To Helios-Heart of Heaven ′′ Listen, king of intellectual fire, Titan of golden reins, listen, dispenser of light, O sovereign!, you who have the key to the sustaining source and distribute from the top in material worlds the abundant stream of harmony. Listen, for being over the headquarters of the ether and having a very splendid circle, heart of heaven, you fill all of your providence that awakens intellect. The planets that stick your torches are always lit, always under relentless and tireless choreas, send vivifying sparkles to men. And every generation, under your returning courses, is reborn according to the law of Hours. And the rumble of elements that go against each other ceases since you, son of an ineffable progenitor." Proclo, Anthem to Helios (extract)
Primordial Deities
About 4.6 billion years ago, our solar system, the Sun and the Earth were formed. Myth straddles a scientifically false account of the world, and one which never took place as recounted but contains core truths about the universe or human experience.
Myths reveal the human condition in relation to the sky, stars, and planets. The theory and nature of myth is related to the sky. The Titan god Helios is one such personification. The ancients naturally worshiped the life-giving sun, the symbol of the Source and origin of all things.
The circumpunct symbol has been around for millennia, as "the circle with the dot in the middle." The circumpunct meaning ranges from an explanation of deity, to an explanation of the self. The circumpunct is one of most symbolic of all symbols. An Egyptian solar symbol dates back to Ra (or Re), god of the midday sun. In fact, the circle with a midpoint, plus a vertical line is the hieroglyph meaning "sun."
The all-seeing eyes derives from the circumpunct. The most ancient initiatory and healing symbols, the circumpunct, a dot within a circle and/or a cross within a circle symbolizes the inner sun. is all-seeing eye evolved from prehistoric sun-disc images. The solar cross and wheel pendants mark the cardinal directions and the zodiacal houses of the precessional Great Year, a 26,000 years long cycle.
Helios symbolizes the order of solstices punctuated by periodic eclipses. Ancient mankind built megaliths, burial chambers, and cave features to predict these cycles and fearsome wonders. Today, we use telescopes, and the heart of each telescope is a mirror which brings things into focus.
The primacy of Helios reflects the primacy of consciousness. Solar energy and fire were always natural metaphors of creative power that becomes exhausted, then sinks back into its prior unconscious condition. Helios became the symbol of pure consciousness shining in the darkness of the unknown and the spiritual vision of the seer, described by H.P. Blavatsky:
"[The] “opened eye” is the inner spiritual eye of the seer, and the faculty which manifests through it is not clairvoyance as ordinarily understood, i.e., the power of seeing at a distance, but rather the faculty of spiritual intuition, through which direct and certain knowledge is obtainable. This faculty is intimately connected with the “third eye"...
All creation stories, scientific or mythic, describe the manifestation of something out of nothing. Beyond our experience of material reality in spacetime, there is a field of infinite potential, of unbounded possibilities, of absolute space, absolute nature. It is the source of naturally arising light. Light arises like consciousness, thoughts, images, and other mental events arise in our field of experience.
Fiat LVX
Only light is omnipresent and eternal. Science now confirms what the alchemists knew centuries ago, that it is more than metaphorical. The meaning of Life is Light. Absolute Light, archetypal divine fire, radiates from the Tree of Life as the vital formative principle. The light of earth and heaven, the animating powers, mingle in our consciousness.
The Light fulfills us and we are fulfilled in its revelation. It shines through us as the internal sun, as a radiant, incandescent orb of light at the heart. This sun of illumination and transformation is the effulgence of transcendental Light. The physical embodiment of spiritual light is Helios, living true to our own integrity.
Self-illumined Light is both an inner (biophysical) and outer (quantum and cosmological) essential phenomena. Mystics say once the inner sun arises in inner vision, it never sets but shines unceasingly, giving riseto gnosis or Divine Knowledge.Kabir claimed,‘The practitioner becomes immortal and never dies.’
Mythically, the void is the reality of possibility. Where do these unseen possibilities come from and what part of nature are they? The void is not devoid, but seethes with fleeting electromagnetic waves and particles that pop into and out of existence. The void is the flux of virtual photons/antiphotons in “negative” space. The void expresses its potentiality in creation.
Electromagnetic energy and particles arise from the virtual vacuum flux of subspace – the Void, which is the metaphysical root of all form. Vacuum friction creates matter from virtual photon flux. It is an experiential metaphor for the perpetual light of nature, the lumennaturae. Unconscious contents struggle toward the light of consciousness. When the sun rises each day it tangibly shows evil has not triumphed during the darkness and order is still here.
Unseen vacuum-spawned particles are constantly flickering in and out of existence around us. They arise from and sink back into the void as pure massless charge flux. Light is hidden in matter and the forces of nature.
We see it gleaming beyond the Abyss that distinguishes being from nondual unmanifest existence. The holographic blur focuses as biological entanglement. Our body is inseparably entangled with an interpenetrating holographic energy body which is entangled the holographic cosmos.
