The rapture of mania
′′ More than any of the other Greek gods, Dionysus amazes us for the novelty of his epiphany, for the variety of his transformations. It's always on the move. It penetrates everywhere, in all countries, in all peoples, in all religious environments, willing to partner with various sometimes antagonistic divinities (e.g. Demeter and Apollo). He is certainly the only Greek God who, when manifesting himself in different ways, astonishes and attracts both peasants and intellectual minorities, politicians and contemplatives, orgiastics and ascetics. Drunkness, eroticism, universal fertility, but at the same time unforgettable experiences caused by the regular arrival of the dead or mania, by the immersion into animal unconsciousness or by the ecstasy of enthousiasm: all these terrors and revelations sprout from a single and same source: the presence of the god. Their way of being expresses the paradoxical unity of life and death. All this makes Dionysus present himself as a radically different type of Olympians. Is a god closer to men than other divinities? In any case, it was not difficult to get close to him and even could become his incarnation; the rapture of mania showed that it was possible to overcome the human condition ".
(Mircea Eliade, History of Beliefs and Religious I).
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 descend into 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…
They are the gravity force of the psyche.” — James Hillman
https://www.academia.edu/12447765/Pseudo_Lactantius_Carmen_de_ave_phoenice_translation
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mushrooms_Myth_and_Mithras/_3fJ4z6WyL4C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=,Ancient+Psychedelic+:+Alien+Gods+and+Mushroom+Goddesses&printsec=frontcover
′′ More than any of the other Greek gods, Dionysus amazes us for the novelty of his epiphany, for the variety of his transformations. It's always on the move. It penetrates everywhere, in all countries, in all peoples, in all religious environments, willing to partner with various sometimes antagonistic divinities (e.g. Demeter and Apollo). He is certainly the only Greek God who, when manifesting himself in different ways, astonishes and attracts both peasants and intellectual minorities, politicians and contemplatives, orgiastics and ascetics. Drunkness, eroticism, universal fertility, but at the same time unforgettable experiences caused by the regular arrival of the dead or mania, by the immersion into animal unconsciousness or by the ecstasy of enthousiasm: all these terrors and revelations sprout from a single and same source: the presence of the god. Their way of being expresses the paradoxical unity of life and death. All this makes Dionysus present himself as a radically different type of Olympians. Is a god closer to men than other divinities? In any case, it was not difficult to get close to him and even could become his incarnation; the rapture of mania showed that it was possible to overcome the human condition ".
(Mircea Eliade, History of Beliefs and Religious I).
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 descend into 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…
They are the gravity force of the psyche.” — James Hillman
https://www.academia.edu/12447765/Pseudo_Lactantius_Carmen_de_ave_phoenice_translation
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mushrooms_Myth_and_Mithras/_3fJ4z6WyL4C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=,Ancient+Psychedelic+:+Alien+Gods+and+Mushroom+Goddesses&printsec=frontcover
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Anger_Madness_and_the_Daimonic/NgB0yim87cQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Anger,+Madness,+and+the+Daimonic+by+Stephen+A.+Diamond&printsec=frontcover
Rollo May suggests the fact "tbat violence is often associated with ecstatic experiences is seen in our using the same phrases for both. We say a person is 'beside himself' with rage; he is 'possessed' by power. There also occurs a self-transcendence in violence which is like the self transcendence in ecstatic experiences. The total absorption, furthermore, that is present in violence is also present in ecstasy."
Rollo May suggests the fact "tbat violence is often associated with ecstatic experiences is seen in our using the same phrases for both. We say a person is 'beside himself' with rage; he is 'possessed' by power. There also occurs a self-transcendence in violence which is like the self transcendence in ecstatic experiences. The total absorption, furthermore, that is present in violence is also present in ecstasy."
--Lancellotti, Attis
"The Archaic structure of consciousness is perhaps the most difficult to understand, for it is the one most removed from our present-day way of thinking. Stated succinctly, it can be likened to zero dimensional mentation, a world devoid of any perspectivity at all. It is a stated in which the holder of consciousness is perhaps only minimally aware of himself or his relationship to the world around him. According to Feuerstein, this structure denotes "a consciousness of maximum latency and minimum transparency." The term "archaic" as used here is derived from the Greek arce, meaning inception, or origin.
Origin (or Ursprung, in the original German) is the source from which all springs, but it is that which springs forth itself. It is the essence which is behind and which underlies consciousness. As Gebser understands the term, "conscious is neither knowledge nor conscience but must be understood for the time being in the broadest sense as wakeful presence."
This presence, or being present, excludes two further overpowering by the past (past-orientation) or any future-oriented finality. He writes: "It is our task to presentiate the past in ourselves, not to lose the present to the transient power of the past. This we can achieve by recognizing the balancing power of the latent "future" with its character of the present, which is to say, its potentiality for consciousness.""
~ by Ed Mahood, Jr.
"Mythology, in other words, is not an outmoded quaintness of the past, but a living complex of archetypal, dynamic images, native to, and eloquent of, some constant, fundamental stratum of the human psyche. And that stratum is the source of the vital energies of our being. Out of it proceed all the fate-creating drives and fears of our lives. While our educated, modern waking-consciousness has been going forward on the wheels and wings of progress, this recalcitrant, dream-creating, wish-creating, under-consciousness has been holding to its primeval companions all the time, the demons and the gods."
— The Ecstasy of Being, a collection of Campbell's works on Mythology and Dance from JCF. (Joseph Campbell, The Ecstasy of Being. New World Library.
Among crosses hung with ivy,
Gentle sunlight, fragrance, and the humming of bees.
Blessed ones, who lie sheltered,
Nestled against the heart of the good earth,
Blessed, who have come home, gentle and nameless,
To rest in the mother’s lap.
But listen, from the hives and blossoms
Longing for life sings to me.
Out of the tangled roots of dreams
The long dead being breaks into the light,
The ruins of life, darkly buried,
Transform themselves and demand the present,
And the queenly earth-mother
Shudders in the effort of birth.
The sweet treasure of peace in the hollowed grave
Rocks gently as a dream in the night.
The dream of death is only the dark smoke
Under which the fires of life are burning.
Hermann Hesse, Country Cemetery
Origin (or Ursprung, in the original German) is the source from which all springs, but it is that which springs forth itself. It is the essence which is behind and which underlies consciousness. As Gebser understands the term, "conscious is neither knowledge nor conscience but must be understood for the time being in the broadest sense as wakeful presence."
