies constantly and is constantly changing, constantly different, never the same. Smell the smells that come to you from the world around you, whatever they may be or may not be. Don’t identify with the smells. Just smell.
Notice the thoughts and images that go through your head. Notice how sometimes there is only one thought or only one image, sometimes there are many thoughts and many images, and sometimes are none at all. These, too, form an endless cycle, endlessly changing, endlessly repeating itself, always different, never the same, yet always recurring. They come and they go, back and forth, in endless procession. Don’t identify with your thoughts and images. Just watch them. Just watch them.
Feelings of joy , sorrow, feelings of anger and feelings of peace, feelings of tension and feelings of calm, feelings of fear and feelings of courage, and all of the thousands of feelings for which we have no names. They come and they go in an endless cycle, endlessly moving, endlessly changing, always different, never the same, but always recurring. Don’t identify with your emotions. Just feel your emotions. Just have them.
Notice also your drives. Feelings of hunger, feelings of thirst, sexual needs, perhaps a need to defecate, perhaps feelings of satiation, needs for air. These come and go just as your feelings do, just as your breathing does, just as everything does. Sometimes they’re strong and sometimes they’re weak. Sometimes they occur separately, sometimes together. Don’t try to identify them. Don’t identify with them. Just have them. Just have them.
Look the way you listen, the way you feel or taste or smell or breathe. Just look. After a while, it may be hard to tell whether you're looking or you're being looked, or who's looking at whom, or what's looking at what and what's looking at whom. Don't try to identify what you're looking at. Don't identify with what you're looking at. Just look. Just look.
And now pay attention to yourself. Notice how sometimes you concentrate on your body, your physical self, and sometimes on your psychological or mental self, and sometimes on both. Notice how you don't pay attention to all of you at once, but that sometimes you focus on one part of you, and then on another part, or, perhaps you might move to the first part again. This, too forms an endless cycle, endlessly changing, always different, never the same, but always recurring. Your experience of yourself, too, shifts as your attention shifts.
Notice that sometime you are supremely aware of yourself, and other time you are not aware you are deepening, you may not be aware of yourself at all. Sometimes in one situation, you'll behave in one way, and sometimes in another situation, you'll behave in another way. These are all part of the self which is always changing, and yet there is a part of the self that watches the self that changes that is ot involved in the change.
You give the self that changes your own name...but there is a self that goes beyond... that watches ... which is greater than .... the I that perceives is different from the I it looks at. The self that perceives is different from the self it perceives. If the perceiving I contains the I that is perceived, it must be other than and greater than the I that is perceived.
So take off your mask! Take off your mask, the mask of your small self... find out who you really are. Experience the self which perceives the lesser self, the I that perceives the lesser I. Know -- who you really are. See -- who you really are. Be -- who you really are. Take off the mask, the mask of (subject's first and last name). Know who you really are. Take off your mask. Take off your mask.
You are male. You are female. You are both male and female. You are neither male nor female, but both male and female. You are young. You are old. You are both young and old, but neither young nor old. Located in time, but timeless. Bounded in space, but boundless.
You have a past and a present, but neither past nor present, but both past and present. You have a past and a future, but neither past nor future, but both past and future. You have a present and future, but neither present nor future, but both present and future.
Wherever you look, universes appear. When you look away, they cease to be, and yet they never were. In any face that you look are all faces -- happy and sad, grotesque and beautiful, light and dark. In any face you can see your own face.
You are here, you are there. You are both here and there, but neither here nor there. Around and through you everything is in motion, yet nothing moves. And still it moves. For whatever is, is not, and whatever is not, is , and whatever is, is, and whatever is not, is not, at one and the same time. Whatever is true is true, whatever is false is false. But whatever is true is false and whatever is false is true at one and the same time.
And you are separate from everything else in the universe and you are everything else in the universe. Whatever exists rests in you, whatever does not exist rests in you. You rest in everything that exists, you rest in everything that does not exist. For nothing exists that does not exist and nothing does not exist that exists.
There is no end to you and no beginning, although you have both an end and a beginning. You are you and you are me and yet you are not you and you are not me. You are anyone else and not anyone else. You are all the objects around you, and you are not any of these objects. The world is your multiplicity, and the world is your unity. You are the multiplicity of the world. You are the unity of the world.
All boundaries have vanished, but everything is bounded. Know who you really are. Be who you really are. Become who you really are. But there is no being, there is no becoming, there is no knowing. You are the similarity of all opposites and the opposite of all similarities, the center of all boundaries and the boundary of the centers. Know who you are. Be who you are.
Way of Devotion
In structuralism, all versions of myths are part if it, including our own versions of depicting myth in literature. All attempts to interpret myths, as universals or even within their own culture and time, are interpretations, theories about theories. Mostly, they are assertions without evidence, even those of such luminaries as Levi-Strauss, Freud, Jung, and Campbell.
All interpretive mythographies or studies about myths and rituals are speculative theories. about art and literature, sexuality, gender roles, power, and more. They are limited by wide variations, sparse archaeological finds, and scant surviving contemporary references. We know things didn't happen like those myths say or it would be history. Instead it dives into the wellspring of human behavior.
We simply can't know what they meant to each devotee. Even history is lore, riptides in the historical dimension. We can do little more than suggest meaning, jeweled multiplicity, rather than assert cosmological, religious, allegorical, or philosophical verities. We can remain true with mythic imagination to keep antiquated realities relevant to our historically-acquired consciousness.
The unconscious is not personal, but in order not to be swamped by infinite information, the brain functions as what Aldous Huxley called "a reducing valve." It shuts out the universe so that the individual can see what is in front of them. . . But the intuition and imagination maintain an opening to the unconscious, which contains all the information that could not register in immediate consciousness. . . In the space-time of the unconscious, past and future mysteriously interpenetrate.
The devotee's way is not academic, but depends on direct contact with the numinous. We may approach it like dream, sticking as close to the original images inspired by the myths as possible. Our personal mythologies grow and change along with us, the psychic force that allows us to braid together the fragments of our experience. They lend coherence to our lives when we tend to them.
The mythical messages from the collective unconscious, a porous light, must travel through the distorting medium of culture and the individual personality before it reaches us. It is a mixture of the myth and noise from the distorting medium that reaches us. To be sure we have the message right, we must hear several different versions until we grasp the structure and morphology.
Telling one tale does not make it authoritatively so but may inspire the next step or potential. Even speculation opens us to the realm of psyche's possibilities, including those of our own personal mythologies, our own fundamental stories for making sense and meaning of the world.
Myths live on in the stories we tell about our own lives. we invent a personal myth. In retelling, some things are lost, and some added , but over all there is enough in common to identify their relationship.
This tale unwittingly mirrors characters and themes from old myths, with a creative side and a dark side. Key aspects resonate with and give a sense of purpose to our own lives. We unconsciously shape the tale, rewriting our life story from time to time to make past and present hold together. The use of flat tones, ambiguous perspectives, and strange juxtapositions suggest an imagined or dreamed reality, magical realism.
We can only do our best with the embedded narrative mythemes of this goddess, associated with 'foreign' practices, many other Olympians, and times and places. This is especially true for the few stories of archaic pre-literate cult traditions of Kybele and her retinue. Among them we may find some surprising correlations.
Life Force
The womb of the mother is the psyche or soul, including the animate natural world, millions of years of instinctive animal life, the dwelling place of the dead, and transformer of life cycles. For us, it is a shift to ecological imagination, inclusive biospheric awareness, and empathizing with nature as an imperative to keep the world habitable and humane.
Connecting the local and global, the past and future, the organism and the environment, place and the biosphere requires an ability to move through ecological and evolutionary space and time. This is the ability to identify with and internalize biospheric processes, and to finally understand that human reflective awareness is a manifestation of the biosphere -- biospherical ecology operating in nature.
We cannot imagine ourselves apart from the planet. Human behavior originates in experiences of environment, the mundus imaginalis. Connectedness positively relates to environmental behaviors. In this time of ecological collapse we cannot shield our souls from the psychological effects of the destruction. We exist in the midst of psyche which is beyond human nature.
The killing off of the world has killed off a part of ourselves. Imagination is not bound by the rational assumption that any psychic life discovered in the world was put there by us. Psyche and matter are two aspects of the same essence. Reality falls apart when we plunge into a wild and unfamiliar landscape. In a world of terrifying strangeness the brain soon realizes knowledge and a need to impose familiar order are futile and the land begins to speak for itself.
Imaginal vision is a way of being in the world, the act by which things take on meaning and become symbol and metaphor through imaginal integration of perceiver and landscape. The intuitive experience of soul in the world cannot be collapsed into five senses. It is only possible when the human barriers that separate us from nature and immediate apprehension of cosmos dissolve.
To be deeply connected to self and environment means growing down into our roots, dwelling more deeply in our lives. We cannot neglect the soul of the world to focus only on the soul of the individual. The mythopoetic dimension exists everywhere in animate and inanimate things and a dynamic relatedness to land as a basis for transformative living. We suffer from that lost connection, the worldly dimension of our souls.
With mythopoetic perception we don't just describe the land but participate in it. We can awaken to our own interiority and and attune our imaginal depths to those of nature. Something divine awakens in us when we can respond to the divinity of the world.
Soul is in the world not just humans. We must extend the clinical into the environmental reanimation of nature, not for ego development but soul expression of deep primal levels of psyche, which we have not left behind. We must move beyond the clinic and even devotional chamber into the animated world of anima mundi with a sense of agency.
Our panpsychic environmental space and the psychic interior of the world is naturally therapeutic and sacred. Panpsychism is the philosophical view that consciousness or a mind-like aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. Destruction of the natural world and our relationship with the natural environment is the most pressing issue we confront today.
Blue Origin
Environmental changes lead to changes in human behavior. Healthy environmental experiences produce healthy behavior; unhealthy environments produce unhealthy behavior. When our experience is destroyed, we lose our own selves. We long to live in a world that isn't being destroyed. We have a jewel of a planet and must protect it from corporate capture of nature.
Our minds originate in experiences of environment, the sum of all relationships, conscious and unconscious, physical, emotional, and spiritual, creating our lives. We lose with the disappearance of hundreds of species daily, the disintegration of connections with our ancestors, and the inability to make any sense of our dreams.
Imagine that what speaks to our souls, the immortal one, is true. Experiences of Gods or greater personality have value because of their rarity. We can facilitate them, but we cannot command or control them or their appearance as a glimpse into a greater reality. Even Joan d'Arc said, "How else would God speak to me, if not through my imagination?" Jung thought, "a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows."
Psychogeographical Exploration
Place and the soul of a place, enters into the dialectic of history as metaphor, psyche as a vivid landscape, and actual wild lands. Like plants, archetypes take root and flourish in particular places. Life gains beauty in diversity and shared inhabitory space, not just the integrative process of wholeness. The landscapes of our childhood memories remain the most vivid.
The wilderness, the idyllic, the topology of nostalgia, the grounding, balance, aesthetics of environment, and ecosophy we need of 'land as home' to sustain the planet, includes an ecology of magic altering the common field of perception. We've ignored that our ecological crisis is a crisis of the spirit. Story-telling is an ancient survival strategy and art -- the landscape of language.
The Paleolithic mother goddess transformed into the Neolithic goddess of sky, earth, and living water, then incorporated Crete's mysteries of life, death, and regeneration, emerging in the Bronze age as the mother goddess and her son-lover. She helped the Greeks and Romans re-imagine the city, its soul, and beauty.
James Hillman thought our real taboos are not what we consider forbidden, but those things we ignore or rarely mention -- "soul has an affinity for negative thoughts and images." He suggested that the major taboo in our society is not sexuality, but the way in which we habitually overlook the ugliness of the environments in which we live and work (1985).
Today she is shifting our thinking and feeling about the place of humans in the world and a more than human world, She brings nature to consciousness through the spell of the sensuous and the greening of our imaginal and mythological studies and devotions revealing the intertwined relation between the human community and the larger, more-than-human field.
In “Little Poems for Gaia,” from Axe Handles, poet Gary Snyder speaks of 'wild wisdom' saying, "As the crickets' soft autumn hum is to us so are we to the trees as are they to the rocks and hills." He also raised concrete questions: “Where does the water you drink come from? What is the soil series where you live? Name five edible plants in your region and their seasons. Where does your garbage go?”
This larger community includes along with the human, the multiple nonhuman entities that constitute the local landscape, from the diverse plants and the myriad animals, birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, insects. They inhabit or migrate through the region to the particular winds that inform the local geography, as well as the various landforms -- forests, rivers, caves, mountain that lend their specific character to the surrounding earth.
So do the imaginal spirits. Primordial magic is existence within an interrelated matrix of multiple intelligences, heightening our receptivity to meaning. The underlying vision is of a variety of goddess images reflecting the vision of life as a living unity. We still live with those imaginal structures of higher order relevance and connection.
Jung said, "The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations. For the root matter is the mother of all things."(Symbols of Transformation, Page xxv)
For millions of years to evolve has meant to adapt to the environment. The rule of the dinosaurs lasted nearly 150 million years, while humans have only been here 200,000. In that relatively short time both the environment and ourselves have changed markedly and will continue to do so. For humans, survival has meant living by our wits.
Emotions influence cultural ideas and practices; biology and culture influences the way we perceive and experience emotions and arousal. Universal emotions are at the heart of our profound affinity with animals and one another. Perception is relational.
Emotions appear instinctual because we do not have conscious access to unconscious conceptualization. Deep emotions such as lust, rage, care, fear, seeking, grief and play are not conceptually constructed. Identifiable physiological patterns undergird them.
Kybele is at the root of the shaping of mythic tradition and symbolic reflexes. We learn to navigate darkness, attending the lamentations of the dead with naked tears from eyes seeking the inky skies of stars. Unless their stories are acknowledged, they remain unseen and unheard.
Ecosophy
Soul remains a perpetual virgin. What is meaningful is connected to what is real. Many hearts are heavy with ecocide and the unprecedented burning of virgin forests in the Amazon, Siberia, Indonesia, Africa, and elsewhere. Our primordial Edens are becoming sterile wastelands -- a malevolent aesthetic of evil. How do we work through our anger and grief about the destruction, the skin of our beloved planet, burning, scorched and pillaged?
Environmental concerns are vital to the heart of the cosmos. "Ecopsychologists believe that our destructive environmental behaviors stem from our sense of disconnection to the natural world. They contend that we have an "ecological unconscious" that is repressed in some individuals. This ecological unconscious is our connection to our evolution on earth. In other words, if we recover our sense of connection to our natural world, we will begin to be more environmentally conscious people." (Kineavy)
One of ecopsychology’s defining goals was: “if the self is expanded to include the natural world, behavior leading to destruction of this world will be experienced as self-destruction.” Ecopsychology may have missed its window for averting the toxic effects of the human death wish on the environment.
We are left with ashes: "Ash speaks to what remains, the barest semblance of what once was. James Hillman wrote, “Ash is the ultimate reduction, the bare soul, the last truth, all else dissolved.” The soul in grief feels reduced, brought to the place where all other thoughts or matters dissipate into ash."
An instinctive passion to live the life of the soul with the help of the unconscious is indigenous to every human being. The soul as a "dark forest in which many gods come and go" is an image of the psyche. Shining water mingles with the blood of our ancestors and murmurs with their voices. Caves were the womb of the mother goddess that harbored birth, death, and transformation.
The Moonlit Path
All life comes from and returns to her for renewal. The goddess was a cave dweller who appeared in dreams, waking trance, prophecy, and visions from the center of earth where the swirl of dreams was made before time.
The underworld was less frightening to those close to their ancestors who continued to share the matrix of life and death, the place where light and dark begin to touch. In this paleolithic version of the root metaphor of the unified field of nature, the living and dead communed, living for the dead, for others, and consciousness itself.
After a few fleeting seasons of gardening, it will be time to slip away into the high mountains, once again to hear the call of the rushing river, the horn of plenty, and the deer's flute song in these days of environmental cataclysm, But in the stillness of the night, we may hear the children and wildlife weeping while storms of predatory aggression and hypocrisy brew.
The living and the dead are one community with a continuum of consciousness with nature as our guide to discovering the truth about the nature of reality; a living phenomenology of nature's processes and transformations. Invisible soul becomes physical body, what we imagine to be true about ourselves, our environment, and unspoken dimensions. From the archaic period, sociopoetic processes transformed the meaning of myth. They aim for completeness.
Eliade says, “To be born or to die, to enter the living family or the ancestral family (and to leave one or the other), there is a common threshold, one’s native Earth.” The Earth herself decides if the birth or death is valid. The true Mother legitimizes and confers protection. Sometimes the sick are buried for regeneration and rebirth. Initiation requires a ritual death and resurrection.
Today's Wasteland is the persistent vision of dystopian and post-apocalyptic futures. Full-scale destruction of the living earth implies dissociation from the body and psychopathology. If we deny our unmet grief, it returns in addictions, obsessions, nightmares, anxieties, depression, aggression, resentment, and dis-ease. It inserts itself into the very fabric of our being and, if ignored, will devour our souls whole.
Metaphors give shape and form to life stories. They are tools for working with experience. They embody the situational knowledge that constitutes culture. We grope through associated images of light and darkness, healing and disease, life and death, toward the perception of truth.
The transpersonal psyche includes terrifying experiences that lead to heightened experience of the transcendental. Imagination couples objective and subjective worlds, literal fact and spiritual meaning. We ask 'what am I looking at', and the self-inquiry, 'why am I seeing things the way I see it'? She protects what is gestating within. Her imagery help us discover new light in our dark crevasses.
We cannot claim that our view of ancient practices from this wilderness of modern life is accurate but it is a natural development and legitimate descendant. Just telling a story as narrative is inherently holy. We recognize the world through creating the kind of meaningful “depth” that makes us aware of that relationship. Moments of gravity change the path.
Thus we construct mediating metaphors for drawing order out of chaos: metaphors for the journey of life, metaphors of identity, metaphors for life's crossroads, metaphors for struggle, metaphors for inexplicable loss, metaphors for the disordered body, metaphors for perseverance of singular women and abandoned daughters.
We have metaphors for transformation, metaphors for healing body and mind, metaphors of hope, metaphors of evil and good, chaos and hopelessness, metaphors for healing the body through the mind. Metaphors for living in limbo, metaphors of acceptance and healing, metaphors for cure, metaphors for present, past and future, metaphors for anticipation of death, etc.
We can only make plausible arguments into coherent narratives. Rational disclosure, however, implies some form of narrative, and narrative can always be tied in some way to myth. Ecstasy takes us out of ourselves into the irrational. Our ancestors knew that sacred ecstasy allowed them to face their own desperate times, allowed them to do the impossible.
Sacred traditions create civilizations. Tradition is the living soil from which all our cultures spring. We learn how to step outside of ourselves and allow the sacred to come. In ecstasy we lose ourselves and notions of how things were going to be, yet gain the chance to live in service to the power of life itself and the spiritual twilight zone of dark wisdom.