Heaven (Ouranos) and Earth (Gaia) merge and create manifest reality -- the big bang. A flux of virtual photons connects our universe with the non-spatio-temporal. Matter arises from the plenum/void of the virtual vacuum potential -- pre-spacetime.
The vacuum substructure is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness of unvarying, unchanging reality -- the groundstate of being. The "ground" is typically invisible.
Internal Sun
The full force of the clear Light of the Divine would blind us, but it is mediated by the LuxNaturae which is always with us. Only in this new millennium have we learned just how literal it is. Light is hidden in matter and the forces of nature, according to physicist David Bohm, so you must seek and see it for yourself.
Psyche reaches toward selfhood. We must cultivate it like an artist. Our medium is the energy body; our means spiritual technology for the soft machine. By this secret fire, the living balsam of nature is brought forth from darkness to light.
In the One World of alchemy, inner and outer light are identical, seamlessly wed like Luna and Sol in illumined lunacy. The light within life is our own awareness, mediated by our energy bodies (field body), which fills each particle of being. Direct communication is healing, realigning body and soul.
We finally come to our senses. When we meditate we come to know the meaning of scintillae and the light of the darkness. We see it gleaming beyond the Abyss that distinguishes being from nondual unmanifest existence, divine luminosity.
Matter is composed of and utterly dependent on organic light that fills the universe and our bodies. The Great Work is an operation of Light. This light has an earthly and spiritual aspect, a psychosomatic and archetypal nature. This meaningful light of our own darkness is the holy Grail, the diamond Stone, the curative Elixir that links our ego-experience and spiritual unity. Self-knowledge is the science of Creation.
Unseen Reality
Symbols connect objectivity and subjectivity. Their relationship contains the meaning and importance of what we describe as reality. The reality is symbolic, not objective or subjective.
Ultimate reality is the heart of ontology. There are ontological realities with valid status that are not observable, but can be explored philosophically and mythically. Our forefathers were particularly fascinated by the starry heavens. It was the projected unconscious which was so fascinating.
Jung noted (ETH, Alchemy, Pages 224-231), "The sun, moon and planets were the exponents, so to speak, of certain psychological or psychical constituents of the human character. ...our forefathers saw all unconscious psychical events, that is, all the roots of the human character, in the sky. ...It was not only the stars which contained the projections of the ancients but the whole space between the stars and the earth, regarded as the kingdom of the air."
Spiritual water deeply impressed our forefathers. Water also described the essence of the unconscious, the wisdom of nature, and "the mysterious operative in nature, which determines us." Unconscious contents arise from this sea of undifferentiated material. Jung said indigenous cultures liken 'scintillae' or soul sparks to the souls of the ancestors. This prima materia is the land of the dead, our populated interior.
Our unconscious still functions like it did 2-4 million years ago. Most generations remain unconscious of their projections and identifications. Sometimes self-image, projections, and dogmas get shattered in self-revealing truth of self, others, and world. A light constellates within our opaque participation mystique as revelatory ecstasy. Transformation by the environment also builds resilience.
Primeval Creativity
Like the Sun, contents of awareness can descend into the unconscious and they can also arise from it. Given enough silence of deep space we can make contact with thoughts that are centuries old. The ancestors are the means of sending consciousness back through time. We protect ourselves from the dissolving influence of outer world with abstraction, and from the inner subjective world with empathy.
The Sun is the primordial symbol of consciousness, rooted in unconscious participation mystique. We may be fully unaware of our participation, but when "the sun is up," we realize the full extent of our participation in the reality surrounding us as an intrinsic part of reality. Aware of it or not we simply exist as a participating being -- the one primordial human being in us all.
Some of our ancestral revelations are a new picture of reality requiring a conversion of our imaginations, a healing of soul wounds. Although we can see the sun rising in the east and setting in the west on its daily trip around the Earth, we are suffering from an illusion. Things don't happen that way at all: the Earth is actually revolving around the sun.
We are all born into the unconscious dimension where all individuals are without boundaries and identical. We tear ourselves away from the collective unconscious womb with radiant consciousness. Like the sun's daily cycle, we begin with unconscious participation mystique and go through the process of self-discovery in phases and passages of life. We come to a conscious awareness of the participation mystique, described by poet Juan Ramon Jimenez in “Full Consciousness.”
You are carrying me, full consciousness, god that has desired all through the world. Here, in this third sea, I almost hear your voice; your voice, the wind, freeing entirely all movements; eternal colors and eternal lights, sea colors and sea lights. Your voice of white fire in the universe of water, the ship, the sky, marking out the roads with delight, engraving for me with a blazing light my firm orbit: a black body with glowing diamond in its center.