This presence, or being present, excludes two further overpowering by the past (past-orientation) or any future-oriented finality. He writes: "It is our task to presentiate the past in ourselves, not to lose the present to the transient power of the past. This we can achieve by recognizing the balancing power of the latent "future" with its character of the present, which is to say, its potentiality for consciousness.""
~ by Ed Mahood, Jr.
"Mythology, in other words, is not an outmoded quaintness of the past, but a living complex of archetypal, dynamic images, native to, and eloquent of, some constant, fundamental stratum of the human psyche. And that stratum is the source of the vital energies of our being. Out of it proceed all the fate-creating drives and fears of our lives. While our educated, modern waking-consciousness has been going forward on the wheels and wings of progress, this recalcitrant, dream-creating, wish-creating, under-consciousness has been holding to its primeval companions all the time, the demons and the gods."
— The Ecstasy of Being, a collection of Campbell's works on Mythology and Dance from JCF. (Joseph Campbell, The Ecstasy of Being. New World Library.
Among crosses hung with ivy,
Gentle sunlight, fragrance, and the humming of bees.
Blessed ones, who lie sheltered,
Nestled against the heart of the good earth,
Blessed, who have come home, gentle and nameless,
To rest in the mother’s lap.
But listen, from the hives and blossoms
Longing for life sings to me.
Out of the tangled roots of dreams
The long dead being breaks into the light,
The ruins of life, darkly buried,
Transform themselves and demand the present,
And the queenly earth-mother
Shudders in the effort of birth.
The sweet treasure of peace in the hollowed grave
Rocks gently as a dream in the night.
The dream of death is only the dark smoke
Under which the fires of life are burning.
Hermann Hesse, Country Cemetery
Kybele Throned
Kybele or Cybele (Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya "Kubeleyan Mother", perhaps "Mountain Mother"; Lydian Kuvava; Greek: Κυβέλη Kybele, Κυβήβη Kybebe, Κύβελις Kybelis) is the great Phrygian Mother of the Gods, a primal nature goddess worshiped with orgiastic rites in the mountains of central and western Anatolia. In Hellenic tradition She is closely associated with the Mother of the Gods Rhea and also the Earth Goddess Gaia. In Roman Tradition She is known as Magna Mater. Roman mythographers reinvented her as a Trojan goddess, and thus an ancestral goddess of the Roman people by way of the Trojan prince Aeneas. With Rome's eventual hegemony over the Mediterranean world, Romanized forms of Cybele's worship spread throughout the Roman Empire. In Phrygia her worship was quite universal, for there is scarcely a town in Phrygia on the coins of which she does not appear. In Galatia she was chiefly worshiped at Pessinus, where her sacred image is believed to have fallen from heaven. Her priests at Pessinus seem from the earliest times to have been, in some respects, the rulers of the place, and to have derived the greatest possible advantages from their priestly functions. Even after the image of the goddess was carried from Pessinus to Rome, Pessinus still continued to be looked upon as the metropolis of the great goddess, and as the principal seat of her worship.
Kybele or Cybele (Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya "Kubeleyan Mother", perhaps "Mountain Mother"; Lydian Kuvava; Greek: Κυβέλη Kybele, Κυβήβη Kybebe, Κύβελις Kybelis) is the great Phrygian Mother of the Gods, a primal nature goddess worshiped with orgiastic rites in the mountains of central and western Anatolia. In Hellenic tradition She is closely associated with the Mother of the Gods Rhea and also the Earth Goddess Gaia. In Roman Tradition She is known as Magna Mater. Roman mythographers reinvented her as a Trojan goddess, and thus an ancestral goddess of the Roman people by way of the Trojan prince Aeneas. With Rome's eventual hegemony over the Mediterranean world, Romanized forms of Cybele's worship spread throughout the Roman Empire. In Phrygia her worship was quite universal, for there is scarcely a town in Phrygia on the coins of which she does not appear. In Galatia she was chiefly worshiped at Pessinus, where her sacred image is believed to have fallen from heaven. Her priests at Pessinus seem from the earliest times to have been, in some respects, the rulers of the place, and to have derived the greatest possible advantages from their priestly functions. Even after the image of the goddess was carried from Pessinus to Rome, Pessinus still continued to be looked upon as the metropolis of the great goddess, and as the principal seat of her worship.
PRIMORDIAL TRADITION
Kybele/Attis & Dionysian Overtones
synthesizing diverse streams of thought from psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures,
biology, ethnobotany, and poetic traditions.
"Gods are personifications of unconscious contents, for they reveal themselves to us through the unconscious activity of the psyche." ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 163.
"Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings, and anything but allegories of physical processes."
~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 261.
Mother goddess. Cybele (Kybele) was a Phrygian mother goddess, who was worshiped in Greece and Rome. She had often being equated with the two other Greek mother goddesses – Rhea and Demeter. Cybele was so revered that she was often called “The Mother of All” or “The Great Mother of the Gods”.
Cybele (Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya“Kubeleyan Mother”, perhaps “MountainMother”; Lydian Kuvava; Greek: ΚυβέληKyveli, Κυβήβη Kyvivi, Κύβελις Kyvelis) was an originally Anatolian mother goddess. She is Phrygia‘s only known goddess, and was probably its state deity. Her Phrygian cult was adopted and adapted by Greek colonists of Asia Minor and spread from there to mainland Greece and its more distant western colonies from around the 6th century BCE.
Though she was one of the most renowned goddesses in her day, the motherly, wise Cybele has long been over-shadowed in the mythology of ancient Greece by the later pre-Olympian goddesses, Rhea, Gaia, and even Hecate. In contrast, the mad, flamboyant Dionysus has been mistaken as a young Greek god for equally as long.
The archaeological and literary evidence suggests that these two gods played much more significant roles in various cultures. Danielou 1992 links Dionysus to the Shaivite some cult. Cybele and Dionysus share so many characteristics in their worship and legends.
In Greece, Cybele met with a mixed reception. She was partially assimilated to aspects of the Earth-goddess Gaia, her Minoan equivalent Rhea, and the Harvest-Mother goddess Demeter. Some city-states, notably Athens, evoked her as a protector, but her most celebrated Greek rites and processions show her as an essentially foreign.