If Kybele is anima mundi, the soul of the world in a cosmos illuminated and animated with divine energy, we are each the world of our unique perceptions. Our concern is how to reconnect to the essence of the past without merely recreating its outward forms. .We can only make the deep past present, each in our own way by experiencing these forces. We have to deduce first principles from the fountain-head or pristine stream of wisdom, flow, and resonance.
Kybele embodies erotic theology, twisted longings, and genetic desire. Our bodies and psyches are the original birthplace of all gods, which informs us about the verdant wilderness of raw soul in its reflective function in our body of images. Deep immersion in nature but most of all to be with self feels very sacred, and may be a metaphor of Attis. Nature is impregnated by radically de-centralized spirit.
The power of this cult lies in its near perfect symbiotic relationship with its collective host, a host already in natural instinctual potential possession of its seed principles. Psyche spontaneously produces religious and mythic symbols. A wounded feeling function means an inability to to find joy, worth, and meaning in life. Soul-making requires wounding -- the breaching of our own souls informed by mythic vibrancy.
Mother initiations call us to the healing of our own mother wounds and attachment issues, to look at how we have been, or not been, mothers to ourselves, to our children, and/or to our creations. When the Mother archetype is in shadow, the wounding with our own mother may be profound.
Through Mother initiations, we are called to discover and heal the wounds that came from our conception, birth, the attachment issues with our mother, and other mother figures, as well as conditions that may have been passed down to us through our matri-lineage. We sometimes ‘carry’ the emotional burdens, wounds, unfulfilled dreams, and unfinished business of our mothers and ancestors.
When the mother archetype is constellated, it may also bring up issues related to sisters and grandmothers, as well as catalyze issues with close women friends. When the Mother archetype is in shadow, a woman may not know how, or be able to, take care of her own physical needs, be in her body, form an attachment to others, or nurture a child. She may feel incompetent, or be narcissistic and deny her child her own individuality and experiences.
The shadow aspect of the Mother can cause a woman to be absent physically and/or emotionally from her children, ineffectual, controlling, demanding, clinging, devouring, manipulative, or guilt-inducing. She may simply not know how to take care of her children on a very basic physical or emotional level due to her own lack of healthy mothering.
Ecosexuality
Such symbols often emerge on a spiritual retreat into fecund nature or wilderness. Jung suggested that “The goal which beckons to this psychic need, the image which promises to heal, to make whole, is at first strange beyond all measure to the conscious mind (CW 12). We work with mythic means.
Mother is a core experience of central symbolic significance, the heart of the moment. She is the goddess, the genesis of paradoxical psyche, to whom all living things return as she loves all life with a mother's devotion.
And we remain devoted to her and her ambiguities -- the uncertainty of her duplex character and the yearnings of the soul and what the soul foretells. Kybele's cult has always been a sanctuary of the carnal, grotesque, and sexual transgression.
A modern movement, Ecosexuality extends green living to romantic sexual life. Its aim is to break down separations between humans and nature. The land and biosphere are Lovers. Ecosexuals prefer Lover Earth to Mother Earth, and practice an erotic eco-logic. An environmental person finds nature romantic, sensual and sexy, and essentially imagines the Earth as their lover, deeper than skinny dipping, carbon neutral sustainable sex products,. and naked hiking.
Feminist professor Lauran Whitwoth asks, “What do ecosexual encounters with nonhuman nature offer current discussions of environmental ethics?” “Can ecosexuality’s posthumanist tendencies queer our speciesist modes of belonging and foster an environmentalism that is not foundationally anthropocentric nor steeped in ‘reproductive futurism’?”
The movement uses such imagery to further political projects. Ecosexuals symbolically marry the earth, moon or other natural bodies, reconceptualizing the way we look at the earth, from seeing the planet as a mother to seeing it as a lover.
An alternative to moralizing, such sexual ethics, fetishizing the landscape, and getting intimate with nature helps people reconnect with nature, and with their own bodies. Neuroception is an unconscious a defensive physical response.
Kybele's serpentine spiral dance reflects the nature of our mortal coil with its winding spirals of DNA that loop and twist, entwining us with our ancestors. A meander pattern mirrors our lives and stories. We leap into inwardness, seeking her in our fundamental helplessness in the face of extreme situations.
The paradoxical nature of the psyche is that "every act of dawning consciousness is a creative act." (Jung, Alchemy) Alan watts said, "Weirdness is a treasure, a verdant wilderness escorting us into the earnest embrace of the unknown… the empty… the nothingness."
Primal Nature Goddess
For the Phyrigians and Greeks, Kybele embodied the mountain wilderness, But later in Ephasus, she became the governing Feminine, governing by unconscious processes. As order-upholding Goddess of the Polis, she expressed the earned and honored powers of Feminine wisdom. Artemis was the name the Greek colonists called Kybele.
She is the archaic nature of the unconscious which finds itself in the psychically relative space-time continuum characteristic of the unconscious. The connecting psychoid field beyond space-time barriers exerts an uncanny influence on the conscious mind.
To the Romans, she was Diana of Ephesus who with Attis represented sexuality and fertility with the ecstatic Mystery cult. The wild feminine rebirths the wild masculine. She is the phenomenal Womb of the Gods, our Mother of the Mountains, Lady of the Plants, and Lady of the Beasts.
To archaic people nature wasn't a ‘wilderness’, ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. It was tame: "every grass and every tree, mountain, hill, land and sea, cloud, meteor, star, are men seen from afar." (William Blake, letter to Butts, 2 Oct. 1800).
Water was connected to the earth, generative nature, and the human sphere. Earth was bountiful, with cliffs, sacred springs. caves, and vast forests surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery of the cosmos. With all creatures of the earth, sky and water it was a real and active principle, felt-Presence, the mode of presence by which divinity is revealed.
The archetype embodies ‘the emergent properties of mindbody, environment, and narrative -- even apparitions of the goddess herself and atavistic erotic passions. The oracle ordered the Phrygians to bury the body of Attis and to worship the Great Mother, or Cybele, in times of epidemics and drought.
But when we wander in the wilderness of the soul we may feel either truly lost or found. Devotees found a special kind of religious experience in the dramatic natural landscape. A response experience is "triggered" by some aspect of nature in the nature mystic experience, oceanic, or peak experience. We are not only touched, but gripped or enthralled.
Merging with nature is affective elevation, a realization or feeling that "All is one," a oneness with the creation. Current research suggests that this link between perceived oneness and life satisfaction occurs regardless of religious affiliation. A brush with the divine through lived experience increases purpose and meaning even decades later.
We feel a presence when we come face to face with a higher order of reality that strikes like a thunderclap. A radiant consciousness of the "otherness" of natural things is the simplest and commonest form of illumination -- readiness and potentiality, not accomplishment. The self is restored to a timeless primitive grace.
The numinous element is veiled by nature. We are conscious of a presence, but not sure what that presence is. We feel rather than knows. Nevertheless, such experiences can redirect one's life, for they give one the exaltation of standing on a high mountain and gaining for a minute the glory of a grand vista, a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness.
Kybele also has a cosmogonic creative origin - a celestial madness.. Cosmogonic symbols are derived from every creative act of dawning consciousness. Satinover (1985: 83) considers archetypal images as "the epigenetic consequence of developmental processes, certain elements of which are inherited."
The effects of psychic elements emerge as certain archetypal images. We objectify and engage these images. Reflection is never enough because holy desire moves the soul. Soul-driven desire ignores personality and personal desires and their outcome.
The soul's motivations and compulsions are beyond ego desire fulfillment. The soul’s instincts and aims are fundamentally linked to the divine image. Inner numinous forms guide us beyond what is known into the unknown on a journey into the great mystery of life and its consummation.
We can consider ourselves as the dwelling place and throne of Kybele's divinity. We may find unspeakable secrets, pulsing fields within fields, within fields of invisible light and psyche's complex language within the dreams and dramas of being alive -- the hidden unity of chaos.
Hillman feels that, archetypally, the Great Mother is in love with the son-and-lover puer as a carrier of spirit. The child-god is forever young, psychologically. An older man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level is usually coupled with too great a dependence on the mother. Spiritual truth resides in the divine child within, not the external mother. The shadow side is sexual compulsion and immaturity. The raging moon embodies transgenerational resentment, frustration, and destruction of primal energy.
She inspires a sense of transcendence that can be both light and dark, a preverbal wave of existential dread. This tremendous Mystery is a personal encounter with the dreadful awe of the numinous, a non-rational, overwhelming felt-sense of preternatural non-human creatureliness.
Fearful expectations arise amidst the force multiplier of pulsating sounds, shifting rhythms, and resonant frequencies. Aggressive, intense, and frenetic music intensely pushes emotions. Vicious, and noisier music drives reality amplification. Frenzied dancing carries devotees from civilization to a wilderness beyond themselves -- innate release, a collective state of total and simultaneous offering.
We begin our inquiry knowing there is an art of approaching, especially for prophecy, oracles, and signs. We can attend to how our brains construct the world. What draws us in may be a devotional, divinatory, or aesthetic interest at the beginning, or an affinity for a different world related to deepening engagement.
She is our contact with a perceptually perpetual virginal aspect within. The word derives from a Latin root meaning strength, force, skill; and was later applied to men: virile. Virginity is a subjective state. It isn't defined by the condition/presence/absence of a body part nor by the participation, or not, in the singular act of heterosexual intercourse.
She has symbolic content, but also directs attention to crucial features in the environment. The process unfolds in natural but unexpected ways. The pattern repeats in Ishtar and Tammuz, Astarte and Adonis, Isis and Osiris/Horus, Anahita and Mithras, Cybele and Attis, her transgendered consort. They are ‘superimposed’, the one on the other, synchronized in meaningful parallellism, modified by selective strengthening or weakening of sympathetic connections.
"I was ten months in search of the 'astral mineral' that had to have the 'red Virgin' pure and entire and I did not find that _mineral_. What I wanted and searched for was the subtle magnetism that one exchanges, the human 'salt' ...and to find it and obtain it, I was ready to sacrifice myself, _to dishonor myself_! ...I was still in search of my 'salt' and human 'mineral' and -- _the 'Virgin'_ was still there in the full sense of the word. ...My researches into the 'red Virgin' and the human 'salt' having necessitated physiological investigations that were certainly not for my age, my imagination was coldly depraved. I looked for the _subject_." -- H.P. Blavatsky
This is not your idealized Virgin Mary. She is mother, because shebears new life, but she does not lose her virginity. She needs no partner to give birth. She creates by extraordinary natural phenomena, her own force demonstrating divine being, the integrity of undeniable inner authority. Her association with the almond tree reflects the vesica piscis symbol of the birth passage.
Even as a mother she remains virgin in a certain inscrutable sense. A virgin in the original sense is whole-in-itself, but that can include unconscious acts of brutality. We can approach transgressive imagery head on or tangentially, by dancing and spiraling around it. Few myths offer more primordial and biologically challenging imagery than Kybele and Attis.
In The Hebrew Goddess, Patai identifies the Persian counterpart of the great virginal-wanton-motherly-warrior goddess as Anahita or Anath. Absorbing the traits and legends, temple estates and rites of the Great Mother goddess of Anatolia, she was worshiped in Ugarit as the fertile and chaste "mother of nations"and "the virgin."
In The Mysteries of Mithras, Nabarz agrees some sources cite the Persian god Mithra's partner and virgin mother as the angel-goddess Anahita. This myth mirrors Kybele and Attis.
"Cybele ... worship seems to be as old as the archaeological record: a figurine from Chatal Hüyük depicts her as potnia therōn, "Lady of the Beasts." In Armenia, numerous terra-cotta figurines depict the goddess in the form of Isis lactans." http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/anahita.pdf
Double-Bind
We may yearn for that which we cannot or dare not name. Breaking the strong bond with the mother, or the emotional incestuousness of the mother complex, likely instigates the hero archetype of adolescence. This passage rite often included phallic mutilations and self-sacrifice.
All such patterns and behaviors can be studied on their own, including the functional disturbance of double-bind phenomena, a universal pathogenic situation in dysfunctional families. Metaphors grow the mind and feed the soul; they are elemental to human thought and imagination.
Unhealthy enmeshment means a mother attaches intensely to adolescent and adult children, which debilitates or psychologically castrates the child, blocking development and transformation with conflict, dilemma, impasse and paradox. Binds can be expressed conceptually, metaphorically, or nonverbally. https://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/articles/10/1/Modelling-the-Structure-of-Binds-and-Double-Binds/Page1.html
The myth makes the metaphor explicit -- literal. Such blurring of boundaries between family members can cause difficulty regulating emotions. Enmeshment is a state of cross-generational bonding within a family, including covert incest and cross-generational sexual relationships. Here it is enough to recognize them in passing as key concepts that arise from primordial psyche.
It is classically replayed in the tragedy of Oedipus (Freud) and modern day maternal enmeshment, spousification, or incestuous symbiosis (Fromm). The personalities are fused in mutual dependency (Bradshaw). Locked in this paradigm of decay and death, they feel extremely anxious and frightened if that relationship is threatened. They believe that they cannot live without the mother substitute, such as family, business, church, or nation.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244012470115
This mother who is a goddess of spiritual (spirit) and physical things (instinct) is a Goddess of opposites -- of wild things, mated with a god of wild things. Her mythos reveals the story of the first surgical “correction” of an intersex infant because the gods were offended and disgusted at hir hermaphroditic inheritance. Such medical procedures are largely hidden to this day.
She is the magic flower who first bore her son by parthenogenesis. Then, in union with the young male deity, she bore all living things. The pattern repeats in Ishtar and Tammuz, Astarte and Adonis, Isis and Osiris/Horus, Cybele and Attis. We can also read this mythos of incestuous marriage metaphorically. We don't need to succumb to the danger of taking it literally.
For us, she represents the primal psychic world of mankind, the world of mythology, the world of archaic humanity, visibly gripped and transported by the transpersonal power that sustains and nourishes all creative development with a wild sense of belonging in a rich and many-layered world that spontaneously engenders imagery.
Sacred experiences are an element of the structure of consciousness. Myth inspired and fed creative imagination. The human psyche is revealed in religion, psychology, and art as a continuous creative force, here and now in the numinous instinctual rhythms of life's flow.In ordinary household life, simple role-sharing may be hermaphroditic, an inherent, necessary behavioral transgender fluidity. Parenting can require enacting cross-sex identification.
Hillman relates the soul of the world to "that particular spark of soul, that germinal image that offers itself in transparency in everything in its visible form. The soul is the archetype of life: in all of us, the soul is all the faces of our being, our style of doing, the direction of our self."
Women's long-lost ability to self-conceive echoes an archaic time before the father's role was even suspected. In parthenogenesis, asexual reproduction, embryos develop from unfertilized eggs. Wild female snakes that usually reproduce sexually can selectively display parthenogenesis, virgin birth of fatherless offspring, even when males are available.
The serpent leads to the goddess and the goddess leads to the dance, instinctuality, emotionality, sensuality, sexuality. Neolithic snake cults were universal. The snake shedding its skin symbolizes renewal of primal life force energy: death and rebirth, transformation, immortality, and healing.
The serpent remains the primary symbol of Gnosis. Snakes are also associated with divine revelation. Evidence from shrines and oracular sites of the Goddess in Babylon, Sumer, Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome suggests that sacred serpents were kept and fed by priestesses who were consulted for prophecy.
The dark center is the kundalini root of all, where energy is inert and consciousness coiled asleep; potential life lies motionless. It ruthlessly destroys all that is not our true individuality or appropriate life path.
Her numinous all-encompassing power (over everyone and everything that had ever been, ever was, and ever will be) included every part of the life cycle, from birth through death. Jung confided that, "The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive." (Psychology and Alchemy, par. 93)
Archetypes change, or rather their worship, locale, and status changes. Their essence may not change but different traits, qualities, and functions are selected by each culture for unfolding spiritual and psychosexual states. The environment is a programmed teaching matrix. So is art, beyond literalist interpretation of sacred metaphor.
Kybele's underworld nature originates in an animal analogy -- the serpent. It precedes the heavenly or celestial origin as a meteorite. But the paradoxical themes remain including Great Mother vs. Terrible Mother. The more they effect you, the more you attract them.
In mass media, we remain hooked on the spectacle of our own demise, of humanity. Black and White are harnessed within us like the lions that draw Kybele's chariot. Canaanite goddess, Ashera, too, was a "Lion Lady," and "Queen of heaven," depicted holding a snake and riding a lion.
The Great Goddess always had a mystical solidarity , kinship with the animal world. Jung spoke of "the abyss of impassioned dissolution, where all human distinctions are merged in the animal divinity of the primordial psyche—a blissful and terrible experience." (Psychology and Alchemy, Page 90.) The snakes entwined around her represent birth, regeneration, and overall protection -- otherworldly wisdom. "The snake is endless time," says Jung, (Meetings with Jung, Page 303).
The vegetation god also presides over or underlies prophecy, tragedy, ecstasy, and the violation of limits. He is the irrational power that allows us to explore our potential for emotional and behavioral extremes. The hilaria was celebrated in Spring, around the time of Easter, and celebrated the death, salvation, and rebirth/resurrection of Attis. Before Christianity, it included sacramental meals, blood offerings, and baptisms. They were merged in the cult of the Naassenes.
https://books.google.com/books?id=7Thonw9sE8kC&pg=PA190&lpg=PA190&dq=,Karl+Kerenyi,+Kybele,+Cybele&source=bl&ots=teiVxkLjlV&sig=ACfU3U2X4tkeIKGhiXoL_tA_nh7VeRi8gQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjwweOnyu_jAhXhs1QKHbhXCvYQ6AEwDHoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=%2CKarl%20Kerenyi%2C%20Kybele%2C%20Cybele&f=false
The Irrational forces us to suspend logic, washes out the firm footing from beneath us, floods us with emotion, rips away false surety, claims us utterly, shakes us to the core. It sweeps us into heavenly heights and underworld depths inexorably full of the sense of mystery, the Unknown.
We cannot expunge or strip away our own troublesome residue of the archaic and barbaric. Such trances have the power to hold us in their grip. The power of trance is to come and go unconsciously, opening to instinctual imagery. Even fragments of thought and adjacent possibilities contain an image. Mind and behavior can either accurately reflect or mutilate these images.
The Dark Queen
"The archetype is an affliction; it makes us suffer. The pathology of the psyche is an integral necessary part of psychology because suffering the archetype through our complexes is an integral and necessary part of psychic life," Hillman says in the Myth of Analysis, p. 199.
Manifestations are real at their own level of operation. Manifestations are real at their own level of operation. Manifestations are real at their own level of operatiThey say you never really know someone until you have met their monster. As Jung has said, "the gods have become diseases," we find the pathology of narcissistic spousification in the sons of the Terrible Mother.
They can deny and refuse the burdon of consciousness becoming unconscious again. by alcohol, refusing to grow up, being dependent. Or you can expand it beyond self-consciousness with more attention.
A complex is an abortive call to Mystery and initiation, a sort-of psychic undertow in which someone can be trapped. She warps their personalities in compulsions, co-dependence, and in Bipolar and Borderline chaotic lifestyles. Maternal enmeshment engages a chosen child. This is emotional incest, a pathological orientation.