Existence Paradigms
The Greeks speculated on their place in the cosmos and spoke of primordial Chaos and Nothingness. The quantum vacuum is a dynamic massless scalar field. In quantum cosmology, spacetime originated in a domain (zero point, quantum vacuum state) that isn't in time and space. The entire universe and all subatomic particles emerged from this pre-creation virtual state, which has no linear time, solidity, dimensionality, energy, etc.
Ontology describes such operators. It models the origin of either the cosmos or universe. Cosmogonies explore the fact that we exist when there could be nothing at all. Humans have wondered why there is a universe and not some existential void completely unconscious of itself. Thus, accounts of the mythic descent of man became necessary (Ananke).
Ontology, investigates what there is, the fundamental nature of existence; 'meta'-ontology investigates what we are asking when we ask what there is. Questions include: What exists; what is a thing; what are the categories of exist in things; what is the meaning of being; what are the modes of being entities? We try to describe existence with the essential features of universals and particulars, the universe and our place in it.
The classical Greek creation myth is a theory of nature with many plausible aspects. They obey the same rules. Higher dimensions of space are real and contain spiritual beings.
The myths describe the ontological domains of the hyperspace Primordials, the Titans, and the Olympians, ready to be manifest. These cycles may mark ancient discontinuities or catastrophes. Neolithic cultures may not be the first. Many Greek gods have Thracian or Asian antecedents.
This three-era process is a meta-ontology with hierarchical connections between its sub-empirical things, or virtual entities, to assess or affirm their realism and qualities. Some connections are fundamental and some derived, as in a descent.
Ontology studies the nature of being, becoming, existence or reality as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. It is the metaphysics concerning what entities exist or may be said to exist and how such entities may be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences. So a genealogical hierarchy of first causes as divine forces is a metaphysical myth.
Ontology only became ordered with Aristotle and his emphasis upon identifying the most fundamental objects. Grounding is a topic in metaphysics. One thing is sometimes said to "ground" another when the first in some way accounts for the being of the second. For example, acts about physical particles allegedly ground facts about larger objects.
The genealogy of the gods makes them a classical hierarchy. Mythic stories correspond with hidden aspects of reality, archetypal entities, their relationships, and interactions. They tried to describe the evolution of the universe consistent with their observations. Plotting mythical events won't correlate with astrophysics but there are analogies and coherence.
Epistemology justifies how we know what we know. How is it acquired, tested, stored, revised, updated, and retrieved? Meta-epistemology tries to identify inaccurate traditional assumptions, or generalizations. Philosophy extends it beyond its traditional domain of word-based definitions.
Myth reveals some remarkable wisdom, the quality of radiance attributed to Hyperion, father of Helios. Great wisdom is the sole eye of primordial consciousness. When it opens we perceive the nature of ultimate reality, suchness, "reality," or the way things really are, even the necessity of afflictions.
“To use the word “reality” implies an ontological condition that cannot be otherwise. Therefore there must be something unalterably necessary about images so that psychic reality, which first of all consists in images, cannot be mere afterimages of sense impressions. Images are primordial, archetypal, in themselves ultimate reals, the only direct reality that the psyche experiences. As such they are the shaped presences of necessity.” (Hillman)
The ancient Greeks imagined Helios as a gigantic eye with a halo, observing everything his light could touch. Helios, who sees everything that his light touches. The worship of Helios came from Asia. Not only the sun-god, he was also the personification of life and all life-giving power. Light is an indispensable condition of all healthy terrestrial life. Such metaphors still appear in art, as in the song, “African Night Flight” by David Bowie:
"Seemed like another day I could fly into the eye of god on high His burning eye will see me through One of these days, one of these days Gotta get a word through one of these days."
Before the Sun
Was the primeval fireball of the Big Bang the first light? Tiny density fluctuations in the primeval plasma are the seeds of later galaxy formation, confirmed in 1922. Without them, there would be nothing from which galaxies, clusters and superclusters of galaxies, and therefore stars, could evolve.
There is a primordial abundance of light chemical elements, helium, deuterium and lithium. All the heavier elements, like carbon, oxygen, phosphorous, copper, iron, chlorine, uranium, etc., are only produced later — in the cores of stars or in the supernova explosions which herald their demise.
The Greek myth may not have been right, but it wasn't entirely wrong, at least metaphorically. Today, we understand chaos as a self-organizing principle. Like the seeds of galaxy making, chaos theory discusses self-organization in terms of islands of predictability in a sea of chaotic unpredictability. Spontaneous ordering requires no outside agents beyond random fluctuation. Chaos was the first thing to exist but from it Gaia (ground; matter) Eros, and other Primordials emerged.
Science still struggles with the conundrum of the creation of the universe, energy, and matter. A cosmogony is a creation story, not a cosmology. The light of the sun becomes important after an episode where there was none as in global catastrophe. The dual character of the ancient mother goddess as both radiant star and primal chaos is a great mystery.