This exotic mystery-goddess arrives in a lion-drawn chariot to the accompaniment of wild music, wine, and a disorderly, ecstatic following. Dionysus, similarly, basks in the power of the natural world, portrayed most often through processions of inebriated dancing. His role in ancient religion has much to do with the transcendence from the natural to the spiritual realms.
Uniquely in Greek religion, she had a transgender or eunuch mendicant priesthood. Many of her Greek cults included rites to a divine Phrygian castrate shepherd-consort Attis, who was probably a Greek invention. “Attis” may have been a name or title of Cybele’s priests or priest-kings in ancient Phrygia.
Most myths of the deified Attis present him as founder of Cybele’s Galli priesthood. Cybele’s priests find Attis at the base of a pine tree; he dies and they bury him, emasculate themselves in his memory, and celebrate him in their rites to the goddess. The Galli’s voluntary emasculation in service of the goddess was thought to give them powers of prophecy.
In Greece, Cybele is associated with mountains, town and city walls, fertile nature, and wild animals, especially lions. Cybele was sometimes referred to as Dindymene or Dinymenian Mother because she was born on Mount Dindymus. Zeus had ejaculated on the ground somewhere around Mount Dindymus, where an offspring sprung out of the ground, with both male and female sex organs.
The gods fearing this creature upon reaching adulthood had the hermaphrodite being castrated, thereby causing the creature to become a female being. The creature became the mother goddess, named Cybele, though in Pessinus she was named Agdistis, after Mount Agdos. The gods threw away the severed phallus, and instantly an almond tree grew on that spot.
The most significant of Jung’s insights into the psyche is the realization that all such experiences rest upon an inner reality which needs to be understood symbolically. This is where the archetypal nature of myths and fairy tales is most relevant, for it explains why people of all ages and all levels of society have been fascinated by them.
People gathered around a fire at the end of a hard day and, gazing into the flames, followed the images arising from the storyteller’s words. Today, many have by and large lost the capacity for such experiences. Children still do; adults are often distracted by the demands of outer life. And yet, myths retell fundamental experiences of life which are timeless.
Some modern sources, such as James Mellaart, Marija Gimbutas, and Barbara Walker, claim that Gaia as Mother Earth is a later form of a pre-Indo-European Great Mother, venerated in Neolithic times. Her existence is a speculation and controversial in the academic community. Some modern mythographers, including Karl Kerenyi, Carl A. P. Ruck, and Danny Staples, interpret the goddesses Demeter the "mother," Persephone the "daughter", and Hecate the "crone," as aspects of a former great goddess identified by some as Rhea or as Gaia herself. In Crete, a goddess was worshiped as Potnia Theron (the "Mistress of the Animals") or simply Potnia ("Mistress"), speculated as Rhea or Gaia; the title was later applied in Greek texts to Artemis. The mother goddess Cybele from Anatolia (modern Turkey) was partly identified by the Greeks with Gaia, but more so with Rhea. (Wikipedia)
https://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12612840/index.pdf
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Gods_of_Love_and_Ecstasy/QDQK7l13WIIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=,Danielou+1992.+dionysus&printsec=frontcover
Kybele/Attis & Dionysian Overtones
synthesizing diverse streams of thought from psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures,
biology, ethnobotany, and poetic traditions.
"Gods are personifications of unconscious contents, for they reveal themselves to us through the unconscious activity of the psyche." ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 163.
"Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings, and anything but allegories of physical processes."
~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 261.
Mother goddess. Cybele (Kybele) was a Phrygian mother goddess, who was worshiped in Greece and Rome. She had often being equated with the two other Greek mother goddesses – Rhea and Demeter. Cybele was so revered that she was often called “The Mother of All” or “The Great Mother of the Gods”.
Cybele (Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya“Kubeleyan Mother”, perhaps “MountainMother”; Lydian Kuvava; Greek: ΚυβέληKyveli, Κυβήβη Kyvivi, Κύβελις Kyvelis) was an originally Anatolian mother goddess. She is Phrygia‘s only known goddess, and was probably its state deity. Her Phrygian cult was adopted and adapted by Greek colonists of Asia Minor and spread from there to mainland Greece and its more distant western colonies from around the 6th century BCE.
Though she was one of the most renowned goddesses in her day, the motherly, wise Cybele has long been over-shadowed in the mythology of ancient Greece by the later pre-Olympian goddesses, Rhea, Gaia, and even Hecate. In contrast, the mad, flamboyant Dionysus has been mistaken as a young Greek god for equally as long.
The archaeological and literary evidence suggests that these two gods played much more significant roles in various cultures. Danielou 1992 links Dionysus to the Shaivite some cult. Cybele and Dionysus share so many characteristics in their worship and legends.
In Greece, Cybele met with a mixed reception. She was partially assimilated to aspects of the Earth-goddess Gaia, her Minoan equivalent Rhea, and the Harvest-Mother goddess Demeter. Some city-states, notably Athens, evoked her as a protector, but her most celebrated Greek rites and processions show her as an essentially foreign.
This exotic mystery-goddess arrives in a lion-drawn chariot to the accompaniment of wild music, wine, and a disorderly, ecstatic following. Dionysus, similarly, basks in the power of the natural world, portrayed most often through processions of inebriated dancing. His role in ancient religion has much to do with the transcendence from the natural to the spiritual realms.
Uniquely in Greek religion, she had a transgender or eunuch mendicant priesthood. Many of her Greek cults included rites to a divine Phrygian castrate shepherd-consort Attis, who was probably a Greek invention. “Attis” may have been a name or title of Cybele’s priests or priest-kings in ancient Phrygia.
Most myths of the deified Attis present him as founder of Cybele’s Galli priesthood. Cybele’s priests find Attis at the base of a pine tree; he dies and they bury him, emasculate themselves in his memory, and celebrate him in their rites to the goddess. The Galli’s voluntary emasculation in service of the goddess was thought to give them powers of prophecy.
In Greece, Cybele is associated with mountains, town and city walls, fertile nature, and wild animals, especially lions. Cybele was sometimes referred to as Dindymene or Dinymenian Mother because she was born on Mount Dindymus. Zeus had ejaculated on the ground somewhere around Mount Dindymus, where an offspring sprung out of the ground, with both male and female sex organs.