Erich Fromm said, "The regressive orientation develops in three manifestations, separate or together: necrophilia, narcissism, and incestuous symbiosis." Necrophilia is love for all that is violent and destructive; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction to death, to suicide, to sadism. Psychic inflation leads to the misuse of transcendental energy; archetypal powers are diverted to personal predatory use in narcissism for power and control.
This Dark Queen turns to her children for narcissistic fuel to feed off them, to feed the false ego, to brainwash, stunt, and bind them to her twisted will, rather than fostering their independence. She ties them to her apron strings of blood, family, or tribe. This is passive-aggressive emotional abuse creating dependencies, self-medication, and lack of emotional availability -- emotionally-impaired relationships.
Complexes consist of meaning but also of value, and the intensity of accompanying feeling tones, according to Jung. All of them may show somatic as well as psychic symptoms, and combinations of the two. In pathological cases, we see fixed or compulsive ideas, manias, and states of possession.
In every creative process paradoxically "the work" absorbs and drains dry all extraneous contents. An unconscious content attracts all others to itself, consumes them, subordinates and co-ordinates them, and forms with them a system of relationships dominated by itself.
When the conscious mind cannot cope with these contents, the result is depression, dissociation, deterioration, fragmentation, disorganization, disintegration -- chaos. Dissociation is being disconnected from memories, feelings, actions, thoughts, body and even identity.
The role of the complex is determined by its interaction with the conscious mind, what states it creates. Without understanding, it de-stablizes the personality. An unconscious complex acts like a second ego in conflict with the conscious ego, an alter ego.
This conflict places the individual between two truths, two conflicting streams of will, threatening to tear them in two. A complex can engulf or overpower the ego through partial or total identification between the ego and the complex. A complex may be projected in the form of spirits, sounds, animals, figures, etc.
Dissociative Disorder
At least three-quarters of people with a dissociative disorder will also have one or more other mental disorders. They may be diagnosed with and treated for other mental health difficulties, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, sleep disorders, borderline personality disorder, or psychosis. They may also be treated for addictions, self-harm, and/or suicidal thoughts (2% of those diagnosed complete suicide).
They may also be misdiagnosed with schizophrenia because hearing voices is common to both.
But their dissociative disorder usually remains undiagnosed. However, treatment for other mental health issues is not likely to be effective unless the underlying dissociation is addressed.
Dark Flow
A goddess of ecstatic and chthonic reproductive mysteries, Kybele changed with the neolithic, bronze and iron ages, the archaic, the architectural, and the debauched, before exaltation as the Black Madonna, Virgin Queen, Queen of Heaven.
Kybele is specifically described as "uncreated, and thus essentially separate from and independent of her creations," the invisible virginal Spirit. Whereas, Marion Woodman describes the Black Madonna as “nature impregnated by spirit,” which is practiced or lived out by “accepting the human body as the chalice of the spirit."
We explain the incomprehensible with stories. Today we might attribute her primordial and fluid cosmogonic force to the bizarre, hypothetical Dark Flow of Negative Mass and Negative Gravity, an invisible continuous creation of dark energy, dark flow, or dark matter.
Negative Existence may be outside the range of our realization, it does not mean that we are beyond the range of its influence. All mystical traditions describe the "Mysterious Unknown at the Roots of All Things" as both inactive (impersonal) and active (personal aspects).
It predicts a continuous range of attractive and repulsive qualities under various void of high baryonic matter density cases. Negative existence is a ‘nothingness’ with a hidden or invisible potential from which the Universe will eventually manifest.
Bizarre 'dark fluid' with negative mass could dominate the universe
https://phys.org/news/2018-12-bizarre-dark-fluid-negative-mass.html
Her autochthonic Anatolian form transitioned into the Ionian Hellenic and Hellenistic Artemis of Ephesus (10th c. BCE), a symbol of the crown, throne and state. Then she was commandeered by Rome as Cybele, a guardian of the dead, cemetery and excessive revelry. Rome traced its origin to Aeneas and Phrygian ancestors. She arose from cultural pergatory as the Black Madonna of the Christian era, the fecundating, comforting, and dark side of the feminine Godhead. Confronting our own blackness is the beginning of alchemy.
Jung said (1964:88), "Archetypes gain life and meaning only when you try to take into account their numinosity (psychic energy) - their relationship to the living individual. . . . Their names mean very little . . . the way they are related to you is all important. The fluidic character of the numinous element enables it to take on whatever characteristics are impressed upon it by passive will."
Kybele is the zero-point of archetypes, nonlocal consciousness. She is the "seed mother," a subterranean goddess who curiously fell to earth and planted itself as a black meteorite. All life is interrelated; somehow we're caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, nature's secret language and art.
The dense and virgin forest is the dark and mysterious aspect of the unconscious, the Mother of the Mountains in vegetative form. The fertile resurgence of life comes in and through darkness. Fueling soul growth, she is a composting and transcendental energy.
Jung said, "Nothing is the same as fullness. In the endless state fullness is the same as nothing. The nothing is both empty and full...that which is endless and eternal has no qualities, because it has all qualities." (Hoeller) We experience a peculiar fascination with her specific energy.
Dark Mater
If the universe is alive, dark matter makes a good analogy for its subconscious, and perhaps our souls, as well, a nonlocal field accessible by direct experience. Dark Mater as the Dark Feminine seems to hold a special spell.
The collective psyche, the deepest layer of the unconscious, is the living ground current from which everything is derived. It is a relic of the original non-differentiation of subject and object, and hence of the primordial unconscious state.
Our dreams are the dark matter of the mind. They unlock the unconscious essence of who we are. Could dark matter itself be an elusive material basis for the paranormal?
Kybele personifies the symbolic life, our spacious awareness, our instinctive tie to symbolic fantasy emanations. The unconscious identity of participation mystique prevails. We need to understand her myths psychologically not just sociologically.
Jung explains, "Where one is identified with the collective unconscious, there is no recognition of the things which come from the unconscious, they cannot be distinguished from those of the self. Such a condition is a possession by the anima or animus. Possession by the animus or anima creates a certain psychological hermaphroditism. The principle of individuation demands a dissociation or differentiation of the male and the female in ourselves. We must dissociate our self from the unconscious." (Cornwall Seminar, Page 26.)
Erich Neumann saw the mythological state arising from the archetype as the primal state of consciousness. In this primordial state humanity is literally one with nature. But (1954:xxiii) "contents which are primarily transpersonal, are in the course of development taken to be personal." Thus arises the complex and pathology. In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia portrays art and history as an unstoppable, near-compulsive sequence of growth, loss, and revival.
Kybele's symbol is the circle, the serpent that bites its tail, encompassing multiple simultaneous realities. In The Great Mother, Neumann (1954:264) suggested that much of the urouboros comes before the Great Mother, and she before the hero. (The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, a study of the Magna Mater 1955. English trans. by Ralph Manheim.)
In Rome, she was associated with the constellation Leo. Strabo described her earlier rites as related to the Orgies of Dionysus. (Geography 10. 3. 13, trans. Jones). Kybele taught Dionysus the mystic rites of initiation for her orgiastic cult.
Deep Forest
Pindar began the dithyramb, hymn to Dionysus "To perform the prelude in thy honor, Megale Meter (Great Mother; Kybele), the whirling of cymbals is at hand, and among them, also, the clanging of castanets, and the torch that blazeth beneath the tawny pine-trees."
We consciously and unconsciously mourn the loss of our wild being and sacred places, the wilderness, the primeval forest in our lives. We miss our primordial relationship with Mother Earth in the abyss of evolution. Still, the archaic still lives within us with an embryonic ego without fixed boundaries, still interwoven wholly with the world and nature. We've forgotten our connection to the dark animal orobouric Great Mother.
Researchers usually presume that Matar is the direct heir of the Neolithic fertility goddess, and the Phrygian origin of Attis -- the Anatolian Matar through the Greek Meter Theôn to the Roman Magna Mater. This narrative is under revision. Not all the untamed, ecstatic and “uncivilized” aspects of the cult in Roman society, were an original part of the cult in Anatolia. The Romans tend to concretize and exaggerate the rites with their own decadence.
Roller demonstrates, there is no divine Attis until Hellenistic and Roman times, and Matar was certainly not a traditional fertility goddess, a fact also noticeable in the absence of ordinary fertility symbols, such as ears of corn or children. Instead, her most persistent iconographical features are those of power: she is presented as a figure who controls nature, protects cities, and is accompanied only by predatory animals (Roller 1999:38).
The Great Mother was the personification of the vital essence in all things. Her symbolism pervades the archaeological record of the ancient world. She personifies mysterious hypnotic and magical powers concealed in nature, as nurturing or destructive effects including pain and death.
We are interlocked in the essence of our realities, the magical imagination and deep memory of the original intimacy of human-animal-plant fusion. Such memories are magnetic, regressive, and atavistic, To experience them requires entering the same ecstatic trance state that is their origin. Because cultivation of plants separated them, plants were sought as a means of reconnection.
Kybele mediates the dream-like contents of the murky unconscious mind, drawing up non-rational knowledge from the depths of the psyche. When we enter the unconscious, we relinquish control and becomes subject to the non-rational, nonlocal forces of life, the “chaotic urge to life.”
Mother is the powerful, elemental creator and destroyer of life, giving birth to and taking back each individual life. She is the promising spring and the fertile harvest as well as the blasted landscape, ravaged by drought, fire, or flood. In myths she is often destroyed, as humanity fears her all-encompassing power.
Mother Nature may be the oldest motif but it is the underlying pattern of symbol-formation that is inherited. Wisdom is recognizing patterns in life, recognizing the self-organizing interconnection of all things. That something missing in the lives of so many people isn't found in another's form, it's found in the dark of the unconscious. The "primordial images" are those expressed in the earliest life-history of the human species.
Images grow out of the rudimentary nature of the psyche in its pre-conscious form. These basic layers of the psyche spontaneously recur in modern psychic phenomena in ever-new forms that vary around certain deeply rooted motifs at the base of consciousness. The generic structural nature of the psyche is unrestricted to collective or group phenomena. We accumulate and retrieve memories that are affecting the psyche.
Kybele was worshiped as a meteoric stone, exotic and foreign, the remains of a 'thunderbolt of Zeus that fertilized the earth or matter. The stone was the goddess and the goddess was the stone, and emissary from above, venerated as the zodiac.
Acts 19:35 says, "And when the town clerk had quieted the crowd, he said, “Men of Ephesus, who is there who does not know that the city of the Ephesians is temple keeper of the great Artemis, and of the sacred stone that fell from the sky?" (English Standard Version) Many translations say her 'image' fell from the sky. Later, the stone was taken to Rome by the Galli priest-emperor Elagabalus/Antoninus.
Our bodies are simply connected with an intuitive sense of meaning, in all its implications and possibilities. Our structure encodes the recent and deep past. The physical and its significance are in no way separate but two aspects of a non-dual reality.
So, some arising emotions may 'belong' to us while others arise from an empathic identification with our ancestors, or even fusions of their energies. They may appear in the pre-sensory, sensory elements and images in our dreams experienced as introception.
"The breath of Kybele" is the spent breath of trillions, the vital energy which can be directed by the devotee, magnetic healer, or adept. We still breath her ancient air. Psyche means the soul, mind, spirit; breath. We can feel how our breathing makes more space around us -- ritual space in the caverns of the unconscious.
Breath becomes part of trance induction with sensory stimulation, visual spectacle, and auditory overload. Trance induction includes the old taboo words, "enchantment," "fascination," "glamor," and "spell," "animal magnetism," and especially the verb "to bewitch." All of it comes together in a synthesis.
This is the interrelated structure of reality. Hypnotic phenomena include many ways of having the god within: frenzy, group trance dance, possession trance, mediumistic or oracular trance, and shamanic trance, religious trance, hysteria, autohypnosis, delerium, sensory deprivation, and psychoactive drugs or ceremonial entheogens.
Between the pines is a doorway to eternity, In their homelands, such power-plants are worshiped. Mushroom language is euphemized, coded, masked, or buried in etymologies. They are spirits, gods that can disappear when they don't get the right sacrifice. They can disappear from culture, remain perhaps on the periphery, and manifest themselves when they wish.
The sacred plants from earlier and wilder people linked back to ecstatic original intimacy. Natives of any area have a superior knowledge of secret magical plant life on their land. Pastoralists would have known about such things since the Ice Age Refugia in the Altai Mountains of central Asia. They would be suitable offerings for a goddess. They are 'unborn' because they have no seed.
Kybele embodied a prehistoric magico-religious archetype and trance-possession. She is the Queen Bee. Thus, Her priestesses, the Melissae, or "the bees," could see the future, interpret signs and omens provided by Nature and the Earth. The Galli high priests followed the footsteps of her son-lover Attis. They mimicked and acted out the lives of the gods, their story.
The Near Eastern "mistress of animals" of the later half of the second millenium BCE evolved into Kybele and Artemis. Animals symbolized three domains of life: birds of prey were air, lions and rabbits earth, and serpents the underworld. In the Hittite era, refugee Chaldean priests fled to its Anatolian capital with their astrotheology and cosmologies. Influenced by steppe-warrior culture, the Phyrgians invaded central Anatolia from the North, some say Thrace.
Kybele also represents the taboo transgressive states of gender ambiguity, ritualized bodies and body modification; initiation, and altered states; dramas of blood, mad music, and orgiastic ecstasy. Psychological matriarchy still persists in the modern psyche, including the 'mother complex.'
Archetypes help us redefine human identity as a hyperconnective multiplicity in a continuous process of integration (holy union) embedded in a cosmic superhologram of consciousness, polarity, and life. In the mysteries of death and renewal, union with the source is a superposition of the "death marriage", a return to the womb, primordial consciousness, and union with the Divine.
For the gods, time is primordial and unstructured; for mankind it is historical and linear. In the unconscious if there is any notion of time at all, it is circular, arranging events so they return eternally and can be re-entered through myth, symbol, and ritual with no distinction between self and environment.
We all carry and relive the primordial psyche which is reliving the soul of our ancestors. They may be gone, but primordial psyche remains alive within us, and available for interaction. Some live closer to it than others, but we all have creative, rational, and intuitive faculties. These are rooted in this primordial ground, an unalterable level of creative imagination, primordial unity, and instinctive participation mystique.
Kybele's symbols are the frame drum (tympanum, tambourine, cymbals, castanets), tower, crown, and throne; the lion and snake. From the Neolithic on, her dual nature included protection but also her alternative terrible nature. Her myths originate in Phrygian mythology but she celebrated her greatest popularity in the Roman Empire.
However, recent discoveries in archaeology and its interpretation, show that many standard interpretations of earlier worship lack evidence and can be based on racial prejudices of their time, against 'savagry' and 'primitivity.'
As Goethe notably said, "There is no art in turning a goddess into a witch, a virgin into a whore, but the opposite operation, to give dignity to what has been scorned, to make the degraded desirable, that calls for art or for character."
Her earliest reported traditional practices reflect our contemporary notions of 'the Feminine,' 'warrior-women,' 'wilderness as medicine,' 'nature-based soul initiation', and plant-based medicine for healing and guidance as a paradigm.
One narrative of Kybele links fertility, rebirth, and the supernatural. Children reincarnated the souls of dead ancestors that penetrated the mother' body through spiritual visitation. So female procreation became linked to rebirth after death. Her world is one of magical reversals. It is an androgynous and nebulous world of magical thinking and animism. The self becomes immersed in the orgiastic rapture of the crowd.
Hittite, Mesopotamian, Chaldean, Syrian and other elements influenced her arc, even before the Greeks came into Asia Minor. Kybele had her own primordial cosmogony tales, yet they still hark back to those of Inanna and Tammuz, reflected in earlier and later mother/son dyads.
Collapsing the timeline of her development also creates confusion, but here we are more interested in Her essential nature, rather than building an epochal historical timeline, which can be found elsewhere. We can root our contemporary devotion in the mytho-poetics of Kybele's cult practice. That doesn't mean we base it all on emotion, symbol, and suggestion. We can express ideas with physical rather than intellectual symbols, with syntax, and imagery.
In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele, Lynn E. Roller attempts to breakdown and decolonialize some of these ideas. Only the Roman practices are well-supported by contemporary literature, but it is possible that the Romans tended to concretize practices, acting out aspects of the myth that were more symbolic or metaphorical in the past. Many issues remain, unless and until such ideas are evidenced.
The situation remains similar to early research in depth psychology on the nature of the 'mother complex', which were inevitably rooted in cultural views of their own times. The Attis practice of Kybele and her son/lover, is another version of what became Freud's Oedipal complex. Such theories have been overturned or revised.
The early goddess may not have been as primitive or savage as she has been portrayed, and this may be reflected in the psyche as well. Some practices only arose or became prominent later in the arc of the Kybele/Cybele dynamic.
This is perhaps observable in the switch from a 'mad goddess of the wild' to a cultural protectress of urban life. As the goddess evolved with society, her myth and practice was sometimes 'sanitized,' and marginalized to outliers, and eventually demonized, especially just prior to and in the early Christian era.
It's important to distinguish when we are talking about trance induction, a drug's effects on a person and a social movement, or an academic trend. There is a difference between psychology and sociology, between phenomenology and politics. They all color scholarly opinion and interpretations.
Psychological matriarchy, including the 'mother complex', still persists in the modern psyche though not within the general culture. But that does not necessarily imply that vast swaths of culture were "matriarchal," or elevated females as has been alleged.
Marija Gimbutas, who drew heavily on folk traditions, proposed a controversial myth of an original unstratified, egalitarian matriarchal society. Her simplistic notions of a matriarchal society have been thrown over for lack of scientific evidence. Still, some will prefer the more romanticized narrative.
Some elements remain more speculative than others, especially since the goddess underwent many transformations displaying different qualities in each society. Even the views of Freud, the early Jungians, (like Erich Neumann who wrote The Great Mother), and anthropologists are coming under revision. Sometimes the core ideas may be right, but the languaging is biased. Or, core ideas themselves may miss the mark.
So, we must bear that in mind during our inquiry into the instinctual, psychic, and spiritual aspects of cult development. Jung reminds us that, "The separation of psychology from the premises of biology is purely artificial, because the human psyche lives in indissoluble union with the body." But Hillman adds, "... although the life of the body is always concrete, it is not necessarily literal." (Re-visioning Psychology)
One main objection is that there is little to no evidence of a universal mother goddess in the Mediterranean, despite the universal hazards of childbirth. That is, not all such local or regional goddesses shared the same qualities, rites, and symbols though they later were assimilated through syncretism that developed along trade routes. Therefore, any attempt to grasp the evolving essence of Kybele must necessarily include some poetic license, assumptions, and hypotheses within suggested conclusions.
https://books.google.com/books?id=BmgTCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&dq=,stone-age+petroglyphs,+kybele&source=bl&ots=nL5HzF8a4w&sig=ACfU3U0R2tGL2VzYUJhhsdGnJsGP0ZKFxQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwipy_Lf5bfjAhXCMXwKHTttBPIQ6AEwFHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=%2Cstone-age%20petroglyphs%2C%20kybele&f=false
A spiritual phenomena, perceptual hypnosis tends toward expanded awareness, focused attention, enhanced somatic and emotional flow, and lack of self-consciousness. Music is a way to contact the ancestors and call up their presence. The tonal field of music amplifies holographic forms as they are experienced. From time to time the goddess seems to come, generating a deep emotional sense of awe, fascination, and mystery.