In modern cosmology, the Primordial Era is the first 10,000 years, when the universe was dominated by radiation. The Greek primordial era is a myth of ultimates. Holistic coherent primordial process includes the roles of matter and radiation. This notion likely traces back 10,000 years or more from the present.
Jung thought mankind experienced rather than invented myths. The archetypes as structures mediate intuitive and symbolic knowledge. Laughlin summarizes, “The archetypes produce all of the universal material in myth and ritual drama.
Archetypal experiences tend to be numinous and transpersonal in their impact upon personal development, for they are the eruption of archaic and timeless meaning into the personal world of the ego. They are archaic in the sense that they have evolved over long periods of time, and are timeless in that they arise anew in the experience of each passing generation bearing recognizably similar patterns.”
Mythic interpretations help us understand the mysteries of creation. Cultures are grounded on creation stories and metaphysics. Concepts which have proved to be useful in ordering things easily acquire authority over us.
Myth provides a field of tropes, the attractors of the ancient mind, informing our lived experience relating us to reality. We can imagine the Archai of Greek myth, the first generation of divine forces, in today's scientific terms as Universal principles, the symbolic properties of the universe.
Aptly selected metaphors convey ontological realities, but remain useful representations of how human consciousness perceives reality, human observation and reasoning. Is there an information exchange and unconscious apprehension between the mind and its ultimate source, even if it is scientifically or phenomenologically naive?
Laughlin points out that, "everything archetypal which is perceived by consciousness seems to represent a set of variations on a ground theme. . . Archetypes form the total ground - the collective unconscious - upon which conscious cultural and personal experience develops...archaic and timeless meaning."
The Protogonoi or Primordials are fundamental essences, original forms, and primordial forces that animate the cosmos. They are the substrate of psyche and universe. The mythopoetic cosmology is part of a living system of meaning.
Universal structures penetrate narrative depth and religious imagination, the inward experience of the connection between the psyche and the outward image. The root matter is the mother of all things. Human archetypes are images of the evolution of the structure of the human psyche and numinous trranspersonal experience.
The COBE satellite confirmed tiny density fluctuations in the primeval plasma through the positive detection of fluctuations in Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation in 1992. They are the seeds of later galaxy formation, from which galaxies, clusters and superclusters of galaxies, and therefore stars, evolve.
Is it Necessary?
Born from Theia and Hyperion, the light of the universal spirit is the Sun. Helios, from which cosmic forces flow and manifest, is primordial or dark light of our interior being that is analogous to the earliest light of cosmic expansion. When light breaks, it differentiates above and below. The primordial part of the chthonic context was sacrificed, pushed down below, for the sake of realism.
Titanic genealogies show that everything came from Nothing, from the Abyss and primordial Chaos -- darkness and stormy expanse. Then, the Earth, herself, Gaia, mated with the Sky.
Paleolithic beliefs were molded by changing environmental conditions of that epoch. In the Paleolithic, humanity was literally fighting titanic forces of the ice age. They included massive climate change, flooding, and fearsome mega-fauna soon to be extinct, but remembered in archaic memory.
Conclusions
Ananke was the Protogenos (primeval goddess) of inevitability, compulsion and necessity. She emerged self-formed at the very beginning of time – an incorporeal, serpentine being whose outstretched arms encompassed the breadth of the universe. Jung explains in his “Visions Seminar “(Pages 1225-1226):
“Tao was symbolized originally as a dragon, and the Greek word drakon means a serpent, it is not so specific as our word dragon, which is now a mythological concept. The Greek meaning occurs in the famous verse: "The bull is the father of the serpent, and the serpent is the father of the bull."
They are a complete circle, that is; the bull stands for the spring, the sun, the rising Yang principle, and the serpent in this case stands for the winter, darkness, humidity, the Yin principle."
From the time she first appeared Ananke was entwined in the serpentine coils of her mate, the time-god Khronos. Orpheus describes Kronos as a Serpent (Drakon) with extra heads growing upon it of a bull and a lion, and a god’s countenance in the middle; it had wings upon its shoulders, and its name was Khronos (Unaging Time), the turning heavens.
The Primordials are rooted in the deepest memories of mankind, perhaps as far back as 12,900 years or more, to the era of the last Ice Age melt. The primordials never appear in human form. The Titans arose in the Neolithic era, around 5,000 BCE. Helios is one of the Titans. Celestial bodies were gods.
The Olympians prevailed over these earlier gods throughout the Bronze Age, before the widespread catastrophes that led to the Greek Dark Ages and subsequent Iron Age. People were thrown into disastrous conditions. The time from roughly 15,000 to 5,000 BC was a transition time of swift and extensive environmental change.
A popular idea suggests that the impact of a comet around 10000 years ago created a vast firestorm, melting parts of the Laurentide ice sheet. Trauma would impact any survivors of a celestial impact, from the fall of the Laurentide comet in North America to that of Burckle Crater off Madagascar. Dr. Abbott estimates, 4,500 to 5,000 years ago it created mega-tsunamis.