The gods fearing this creature upon reaching adulthood had the hermaphrodite being castrated, thereby causing the creature to become a female being. The creature became the mother goddess, named Cybele, though in Pessinus she was named Agdistis, after Mount Agdos. The gods threw away the severed phallus, and instantly an almond tree grew on that spot.
The most significant of Jung’s insights into the psyche is the realization that all such experiences rest upon an inner reality which needs to be understood symbolically. This is where the archetypal nature of myths and fairy tales is most relevant, for it explains why people of all ages and all levels of society have been fascinated by them.
People gathered around a fire at the end of a hard day and, gazing into the flames, followed the images arising from the storyteller’s words. Today, many have by and large lost the capacity for such experiences. Children still do; adults are often distracted by the demands of outer life. And yet, myths retell fundamental experiences of life which are timeless.
Some modern sources, such as James Mellaart, Marija Gimbutas, and Barbara Walker, claim that Gaia as Mother Earth is a later form of a pre-Indo-European Great Mother, venerated in Neolithic times. Her existence is a speculation and controversial in the academic community. Some modern mythographers, including Karl Kerenyi, Carl A. P. Ruck, and Danny Staples, interpret the goddesses Demeter the "mother," Persephone the "daughter", and Hecate the "crone," as aspects of a former great goddess identified by some as Rhea or as Gaia herself. In Crete, a goddess was worshiped as Potnia Theron (the "Mistress of the Animals") or simply Potnia ("Mistress"), speculated as Rhea or Gaia; the title was later applied in Greek texts to Artemis. The mother goddess Cybele from Anatolia (modern Turkey) was partly identified by the Greeks with Gaia, but more so with Rhea. (Wikipedia)
https://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12612840/index.pdf
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Gods_of_Love_and_Ecstasy/QDQK7l13WIIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=,Danielou+1992.+dionysus&printsec=frontcover
Matar Kubileya
Dionysus; Attis
Dionysus; Attis
She it is whom the ancient and learned poets of Greece celebrated, as a goddess seated in her chariot, driving her twin-yoked lions; and so they taught us that the great world hangs in spacious air, and that the earth cannot rest on earth…She it is whom the different nations, by their ancient religious custom, hail as ‘the Idean Mother’, and they give her a retinue of Phrygians as her escort, because they claim that corn was first created in those parts and spread from there over the whole world.
MOTHER MYCELIUM: NATIVE MYTH
Cosmic Mother, Mystery Goddess, & Consorts
In his poem "Mont Blanc", Percy Bysshe Shelley, expressed the oneness of Nature and his state of unity between mind and universe. The universe flows through his consciousness, both dark and light. He recognizes that Nature has a dark side, as well as being divine. He believed we can apprehend truth by experiencing Nature via the human imagination:
The everlasting universe of Things
Flows through the Mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark – now glittering – now reflecting gloom –
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters – with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the Mountains lone…
Solace in the Ground of Things
′′Psychologically the gods are never dead; and what interests archetypical psychology is not the revival of religion, but the survival of the soul". James Hillman, Re-Vision of Psychology, p. 290
The Archai are Universal principles, original forms. These fundamental essences and primordial forces animate the cosmos. Derived from the Greek word, arkhe, archai means beginning. In archetypal psychology, they are root metaphors of psychological function, an experience of a larger and greater personality into which nature would like to change us.
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). He said, "the nameless spirit of the depths evokes everything that man cannot."
The myths of the archaic mother concern Soul and the World, indwelling animated spirit. She is the ground of becoming and potential of emptiness and the encoding of interactional behavior. She carries meaning for our underworld psychic life. The archetypal great mountain always borders the spirit realm.
The archaic structure of primordial consciousness emerges from the "ever-present origin". The sacred vacuum is the essence which is behind and underlies consciousness, wakeful presence. She is not just nature, but nature in human experience. It builds on personal experience into a rich figural presence with phenomenal appearance in its field of awareness.
"The vacuum itself is shapeless but it may assume specific forms as it takes on the configurations of mass-energy resulting in what is conventionally called the “real world.” ..."Consciousness is empty for it is like space, intangible and unsubstantial. Consciousness is luminous in being clear cognizance, or knowing." (B. Alan Wallace)
The primal Mother is so because our soul is a resonant part of the world soul, encouraging experiential entry into the interactive field. The encounter as a psychic event occurs between abstract concepts and sensory phenomena. We must ask, "Who is the Earth?" "Who are the waters, the plants, the animals, the mountains?" or to whom do they correspond?
This is the face of an immense Mystery that can only be encountered and lived, but not understood. The cosmos is expressed in multilayered living Nature. The Earth is an angel of telluric glory linked with a psycho-spiritual structure. Her names have different complex and ambiguous lineage.
A descent into her underworld breeds visions. A magical drink programmed an initiatory experience of death and resurrection. Psychedelics catalyze the invention of better forms of life, imaginary and real. The sacred meal is the first ritual of Kybele, separate from later Greek and Roman forms of cult-worship.
We have to rediscover her through the frightening and transformative state of psychological uncertainty, even hysterical mourning, rapt frenzy, and descent into whatever cave produces the vision. This rebirth is a rock-birth. We struggle to interpret and live with forces in the psyche that are autonomous -- a constant psychic undercurrent.
Her stories are like poems where characters and events at the beginning and end form mirror images; they echo with her resonance. The dead live in the unconscious and may consider our lives more unconscious than themselves who are in an expanded domain -- the vastness of the unconscious. There are several different versions of each story.
The tales can be ugly and repulsive, too. Even Phrygian ritual tattooing is done with red hot needles. The result is the coexistence and active interaction of plots, motifs and poetic formulas of different origins. Worldviews cannot be taken literally.
The soul itself, objective psyche, is a source of knowledge, with imagination or inner vision mediating between reason and belief/faith to perceive fantasy creating reality. Psyche is a process capable of transformation of images in dynamic interrelationship to each other. The psychic field constellates around us through the energetic interconnections of psyche and matter.
This is about exceptional human experience, a remembering of a worldly soul and of an ensouled world. To whom do you belong? Where are you? How do you understand your world? Enacting a presence in a psychological or spiritual passage can alter our lives, or mode of being, and understanding of the meaning of life and the world.