Don’t try to figure out what you’re listening to. Just listen. Don’t try to figure our what you’re listening to. Around you is a universe of sound. Just listen. Sound is only the movement of air at your eardrums. Just listen. After a while it may get hard to tell if you’re listening or you’re being listened, or who’s listening; to what, or what’s listening to whom–or who’s listening to whom and what’s listening to what. Just listen.
While you’re listening, notice the pressure of gravity on your body. Feel how it tugs at your feet and your legs and your wrists. Feel how the pressure of gravity pulls at your shoulders and your back and your neck and your head. Feel how it is on your muscles. sometimes you are aware of gravity in one part of your body, and sometimes in another, and then your awareness shifts to another part, or perhaps moves back to the first place again. So that it forms an endless cycle, endlessly moving, endlessly changing, always different, yet always recurring as your attention moves over your body.
Just feel the gravity. Just feel it.
While you’re feeling the gravity, notice how your skin feels.
Areas of warmth, and of cold. Perhaps a slight breeze blowing across your skin. Feelings of touch. Maybe a momentary sense of pain. Perhaps some tickle. Maybe some sexual sensation. This also forms an endless cycle, endlessly moving, endlessly changing, always recurring, but never the same.
And notice how your attention fluctuates over your whole body, so that sometimes you are aware of it in one part and sometimes in another. Don’t try to identify with these sensations. Just sense it.
Notice how some times you breathe deeply, and some times not so deeply. Sometimes you might even stop breathing for a few seconds, then your breathing starts again. Your breathing, too, is an endless cycle, endlessly changing, endlessly recurring, always different, never the same, but always repeating itself. Don’t identify with your breathing. Just breathe.
Notice how sometimes when the air goes through your nostrils you are or aren't aware of scents and odors, and at other times you aren’t aware of them. This, too, varies constantly and is constantly changing, constantly different, never the same. Smell the smells that come to you from the world around you, whatever they may be or may not be. Don’t identify with the smells. Just smell.
Notice the thoughts and images that go through your head. Notice how sometimes there is only one thought or only one image, sometimes there are many thoughts and many images, and sometimes are none at all. These, too, form an endless cycle, endlessly changing, endlessly repeating itself, always different, never the same, yet always recurring. They come and they go, back and forth, in endless procession. Don’t identify with your thoughts and images. Just watch them. Just watch them.
Feelings of joy , sorrow, feelings of anger and feelings of peace, feelings of tension and feelings of calm, feelings of fear and feelings of courage, and all of the thousands of feelings for which we have no names. They come and they go in an endless cycle, endlessly moving, endlessly changing, always different, never the same, but always recurring. Don’t identify with your emotions. Just feel your emotions. Just have them.
Notice also your drives. Feelings of hunger, feelings of thirst, sexual needs, perhaps a need to defecate, perhaps feelings of satiation, needs for air. These come and go just as your feelings do, just as your breathing does, just as everything does. Sometimes they’re strong and sometimes they’re weak. Sometimes they occur separately, sometimes together. Don’t try to identify them. Don’t identify with them. Just have them. Just have them.
Look the way you listen, the way you feel or taste or smell or breathe. Just look. After a while, it may be hard to tell whether you're looking or you're being looked, or who's looking at whom, or what's looking at what and what's looking at whom. Don't try to identify what you're looking at. Don't identify with what you're looking at. Just look. Just look.
And now pay attention to yourself. Notice how sometimes you concentrate on your body, your physical self, and sometimes on your psychological or mental self, and sometimes on both. Notice how you don't pay attention to all of you at once, but that sometimes you focus on one part of you, and then on another part, or, perhaps you might move to the first part again. This, too forms an endless cycle, endlessly changing, always different, never the same, but always recurring. Your experience of yourself, too, shifts as your attention shifts.
Notice that sometime you are supremely aware of yourself, and other time you are not aware you are deepening, you may not be aware of yourself at all. Sometimes in one situation, you'll behave in one way, and sometimes in another situation, you'll behave in another way. These are all part of the self which is always changing, and yet there is a part of the self that watches the self that changes that is ot involved in the change.
You give the self that changes your own name...but there is a self that goes beyond... that watches ... which is greater than .... the I that perceives is different from the I it looks at. The self that perceives is different from the self it perceives. If the perceiving I contains the I that is perceived, it must be other than and greater than the I that is perceived.
So take off your mask! Take off your mask, the mask of your small self... find out who you really are. Experience the self which perceives the lesser self, the I that perceives the lesser I. Know -- who you really are. See -- who you really are. Be -- who you really are. Take off the mask, the mask of (subject's first and last name). Know who you really are. Take off your mask. Take off your mask.
You are male. You are female. You are both male and female. You are neither male nor female, but both male and female. You are young. You are old. You are both young and old, but neither young nor old. Located in time, but timeless. Bounded in space, but boundless.
You have a past and a present, but neither past nor present, but both past and present. You have a past and a future, but neither past nor future, but both past and future. You have a present and future, but neither present nor future, but both present and future.
Wherever you look, universes appear. When you look away, they cease to be, and yet they never were. In any face that you look are all faces -- happy and sad, grotesque and beautiful, light and dark. In any face you can see your own face.
You are here, you are there. You are both here and there, but neither here nor there. Around and through you everything is in motion, yet nothing moves. And still it moves. For whatever is, is not, and whatever is not, is , and whatever is, is, and whatever is not, is not, at one and the same time. Whatever is true is true, whatever is false is false. But whatever is true is false and whatever is false is true at one and the same time.
And you are separate from everything else in the universe and you are everything else in the universe. Whatever exists rests in you, whatever does not exist rests in you. You rest in everything that exists, you rest in everything that does not exist. For nothing exists that does not exist and nothing does not exist that exists.
There is no end to you and no beginning, although you have both an end and a beginning. You are you and you are me and yet you are not you and you are not me. You are anyone else and not anyone else. You are all the objects around you, and you are not any of these objects. The world is your multiplicity, and the world is your unity. You are the multiplicity of the world. You are the unity of the world.
All boundaries have vanished, but everything is bounded. Know who you really are. Be who you really are. Become who you really are. But there is no being, there is no becoming, there is no knowing. You are the similarity of all opposites and the opposite of all similarities, the center of all boundaries and the boundary of the centers. Know who you are. Be who you are.
Way of Devotion
In structuralism, all versions of myths are part if it, including our own versions of depicting myth in literature. All attempts to interpret myths, as universals or even within their own culture and time, are interpretations, theories about theories. Mostly, they are assertions without evidence, even those of such luminaries as Levi-Strauss, Freud, Jung, and Campbell.
All interpretive mythographies or studies about myths and rituals are speculative theories. about art and literature, sexuality, gender roles, power, and more. They are limited by wide variations, sparse archaeological finds, and scant surviving contemporary references. We know things didn't happen like those myths say or it would be history. Instead it dives into the wellspring of human behavior.
We simply can't know what they meant to each devotee. Even history is lore, riptides in the historical dimension. We can do little more than suggest meaning, jeweled multiplicity, rather than assert cosmological, religious, allegorical, or philosophical verities. We can remain true with mythic imagination to keep antiquated realities relevant to our historically-acquired consciousness.
The unconscious is not personal, but in order not to be swamped by infinite information, the brain functions as what Aldous Huxley called "a reducing valve." It shuts out the universe so that the individual can see what is in front of them. . . But the intuition and imagination maintain an opening to the unconscious, which contains all the information that could not register in immediate consciousness. . . In the space-time of the unconscious, past and future mysteriously interpenetrate.
The devotee's way is not academic, but depends on direct contact with the numinous. We may approach it like dream, sticking as close to the original images inspired by the myths as possible. Our personal mythologies grow and change along with us, the psychic force that allows us to braid together the fragments of our experience. They lend coherence to our lives when we tend to them.
The mythical messages from the collective unconscious, a porous light, must travel through the distorting medium of culture and the individual personality before it reaches us. It is a mixture of the myth and noise from the distorting medium that reaches us. To be sure we have the message right, we must hear several different versions until we grasp the structure and morphology.
Telling one tale does not make it authoritatively so but may inspire the next step or potential. Even speculation opens us to the realm of psyche's possibilities, including those of our own personal mythologies, our own fundamental stories for making sense and meaning of the world.
Myths live on in the stories we tell about our own lives. we invent a personal myth. In retelling, some things are lost, and some added , but over all there is enough in common to identify their relationship.
This tale unwittingly mirrors characters and themes from old myths, with a creative side and a dark side. Key aspects resonate with and give a sense of purpose to our own lives. We unconsciously shape the tale, rewriting our life story from time to time to make past and present hold together. The use of flat tones, ambiguous perspectives, and strange juxtapositions suggest an imagined or dreamed reality, magical realism.
We can only do our best with the embedded narrative mythemes of this goddess, associated with 'foreign' practices, many other Olympians, and times and places. This is especially true for the few stories of archaic pre-literate cult traditions of Kybele and her retinue. Among them we may find some surprising correlations.
Life Force
The womb of the mother is the psyche or soul, including the animate natural world, millions of years of instinctive animal life, the dwelling place of the dead, and transformer of life cycles. For us, it is a shift to ecological imagination, inclusive biospheric awareness, and empathizing with nature as an imperative to keep the world habitable and humane.
Connecting the local and global, the past and future, the organism and the environment, place and the biosphere requires an ability to move through ecological and evolutionary space and time. This is the ability to identify with and internalize biospheric processes, and to finally understand that human reflective awareness is a manifestation of the biosphere -- biospherical ecology operating in nature.
We cannot imagine ourselves apart from the planet. Human behavior originates in experiences of environment, the mundus imaginalis. Connectedness positively relates to environmental behaviors. In this time of ecological collapse we cannot shield our souls from the psychological effects of the destruction. We exist in the midst of psyche which is beyond human nature.
The killing off of the world has killed off a part of ourselves. Imagination is not bound by the rational assumption that any psychic life discovered in the world was put there by us. Psyche and matter are two aspects of the same essence. Reality falls apart when we plunge into a wild and unfamiliar landscape. In a world of terrifying strangeness the brain soon realizes knowledge and a need to impose familiar order are futile and the land begins to speak for itself.
Imaginal vision is a way of being in the world, the act by which things take on meaning and become symbol and metaphor through imaginal integration of perceiver and landscape. The intuitive experience of soul in the world cannot be collapsed into five senses. It is only possible when the human barriers that separate us from nature and immediate apprehension of cosmos dissolve.
To be deeply connected to self and environment means growing down into our roots, dwelling more deeply in our lives. We cannot neglect the soul of the world to focus only on the soul of the individual. The mythopoetic dimension exists everywhere in animate and inanimate things and a dynamic relatedness to land as a basis for transformative living. We suffer from that lost connection, the worldly dimension of our souls.
With mythopoetic perception we don't just describe the land but participate in it. We can awaken to our own interiority and and attune our imaginal depths to those of nature. Something divine awakens in us when we can respond to the divinity of the world.
Soul is in the world not just humans. We must extend the clinical into the environmental reanimation of nature, not for ego development but soul expression of deep primal levels of psyche, which we have not left behind. We must move beyond the clinic and even devotional chamber into the animated world of anima mundi with a sense of agency.
Our panpsychic environmental space and the psychic interior of the world is naturally therapeutic and sacred. Panpsychism is the philosophical view that consciousness or a mind-like aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. Destruction of the natural world and our relationship with the natural environment is the most pressing issue we confront today.
Blue Origin
Environmental changes lead to changes in human behavior. Healthy environmental experiences produce healthy behavior; unhealthy environments produce unhealthy behavior. When our experience is destroyed, we lose our own selves. We long to live in a world that isn't being destroyed. We have a jewel of a planet and must protect it from corporate capture of nature.
Our minds originate in experiences of environment, the sum of all relationships, conscious and unconscious, physical, emotional, and spiritual, creating our lives. We lose with the disappearance of hundreds of species daily, the disintegration of connections with our ancestors, and the inability to make any sense of our dreams.
Imagine that what speaks to our souls, the immortal one, is true. Experiences of Gods or greater personality have value because of their rarity. We can facilitate them, but we cannot command or control them or their appearance as a glimpse into a greater reality. Even Joan d'Arc said, "How else would God speak to me, if not through my imagination?" Jung thought, "a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows."
Psychogeographical Exploration
Place and the soul of a place, enters into the dialectic of history as metaphor, psyche as a vivid landscape, and actual wild lands. Like plants, archetypes take root and flourish in particular places. Life gains beauty in diversity and shared inhabitory space, not just the integrative process of wholeness. The landscapes of our childhood memories remain the most vivid.
The wilderness, the idyllic, the topology of nostalgia, the grounding, balance, aesthetics of environment, and ecosophy we need of 'land as home' to sustain the planet, includes an ecology of magic altering the common field of perception. We've ignored that our ecological crisis is a crisis of the spirit. Story-telling is an ancient survival strategy and art -- the landscape of language.
The Paleolithic mother goddess transformed into the Neolithic goddess of sky, earth, and living water, then incorporated Crete's mysteries of life, death, and regeneration, emerging in the Bronze age as the mother goddess and her son-lover. She helped the Greeks and Romans re-imagine the city, its soul, and beauty.
James Hillman thought our real taboos are not what we consider forbidden, but those things we ignore or rarely mention -- "soul has an affinity for negative thoughts and images." He suggested that the major taboo in our society is not sexuality, but the way in which we habitually overlook the ugliness of the environments in which we live and work (1985).
Today she is shifting our thinking and feeling about the place of humans in the world and a more than human world, She brings nature to consciousness through the spell of the sensuous and the greening of our imaginal and mythological studies and devotions revealing the intertwined relation between the human community and the larger, more-than-human field.
In “Little Poems for Gaia,” from Axe Handles, poet Gary Snyder speaks of 'wild wisdom' saying, "As the crickets' soft autumn hum is to us so are we to the trees as are they to the rocks and hills." He also raised concrete questions: “Where does the water you drink come from? What is the soil series where you live? Name five edible plants in your region and their seasons. Where does your garbage go?”
This larger community includes along with the human, the multiple nonhuman entities that constitute the local landscape, from the diverse plants and the myriad animals, birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, insects. They inhabit or migrate through the region to the particular winds that inform the local geography, as well as the various landforms -- forests, rivers, caves, mountain that lend their specific character to the surrounding earth.
So do the imaginal spirits. Primordial magic is existence within an interrelated matrix of multiple intelligences, heightening our receptivity to meaning. The underlying vision is of a variety of goddess images reflecting the vision of life as a living unity. We still live with those imaginal structures of higher order relevance and connection.
Jung said, "The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations. For the root matter is the mother of all things."(Symbols of Transformation, Page xxv)
For millions of years to evolve has meant to adapt to the environment. The rule of the dinosaurs lasted nearly 150 million years, while humans have only been here 200,000. In that relatively short time both the environment and ourselves have changed markedly and will continue to do so. For humans, survival has meant living by our wits.
Emotions influence cultural ideas and practices; biology and culture influences the way we perceive and experience emotions and arousal. Universal emotions are at the heart of our profound affinity with animals and one another. Perception is relational.
Emotions appear instinctual because we do not have conscious access to unconscious conceptualization. Deep emotions such as lust, rage, care, fear, seeking, grief and play are not conceptually constructed. Identifiable physiological patterns undergird them.
Kybele is at the root of the shaping of mythic tradition and symbolic reflexes. We learn to navigate darkness, attending the lamentations of the dead with naked tears from eyes seeking the inky skies of stars. Unless their stories are acknowledged, they remain unseen and unheard.
Ecosophy
Soul remains a perpetual virgin. What is meaningful is connected to what is real. Many hearts are heavy with ecocide and the unprecedented burning of virgin forests in the Amazon, Siberia, Indonesia, Africa, and elsewhere. Our primordial Edens are becoming sterile wastelands -- a malevolent aesthetic of evil. How do we work through our anger and grief about the destruction, the skin of our beloved planet, burning, scorched and pillaged?
Environmental concerns are vital to the heart of the cosmos. "Ecopsychologists believe that our destructive environmental behaviors stem from our sense of disconnection to the natural world. They contend that we have an "ecological unconscious" that is repressed in some individuals. This ecological unconscious is our connection to our evolution on earth. In other words, if we recover our sense of connection to our natural world, we will begin to be more environmentally conscious people." (Kineavy)
One of ecopsychology’s defining goals was: “if the self is expanded to include the natural world, behavior leading to destruction of this world will be experienced as self-destruction.” Ecopsychology may have missed its window for averting the toxic effects of the human death wish on the environment.
We are left with ashes: "Ash speaks to what remains, the barest semblance of what once was. James Hillman wrote, “Ash is the ultimate reduction, the bare soul, the last truth, all else dissolved.” The soul in grief feels reduced, brought to the place where all other thoughts or matters dissipate into ash."
An instinctive passion to live the life of the soul with the help of the unconscious is indigenous to every human being. The soul as a "dark forest in which many gods come and go" is an image of the psyche. Shining water mingles with the blood of our ancestors and murmurs with their voices. Caves were the womb of the mother goddess that harbored birth, death, and transformation.
The Moonlit Path
All life comes from and returns to her for renewal. The goddess was a cave dweller who appeared in dreams, waking trance, prophecy, and visions from the center of earth where the swirl of dreams was made before time.
The underworld was less frightening to those close to their ancestors who continued to share the matrix of life and death, the place where light and dark begin to touch. In this paleolithic version of the root metaphor of the unified field of nature, the living and dead communed, living for the dead, for others, and consciousness itself.
After a few fleeting seasons of gardening, it will be time to slip away into the high mountains, once again to hear the call of the rushing river, the horn of plenty, and the deer's flute song in these days of environmental cataclysm, But in the stillness of the night, we may hear the children and wildlife weeping while storms of predatory aggression and hypocrisy brew.
The living and the dead are one community with a continuum of consciousness with nature as our guide to discovering the truth about the nature of reality; a living phenomenology of nature's processes and transformations. Invisible soul becomes physical body, what we imagine to be true about ourselves, our environment, and unspoken dimensions. From the archaic period, sociopoetic processes transformed the meaning of myth. They aim for completeness.
Eliade says, “To be born or to die, to enter the living family or the ancestral family (and to leave one or the other), there is a common threshold, one’s native Earth.” The Earth herself decides if the birth or death is valid. The true Mother legitimizes and confers protection. Sometimes the sick are buried for regeneration and rebirth. Initiation requires a ritual death and resurrection.
Today's Wasteland is the persistent vision of dystopian and post-apocalyptic futures. Full-scale destruction of the living earth implies dissociation from the body and psychopathology. If we deny our unmet grief, it returns in addictions, obsessions, nightmares, anxieties, depression, aggression, resentment, and dis-ease. It inserts itself into the very fabric of our being and, if ignored, will devour our souls whole.