There may have been recurrent periods where earth collided with ejecta from the breakup of the massive comet Encke (Napier). Such phenomena may have given rise to mythic notions of a terrifying and belief-changing War in Heaven, a titanic battle in the sky with dire consequences on earth.
Through our metaphysical devotions to such unimaginable and overwhelming forces, we keep the primordial memories of our ancestors alive, honoring their courage, whether we can overcome our cultural amnesia or put such catastrophic change into words, or not.
This Khronos (Time), the serpent has offspring, three in number: moist Aither (Light), unbounded Khaos (Air), and misty Erebos (Darkness). They surrounded the primal egg of solid matter in their constricting coils and split it into its constituent parts (earth, heaven and sea) bringing about the creation of the ordered universe.
Helios echoes their qualities. Eliade explains the place of the sun in Greek mythology and religion: “Helios is not only pythios, chthonios, titan, and so on; over and above all this, he is in communication with the chosen world of darkness: sorcery and hell. He is the father of the sorceress Circe, and the grandfather of Medea."
We don't need to be too literal about it, misuse quantum jargon and technological metaphors, or turn it into a Procrustean bed. The same forces remain in play that they intuited or sensed in the cosmos and their own being.
The classical Greeks had a few versions of their cosmogony with a changing worldview, a functional dialogue between mankind and universe -- consciousness, symbolism, and reality. Myth illuminates the subject-relative hidden aspects of reality. Cosmology is a cognized view or system of comprehensive meaning.
Myths are understood only relative to other myths. Magical consciousness participates in myth as lived experience through metaphor or episthemology, nonlinear, meaningful stories that help us interpret experience and attempt to confirm reality.
In the earliest times their view of the world and its origin was firmly based on creation myths consolidated by Homer in the Iliad and Odyssey. As the culture evolved this view of the universe evolved and distanced itself from the purely religious outlook.
War In Heaven
Each cycle of meaning re-arranges the highly symbolic but coherent elements that vivify and verify direct experience and interpreted sacred being. What we perceive as the source of reality is always filtered by our sensors with a nonlinguistic expression of the structure of human consciousness, our species-typical point of view (Laughlin). Archetypes don't become intelligible living realities until the Olympians cycle.
The Greeks attempted to name and describe lateral and vertical metaphorical correlations, and recognized in every way that they 'descended' from them. Gaia remains a symbolically pregnant mythic reality. The Greeks participated symbolically in this pregnant mythic reality.
The second generation of Titanic forces may have been realized through great upheavals in the heavens and on earth. Ice sheets, earthquakes, vulcanism, comet strikes, and other massively catastrophic natural events were otherwise unexplained in those days. The Titans were personified, whereas the Archai were not. Different creation stories account for hidden variables in conception.
Archai is from the Greek, arkhe, meaning beginning. In archetypal psychology, archai refers to the deepest patterns or root metaphors of psychological function. The mother of Helios, the physical sun, was Shining Goddess and his father Bright High One.
All perceptions, thoughts, and creative dynamics arise from this underlying transcendent field, known classically as the Void, Clear Light or Primordial Awareness. They descended from Gaia and Ouranos, preceded only by Nothingness and Chaos. There is chaos and complexity in astrophysics. Only in Helios does the field of the unseen become physical and visible as glorious Sol.
So-called Reality is not at all solid, emerging from the primordial Nothingness beyond the mystic veil of biological and inorganic corporeality. Nothing Matters. Nothing has been the same since science convinced us we DO live in a vacuum (fluctuation). It is right here within the zone of our bodies and our ancient memory still recalls memories of being before conscious awareness.
Myth portrays the real world in metaphor. The Greek intuition that there are subtle forms of light that differentiate from darkness was correct. Light existed before either sun or moon came into being yet, but matter was still undifferentiated. Naturally arising light has many philosophical and psychological names: Flickering Awareness, Scintillae, Plenum, Clear Light, Ain Soph Aur. Primordial forces work even today right within us.
Sacred stories hide and reveal profound truths. We can imagine The Void as the Zero Point ocean of universal energy, or Nothingness of Chaos, Ouranos is the Primordial Field, Eros as Entanglement and Nonlocality. Gaia is Absolute Space, the pregnant plenum of the ground.
Jung recognized the primordial darkness has a role in consciousness. "To put it simply, if you look long enough into a dark hole, then you perceive what is looking in. Hence, this is the principle of perception in Yoga, which derives all perception from the absolute emptiness of consciousness."
Clear Light could be virtual photons. Scintillae is photon flux, Gaia embodies the Plenum, etc. Hyperion could be biophotons. The Shining Goddess and Bright One give birth to all radiant energy and manifesting matter. Hyperion is Primordial Light, Helios is the negentropic effect, since we all live on the Solar energy of the physical sun.