Coming into the world is a recognition of the symbolic and metaphorical nature of reality, revealing the transcendent individuality of each human. To come into the imaginal world is to be born. Even the mountain cannot stand tall without the Earth.
Personal revelation is a rebirth of the individual through experience of the soul's relation to cosmos. Life-force is the driver of rebirth. Spiritual realism reveals the presences that inhabit us without our awareness. Dramaturgy opens the place of personally lived adventure.
As Avens puts it, "the whole of nature works through each thing, and each thing is a reflection of the whole" (New Gnosis, p. 26). Avens concludes that "we know the world because our personal soul is from the very outset related to the world soul" (p. 48).
Psyche produces by not making. Images only relate indirectly to external reality. The Myth of Kybele and Attis suggests the psyche has spiritual needs, which the puer part of us can fulfill. There is a spirit in our madness. Profound mystery envelopes our humanity.
Depth images, including the image of our own world, precede all perception. The entire image conveys its own mood and meaning instinctually and does not require analysis or interpretation.
The god was fully within the participant, who was infused with a deified A. muscaria. In a theophagic rite a priestess ingested Kybele's botanical embodiment, the A. muscaria. It rendered this priestess her human embodiment, after which the priestess used her mediumship to channel the divine voice to her supplicants.
The unconscious consists of mythological motifs or primordial images. An image carries its own inherent meaning which is sort of a ‘condensed expression of the psychic situation as a whole.’ Further, ‘the image is an expression of the unconscious as well as the conscious situation of the moment,’ according to Jung.
"Most people do not tend to think of "dark," "terrifying," or "shattering" experiences which originate in the underworld as "mystical," but often they are just that. Frightening hallucinations, states of terror, profound and devastating grief -- all are forms of altered states of consciousness. It is only our stereotypes and fantasies that tell us that mystical experiences are all bright, blissful, and ecstatic."
"Such underworld experiences are often accompanied by marked changes in one's bodily experience and can produce remarkable states of clarity. They may provide insight into suffering, impermanence, and death, among other things. The fact is that encounters with the underworld, and experience of the pain and suffering of humanity, are not so different from other forms of mystical experience." (Caplan, Halfway Up the Mountain: The Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment)
Images are self-revelatory. Imagination is a direct expression of psychic life. Imagination flows forth from the imaginal field continually, self-organizing its multisensory narrative and conditioning our experiences. In fact, this imaginal dimension is our experience. Everything we perceive of ourselves, others and world is filtered through it.
Psyche is a cornucopia of emergent imagery, spewing forth from the primal fount of creativity, ever born anew with each and every moment. ‘Images’ are soul, in that it is impossible to experience soul, except through the imagination. In a magical moment, consciousness is radically deepened.
Imagination has a discrete redemptive and regenerative power. Exploration of the soul is possible through imagination. Soul, or imagination, is both a realm or domain of experience and a human faculty. Patterned presences embody the energetic imprint of achetypes. Imagination embodies the power of transformation.
While we cannot compose a full or consistent picture, we can make a substantial contribution by touching directly on important segments, remythologizing with our explorations. We can speak in the present tense because in the sacred domain there is no past or future. The mind-altering effect remains the same.
There is mounting evidence for the role of spiritually significant entheogens in the origins of religion by becoming one with the god. Sacraments seal a communion and shared existence between human and divine. The divine resides within us and the plant brings it out as surely today as in prehistoric times.
Hellenistic reconfigurations veil the original ancient Near Eastern background. No contemporary text or myth survives to attest the original character and nature of Kybele's Phrygian cult but the ubiquity of her Phrygian name Matar ("Mother").
The Orgia (Orgiastic festivals) of the Phrygian Mother of the Gods were introduced to Greece by way the island of Samothrake. They were closely connected with the Orgies of the god Dionysos, whose Phrygian counterpart, Sabazios, was described as a son of the goddess.
We are sometimes in the awkward position of making up new myths about old myths. We have no way of imposing guidelines on the imagination. Our understanding lacks completeness and finality. What we understand is inseparable from who we are. Imaginal understanding is evocative and numinous. We ignore her at our peril:
"Western man has no need of more superiority over nature whether outside or inside. He has both in an almost devilish perfection. What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around him and within him. He must learn that he may not do exactly as he wills. If he does not not learn this,his own nature will destroy him. He does not know that his own soul is rebelling against him in a suicidal way."~C.G.Jung, CW II, Par. 869-70.
The tale to follow is living wisdom. Working with a therapeutic myth or story takes preparation for the experience. Then comes the experience itself with the potential of some kind of purifying catharsis to occur, making it part of yourself. Then comes reintegration and rejuvenation. Then the narrative is passed on.
Jung determined that these fantasies come from the mytho-poetic layer of the psyche, mediating the boundaries of the known and the unknown. New stories, maps for living, and interpretations of the primordial mother's myth and cult continue to emerge through evidence and understanding. The gnosis with the power to effect transformation is that we ourselves are the truth made flesh.
Direct inner vision is between believing and knowing. The divine ground expresses itself in our existence, letting your life speak. You answer to the vision given you. Memories of the Origin give rise to longing. When we exemplify that, we are raised to the archetypal dimension. Focus shifts from the earthly mortal to archetypal counterpart and the profound mutuality between them; it unveils the hidden.
The form of your vision and worship are equivalent to your essence. Being supersedes behavior as the basis of reciprocality. A mutually reinforcing relationship can take the form of a dialogue which verifies the authenticity of the vision and cyclic return.
Myths are quite heavily charged with religious significance. Equating prehension with imagination, Colin Wilson said, "This craving for greater intensity of imagination is the religious appetite." It accentuates the primary use of metaphorical thinking.
James Hillman states that "We can describe the psyche as a polycentric realm of nonverbal, nonspatial images. Myth offers the same kind of world. It too, is polycentric, with innumerable personifications in imaginal space. Just as dream images are not mere words in disguise...so the ancient personifications of myths are not concepts in disguise."
He states further that these "soul events are not parts of any system. They are independent of the tandems in which they are placed, inasmuch as there is an independent primacy of the imaginal that creates its fantasies automatically, ceaselessly, and spontaneously. Myth-making is not compensatory to anything else."