Metaphors give shape and form to life stories. They are tools for working with experience. They embody the situational knowledge that constitutes culture. We grope through associated images of light and darkness, healing and disease, life and death, toward the perception of truth.
The transpersonal psyche includes terrifying experiences that lead to heightened experience of the transcendental. Imagination couples objective and subjective worlds, literal fact and spiritual meaning. We ask 'what am I looking at', and the self-inquiry, 'why am I seeing things the way I see it'? She protects what is gestating within. Her imagery help us discover new light in our dark crevasses.
We cannot claim that our view of ancient practices from this wilderness of modern life is accurate but it is a natural development and legitimate descendant. Just telling a story as narrative is inherently holy. We recognize the world through creating the kind of meaningful “depth” that makes us aware of that relationship. Moments of gravity change the path.
Thus we construct mediating metaphors for drawing order out of chaos: metaphors for the journey of life, metaphors of identity, metaphors for life's crossroads, metaphors for struggle, metaphors for inexplicable loss, metaphors for the disordered body, metaphors for perseverance of singular women and abandoned daughters.
We have metaphors for transformation, metaphors for healing body and mind, metaphors of hope, metaphors of evil and good, chaos and hopelessness, metaphors for healing the body through the mind. Metaphors for living in limbo, metaphors of acceptance and healing, metaphors for cure, metaphors for present, past and future, metaphors for anticipation of death, etc.
We can only make plausible arguments into coherent narratives. Rational disclosure, however, implies some form of narrative, and narrative can always be tied in some way to myth. Ecstasy takes us out of ourselves into the irrational. Our ancestors knew that sacred ecstasy allowed them to face their own desperate times, allowed them to do the impossible.
Sacred traditions create civilizations. Tradition is the living soil from which all our cultures spring. We learn how to step outside of ourselves and allow the sacred to come. In ecstasy we lose ourselves and notions of how things were going to be, yet gain the chance to live in service to the power of life itself and the spiritual twilight zone of dark wisdom.
If Kybele is anima mundi, the soul of the world in a cosmos illuminated and animated with divine energy, we are each the world of our unique perceptions. Our concern is how to reconnect to the essence of the past without merely recreating its outward forms. .We can only make the deep past present, each in our own way by experiencing these forces. We have to deduce first principles from the fountain-head or pristine stream of wisdom, flow, and resonance.
Kybele embodies erotic theology, twisted longings, and genetic desire. Our bodies and psyches are the original birthplace of all gods, which informs us about the verdant wilderness of raw soul in its reflective function in our body of images. Deep immersion in nature but most of all to be with self feels very sacred, and may be a metaphor of Attis. Nature is impregnated by radically de-centralized spirit.
The power of this cult lies in its near perfect symbiotic relationship with its collective host, a host already in natural instinctual potential possession of its seed principles. Psyche spontaneously produces religious and mythic symbols. A wounded feeling function means an inability to to find joy, worth, and meaning in life. Soul-making requires wounding -- the breaching of our own souls informed by mythic vibrancy.
Mother initiations call us to the healing of our own mother wounds and attachment issues, to look at how we have been, or not been, mothers to ourselves, to our children, and/or to our creations. When the Mother archetype is in shadow, the wounding with our own mother may be profound.
Through Mother initiations, we are called to discover and heal the wounds that came from our conception, birth, the attachment issues with our mother, and other mother figures, as well as conditions that may have been passed down to us through our matri-lineage. We sometimes ‘carry’ the emotional burdens, wounds, unfulfilled dreams, and unfinished business of our mothers and ancestors.
When the mother archetype is constellated, it may also bring up issues related to sisters and grandmothers, as well as catalyze issues with close women friends. When the Mother archetype is in shadow, a woman may not know how, or be able to, take care of her own physical needs, be in her body, form an attachment to others, or nurture a child. She may feel incompetent, or be narcissistic and deny her child her own individuality and experiences.
The shadow aspect of the Mother can cause a woman to be absent physically and/or emotionally from her children, ineffectual, controlling, demanding, clinging, devouring, manipulative, or guilt-inducing. She may simply not know how to take care of her children on a very basic physical or emotional level due to her own lack of healthy mothering.
Ecosexuality
Such symbols often emerge on a spiritual retreat into fecund nature or wilderness. Jung suggested that “The goal which beckons to this psychic need, the image which promises to heal, to make whole, is at first strange beyond all measure to the conscious mind (CW 12). We work with mythic means.
Mother is a core experience of central symbolic significance, the heart of the moment. She is the goddess, the genesis of paradoxical psyche, to whom all living things return as she loves all life with a mother's devotion.
And we remain devoted to her and her ambiguities -- the uncertainty of her duplex character and the yearnings of the soul and what the soul foretells. Kybele's cult has always been a sanctuary of the carnal, grotesque, and sexual transgression.
A modern movement, Ecosexuality extends green living to romantic sexual life. Its aim is to break down separations between humans and nature. The land and biosphere are Lovers. Ecosexuals prefer Lover Earth to Mother Earth, and practice an erotic eco-logic. An environmental person finds nature romantic, sensual and sexy, and essentially imagines the Earth as their lover, deeper than skinny dipping, carbon neutral sustainable sex products,. and naked hiking.
Feminist professor Lauran Whitwoth asks, “What do ecosexual encounters with nonhuman nature offer current discussions of environmental ethics?” “Can ecosexuality’s posthumanist tendencies queer our speciesist modes of belonging and foster an environmentalism that is not foundationally anthropocentric nor steeped in ‘reproductive futurism’?”
The movement uses such imagery to further political projects. Ecosexuals symbolically marry the earth, moon or other natural bodies, reconceptualizing the way we look at the earth, from seeing the planet as a mother to seeing it as a lover.
An alternative to moralizing, such sexual ethics, fetishizing the landscape, and getting intimate with nature helps people reconnect with nature, and with their own bodies. Neuroception is an unconscious a defensive physical response.
Kybele's serpentine spiral dance reflects the nature of our mortal coil with its winding spirals of DNA that loop and twist, entwining us with our ancestors. A meander pattern mirrors our lives and stories. We leap into inwardness, seeking her in our fundamental helplessness in the face of extreme situations.
The paradoxical nature of the psyche is that "every act of dawning consciousness is a creative act." (Jung, Alchemy) Alan watts said, "Weirdness is a treasure, a verdant wilderness escorting us into the earnest embrace of the unknown… the empty… the nothingness."
Primal Nature Goddess
For the Phyrigians and Greeks, Kybele embodied the mountain wilderness, But later in Ephasus, she became the governing Feminine, governing by unconscious processes. As order-upholding Goddess of the Polis, she expressed the earned and honored powers of Feminine wisdom. Artemis was the name the Greek colonists called Kybele.
She is the archaic nature of the unconscious which finds itself in the psychically relative space-time continuum characteristic of the unconscious. The connecting psychoid field beyond space-time barriers exerts an uncanny influence on the conscious mind.
To the Romans, she was Diana of Ephesus who with Attis represented sexuality and fertility with the ecstatic Mystery cult. The wild feminine rebirths the wild masculine. She is the phenomenal Womb of the Gods, our Mother of the Mountains, Lady of the Plants, and Lady of the Beasts.
To archaic people nature wasn't a ‘wilderness’, ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. It was tame: "every grass and every tree, mountain, hill, land and sea, cloud, meteor, star, are men seen from afar." (William Blake, letter to Butts, 2 Oct. 1800).
Water was connected to the earth, generative nature, and the human sphere. Earth was bountiful, with cliffs, sacred springs. caves, and vast forests surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery of the cosmos. With all creatures of the earth, sky and water it was a real and active principle, felt-Presence, the mode of presence by which divinity is revealed.
The archetype embodies ‘the emergent properties of mindbody, environment, and narrative -- even apparitions of the goddess herself and atavistic erotic passions. The oracle ordered the Phrygians to bury the body of Attis and to worship the Great Mother, or Cybele, in times of epidemics and drought.
But when we wander in the wilderness of the soul we may feel either truly lost or found. Devotees found a special kind of religious experience in the dramatic natural landscape. A response experience is "triggered" by some aspect of nature in the nature mystic experience, oceanic, or peak experience. We are not only touched, but gripped or enthralled.
Merging with nature is affective elevation, a realization or feeling that "All is one," a oneness with the creation. Current research suggests that this link between perceived oneness and life satisfaction occurs regardless of religious affiliation. A brush with the divine through lived experience increases purpose and meaning even decades later.
We feel a presence when we come face to face with a higher order of reality that strikes like a thunderclap. A radiant consciousness of the "otherness" of natural things is the simplest and commonest form of illumination -- readiness and potentiality, not accomplishment. The self is restored to a timeless primitive grace.
The numinous element is veiled by nature. We are conscious of a presence, but not sure what that presence is. We feel rather than knows. Nevertheless, such experiences can redirect one's life, for they give one the exaltation of standing on a high mountain and gaining for a minute the glory of a grand vista, a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness.
Kybele also has a cosmogonic creative origin - a celestial madness.. Cosmogonic symbols are derived from every creative act of dawning consciousness. Satinover (1985: 83) considers archetypal images as "the epigenetic consequence of developmental processes, certain elements of which are inherited."
The effects of psychic elements emerge as certain archetypal images. We objectify and engage these images. Reflection is never enough because holy desire moves the soul. Soul-driven desire ignores personality and personal desires and their outcome.
The soul's motivations and compulsions are beyond ego desire fulfillment. The soul’s instincts and aims are fundamentally linked to the divine image. Inner numinous forms guide us beyond what is known into the unknown on a journey into the great mystery of life and its consummation.
We can consider ourselves as the dwelling place and throne of Kybele's divinity. We may find unspeakable secrets, pulsing fields within fields, within fields of invisible light and psyche's complex language within the dreams and dramas of being alive -- the hidden unity of chaos.
Hillman feels that, archetypally, the Great Mother is in love with the son-and-lover puer as a carrier of spirit. The child-god is forever young, psychologically. An older man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level is usually coupled with too great a dependence on the mother. Spiritual truth resides in the divine child within, not the external mother. The shadow side is sexual compulsion and immaturity. The raging moon embodies transgenerational resentment, frustration, and destruction of primal energy.
She inspires a sense of transcendence that can be both light and dark, a preverbal wave of existential dread. This tremendous Mystery is a personal encounter with the dreadful awe of the numinous, a non-rational, overwhelming felt-sense of preternatural non-human creatureliness.
Fearful expectations arise amidst the force multiplier of pulsating sounds, shifting rhythms, and resonant frequencies. Aggressive, intense, and frenetic music intensely pushes emotions. Vicious, and noisier music drives reality amplification. Frenzied dancing carries devotees from civilization to a wilderness beyond themselves -- innate release, a collective state of total and simultaneous offering.
We begin our inquiry knowing there is an art of approaching, especially for prophecy, oracles, and signs. We can attend to how our brains construct the world. What draws us in may be a devotional, divinatory, or aesthetic interest at the beginning, or an affinity for a different world related to deepening engagement.
She is our contact with a perceptually perpetual virginal aspect within. The word derives from a Latin root meaning strength, force, skill; and was later applied to men: virile. Virginity is a subjective state. It isn't defined by the condition/presence/absence of a body part nor by the participation, or not, in the singular act of heterosexual intercourse.
She has symbolic content, but also directs attention to crucial features in the environment. The process unfolds in natural but unexpected ways. The pattern repeats in Ishtar and Tammuz, Astarte and Adonis, Isis and Osiris/Horus, Anahita and Mithras, Cybele and Attis, her transgendered consort. They are ‘superimposed’, the one on the other, synchronized in meaningful parallellism, modified by selective strengthening or weakening of sympathetic connections.
"I was ten months in search of the 'astral mineral' that had to have the 'red Virgin' pure and entire and I did not find that _mineral_. What I wanted and searched for was the subtle magnetism that one exchanges, the human 'salt' ...and to find it and obtain it, I was ready to sacrifice myself, _to dishonor myself_! ...I was still in search of my 'salt' and human 'mineral' and -- _the 'Virgin'_ was still there in the full sense of the word. ...My researches into the 'red Virgin' and the human 'salt' having necessitated physiological investigations that were certainly not for my age, my imagination was coldly depraved. I looked for the _subject_." -- H.P. Blavatsky
This is not your idealized Virgin Mary. She is mother, because shebears new life, but she does not lose her virginity. She needs no partner to give birth. She creates by extraordinary natural phenomena, her own force demonstrating divine being, the integrity of undeniable inner authority. Her association with the almond tree reflects the vesica piscis symbol of the birth passage.
Even as a mother she remains virgin in a certain inscrutable sense. A virgin in the original sense is whole-in-itself, but that can include unconscious acts of brutality. We can approach transgressive imagery head on or tangentially, by dancing and spiraling around it. Few myths offer more primordial and biologically challenging imagery than Kybele and Attis.
In The Hebrew Goddess, Patai identifies the Persian counterpart of the great virginal-wanton-motherly-warrior goddess as Anahita or Anath. Absorbing the traits and legends, temple estates and rites of the Great Mother goddess of Anatolia, she was worshiped in Ugarit as the fertile and chaste "mother of nations"and "the virgin."
In The Mysteries of Mithras, Nabarz agrees some sources cite the Persian god Mithra's partner and virgin mother as the angel-goddess Anahita. This myth mirrors Kybele and Attis.
"Cybele ... worship seems to be as old as the archaeological record: a figurine from Chatal Hüyük depicts her as potnia therōn, "Lady of the Beasts." In Armenia, numerous terra-cotta figurines depict the goddess in the form of Isis lactans." http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/anahita.pdf
Double-Bind
We may yearn for that which we cannot or dare not name. Breaking the strong bond with the mother, or the emotional incestuousness of the mother complex, likely instigates the hero archetype of adolescence. This passage rite often included phallic mutilations and self-sacrifice.
All such patterns and behaviors can be studied on their own, including the functional disturbance of double-bind phenomena, a universal pathogenic situation in dysfunctional families. Metaphors grow the mind and feed the soul; they are elemental to human thought and imagination.
Unhealthy enmeshment means a mother attaches intensely to adolescent and adult children, which debilitates or psychologically castrates the child, blocking development and transformation with conflict, dilemma, impasse and paradox. Binds can be expressed conceptually, metaphorically, or nonverbally. https://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/articles/10/1/Modelling-the-Structure-of-Binds-and-Double-Binds/Page1.html
The myth makes the metaphor explicit -- literal. Such blurring of boundaries between family members can cause difficulty regulating emotions. Enmeshment is a state of cross-generational bonding within a family, including covert incest and cross-generational sexual relationships. Here it is enough to recognize them in passing as key concepts that arise from primordial psyche.
It is classically replayed in the tragedy of Oedipus (Freud) and modern day maternal enmeshment, spousification, or incestuous symbiosis (Fromm). The personalities are fused in mutual dependency (Bradshaw). Locked in this paradigm of decay and death, they feel extremely anxious and frightened if that relationship is threatened. They believe that they cannot live without the mother substitute, such as family, business, church, or nation.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244012470115
This mother who is a goddess of spiritual (spirit) and physical things (instinct) is a Goddess of opposites -- of wild things, mated with a god of wild things. Her mythos reveals the story of the first surgical “correction” of an intersex infant because the gods were offended and disgusted at hir hermaphroditic inheritance. Such medical procedures are largely hidden to this day.
She is the magic flower who first bore her son by parthenogenesis. Then, in union with the young male deity, she bore all living things. The pattern repeats in Ishtar and Tammuz, Astarte and Adonis, Isis and Osiris/Horus, Cybele and Attis. We can also read this mythos of incestuous marriage metaphorically. We don't need to succumb to the danger of taking it literally.
For us, she represents the primal psychic world of mankind, the world of mythology, the world of archaic humanity, visibly gripped and transported by the transpersonal power that sustains and nourishes all creative development with a wild sense of belonging in a rich and many-layered world that spontaneously engenders imagery.
Sacred experiences are an element of the structure of consciousness. Myth inspired and fed creative imagination. The human psyche is revealed in religion, psychology, and art as a continuous creative force, here and now in the numinous instinctual rhythms of life's flow.In ordinary household life, simple role-sharing may be hermaphroditic, an inherent, necessary behavioral transgender fluidity. Parenting can require enacting cross-sex identification.
Hillman relates the soul of the world to "that particular spark of soul, that germinal image that offers itself in transparency in everything in its visible form. The soul is the archetype of life: in all of us, the soul is all the faces of our being, our style of doing, the direction of our self."
Women's long-lost ability to self-conceive echoes an archaic time before the father's role was even suspected. In parthenogenesis, asexual reproduction, embryos develop from unfertilized eggs. Wild female snakes that usually reproduce sexually can selectively display parthenogenesis, virgin birth of fatherless offspring, even when males are available.
The serpent leads to the goddess and the goddess leads to the dance, instinctuality, emotionality, sensuality, sexuality. Neolithic snake cults were universal. The snake shedding its skin symbolizes renewal of primal life force energy: death and rebirth, transformation, immortality, and healing.
The serpent remains the primary symbol of Gnosis. Snakes are also associated with divine revelation. Evidence from shrines and oracular sites of the Goddess in Babylon, Sumer, Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome suggests that sacred serpents were kept and fed by priestesses who were consulted for prophecy.
The dark center is the kundalini root of all, where energy is inert and consciousness coiled asleep; potential life lies motionless. It ruthlessly destroys all that is not our true individuality or appropriate life path.
Her numinous all-encompassing power (over everyone and everything that had ever been, ever was, and ever will be) included every part of the life cycle, from birth through death. Jung confided that, "The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive." (Psychology and Alchemy, par. 93)
Archetypes change, or rather their worship, locale, and status changes. Their essence may not change but different traits, qualities, and functions are selected by each culture for unfolding spiritual and psychosexual states. The environment is a programmed teaching matrix. So is art, beyond literalist interpretation of sacred metaphor.
Kybele's underworld nature originates in an animal analogy -- the serpent. It precedes the heavenly or celestial origin as a meteorite. But the paradoxical themes remain including Great Mother vs. Terrible Mother. The more they effect you, the more you attract them.
In mass media, we remain hooked on the spectacle of our own demise, of humanity. Black and White are harnessed within us like the lions that draw Kybele's chariot. Canaanite goddess, Ashera, too, was a "Lion Lady," and "Queen of heaven," depicted holding a snake and riding a lion.
The Great Goddess always had a mystical solidarity , kinship with the animal world. Jung spoke of "the abyss of impassioned dissolution, where all human distinctions are merged in the animal divinity of the primordial psyche—a blissful and terrible experience." (Psychology and Alchemy, Page 90.) The snakes entwined around her represent birth, regeneration, and overall protection -- otherworldly wisdom. "The snake is endless time," says Jung, (Meetings with Jung, Page 303).