Aether has no reference points, no meaningful motion, no time, no wave fronts. It is just absolute space. At the hyperspace level of observation, we find holographic patterns, EM waves, strings, branes, quanta, etc. Finally, classical spacetime emerges, the objective Universe as we naturally perceive it -- the realm of Cronos. The infinitesimal center is coextensive with the universal continuum. Events take place in the context of universal cosmology.
Chaos = Aether -- (Sub-quantum level): Dimensionless, eternal. David Bohm's implicate order, Basil Hiley's pre-space. The scale at which non-local, instantaneous state change occurs. Nature's four fundamental forces emerge from here.
Ouranos = Hyperspace -- (Quantum level): Wheeler's quantum foam. Quantum gravity. Quantum weirdness. A medium where more than one object can occupy the same space; allowing for quantum wave superposition, parallel, and non-linear, information processing.
Cronos = Spacetime -- (Classical level): Intersubjective creation; Gravitation, matter; the objective Universe. Cronos and Rhea are time and matter.
Pre-human Origins
The initial state of the universe is chaos, a dark indefinite void considered a divine primordial condition from which everything else appeared. Primordial Light is the scientific name given to the oldest light in the Universe—the 13.7 billion-year-old photons that come to us from the Big Bang. Primordial Light photons travel through the cosmos for many millions of years.
Since the most ancient times, humans worshiped the primal divine couple, earth goddess Gaia and sky god Uranus. They are ancestors of the other gods that gave their names to the planets of the Solar System after the upheaval with the ancient gods, the Titanic forces with their psychophysical effects.
Primordial images imitate nature. Can we map their phenomenological terrain? It is uncharted territory. Innate instinct is a concrete body-based mind, somatic-motor, sensory-perceptual, auditory-visual sense, not symbolic, integrative, or reflective. Undefined and threatening, chthonic divine activity arises from below as non-directed, unconscious, primary process, numinous autonomous prompting of the divine.
The Primordials and Titans are deeply conflicting drives that lie at the roots of madness and primitive impulses for self-preservation. Informed by biology, our core drives include Acquisition, Preservation against loss, and Perpetuation.
This is the elemental level of non-directed primary process, primordial awareness, the primal religious experience: the naked mind, free of everything, dwelling in the uncreated state. Primal consciousness has not been altered or fragmented by modern life, but remains whole. Consciousness is identified with the earth and god is nature in all its forms.
Archetypes are always consuming and acquisitive (survival), explosive and overwhelming sensations with aversions, or autonomous radical avoidant behaviors to pain, fear, and anxiety. Primary process flows beneath actions, hopes and problems. We remain open to its presence and communication.
Non-directive thinking includes deeply hidden compulsion, enthrallment, confusion, unconscious motivations, and chaos. Alien anxieties sweep away our presence of cannot be expelled from our conscious mind. Feeling conflict initiates defenses, compulsive acting out, and concrete enactments.
Obsessive dysfunctions and defensive reactions include virulent maladaptive power, boundless ambition, and raging competitiveness, the excess of elements without image or form, the dark side of our raw nature or unchecked psychopathy, repression, reflexive avoidance, infinite cruel realities of human being.
Our brains were shaped over many millions of years in a paleolithic environmental context few humans experience today (Gatherer-hunter). Our neurological wiring, so to speak, is a prosaic mesh of domain-specific adaptations which give rise to the complex faculties we call "mind."
Acquisition, prevention against loss (defense), and perpetuation are survival advantages. Primate behavior should reflect a brain "wired" with these core or primal (adaptive) drives. Many primatological, ethnological, and anthropological field studies validate this prediction.
Primordial images are delimited archetypes of confusion, older than historical mankind,. This inborn ground of the human psyche is the forgotten primal realm of our pre-conscious ancestors. Unconscious energetic forces of universal mind are not just subconscious psyche,, but thought-related symbolic activity. James Hillman notes, "soul comes in fantasies, not in meanings."
They are experiences of displacement and projective identification we cannot discuss without turning them into mere concepts, which they are not. Such basic mental organization, primary sense unconscious, is seen in many nonhuman mammals, without words, abstract concepts, or time. Even imagination is concrete, not symbolic beyond the body language of fantasy. Direct apprehension of external reality underlies relational thinking.
Irrational Perceptive Identity
The domain of elemental chaos includes mobilization of somatic, sensory, and phenomenal activity without boundaries in a virtual timelessness like the pictographic nature of dreams, spontaneous sensory-perceptual happenings.
The mind tries to process the instinctual tension of somatic and emotional experience without archetype, symbol, or metaphors. It uses delusional displacement, excitation discharge, affect, instinct, and anxiety in reactionary discharge, acting out automatically without reality testing.
Ancient mind experiences and expresses itself in a way qualitatively different from thought. A primary process of mental activity, non-thoughtful mind has its own epistemology. It is revealed through the Primordials and Titans as concrete but undifferentiated and unintrgrated multi-sensory phenomena of primary process.