Nietzsche sought after metaphysical solace in the “revitalization of myth and activation of the myth-building potential of consciousness” (Safranski 86). In writing about Attic tragedy, Nietzsche states:
"The metaphysical solace which, I wish to suggest, we derive from every true tragedy, the solace that in the ground of things, and despite all changing appearances, life is indestructibly mighty and pleasurable, this solace appears with palpable clarity in the chorus of satyrs, a chorus of natural beings whose life goes on ineradicably behind and beyond all civilization, as it were, and who remain eternally the same despite all the changes of generations and in the history of nations" (Nietzsche 39).
Hillman said, "The gift of an image is a place to watch your soul." ..."It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it." ... The moment an angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one. ... We would like otherworldly visitations to come as distinct voices with clear instructions, but they may only give small signs in dreams, or as sudden hunches and insights that cannot be denied. They feel more as if they emerged from inside and steer you from within ... To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere."
It isn't a supernatural metaphysical system, but is simply 'beyond' the physical, a visible presence of archaic and ubiquitous invisible processes. A material ritual is less important than the beliefs, inspirations, and social purposes underpinning it, especially rituals relating to cult. Rumi suggested, "Wherever you stand be the soul of that place."
In Alchemy in a Modern Woman, Robert Grinnell says, "rites are performed by men and women, but their content emanates from the divine sphere which is past, present, and future. These rites unite the instinctual pattern or pole of the constellated archetype to its divine, spiritual pole: the animal shadow of the archetype and its superhuman, divine aspect are linked together."
A material ritual is less important than the beliefs, inspirations, and social purposes underpinning it, especially rituals relating to cult. Rumi suggested, "Wherever you stand be the soul of that place." We may venture into the wilderness of emotions and sexuality.
The "Mother of All Animals," the 'animal guardian' is the master of animals who is an animal themselves, the 'supreme being' in phenomenal form. Such displays of divinity present the dilemmas, agonies, and potentialities of the religious instinct.
But animals also bear unknown qualities other than religious instinct. In and of themselves, they have no set correlations or interpretations. Animals are restored to their roles as daimonic beings.
Animal Presence & Bestial Vision
James Hullman claimed, "Animals really wake up the imagination ... animal dreams can do this too. They really wake people up. Animal dreams provoke their feelings. get them thinking, interested, and curious. As we get more into imagining, we become more animal-like...more instinctively alive."
Stanton Marlan speaks about his imaginal experience of Animal Presence as its own quality of light, where "animal and human psyches present themselves to each other."
Animal behavior gives us insight into human society. Animal presence is immediately experienced as present to the human psyche, including images of animals as Greek gods, or an animal head, our reception of it as an idea.
We know them through images...a metaphysical forest, anima mundi, abstract and animated, "the flesh of the soul in the world," "the archetypal implications of delight in the flesh." He suggests perhaps imagination is a 'great animal,' human/animal presence, an expression of the Mystery between humans and animals -- the animal soul, 'animalistic animism'.
Gary Snyder said, "animals come into myth or dreams not as projections but as a way to speak to the human mind" (Radical Ecopsychology). "Exaggerated compulsive physicality is the very drive downward into the mystery of life's materiality" (Hillman, 2008). It can be related to the cult practices of the primal Mother.
Hillman asks a few specific questions that are relevant to our imaginal relationships in images, visions, or dreams without therapeutic intentions. What is the animal kingdom to the dreamer? "How does it behave? What does it want? What is the relation between the dream animal and dream human?"
Hillman saw animals as 'waking up the imaginal,' recognizing that animals own themselves but are intimately related to us. "The animal is not reducible to what it may correspond with in the psyche."
He made "the connection between the vitality of the psyche and the psyche's animal images -- that the "animal spirits" are indeed animal spirits!" He calls each animal a psychopompous, "leading human consciousness to yield its theriophobic exclusivity, restoring participation in the animal kingdom."
They come into dreams and imagination from the wild not to be caged or controlled but to teach us something through their qualities in nature, dreams, or art. They express the wild, nature, ongoing playfulness, joy, surprise, impermanence, and self-authenticating, complex, sacred, deep intelligence.
Hillman contends dream animals are not mere symbols of our instincts or dangerous subjective forces inside us, but are "motifs of learning from the animal, amazed by its beauty, touched by its pain, reconciliation with it, being borne, helped, saved by the animal." (Animal Kingdom in the Human Dream, p. 329. In Dream and the Underworld he contrasts how "they are not images of animals, but images as animals." (p. 150)
We are all in the service of life. In the past and today, we understand a religious experience transcends the physical surroundings and material objects associated with it. A symbolic mineral, plant, or animal presence or spirit can express the universal mind, which is a post-historical 'non-knowledge' outside of being.
"Yet it is increasingly clear that contemporary notions of such concepts as religion and the sacred may be of little help in understanding these concepts in prehistory. It is virtually impossible even to agree on the particular referents of ritual symbolism, let alone infer from those referents either the transcendent, ineffable experience of the ritual, or the tenets of the cult itself." (Blake & Knapp, 2005, The Archaeology of Mediterranean Prehistory)
Temples of Vanished Dreams
The root matter is the mother of all things. This is a complex view of the interaction of prehistorical, Anatolian, and Hellenized development of the cult.
Formerly taboo aspects of academic theories are under revision in light of new evidence, such as religious, medicinal, and entheogenic use of natural substances. This is not advocacy, but simple recognition of their role. Wandering initiators have been replaced by wandering scholars, sifting through the buried rubble of the past.
Centuries of earthquakes, floods, erosion, and wars shattered, stirred, and covered much of the detritus of millennia. It was a crossroads battleground, gatekeeper of Asia. The Romans clear-cut many of Anatolia's forests and gouged out countless mines.
Erosion ate away the thin topsoil of the region's highlands, choking rivers and inundating lowland sites of early habitation with tons of water-borne silt. The ruins not buried or thrown down by storm, earthquake, or marauders were chipped away by frost, wind, and rain.
The raw landscape was changing in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene to pastoral and agricultural. Evidence from caves shows that the key difference between late Pleistocene and early Holocene foraging is the evidence for intensive plant gathering in the latter period. The primary species represented are oats, lentils, pistachio, almond, barley, einkorn wheat, and various legumes.
Some information comes from artifacts, inferences, and interpolations of their cultures. We have to return to the archaeology of prehistory: the proto-religious, proto-scientific, and proto-philosophical roots of belief. Both artwork and physical remains of mystical mushrooms have been found in paleolithic caves.