The vegetation god also presides over or underlies prophecy, tragedy, ecstasy, and the violation of limits. He is the irrational power that allows us to explore our potential for emotional and behavioral extremes. The hilaria was celebrated in Spring, around the time of Easter, and celebrated the death, salvation, and rebirth/resurrection of Attis. Before Christianity, it included sacramental meals, blood offerings, and baptisms. They were merged in the cult of the Naassenes.
https://books.google.com/books?id=7Thonw9sE8kC&pg=PA190&lpg=PA190&dq=,Karl+Kerenyi,+Kybele,+Cybele&source=bl&ots=teiVxkLjlV&sig=ACfU3U2X4tkeIKGhiXoL_tA_nh7VeRi8gQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjwweOnyu_jAhXhs1QKHbhXCvYQ6AEwDHoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=%2CKarl%20Kerenyi%2C%20Kybele%2C%20Cybele&f=false
The Irrational forces us to suspend logic, washes out the firm footing from beneath us, floods us with emotion, rips away false surety, claims us utterly, shakes us to the core. It sweeps us into heavenly heights and underworld depths inexorably full of the sense of mystery, the Unknown.
We cannot expunge or strip away our own troublesome residue of the archaic and barbaric. Such trances have the power to hold us in their grip. The power of trance is to come and go unconsciously, opening to instinctual imagery. Even fragments of thought and adjacent possibilities contain an image. Mind and behavior can either accurately reflect or mutilate these images.
The Dark Queen
"The archetype is an affliction; it makes us suffer. The pathology of the psyche is an integral necessary part of psychology because suffering the archetype through our complexes is an integral and necessary part of psychic life," Hillman says in the Myth of Analysis, p. 199.
Manifestations are real at their own level of operation. Manifestations are real at their own level of operation. Manifestations are real at their own level of operatiThey say you never really know someone until you have met their monster. As Jung has said, "the gods have become diseases," we find the pathology of narcissistic spousification in the sons of the Terrible Mother.
They can deny and refuse the burdon of consciousness becoming unconscious again. by alcohol, refusing to grow up, being dependent. Or you can expand it beyond self-consciousness with more attention.
A complex is an abortive call to Mystery and initiation, a sort-of psychic undertow in which someone can be trapped. She warps their personalities in compulsions, co-dependence, and in Bipolar and Borderline chaotic lifestyles. Maternal enmeshment engages a chosen child. This is emotional incest, a pathological orientation.
Erich Fromm said, "The regressive orientation develops in three manifestations, separate or together: necrophilia, narcissism, and incestuous symbiosis." Necrophilia is love for all that is violent and destructive; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction to death, to suicide, to sadism. Psychic inflation leads to the misuse of transcendental energy; archetypal powers are diverted to personal predatory use in narcissism for power and control.
This Dark Queen turns to her children for narcissistic fuel to feed off them, to feed the false ego, to brainwash, stunt, and bind them to her twisted will, rather than fostering their independence. She ties them to her apron strings of blood, family, or tribe. This is passive-aggressive emotional abuse creating dependencies, self-medication, and lack of emotional availability -- emotionally-impaired relationships.
Complexes consist of meaning but also of value, and the intensity of accompanying feeling tones, according to Jung. All of them may show somatic as well as psychic symptoms, and combinations of the two. In pathological cases, we see fixed or compulsive ideas, manias, and states of possession.
In every creative process paradoxically "the work" absorbs and drains dry all extraneous contents. An unconscious content attracts all others to itself, consumes them, subordinates and co-ordinates them, and forms with them a system of relationships dominated by itself.
When the conscious mind cannot cope with these contents, the result is depression, dissociation, deterioration, fragmentation, disorganization, disintegration -- chaos. Dissociation is being disconnected from memories, feelings, actions, thoughts, body and even identity.
The role of the complex is determined by its interaction with the conscious mind, what states it creates. Without understanding, it de-stablizes the personality. An unconscious complex acts like a second ego in conflict with the conscious ego, an alter ego.
This conflict places the individual between two truths, two conflicting streams of will, threatening to tear them in two. A complex can engulf or overpower the ego through partial or total identification between the ego and the complex. A complex may be projected in the form of spirits, sounds, animals, figures, etc.
Dissociative Disorder
At least three-quarters of people with a dissociative disorder will also have one or more other mental disorders. They may be diagnosed with and treated for other mental health difficulties, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, sleep disorders, borderline personality disorder, or psychosis. They may also be treated for addictions, self-harm, and/or suicidal thoughts (2% of those diagnosed complete suicide).
They may also be misdiagnosed with schizophrenia because hearing voices is common to both.
But their dissociative disorder usually remains undiagnosed. However, treatment for other mental health issues is not likely to be effective unless the underlying dissociation is addressed.
Dark Flow
A goddess of ecstatic and chthonic reproductive mysteries, Kybele changed with the neolithic, bronze and iron ages, the archaic, the architectural, and the debauched, before exaltation as the Black Madonna, Virgin Queen, Queen of Heaven.
Kybele is specifically described as "uncreated, and thus essentially separate from and independent of her creations," the invisible virginal Spirit. Whereas, Marion Woodman describes the Black Madonna as “nature impregnated by spirit,” which is practiced or lived out by “accepting the human body as the chalice of the spirit."
We explain the incomprehensible with stories. Today we might attribute her primordial and fluid cosmogonic force to the bizarre, hypothetical Dark Flow of Negative Mass and Negative Gravity, an invisible continuous creation of dark energy, dark flow, or dark matter.
Negative Existence may be outside the range of our realization, it does not mean that we are beyond the range of its influence. All mystical traditions describe the "Mysterious Unknown at the Roots of All Things" as both inactive (impersonal) and active (personal aspects).
It predicts a continuous range of attractive and repulsive qualities under various void of high baryonic matter density cases. Negative existence is a ‘nothingness’ with a hidden or invisible potential from which the Universe will eventually manifest.
Bizarre 'dark fluid' with negative mass could dominate the universe
https://phys.org/news/2018-12-bizarre-dark-fluid-negative-mass.html
Her autochthonic Anatolian form transitioned into the Ionian Hellenic and Hellenistic Artemis of Ephesus (10th c. BCE), a symbol of the crown, throne and state. Then she was commandeered by Rome as Cybele, a guardian of the dead, cemetery and excessive revelry. Rome traced its origin to Aeneas and Phrygian ancestors. She arose from cultural pergatory as the Black Madonna of the Christian era, the fecundating, comforting, and dark side of the feminine Godhead. Confronting our own blackness is the beginning of alchemy.
Jung said (1964:88), "Archetypes gain life and meaning only when you try to take into account their numinosity (psychic energy) - their relationship to the living individual. . . . Their names mean very little . . . the way they are related to you is all important. The fluidic character of the numinous element enables it to take on whatever characteristics are impressed upon it by passive will."
Kybele is the zero-point of archetypes, nonlocal consciousness. She is the "seed mother," a subterranean goddess who curiously fell to earth and planted itself as a black meteorite. All life is interrelated; somehow we're caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, nature's secret language and art.
The dense and virgin forest is the dark and mysterious aspect of the unconscious, the Mother of the Mountains in vegetative form. The fertile resurgence of life comes in and through darkness. Fueling soul growth, she is a composting and transcendental energy.
Jung said, "Nothing is the same as fullness. In the endless state fullness is the same as nothing. The nothing is both empty and full...that which is endless and eternal has no qualities, because it has all qualities." (Hoeller) We experience a peculiar fascination with her specific energy.
Dark Mater
If the universe is alive, dark matter makes a good analogy for its subconscious, and perhaps our souls, as well, a nonlocal field accessible by direct experience. Dark Mater as the Dark Feminine seems to hold a special spell.
The collective psyche, the deepest layer of the unconscious, is the living ground current from which everything is derived. It is a relic of the original non-differentiation of subject and object, and hence of the primordial unconscious state.
Our dreams are the dark matter of the mind. They unlock the unconscious essence of who we are. Could dark matter itself be an elusive material basis for the paranormal?
Kybele personifies the symbolic life, our spacious awareness, our instinctive tie to symbolic fantasy emanations. The unconscious identity of participation mystique prevails. We need to understand her myths psychologically not just sociologically.
Jung explains, "Where one is identified with the collective unconscious, there is no recognition of the things which come from the unconscious, they cannot be distinguished from those of the self. Such a condition is a possession by the anima or animus. Possession by the animus or anima creates a certain psychological hermaphroditism. The principle of individuation demands a dissociation or differentiation of the male and the female in ourselves. We must dissociate our self from the unconscious." (Cornwall Seminar, Page 26.)
Erich Neumann saw the mythological state arising from the archetype as the primal state of consciousness. In this primordial state humanity is literally one with nature. But (1954:xxiii) "contents which are primarily transpersonal, are in the course of development taken to be personal." Thus arises the complex and pathology. In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia portrays art and history as an unstoppable, near-compulsive sequence of growth, loss, and revival.
Kybele's symbol is the circle, the serpent that bites its tail, encompassing multiple simultaneous realities. In The Great Mother, Neumann (1954:264) suggested that much of the urouboros comes before the Great Mother, and she before the hero. (The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, a study of the Magna Mater 1955. English trans. by Ralph Manheim.)
In Rome, she was associated with the constellation Leo. Strabo described her earlier rites as related to the Orgies of Dionysus. (Geography 10. 3. 13, trans. Jones). Kybele taught Dionysus the mystic rites of initiation for her orgiastic cult.
Deep Forest
Pindar began the dithyramb, hymn to Dionysus "To perform the prelude in thy honor, Megale Meter (Great Mother; Kybele), the whirling of cymbals is at hand, and among them, also, the clanging of castanets, and the torch that blazeth beneath the tawny pine-trees."
We consciously and unconsciously mourn the loss of our wild being and sacred places, the wilderness, the primeval forest in our lives. We miss our primordial relationship with Mother Earth in the abyss of evolution. Still, the archaic still lives within us with an embryonic ego without fixed boundaries, still interwoven wholly with the world and nature. We've forgotten our connection to the dark animal orobouric Great Mother.
Researchers usually presume that Matar is the direct heir of the Neolithic fertility goddess, and the Phrygian origin of Attis -- the Anatolian Matar through the Greek Meter Theôn to the Roman Magna Mater. This narrative is under revision. Not all the untamed, ecstatic and “uncivilized” aspects of the cult in Roman society, were an original part of the cult in Anatolia. The Romans tend to concretize and exaggerate the rites with their own decadence.
Roller demonstrates, there is no divine Attis until Hellenistic and Roman times, and Matar was certainly not a traditional fertility goddess, a fact also noticeable in the absence of ordinary fertility symbols, such as ears of corn or children. Instead, her most persistent iconographical features are those of power: she is presented as a figure who controls nature, protects cities, and is accompanied only by predatory animals (Roller 1999:38).
The Great Mother was the personification of the vital essence in all things. Her symbolism pervades the archaeological record of the ancient world. She personifies mysterious hypnotic and magical powers concealed in nature, as nurturing or destructive effects including pain and death.
We are interlocked in the essence of our realities, the magical imagination and deep memory of the original intimacy of human-animal-plant fusion. Such memories are magnetic, regressive, and atavistic, To experience them requires entering the same ecstatic trance state that is their origin. Because cultivation of plants separated them, plants were sought as a means of reconnection.
Kybele mediates the dream-like contents of the murky unconscious mind, drawing up non-rational knowledge from the depths of the psyche. When we enter the unconscious, we relinquish control and becomes subject to the non-rational, nonlocal forces of life, the “chaotic urge to life.”
Mother is the powerful, elemental creator and destroyer of life, giving birth to and taking back each individual life. She is the promising spring and the fertile harvest as well as the blasted landscape, ravaged by drought, fire, or flood. In myths she is often destroyed, as humanity fears her all-encompassing power.
Mother Nature may be the oldest motif but it is the underlying pattern of symbol-formation that is inherited. Wisdom is recognizing patterns in life, recognizing the self-organizing interconnection of all things. That something missing in the lives of so many people isn't found in another's form, it's found in the dark of the unconscious. The "primordial images" are those expressed in the earliest life-history of the human species.
Images grow out of the rudimentary nature of the psyche in its pre-conscious form. These basic layers of the psyche spontaneously recur in modern psychic phenomena in ever-new forms that vary around certain deeply rooted motifs at the base of consciousness. The generic structural nature of the psyche is unrestricted to collective or group phenomena. We accumulate and retrieve memories that are affecting the psyche.
Kybele was worshiped as a meteoric stone, exotic and foreign, the remains of a 'thunderbolt of Zeus that fertilized the earth or matter. The stone was the goddess and the goddess was the stone, and emissary from above, venerated as the zodiac.
Acts 19:35 says, "And when the town clerk had quieted the crowd, he said, “Men of Ephesus, who is there who does not know that the city of the Ephesians is temple keeper of the great Artemis, and of the sacred stone that fell from the sky?" (English Standard Version) Many translations say her 'image' fell from the sky. Later, the stone was taken to Rome by the Galli priest-emperor Elagabalus/Antoninus.
Our bodies are simply connected with an intuitive sense of meaning, in all its implications and possibilities. Our structure encodes the recent and deep past. The physical and its significance are in no way separate but two aspects of a non-dual reality.
So, some arising emotions may 'belong' to us while others arise from an empathic identification with our ancestors, or even fusions of their energies. They may appear in the pre-sensory, sensory elements and images in our dreams experienced as introception.
"The breath of Kybele" is the spent breath of trillions, the vital energy which can be directed by the devotee, magnetic healer, or adept. We still breath her ancient air. Psyche means the soul, mind, spirit; breath. We can feel how our breathing makes more space around us -- ritual space in the caverns of the unconscious.
Breath becomes part of trance induction with sensory stimulation, visual spectacle, and auditory overload. Trance induction includes the old taboo words, "enchantment," "fascination," "glamor," and "spell," "animal magnetism," and especially the verb "to bewitch." All of it comes together in a synthesis.
This is the interrelated structure of reality. Hypnotic phenomena include many ways of having the god within: frenzy, group trance dance, possession trance, mediumistic or oracular trance, and shamanic trance, religious trance, hysteria, autohypnosis, delerium, sensory deprivation, and psychoactive drugs or ceremonial entheogens.
Between the pines is a doorway to eternity, In their homelands, such power-plants are worshiped. Mushroom language is euphemized, coded, masked, or buried in etymologies. They are spirits, gods that can disappear when they don't get the right sacrifice. They can disappear from culture, remain perhaps on the periphery, and manifest themselves when they wish.
The sacred plants from earlier and wilder people linked back to ecstatic original intimacy. Natives of any area have a superior knowledge of secret magical plant life on their land. Pastoralists would have known about such things since the Ice Age Refugia in the Altai Mountains of central Asia. They would be suitable offerings for a goddess. They are 'unborn' because they have no seed.
Kybele embodied a prehistoric magico-religious archetype and trance-possession. She is the Queen Bee. Thus, Her priestesses, the Melissae, or "the bees," could see the future, interpret signs and omens provided by Nature and the Earth. The Galli high priests followed the footsteps of her son-lover Attis. They mimicked and acted out the lives of the gods, their story.
The Near Eastern "mistress of animals" of the later half of the second millenium BCE evolved into Kybele and Artemis. Animals symbolized three domains of life: birds of prey were air, lions and rabbits earth, and serpents the underworld. In the Hittite era, refugee Chaldean priests fled to its Anatolian capital with their astrotheology and cosmologies. Influenced by steppe-warrior culture, the Phyrgians invaded central Anatolia from the North, some say Thrace.
Kybele also represents the taboo transgressive states of gender ambiguity, ritualized bodies and body modification; initiation, and altered states; dramas of blood, mad music, and orgiastic ecstasy. Psychological matriarchy still persists in the modern psyche, including the 'mother complex.'
Archetypes help us redefine human identity as a hyperconnective multiplicity in a continuous process of integration (holy union) embedded in a cosmic superhologram of consciousness, polarity, and life. In the mysteries of death and renewal, union with the source is a superposition of the "death marriage", a return to the womb, primordial consciousness, and union with the Divine.
For the gods, time is primordial and unstructured; for mankind it is historical and linear. In the unconscious if there is any notion of time at all, it is circular, arranging events so they return eternally and can be re-entered through myth, symbol, and ritual with no distinction between self and environment.
We all carry and relive the primordial psyche which is reliving the soul of our ancestors. They may be gone, but primordial psyche remains alive within us, and available for interaction. Some live closer to it than others, but we all have creative, rational, and intuitive faculties. These are rooted in this primordial ground, an unalterable level of creative imagination, primordial unity, and instinctive participation mystique.
Kybele's symbols are the frame drum (tympanum, tambourine, cymbals, castanets), tower, crown, and throne; the lion and snake. From the Neolithic on, her dual nature included protection but also her alternative terrible nature. Her myths originate in Phrygian mythology but she celebrated her greatest popularity in the Roman Empire.
However, recent discoveries in archaeology and its interpretation, show that many standard interpretations of earlier worship lack evidence and can be based on racial prejudices of their time, against 'savagry' and 'primitivity.'
As Goethe notably said, "There is no art in turning a goddess into a witch, a virgin into a whore, but the opposite operation, to give dignity to what has been scorned, to make the degraded desirable, that calls for art or for character."
Her earliest reported traditional practices reflect our contemporary notions of 'the Feminine,' 'warrior-women,' 'wilderness as medicine,' 'nature-based soul initiation', and plant-based medicine for healing and guidance as a paradigm.
One narrative of Kybele links fertility, rebirth, and the supernatural. Children reincarnated the souls of dead ancestors that penetrated the mother' body through spiritual visitation. So female procreation became linked to rebirth after death. Her world is one of magical reversals. It is an androgynous and nebulous world of magical thinking and animism. The self becomes immersed in the orgiastic rapture of the crowd.
Hittite, Mesopotamian, Chaldean, Syrian and other elements influenced her arc, even before the Greeks came into Asia Minor. Kybele had her own primordial cosmogony tales, yet they still hark back to those of Inanna and Tammuz, reflected in earlier and later mother/son dyads.
Collapsing the timeline of her development also creates confusion, but here we are more interested in Her essential nature, rather than building an epochal historical timeline, which can be found elsewhere. We can root our contemporary devotion in the mytho-poetics of Kybele's cult practice. That doesn't mean we base it all on emotion, symbol, and suggestion. We can express ideas with physical rather than intellectual symbols, with syntax, and imagery.
In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele, Lynn E. Roller attempts to breakdown and decolonialize some of these ideas. Only the Roman practices are well-supported by contemporary literature, but it is possible that the Romans tended to concretize practices, acting out aspects of the myth that were more symbolic or metaphorical in the past. Many issues remain, unless and until such ideas are evidenced.
The situation remains similar to early research in depth psychology on the nature of the 'mother complex', which were inevitably rooted in cultural views of their own times. The Attis practice of Kybele and her son/lover, is another version of what became Freud's Oedipal complex. Such theories have been overturned or revised.
The early goddess may not have been as primitive or savage as she has been portrayed, and this may be reflected in the psyche as well. Some practices only arose or became prominent later in the arc of the Kybele/Cybele dynamic.