This primitive and primordial psyche of our ancestors erupts with suprapersonal force and overwhelming intensity of emotional flooding and disturbed imagination. Our ancestors struggled between two worlds with undifferentiated titanic aggression, incest, and destructive collective forces, yearning for death and dissolution with Titanic contempt for mortality.
Our primitive origins are a world of deeply instinctual drives, whose destructive powers have been suppressed. We have a universal regressive urge to reunite in our original fusion with the cosmic mother. Madness comes from the most primitive complexes.
Parareception swings the doors of perception wide open with telepathic confusion, primitive possession, and life-threatening, unregulated neuroception. Psychic rape, suffocating parent imagos, hysteria, and infernal repetition are primitive archetypes.
Myth resides in this multidimensional primordial unconscious of universal psychic history. It is a deeply rooted liminal world of fragmentation, dissociation, and monstrosities -- the hidden reality beneath all cultures. Flooded with all-encompassing phenomena we become so engrossed in something that we "merge" with it, losing track of time and feeling our own boundaries soften and begin to blur with immersion.
The Titans are the pre-human or animalistic realm of disintegration and incestuous tendencies arsing from the undifferentiated fusion of self and others. An oceanic intrapsychic phenomena is not simply an interpersonal process. When a personal experience corresponds to a latent primordial image, an archetype is activated.
The Olympians are a realm of psychosocial being, integration and kinship libido, the genomic level that lies between us and the other. In both tangible and mysterious ways, we are all interconnected, and any one of us can have a profound effect on the whole.
The Titans, a residual substrate of primal mind, were reduced to monsters and demons from the bottom of psyche's Abyss in the Olympian world. Only Dionysisan fragmentation ecstasy and Aphroditic rapture found a place in the Olympian order. But all gods retain the root of their archaic madness and the split with sacred and rational way of being. Linking to the larger self, artists reach back to primordial images which correct such one-sidedness.
Hesiod’s Theogony starts with goddess Gaia and ends to the polytheistic reign of the Olympian gods. Uranus surrounds Gaia and fertilizes her. They deified Mother Earth as the sustaining ground of life and death. The original parent represents the source of all life prior to the distinctions of actual mother and father.
The birth of the gods parallels nature’s elements. Primordial waters give birth to new creation. The original "chaos" or "sea" constitutes all matter. Cronus metaphorically symbolizes Time, Rhea the flux, and Hera (an anagram of Aer) air. Helios is a fiery flash of numinosity in that dark world of nonordinary phenomena.
The sun (Helios) was the divine king of the sky for the Greeks. According to the “Homeric Hymn” of Helios: The sun shines his light on both men and immortal gods by driving his four-horse “golden-yoked” chariot across the sky from east to west. Helios brought the warmth and light of the sun and ripened their crops. It illumined the moon's reflection. The son of Zeus, as Apollo, was god of light, healing, music, archery and prophecy.
The Dorian Greeks worshiped Helios as the rising of the sun. Plato also explained that the name of Selene came from selas (bright light) and phos (light). The third or fourth century novelist Heliodoros considered himself “of the line of the descendants of Helios.” He worshipped Helios and Selene: “the purest and brightest of the gods.” The light-giving Helios, the Sun, is the source of every life form on Earth. He was eternal witness to human acts and the natural avenger of cheating. The rays of the Sun falling on Mother Earth after the rain-sperm of the Sky created the first living creatures.
The Celestial Dome is of primary astronomical importance. We still observe the all-seeing Helios who reigns in daytime, and at night the stars and the pale figure of Selene-Moon. The Sun and Moon were crucial for the invention of the religious calendar systems of ancient people.
The dark or chthonic form of Helios was the pythios, or serpent, as seen in the cult of Delphi. Python was variously described as a male or female Drakon, or dragon. The wild ungovernable animal mind breaks through, even psychotic upheaval and undifferentiated dark determining forces. The shadow is forced into the light.
Wild kundalini serpent energy can be destructive, as well as enlightening. The shadow of the light is darkness. The Titans symbolize the daemonic and its battle with the gods of the light-world. Primordial nature correlates with primordial unconscious and primordial images of absolute validity. (Theodossiou, et al).
Tumultuous Past
The first four primordial deities arise in a highly significant relationship to unthinkable primitive agonies. Chaos represents differentiation, since it separates or divides Tartarus and Earth. Even though Chaos is "first of all" for Hesiod, Tartarus represents the primacy of the undifferentiated, or the unlimited. Ice-age comets, solar ejecta, and the 3150 BCE comet disaster created dark chaos and extinction-level events.
Since undifferentiation is unthinkable, Chaos is the "first of all" in that he is the first thinkable being. In this way, Chaos (the principle of division) is the natural opposite of Eros (the principle of unification). Earth (light, day, waking, life) is the natural opposite of Tartarus (darkness, night, sleep, death). These four are the parents of all the other Titans.