Anatolia was a cauldron of cultures, including worship of a nameless Neolithic goddess and cavern deities. Close ties between religions and drugs are coming to light. To the ancients, devotion wasn't about the drugs, even though they embodied the divine, but the potential to experience the divine directly.
Ancient Greeks considered intoxication as a genuine possession by the gods. Such temporal insanity was credited to the gods instead of physiological or psychological causes. Mystery cult initiates thought that a god was manifesting their mind and making direct contact with the mortal world.
Distinguished from ordinary madness in Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates says that our biggest blessings are from madness with a divine origin. He describes four different kinds: Prophetic madness of Apollo, Telestic or ritual madness of Dionysos, Poetic madness from the Muses, and Erotic madness from Aphrodite and Eros.
These are “paradoxical” aspects of the benign and destructive Divine, “the loving and terrible mother,” who from the beginning had no other name. Her archaic cult was autochthonic, incomparable, existing where it was formed or born; native, aboriginal, indigenous. It is mystical in that it is open to Presence.
The mysteries mainly consisted of a procession that led the devotees out of the polis and a frenzied dancing-ritual out in the wild. In the processions were carried containers which held the sacred objects that were to be revealed during the culminating ritual and during the procession.
Thus, the normal sequence of events involved the public procession that led the followers outside of the polis. Anyone could witness and join in, followed by the culminating secret ritual out in the wild.
Rhythmic dance and music clearly played a major role in the bacchic mysteries as it did in the nighttime rituals of the Mother Goddess.
Although these rituals were collective acts, they can rightfully be called private group rituals. There was no strict time of the year for the ritual, no fixed sanctuary or sanctioned priests such as with the mysteries of Eleusis. A private organization of devotees went into the wild to worship at their own leisure.
There was a secret nature of the ritual and its nocturnal setting. We know that they were secret cults only accessible for initiates, but the exact nature of many of the rituals has been lost or never revealed at all -- a way to experience religion in a deeper, secret way, a way to experience the divine up close.
Some gods and goddesses appear in disguise, in animal forms, as a ghostly apparition or in abstract form, such as a sudden bright light, an igniting fire or the sudden appearance of water. Some ‘miracles’ and appearances in the form of animals were simply natural events that were given a religious interpretation.
Sometimes they can only be felt, or their presence could only be known by some ‘miracle’ happening such as a sudden lightning storm, large waves or a sudden onset of seizures. When a god was seen in a ghostly form, an abstract form or an unclear humanoid form, it was often between waking and sleeping or during ecstatic states.
Dionysos and the Mother Goddess were worshiped in
mystery-cults involving altered states. However, both gods were also known for their power of spontaneous intervention. Contact with the Mother Goddess could be an enlightening or a healing experience, but it could also be frightening.
An unwilling victim could be ‘possessed’ by the Mother Goddess. In Euripides’ Kippolytos, Phaedra acts strangely, so her nurse wonders if ‘the Mountain Mother' has possessed her. She was also one of the deities held responsible for the frenzied ‘Sacred Disease,’ (epilepsy). https://studylib.net/doc/7529336/
The possible dangerous nature of meeting a god face-to-face as was the intention of some of the rituals of worship (Bowden, Mystery Cults 21, 105-136.) Direct contact with the gods could be dangerous if not lethal, but was to be greatly desired.
Such direct contact was quite different from transactional sacrificial rituals or the public rituals of honor during festivals. These activities maintained the goodwill of the gods, a formal and distant relationship. Did ancient Greeks deliberately induce altered states in religious contexts?
Worship in mystery cults assisted possible relationships between gods and mortals that were intimate, personal, and not easily shared. Spontaneous altered states of mind, heavily charged with religious significance, were also often given a religious interpretation. Images are a way of seeing with a mythic sensibility. “To mythic consciousness, the persons of the imagination are real." (Hillman)
For Jung, the unconscious is how the non-human nature inhabits human nature. The non-human nature within us is our psychic nature. Generative images are the self-generative activity of the soul. Psyche generates its archetypal potentialities and imagery, that hold the imagination, move the heart, and influence us over a lifetime.
This imaginal representation of an experience of transformative knowing and learning is linked to human mythopoesis, which is the creation of significant life-interpreting and life-guiding stories. This metaphoric and imaginal representational process is usually carried in colorful, immediate stories.
Many cultures consider psyche or soul to be androgynous, having feminine and masculine energies. Soul also has a natural cycle of descents and integrations -- alchemical soul process.
Myth both describes and changes consciousness, the way to value, fantasy and emotion -- psyche's poetic impulse. The animal forces in human nature and the life of the polis find confluence.
What is imagined to be, is. Intuition is an instinct. Potential to be is the source and power of imagination. Phenomena speak in their own imagistic language. Hillman called the archetypal 'necessary patterns,' that are "ubiquitous, passionate, ever-recurring, inescapable patterns" of value and religious depth rooted in psychic life. (2006, 226)
We hear fractured voices where the world is coiled, gnarled, twisted, ruptured, broken, gapped, fissured, chasmed, and charmed. The sacred or divine inheres within the in-between places. The non-human in animism is a world divinely inspirited with a multitude of voices; mystical traditions are pluralistic and not unitary.
We are inside (immanent) and outside (transcendent) the animate and inanimate earth. Soul seeks its own diversity, perversity, and conversions as it uses us for its own purposes. Psyche has access to universals that the ego can only encounter in specific images -- the suggestive power of primordial images. Aesthetics becomes a means of noticing, a retreat from dichotomies.
Paul Bowles describes wilderness: "Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem fainthearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape. At sunset, the precise, curved shadow of the earth rises into it swiftly from the horizon, cutting into light section and dark section. When all daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intense and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, so that the night never really goes dark."
The baptism of solitude is a unique sensation, having nothing to do with loneliness, which presupposes memory. Here in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside, and we have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person we have always been, or letting it take its course.
No one is quite the same as when they came. Once we have been under the spell of the vast luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. We will go back, for the absolute has no price.
"Nothing disappears completely ... In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows ... Pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements, but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives."
(Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space)
Change in the soul, suggests Hillman, "requires recognition of history, an archaeology of the soul, a digging in the ruins, a recollecting. And – a planting in specific geographical and historical soil with its own smell and savor, in connection with the spirits of the dead..."