This is perhaps observable in the switch from a 'mad goddess of the wild' to a cultural protectress of urban life. As the goddess evolved with society, her myth and practice was sometimes 'sanitized,' and marginalized to outliers, and eventually demonized, especially just prior to and in the early Christian era.
It's important to distinguish when we are talking about trance induction, a drug's effects on a person and a social movement, or an academic trend. There is a difference between psychology and sociology, between phenomenology and politics. They all color scholarly opinion and interpretations.
Psychological matriarchy, including the 'mother complex', still persists in the modern psyche though not within the general culture. But that does not necessarily imply that vast swaths of culture were "matriarchal," or elevated females as has been alleged.
Marija Gimbutas, who drew heavily on folk traditions, proposed a controversial myth of an original unstratified, egalitarian matriarchal society. Her simplistic notions of a matriarchal society have been thrown over for lack of scientific evidence. Still, some will prefer the more romanticized narrative.
Some elements remain more speculative than others, especially since the goddess underwent many transformations displaying different qualities in each society. Even the views of Freud, the early Jungians, (like Erich Neumann who wrote The Great Mother), and anthropologists are coming under revision. Sometimes the core ideas may be right, but the languaging is biased. Or, core ideas themselves may miss the mark.
So, we must bear that in mind during our inquiry into the instinctual, psychic, and spiritual aspects of cult development. Jung reminds us that, "The separation of psychology from the premises of biology is purely artificial, because the human psyche lives in indissoluble union with the body." But Hillman adds, "... although the life of the body is always concrete, it is not necessarily literal." (Re-visioning Psychology)
One main objection is that there is little to no evidence of a universal mother goddess in the Mediterranean, despite the universal hazards of childbirth. That is, not all such local or regional goddesses shared the same qualities, rites, and symbols though they later were assimilated through syncretism that developed along trade routes. Therefore, any attempt to grasp the evolving essence of Kybele must necessarily include some poetic license, assumptions, and hypotheses within suggested conclusions.
https://books.google.com/books?id=BmgTCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&dq=,stone-age+petroglyphs,+kybele&source=bl&ots=nL5HzF8a4w&sig=ACfU3U0R2tGL2VzYUJhhsdGnJsGP0ZKFxQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwipy_Lf5bfjAhXCMXwKHTttBPIQ6AEwFHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=%2Cstone-age%20petroglyphs%2C%20kybele&f=false
Protecting Souls & Guarding the Dead
In her chthonic and funereal aspect Kybele was "the guardian of the dead in the underworld and as a caring mother whose image was customarily placed in graves as a reminder that 'the Queen of the Shadows never abandoned the dead..." As Magna Mater, she is the protectress and guardian of souls who stops them from wandering in the shadows, making the soul brave against evil and fears. She was a loyal redeemer who wiped out sin and impiety.
https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10092/10791/Bell_thesis.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Sacrifices include herbs, cypress, myrrh, civet, blood, pomegranate, and opium poppy. Her statues show her holding a bunch of wheat and poppy heads symbolizing her role as the goddess of agriculture. Anatolians called her "the mother of poppies." Her pharmacopeia also included cannabis and psychoactive mushrooms. The same devotees would likely be familiar with ephedra and Syrian rue (harmala). Ancient healers used poppies medicinally to aid menstruation and childbirth
Biodrama is a form of play therapy. The Great Mother goddess let the entire community participate in the healing and celebration rituals that were the origin of theatre. Hidden wisdom, sacred awareness, and memory were held within this performative matrix for the exaltation of natural energies witnessed personally by the 'beholder-of-secrets.' You can't be told but have to see it for yourself.
Kybele's primary historical image was a hermaphroditic God(dess), the primordial androgyne -- sovereign matron crowned with towers, seated in a chariot drawn by lions. Her androgyny symbolized a wild and uncontrollable nature and savage masculine animus.
She is our deepest memory. Focusing on the goddess herself, rather than her gender transgression, reveling retinue, castrated priesthood, or sensationalistic orgiastic rites and related cults, we seek a felt-sense of her living presence within us, beyond historical knowledge of this archetypal mother.
One approach is to drop into the body and get a sensation for where a feeling is, following it around, if necessary. Sensory responses are evoked potentials. When we detect a response we have a place to begin noticing, remembering, and processing.
At the threshold level we have a 50-50 chance of detecting our response as attention or distraction. We may feel it weakly or even wonder if we felt it at all. This way we can reactivate pretty much any feeling we've ever had or that lives deep in us with a new level of sensation and connection in the present. We become aware of issues by their somatic, energetic, and emotional components.
Kybele is Original Consciousness being the first Immortal. The dragon or serpent represents the initial state of unconsciousness. The paradoxical image typically appears before dissolution of the center into its unconscious element—the undifferentiated consciousness of the ground state.
Consciousness does not mean individual awareness. The larger concept includes the personal unconscious and collective mind, conscious and unconscious. Consciousness is the bottomless pit or abyss of the indivisible whole. It means the world. In the most inclusive sense it is cosmic consciousness. The mind's nature is primordial awareness, practiced by shaman, mystics and sages from time immemorial.
Evolving Archetypal Matrix
Ancient divinities were not static, but expressed cultural systems that responded to historical change. Being remains constant during the process of becoming. The Anatolian Kybele was a dynamic Goddess of the Cycle, never to be taken lightly. Her worship was dated to about 6,000 BCE. Now, some suggest her ancestral worship goes back at least 10,000 years to the era of Gobekli Tepe with its birth statuary and monumental carved pillars.
The Ionian worship of Artemis at Ephesus was built upon the ancient worship of Kybele. She embodied the Mother Goddess of mountains, caves, and vines by incorporating the traits of primal indigenous traditions with its paradoxical relationship to city life. The Great Mother, (Meter, Gr.), hides an array of other feminine ways of enacting life. She is the original Immortal from whom all creation is derived. She personifies vital essence, the upwelling fountain of all that breathes.
"The Breath of Cyblele"
Akash and the Akashic Records have been linked to primordial informational fields. Even Tesla says, “All perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasha or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles, all things and phenomena.” (Man’s Greatest Achievement, 1907)
"The breath of Cybele" is equivalent to akasha-tattva, the stuff of miracles, visions, apparitions, and paranormal phenomena. This aether or 'astral light' is the primordial cosmic root-matter, “the divine space,” “the primordial ocean of space,” “the celestial virgin-mother,” etc. In mythology and dreams, the sea symbolizes the unfathomable unconscious. We encounter more primitive layers the deeper we go into the unconscious, an information field outside space-time likened to a black hole.
Akasha is also the divine screen recording permanent images of every thought, deed, or event, indelibly impressed on this enigmatic medium. It contains the wholeness of past, present, and future making it synonymous with Jung's collective unconscious or the holographic information medium. This holofield can be likened to physicist David Bohm's implicate order, a “potential reality” behind the space-time “experienced reality” within which we ordinarily navigate.
If akasha is a deep dimension in the universe that generates and interconnects all things in the world, it gives us a new, encompassing concept of cosmos and consciousness, fresh meaning for our life, and reliable guidance for creating our future. The body exchanges information with the quantum vacuum. Coherence is the criteria for existence with flux, process, and stasis over time. There are less certainties in process.
We recognize that our “coherence” is our connection with our interior and exterior world – the key to our health and viability in a self-actualizing cosmos. From the inside, our embeddedness in nonlocal coherence give us access to information beyond the reach of our physical senses. This framework anticipates and expects paranormal phenomena in "a locally and nonlocally interconnected and interacting universe," according to Whitehead the philosopher.
Pythagoras called the deepest reality kosmos, with a k, unbroken wholeness, the prior ground, or substrate. Jung called it the unmanifest Plenum, from which all manifest phenomena arise from the relationships in a deeper dimension of reality. It is either a spirit or consciousness that infuses the natural world (the immanentist view), or a spirit or consciousness that is above and beyond it (the transcendentalist claim).
Laszlo calls the akashic field the quantum vacuum, which contains all the information of our history from the Big Bang to now and is also consciousness. It is saturated with vibrant potential energy and is in fact a highly energetic medium, an absolute fullness of potential energy, the dynamic modification of which actually "emanates" what we call mass, matter or material form. This is the realm of quantum electrodynamics.
Akasha is described as an infinite potential energy and as the source of various kinds of vibration, especially those of sound and light, which are the basis of the created universe. Akasha is the universal soul, the matrix of the universe, the mysterium magnum from which all that exists is born by separation or differentiation. The cause of existence, it fills all infinite space and is space itself, (Krippner, Future Science).
This groundstate of nature is the heart of matter and it implies the notion of a continuous creation. Our nature is radiant scalar energy, the nonobservable yet roiling cosmic ocean of vacuum fluctuation, the disassembled roots of all being, the true primordial soup, reflected in the myths of Kybele who arose from chaos.
The Heart Sutra claims that all form is nothing but Void and quantum physics agrees. J. Krishnamurti said, "Nothingness is not a reality [created by thought] but it is the truth." This matrix is, indeed, the mother of all life, uncreated, having always been there -- the bisexual goddess from whom all the world originated.
Kybele was religiously called "the Mother" in hymns and votive dedications, but in devotion, poetry and literature, devotees used her personal name. Ma of Cappadocia was also a mother-warrior. The marble Temple of Artemis Ephesia, known as the Artemision, was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Artemis Ephesus inherits the characteristics, responsibilities, and authority, of the Cretan “Mother of Gods,” Kybele. She protects springs, rivers, lakes, and marshes. Her inheritance is a powerful royal lineage, a worldly responsibility, and complete dominion over all Ephesian citizens. In Ephesus, Artemis is not just an Olympian. Her legend is built on that of the bold Amazon founders of her city. Whether they did or not, it was a widely held belief of those times that lent her credibility in the warrior-maiden tradition.
Her Olympian birth story claims she was a terribly wild and hermaphroditic being, castrated at birth. Her son-lovers and eunuch priests emulated this -- life subject to death but never dying, but reproducing in new forms of self-identity. These priests lost their fertility but not the pneuma of their psychic spirit, in which unbridled sexuality imparted initiatory salvation. Such a non-specific mental amplifier is conditioned by cult programming and ritual direction of the strong process of alternate reality of ephemeral beings, light, colors, and information.
"Behind closed eyes, initiates of the mysteries beheld awe-striking visions, theriomorphic transformations, and inconceivable phantasmagoria; on the outside, however, initiates were
pulled through a hallucinatory ritual drama by priests and former initiates. At the root of many of these initiatory circles there endured a number of ritual practices stretching back to the Neolithic period whereby intoxicated initiates re-enacted the drama of an androgynous dying god being united with his mistress." (Atrell, 2013)
Meeting the God-Plant
In her Mysteries, Cybele mourned the death of her beloved and the passing of her devotees . They were transformed by her communion, mystique, and the attainment of sacred knowledge (gnosis) through identification with Attis, her son-lover. They were collectively known as the Galli.
In the myths of Attis, Kybele bargained with fate and the gods so his hair and regenerated phallus grow under the pine tree forever - an analogy for mycelium and fruits of the amanita muscaria mushroom, a likely source for the revelers mania, dropping the habitual self for a primordial regression. It can only be described as a shamanic ordeal, a soma sacifice of all that is material.
Those who ate the mushrooms felt the god within themselves as reality dissolved into wriggling serpents. Shepherds tending flocks would have found the fly agaric high in the wild mountains after rains, when the mountains of the goddess were raging with thunderstorms on the slopes.
Daniel Atrell summarizes in his thesis:
"Abstract - The administration of initiation rites by an ecstatic specialist, now known to western scholarship by the general designation of ̳shaman‘, has proven to be one of humanity‘s oldest, most widespread, and continuous magico-religious traditions. At the heart of their initiatory rituals lay an ordeal–a metaphysical journey - almost ubiquitously brought on by the effects of a life-changing hallucinogenic drug experience. To guide their initiates, these shaman worked with a repertoire of locally acquired instruments, costumes, dances, and ecstasy-inducing substances.
Among past Mediterranean cultures, Semitic and Indo-European, these sorts of initiation rites were vital to society‘s spiritual well-being. It was, however, the mystery schools of antiquity–organizations founded upon conserving the secrets of plant-lore, astrology, theurgy and mystical philosophy–which satisfied the role of the shaman in Greco-Roman society.
The rites they delivered to the common individual were a form of ritualized ecstasy and they provided an orderly context for religiously-oriented intoxication.
In the eastern Mediterranean, these ecstatic cults weremost often held in honour of a great
mother goddess and her perennially dying-and-rising consort. The goddess‘ religious dramas enacted in cultic ritual stressed the importance of fasting, drumming, trance-inducing music, self-mutilation, and a non-alcoholic ritual intoxication. Far and wide the dying consort worshiped by these cults was a god of vegetation, ecstasy, revelation, and salvation; by ingesting his body initiates underwent a profound mystical experience.
From what limited information has survived from antiquity, it appears that the rites practiced in the eastern mystery cults were in essence traditional shamanic ordeals
remodeled to suit the psychological needs of Mediterranean civilization‘s marginalized people.
This paper argues that the myths of this vegetable god, so-called ̳the Divine Bridegroom,‘
particularly in manifestation of the Phrygian Attis and the Greek Dionysus, is deeply rooted in the life-cycle, cultivation, treatment, consumption of a tree-born hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria."
(Dionysian Semiotics: Myco-Dendrolatry and Other Shamanic Motifs in the Myths and Rituals of the Phrygian Mother)
https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/7857/Attrell_Daniel.pdf?sequence=1
Clark Heinrich describes how initiates were made aware of "meeting" the god-plant and being in the presence of a god. "One can also feel extremely energetic and strong, and this strength is not an illusion. It is well known among Siberian users of the fly agaric that feats of tremendous physical endurance are possible under its influence."
Clark Heinrich, Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy, 2002, Inner Traditions, (Rochester: Park Street
It's bisexual morphology is symbolic: "the correct god-plant: the plant grows in the mountains, low to the ground; it contains the power of a god; it resembles a serpent in several ways; it stands on one "staff' and is phallic in appearance; it has white patches covering its "breast"; and it glows red like a live coal."
It can actually simulate or produce with poison a near-death experience or the psychic ego-death common to psychedelics. "The foreskin of the penis is related to the cap of the fly agaric. It could easily be construed to refer to the whole cap and not just the universal veil, and since the entire cap separates from the base at "circumcision," cutting off the cap still leaves the phallic stalk intact."
Heinrich continues, "bloody" juice flows from the moistened" cap. A woman using the fly agaric in similar fashion by herself could also address the mushroom directly with the same statement, "Surely you are a bloody husband to me." For that matter, so could a man."
Daniel Attrell describes how, "What appears to be afoot in Kybele's myth is a description of Amanita muscaria‘s life-cycle at the base of a tree, which begins in a spore dropped during the blooming and potential extirpation of a preceding generation of mushrooms. The spore falls into the earth and unites mycorrhizally with its host tree. The tree, which is the dismembered member of the once androgynous goddess, and its red fruit emerge first in the myth. The fruit conjoined with moisture...begets the birth of Attis." (Attrell)
https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/7857/Attrell_Daniel.pdf?sequence=1
Attis, his resurrecting "little finger", and his ever-growing hair are mythical symbols for the deified intoxicant.
Dactyli (Gr.) From daktulos, “a finger” is the name given to the Phrygian Hierophants of Kybele, who were regarded as the greatest magicians and exorcists. In the era of Hittites, Chaldean priests took refuge in Anatolia. The priests were five or ten in number because of the five fingers on one hand that blessed, and the ten on both hands which evoke the gods. Was that code for a powerful dosage? They also healed by manipulation and hypnosis.
Curetes were Priest-Initiates of ancient Crete, in the service of Cybele. Initiation in their temples was very severe; it lasted twenty-seven days, during which time the aspirant was left by himself in a crypt, undergoing terrible trials in a secret subterranean vault.
There were crypts under every temple in antiquity, used for initiation and burial. Kybele was associated with cannabis, "the mother plant," so we might speculate that such initiates where anointed with concentrated oils to enhance their underworld experience, similar to Egyptian initiations (Bennett).
Pythagoras was initiated into these rites and came out victorious. Zosimos and Paracelsus spoke of the homunculus as devouring himself, and giving birth to himself—the death/rebirth necessary for casting off the old and inviting in the new self image.
This bisexual goddess was worshiped with orgies of ecstatic freedom under various names for the mystery of self-reproduction. A single divine life conferred spiritual intimacy with the underworld and protective cosmic influence. The Anatolians and Ionians worshiped a divine family of a mother, and a male deity who was her son, her spouse, her brother, and sometimes father. But they were considered one bisexual being.
Her names have morphed over the years, but not her archetypal qualities. Kybele is her Greek form, and Cybele is Roman. Believers and devotees never forgot her grace or miraculous visits. As Cybele, her authority predates the Olympians, and through early Cretan practice she embodies the Titan Rhea, archaic Hekate, and even the all-encompassing Mother Goddess Gaia, and deities of Eleusis. When the Romans took over Asia Minor, Artemis became Diana and Ephesus became the provincial Roman Capital.
Later the Vatican was built over her pagan Roman shrine. The oriental cults of Cybele, Isis, and Mithras were Romanized myth, salvation, and ethics in the cults of Cybele. As a side note, Heinrich has reported that monks used tonsure and their red skull cap as symbols of amanita rites. The preparation was rubbed on the bald scalp, rather than ingested. Many priestly vestments hark back to the vivid red and white of the mushroom.
The eastern Kybele cult was absorbed into the Ophite Gnostic 'heresy' of serpent worship -- a Kundalini path that worshiped Kybele as the gnostic Sophia. This harks back to the dual raised-bodied serpents flanking the figure seen in the Neolithic totem from Gobekli Tepe, pre-dating any Indian syncretism. The serpent was primal cosmic energy, creativity, and wisdom. The serpent or dragon Adepts of divine wisdom taught primeval mysteries to archaic mankind.
In this sense Kybele was the prototypical Black Madonna, the 'black light' of the undulant darkness, connected with caring, tending, childbirth, animals, and the bees. Caring for the earth and regeneration enlivens our care for the body. She is aware of our hardships, the uncertainty and unconsciousness of the dark cloud of unknowing, uncertainty, ignorance, and innocence. Suffering brings us into the unknown.
“Have You Forgotten? I Am Your Mother. You Are Under My Protection.”