The children of Hyperion reinforce his status as lord of light: they are Helios, the younger Titan of the sun, Selene, the Titanid of the moon, and Eos, Titanid of the dawn. As the original primordial god of light, it only makes sense for his children to be expressions of that light, appearing as the various celestial powers that shower illumination over the world.
Titanic Creation Myth
The earliest Aegean cultures tried to describe the mammoth forces of the dynamic universe at the cosmic, interplanetary, planetary, and local level as waves of creation from the aethyr. They encoded their imaginal understanding of the vast forces of nature in their mythology.
The primordial gods don't take human form. Primal chaos remains the substrate of our existence. Creation involved exposure to chaos and dark protoplasmic energy. It equates with primal darkness -- the transcendental Id of negative and monstrous energies.
The Abyss is the fertile empty space of far-reaching effects, from which energy is created. When Ouranos and Gaia, raw unrefined fertility, give birth Cronos, deep time is born. The deep precessional cycle is read in the cosmic clock of the heavens.
Humans recognize the vast dimension of cyclic time at work among the stars. The Sun, life-giving Fire, was the one god that made the heroic procession around the wheel of precession, the basis of solar doctrine. Helios, the sun, is shorthand for the entire archetypal Zodiac, the constellations of the ecliptic. Because his sacred animal is the horse, we can imagine his clearer emergence around the time the chariot is invented, at least c. 2000 BCE.
Stellar myths of constellations, astronomical time cycles, were reduced to the backdrop of solar myths, from which the four directions are derived. The Vedic astronomical classic Surya Siddhanta is very precise in its measurements of both heaven and earth as a spherical body and other planetary diameters and circumferences. Both were used to measure vast epochs or ages of mankind.
As psyche Gaia is pregnant with the future, pre-existent to consciousness. Time devours the ages as all things; the past devours the future. The youngest Titan overthrew his father Ouranos, and Cronos' children, the Olympians overthrew the Titans with a new class of ultimate paternal authority and planetary formative energy. The Titans, denied and repressed energies, are pushed back into the underworld, into Tartarus, their origin.
Jung suggested, "This may account for the unnatural intensification of the fear of death in our time, when life has lost its deeper meaning for so many people, forcing them to exchange the life-preserving rhythm of the aeons for the dread ticking of the clock." (CW 10, Para 696).
The Olympians come streaming out of the unconscious, out of the unknown and repressed part of the psyche, repudiating and reversing former values,. Thus, the War in Heaven mirrored a war for the human soul. Rulership passed from time to kingly authority -- a ruling class.
New and powerful life springs up and spills out, spread over the generations, discrediting and rejecting the old source of vitality. The destructive unconscious and The Titans are pushed back into oblivion during an epoch of great catastrophe and upheaval.
Yet, Paracelsus speaks of the immensity of man: "When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven, as it were, and from it the work that he desires to create flows into him... For such is the immensity of man that he is greater than heaven and earth." (unsourced)
There may have been recurrent periods where earth collided with ejecta from the breakup of the massive comet Encke (Napier). Such phenomena may have given rise to mythic notions of a terrifying and belief-changing War in Heaven, a titanic battle in the sky with dire consequences on earth.
Through our metaphysical devotions to such unimaginable and overwhelming forces, we keep the primordial memories of our ancestors alive, honoring their courage, whether we can overcome our cultural amnesia or put such catastrophic change into words, or not.
REFERENCES
Abbott, Dallas, Burckle Abyssal Impact Crater: Did This Impact Produce a Global Deluge? <https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/158160872.pdf>
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Hillman, James (2012-11-24). Mythic Figures (Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman). Spring Publications, Inc., “Athene, Ananke, and the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology”.
Jung, Carl, Clare Douglas (Ed), (1997), Visions Seminar, Visions : Notes of the seminar given in 1930-1934 (2 Volume Set) (Bollingen) Princeton University Press. Laughlin, Charles D., (1996), “Archetypes, Neurognosis, & the Quantum Sea”. psychsyllabi.gmu.edu/syllspring05/461010.doc
Miller, Iona (2018), Helios: The Uplifter of Souls, https://ionamiller2017.weebly.com/helios.html
Napier, W,M., (2009), Comets, Catastrophes, and Earth's History, Journal of Cosmology, 2009, Vol 2, pages 344-355. Quintaes, Marcus, "Nous, Ananke and Eros:: Reflections about the Images of the Soul”.
Theodossiou, Efstratios, Vassilios N. Manimanis, Milan S. Dimitrijevi, Petros Mantarakis;
Gaia, Helios, Selene and Ouranos: the three principal celestial bodies and the sky in the ancient Greek cosmogony; <https://www.academia.edu/14121325/Gaia_Helios_Selene_and_Ouranos_the_three_principal_celestial_bodies_and_the_sky_in_the_ancient_Greek_cosmogony>