“There is a promise Holy Mother makes to us,” explains Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Untie the Strong Woman, “that any soul needing comfort, vision, guidance, or strength can cry out to her, flee to her protection, and Blessed Mother will immediately arrive with veils flying. She will place us under her mantle for refuge, and give us the warmth of her most compassionate touch, and strong guidance about how to go by the soul’s lights.”
https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10315/32726/Carla_Ionescu_Dissertation_Manuscript.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
https://books.google.com/books?id=dXQkDQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=ophite+gnosticism+kybele,+cybele&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiXk-fAyK7jAhWHrFQKHaS5BzoQ6AEITzAG#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://www.academia.edu/11575268/9_000_Years_of_the_Goddess_in_Anatolia
In her chthonic and funereal aspect Kybele was "the guardian of the dead in the underworld and as a caring mother whose image was customarily placed in graves as a reminder that 'the Queen of the Shadows never abandoned the dead..." As Magna Mater, she is the protectress and guardian of souls who stops them from wandering in the shadows, making the soul brave against evil and fears. She was a loyal redeemer who wiped out sin and impiety.
https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10092/10791/Bell_thesis.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Sacrifices include herbs, cypress, myrrh, civet, blood, pomegranate, and opium poppy. Her statues show her holding a bunch of wheat and poppy heads symbolizing her role as the goddess of agriculture. Anatolians called her "the mother of poppies." Her pharmacopeia also included cannabis and psychoactive mushrooms. The same devotees would likely be familiar with ephedra and Syrian rue (harmala). Ancient healers used poppies medicinally to aid menstruation and childbirth
Biodrama is a form of play therapy. The Great Mother goddess let the entire community participate in the healing and celebration rituals that were the origin of theatre. Hidden wisdom, sacred awareness, and memory were held within this performative matrix for the exaltation of natural energies witnessed personally by the 'beholder-of-secrets.' You can't be told but have to see it for yourself.
Kybele's primary historical image was a hermaphroditic God(dess), the primordial androgyne -- sovereign matron crowned with towers, seated in a chariot drawn by lions. Her androgyny symbolized a wild and uncontrollable nature and savage masculine animus.
She is our deepest memory. Focusing on the goddess herself, rather than her gender transgression, reveling retinue, castrated priesthood, or sensationalistic orgiastic rites and related cults, we seek a felt-sense of her living presence within us, beyond historical knowledge of this archetypal mother.
One approach is to drop into the body and get a sensation for where a feeling is, following it around, if necessary. Sensory responses are evoked potentials. When we detect a response we have a place to begin noticing, remembering, and processing.
At the threshold level we have a 50-50 chance of detecting our response as attention or distraction. We may feel it weakly or even wonder if we felt it at all. This way we can reactivate pretty much any feeling we've ever had or that lives deep in us with a new level of sensation and connection in the present. We become aware of issues by their somatic, energetic, and emotional components.
Kybele is Original Consciousness being the first Immortal. The dragon or serpent represents the initial state of unconsciousness. The paradoxical image typically appears before dissolution of the center into its unconscious element—the undifferentiated consciousness of the ground state.
Consciousness does not mean individual awareness. The larger concept includes the personal unconscious and collective mind, conscious and unconscious. Consciousness is the bottomless pit or abyss of the indivisible whole. It means the world. In the most inclusive sense it is cosmic consciousness. The mind's nature is primordial awareness, practiced by shaman, mystics and sages from time immemorial.
Evolving Archetypal Matrix
Ancient divinities were not static, but expressed cultural systems that responded to historical change. Being remains constant during the process of becoming. The Anatolian Kybele was a dynamic Goddess of the Cycle, never to be taken lightly. Her worship was dated to about 6,000 BCE. Now, some suggest her ancestral worship goes back at least 10,000 years to the era of Gobekli Tepe with its birth statuary and monumental carved pillars.
The Ionian worship of Artemis at Ephesus was built upon the ancient worship of Kybele. She embodied the Mother Goddess of mountains, caves, and vines by incorporating the traits of primal indigenous traditions with its paradoxical relationship to city life. The Great Mother, (Meter, Gr.), hides an array of other feminine ways of enacting life. She is the original Immortal from whom all creation is derived. She personifies vital essence, the upwelling fountain of all that breathes.
"The Breath of Cyblele"
Akash and the Akashic Records have been linked to primordial informational fields. Even Tesla says, “All perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasha or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles, all things and phenomena.” (Man’s Greatest Achievement, 1907)
"The breath of Cybele" is equivalent to akasha-tattva, the stuff of miracles, visions, apparitions, and paranormal phenomena. This aether or 'astral light' is the primordial cosmic root-matter, “the divine space,” “the primordial ocean of space,” “the celestial virgin-mother,” etc. In mythology and dreams, the sea symbolizes the unfathomable unconscious. We encounter more primitive layers the deeper we go into the unconscious, an information field outside space-time likened to a black hole.
Akasha is also the divine screen recording permanent images of every thought, deed, or event, indelibly impressed on this enigmatic medium. It contains the wholeness of past, present, and future making it synonymous with Jung's collective unconscious or the holographic information medium. This holofield can be likened to physicist David Bohm's implicate order, a “potential reality” behind the space-time “experienced reality” within which we ordinarily navigate.
If akasha is a deep dimension in the universe that generates and interconnects all things in the world, it gives us a new, encompassing concept of cosmos and consciousness, fresh meaning for our life, and reliable guidance for creating our future. The body exchanges information with the quantum vacuum. Coherence is the criteria for existence with flux, process, and stasis over time. There are less certainties in process.
We recognize that our “coherence” is our connection with our interior and exterior world – the key to our health and viability in a self-actualizing cosmos. From the inside, our embeddedness in nonlocal coherence give us access to information beyond the reach of our physical senses. This framework anticipates and expects paranormal phenomena in "a locally and nonlocally interconnected and interacting universe," according to Whitehead the philosopher.
Pythagoras called the deepest reality kosmos, with a k, unbroken wholeness, the prior ground, or substrate. Jung called it the unmanifest Plenum, from which all manifest phenomena arise from the relationships in a deeper dimension of reality. It is either a spirit or consciousness that infuses the natural world (the immanentist view), or a spirit or consciousness that is above and beyond it (the transcendentalist claim).
Laszlo calls the akashic field the quantum vacuum, which contains all the information of our history from the Big Bang to now and is also consciousness. It is saturated with vibrant potential energy and is in fact a highly energetic medium, an absolute fullness of potential energy, the dynamic modification of which actually "emanates" what we call mass, matter or material form. This is the realm of quantum electrodynamics.
Akasha is described as an infinite potential energy and as the source of various kinds of vibration, especially those of sound and light, which are the basis of the created universe. Akasha is the universal soul, the matrix of the universe, the mysterium magnum from which all that exists is born by separation or differentiation. The cause of existence, it fills all infinite space and is space itself, (Krippner, Future Science).
This groundstate of nature is the heart of matter and it implies the notion of a continuous creation. Our nature is radiant scalar energy, the nonobservable yet roiling cosmic ocean of vacuum fluctuation, the disassembled roots of all being, the true primordial soup, reflected in the myths of Kybele who arose from chaos.
The Heart Sutra claims that all form is nothing but Void and quantum physics agrees. J. Krishnamurti said, "Nothingness is not a reality [created by thought] but it is the truth." This matrix is, indeed, the mother of all life, uncreated, having always been there -- the bisexual goddess from whom all the world originated.
Kybele was religiously called "the Mother" in hymns and votive dedications, but in devotion, poetry and literature, devotees used her personal name. Ma of Cappadocia was also a mother-warrior. The marble Temple of Artemis Ephesia, known as the Artemision, was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Artemis Ephesus inherits the characteristics, responsibilities, and authority, of the Cretan “Mother of Gods,” Kybele. She protects springs, rivers, lakes, and marshes. Her inheritance is a powerful royal lineage, a worldly responsibility, and complete dominion over all Ephesian citizens. In Ephesus, Artemis is not just an Olympian. Her legend is built on that of the bold Amazon founders of her city. Whether they did or not, it was a widely held belief of those times that lent her credibility in the warrior-maiden tradition.
Her Olympian birth story claims she was a terribly wild and hermaphroditic being, castrated at birth. Her son-lovers and eunuch priests emulated this -- life subject to death but never dying, but reproducing in new forms of self-identity. These priests lost their fertility but not the pneuma of their psychic spirit, in which unbridled sexuality imparted initiatory salvation. Such a non-specific mental amplifier is conditioned by cult programming and ritual direction of the strong process of alternate reality of ephemeral beings, light, colors, and information.
"Behind closed eyes, initiates of the mysteries beheld awe-striking visions, theriomorphic transformations, and inconceivable phantasmagoria; on the outside, however, initiates were
pulled through a hallucinatory ritual drama by priests and former initiates. At the root of many of these initiatory circles there endured a number of ritual practices stretching back to the Neolithic period whereby intoxicated initiates re-enacted the drama of an androgynous dying god being united with his mistress." (Atrell, 2013)
Meeting the God-Plant
In her Mysteries, Cybele mourned the death of her beloved and the passing of her devotees . They were transformed by her communion, mystique, and the attainment of sacred knowledge (gnosis) through identification with Attis, her son-lover. They were collectively known as the Galli.
In the myths of Attis, Kybele bargained with fate and the gods so his hair and regenerated phallus grow under the pine tree forever - an analogy for mycelium and fruits of the amanita muscaria mushroom, a likely source for the revelers mania, dropping the habitual self for a primordial regression. It can only be described as a shamanic ordeal, a soma sacifice of all that is material.
Those who ate the mushrooms felt the god within themselves as reality dissolved into wriggling serpents. Shepherds tending flocks would have found the fly agaric high in the wild mountains after rains, when the mountains of the goddess were raging with thunderstorms on the slopes.
Daniel Atrell summarizes in his thesis:
"Abstract - The administration of initiation rites by an ecstatic specialist, now known to western scholarship by the general designation of ̳shaman‘, has proven to be one of humanity‘s oldest, most widespread, and continuous magico-religious traditions. At the heart of their initiatory rituals lay an ordeal–a metaphysical journey - almost ubiquitously brought on by the effects of a life-changing hallucinogenic drug experience. To guide their initiates, these shaman worked with a repertoire of locally acquired instruments, costumes, dances, and ecstasy-inducing substances.
Among past Mediterranean cultures, Semitic and Indo-European, these sorts of initiation rites were vital to society‘s spiritual well-being. It was, however, the mystery schools of antiquity–organizations founded upon conserving the secrets of plant-lore, astrology, theurgy and mystical philosophy–which satisfied the role of the shaman in Greco-Roman society.
The rites they delivered to the common individual were a form of ritualized ecstasy and they provided an orderly context for religiously-oriented intoxication.
In the eastern Mediterranean, these ecstatic cults weremost often held in honour of a great
mother goddess and her perennially dying-and-rising consort. The goddess‘ religious dramas enacted in cultic ritual stressed the importance of fasting, drumming, trance-inducing music, self-mutilation, and a non-alcoholic ritual intoxication. Far and wide the dying consort worshiped by these cults was a god of vegetation, ecstasy, revelation, and salvation; by ingesting his body initiates underwent a profound mystical experience.
From what limited information has survived from antiquity, it appears that the rites practiced in the eastern mystery cults were in essence traditional shamanic ordeals
remodeled to suit the psychological needs of Mediterranean civilization‘s marginalized people.
This paper argues that the myths of this vegetable god, so-called ̳the Divine Bridegroom,‘
particularly in manifestation of the Phrygian Attis and the Greek Dionysus, is deeply rooted in the life-cycle, cultivation, treatment, consumption of a tree-born hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria."
(Dionysian Semiotics: Myco-Dendrolatry and Other Shamanic Motifs in the Myths and Rituals of the Phrygian Mother)
https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/7857/Attrell_Daniel.pdf?sequence=1
Clark Heinrich describes how initiates were made aware of "meeting" the god-plant and being in the presence of a god. "One can also feel extremely energetic and strong, and this strength is not an illusion. It is well known among Siberian users of the fly agaric that feats of tremendous physical endurance are possible under its influence."
Clark Heinrich, Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy, 2002, Inner Traditions, (Rochester: Park Street
It's bisexual morphology is symbolic: "the correct god-plant: the plant grows in the mountains, low to the ground; it contains the power of a god; it resembles a serpent in several ways; it stands on one "staff' and is phallic in appearance; it has white patches covering its "breast"; and it glows red like a live coal."
It can actually simulate or produce with poison a near-death experience or the psychic ego-death common to psychedelics. "The foreskin of the penis is related to the cap of the fly agaric. It could easily be construed to refer to the whole cap and not just the universal veil, and since the entire cap separates from the base at "circumcision," cutting off the cap still leaves the phallic stalk intact."
Heinrich continues, "bloody" juice flows from the moistened" cap. A woman using the fly agaric in similar fashion by herself could also address the mushroom directly with the same statement, "Surely you are a bloody husband to me." For that matter, so could a man."
Daniel Attrell describes how, "What appears to be afoot in Kybele's myth is a description of Amanita muscaria‘s life-cycle at the base of a tree, which begins in a spore dropped during the blooming and potential extirpation of a preceding generation of mushrooms. The spore falls into the earth and unites mycorrhizally with its host tree. The tree, which is the dismembered member of the once androgynous goddess, and its red fruit emerge first in the myth. The fruit conjoined with moisture...begets the birth of Attis." (Attrell)
https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/7857/Attrell_Daniel.pdf?sequence=1
Attis, his resurrecting "little finger", and his ever-growing hair are mythical symbols for the deified intoxicant.
Dactyli (Gr.) From daktulos, “a finger” is the name given to the Phrygian Hierophants of Kybele, who were regarded as the greatest magicians and exorcists. In the era of Hittites, Chaldean priests took refuge in Anatolia. The priests were five or ten in number because of the five fingers on one hand that blessed, and the ten on both hands which evoke the gods. Was that code for a powerful dosage? They also healed by manipulation and hypnosis.
Curetes were Priest-Initiates of ancient Crete, in the service of Cybele. Initiation in their temples was very severe; it lasted twenty-seven days, during which time the aspirant was left by himself in a crypt, undergoing terrible trials in a secret subterranean vault.
There were crypts under every temple in antiquity, used for initiation and burial. Kybele was associated with cannabis, "the mother plant," so we might speculate that such initiates where anointed with concentrated oils to enhance their underworld experience, similar to Egyptian initiations (Bennett).
Pythagoras was initiated into these rites and came out victorious. Zosimos and Paracelsus spoke of the homunculus as devouring himself, and giving birth to himself—the death/rebirth necessary for casting off the old and inviting in the new self image.
This bisexual goddess was worshiped with orgies of ecstatic freedom under various names for the mystery of self-reproduction. A single divine life conferred spiritual intimacy with the underworld and protective cosmic influence. The Anatolians and Ionians worshiped a divine family of a mother, and a male deity who was her son, her spouse, her brother, and sometimes father. But they were considered one bisexual being.
Her names have morphed over the years, but not her archetypal qualities. Kybele is her Greek form, and Cybele is Roman. Believers and devotees never forgot her grace or miraculous visits. As Cybele, her authority predates the Olympians, and through early Cretan practice she embodies the Titan Rhea, archaic Hekate, and even the all-encompassing Mother Goddess Gaia, and deities of Eleusis. When the Romans took over Asia Minor, Artemis became Diana and Ephesus became the provincial Roman Capital.
Later the Vatican was built over her pagan Roman shrine. The oriental cults of Cybele, Isis, and Mithras were Romanized myth, salvation, and ethics in the cults of Cybele. As a side note, Heinrich has reported that monks used tonsure and their red skull cap as symbols of amanita rites. The preparation was rubbed on the bald scalp, rather than ingested. Many priestly vestments hark back to the vivid red and white of the mushroom.
The eastern Kybele cult was absorbed into the Ophite Gnostic 'heresy' of serpent worship -- a Kundalini path that worshiped Kybele as the gnostic Sophia. This harks back to the dual raised-bodied serpents flanking the figure seen in the Neolithic totem from Gobekli Tepe, pre-dating any Indian syncretism. The serpent was primal cosmic energy, creativity, and wisdom. The serpent or dragon Adepts of divine wisdom taught primeval mysteries to archaic mankind.
In this sense Kybele was the prototypical Black Madonna, the 'black light' of the undulant darkness, connected with caring, tending, childbirth, animals, and the bees. Caring for the earth and regeneration enlivens our care for the body. She is aware of our hardships, the uncertainty and unconsciousness of the dark cloud of unknowing, uncertainty, ignorance, and innocence. Suffering brings us into the unknown.
“Have You Forgotten? I Am Your Mother. You Are Under My Protection.”
“There is a promise Holy Mother makes to us,” explains Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Untie the Strong Woman, “that any soul needing comfort, vision, guidance, or strength can cry out to her, flee to her protection, and Blessed Mother will immediately arrive with veils flying. She will place us under her mantle for refuge, and give us the warmth of her most compassionate touch, and strong guidance about how to go by the soul’s lights.”
https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10315/32726/Carla_Ionescu_Dissertation_Manuscript.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
https://books.google.com/books?id=dXQkDQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=ophite+gnosticism+kybele,+cybele&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiXk-fAyK7jAhWHrFQKHaS5BzoQ6AEITzAG#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://www.academia.edu/11575268/9_000_Years_of_the_Goddess_in_Anatolia
REFERENCES
Sfameni Gasparro, Giulia. Soteriology and Mystic Aspects in the Cult of Cybele and Attis. Leiden, 1985.
Vermaseren, Maarten J. Cybele and Attis: The Myth and the Cult. Translated by A. M. H. Lemmers. London, 1977.
The Earth Has a Soul: The Nature Writings of C.G. Jung By Carl Gustav Jung
Dionysian Semiotics: Myco-Dendrolatry and Other Shamanic Motifs in the Myths and Rituals
of the Phrygian Mother by Daniel Attrell 2013 https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/7857/Attrell_Daniel.pdf?sequence=1
The Phrygian Background of Kybele Birgitte Bøgh, Numen Vol. 54, No. 3 (2007), pp. 304-339
Published by: Brill https://www.jstor.org/stable/27643268
Birth totem from Gobekli Tepe, Anatolia, discovered in 2010. The woman giving birth in the mid-part of the sculpture, is herself an aspect of the greater figure who thus appears to have the aspect of a birth Goddess: a mother gives birth, to a mother that gives birth, to a mother that gives birth to a child.
Many ancient cultures depict a divine being, a central figure, a forward-facing male or female figure with outstretched hands holding a pair of identical symbols (animals, staffs, scepters, etc.). These symbolic objects represent opposing principles, including conscious and unconscious -- the co-existence of contradictory essences in human reality.
They can result in a third thing like the offspring of male and female, like the in and out breath that creates life. Jung called this the coincidentia oppositorum, central to the meaning of paradigm, paradox and the structure of reality. Archetypal opposites include the pro-historical and anti-historical.
The dualities remain the same across time: unconscious dynamics of good and evil, light and dark, male and female, sun and moon, sacred and profane, chthonic (earth underworld) and pneumatic (airy, upper world), pleasure and pain, sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system.
Many ancient cultures depict a divine being, a central figure, a forward-facing male or female figure with outstretched hands holding a pair of identical symbols (animals, staffs, scepters, etc.). These symbolic objects represent opposing principles, including conscious and unconscious -- the co-existence of contradictory essences in human reality.
They can result in a third thing like the offspring of male and female, like the in and out breath that creates life. Jung called this the coincidentia oppositorum, central to the meaning of paradigm, paradox and the structure of reality. Archetypal opposites include the pro-historical and anti-historical.
The dualities remain the same across time: unconscious dynamics of good and evil, light and dark, male and female, sun and moon, sacred and profane, chthonic (earth underworld) and pneumatic (airy, upper world), pleasure and pain, sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system.