He and Jung both thought that unless we come to terms with the dead we cannot live because our life is dependent on finding answers to their unanswered questions. The dead are animating us.
Hillman suggests that a descent into the depths is a descent into human ancestry. It is not a metaphor; the dead still 'live on' in the anonymous and differentiated stream of the historical dead. Even specific historical figures are not actual but emerge as part of our flowing dialogue with the past.
Sticking to a precise description of what happens maintains our fidelity to fantastic but real events. A stream of self-generative imagery is enabled for our active engagement. "The underground stream comes closer to the surface. It comes up" (Lament for the Dead, pg. 1-5).
Gurdjieff wryly suggests that, "A considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror."
"We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us,"
said Liam Callanan in The Cloud Atlas. We are wholy in nature and inhabit her body. She is the anima mundi, the psyche of the world.
Soul craves and needs images, blurring the boundaries of mind and reality. The creative power of an image becomes part of reality, assimilated into our personal reality. Soul animates images and symbols by which psyche imagines.
We sense the animate, anima, and animal with the body -- being alive and alert to every interaction, feeling whatever feelings emerge, sensing whatever sensations arise. Our bodies capture external stimuli, relay those stimuli through our nervous system, parse them in our brains, and consolidate them into a variable “binding frame” of interpretation, or focus, an image. Specific cases lay within a general binding frame connecting content and image.
The void of the sublime stimulates our aesthetic perception. The sublime hovers between being and non-being, between life Eros and death Thanatos. It likes to hide itself. Beauty requires mater, form, color, rhythm, and sound to manifest.
Philosopher Fons Elders claims, "Humanity belongs first of all to the domain of creative imagination, and within creative imagination to the domains of beauty and the sublime. Only when the sublime and beautiful meet, something good and special will manifest itself, not otherwise."
These qualities and impulses extend, amplify, and coax us deeper into mythopoetic imagining and inflections, the inevitable connectedness of all living beings, and the ceaseless activity of our own inherent nature.
"Realizing the imperfection and weakness of ordinary language, the people who have possessed objective knowledge have tried to express the idea of unity in ‘myths,’ in ‘symbols,’ and in particular ‘verbal formulas,’ which, having been transmitted without alteration, have carried on the idea from one school to another, often from one epoch to another."
~ G. I. Gurdjieff
We all live within the body of the divine mother. Ancient Greeks did not have a monolithic, clear view of their gods. The Mother Goddess might well be the best example of this characteristic of ancient Greek religion. Diogenes claimed that the roaring of the Mother Goddess’ cymbals brings forth wisdom and healing.
Beside the original mountain shrines dedicated to the Mother Goddess in Anatolia, large temples called Metroön’s were dedicated to the mother goddess, in many Greek cities along the Ionian coastline and in mainland Greece.
The Mother of the gods figures prominently in Athenian social and political institutions. Athenian drama portrays the goddess and her rites as foreign. The formal public cults created and maintained Greek and non-Greek social boundaries while the ecstatic cults cut across those boundaries. Euripides stresses the necessity of the foreign deity to ‘break down barriers between public and private cult. (Roller)
Athens celebrated a spring festival in her name called the Galaxia, a 'mother's milk' ritual. However, she was most renowned for her powers of madness and disease, but also for the opposites: healing and inner calm. A summer festival Cronia, was addressed alone to the Mother of the Gods.
This festival isn't for Cronus but from the kernos, the vessel well-attested in rituals of the Mother. Various versions of the aetiological myths of this summer festival associated the frenzied and raucous festival with stories of the roaming Mother and various forms of raucous protective warriors.
The Greek cult of the mother goddess originated in Phrygia, where a mother goddess was worshiped as the most important (and also solely pictured) deity. Kybele as a ‘multifarious divinity.
The mother goddess was simultaneously identified with Ge or Gaea (the Greek earth goddess), Rhea (sister and wife of Kronos and mother of the Olympians), and Demeter. Worship of Demeter, the Mother Goddess, and Dionysos were known as mystery-cults in the ancient Greek world.
Most common, Meter Kybele, which can be translated as mother of the mountains, is a derivation from Matar Kubileya, an epitaph given to the mother goddess in Phrygia. There she was traditionally worshiped as the goddess that guided the conquering of the wild; a goddess of the hunt, of the mountains, but also as a protective goddess of mankind and its cities. However, in the Greek world, the Mother Goddess had an unclear and multidimensional character.
Homeric Hymns illustrate she was also connected with the wild nature and loud rhythmic music. Aspects of her cult, such as torchlit nighttime rituals of ecstatic dance and offerings in honor of the goddess were accompanied by loud music from Tympanum, flute and cymbals. The rituals and music are often described as roaring and resounding which illustrates its heavy repetitive character. Most vividly described however, is the frenzied, serpentine, encircling dance that accompanied the ritual.
Clarity about the personification was not that important in the worship of a mystery deity. Religious practice surrounding the mystery cults probably stemmed from an emotional urge for religious experience rather than a curiosity about the hierarchy of the divine. The need to feel the divine up close overshadowed the problem of identification.
A vase depicts a seated Mother Goddess with a consort. All around the gods human devoteesare pictured honoring the two gods with ritual dance and music. Some of them are holding snakes and all of the dancers are pictured with their heads tossed backward, their legs kicked upwards and with open mouths. The Mother goddess can be identified through her crowned head and the presence of lions.
The attending consort is a god posed as an equal next to the goddess. Dionysos seems the most logical possibility, because he is also associated with ecstatic cult rituals and because of the snake fillet. Snakes were a returning attribute of Dionysos' maenads. In Ion and the Phaedrus, Plato suggested that devotees of the Mother Goddess could find an inner peace in the trance-like state of consciousness that accompanied the dance.
These accounts all communicate the emotional content of the rituals, ‘for the individuals depicted are engaged in activities of deep personal intensity.’ The attraction of the Meter cult to her worshipers responds to a felt need, to cut through dry ceremony that normally surround the officially sanctioned religions of the state and seek direct contact with the divine.
We are always enmeshed in the nature of the psyche. Emotional memories embody the characteristics, propensities, and yearnings of the goddess. Blind longing is first transformed into the lower level of pleasure and recognized as soul in pleasure, informed by imagination.
Deep Personal Intensity
Magic and religion mediate the space between what is human and non-human, an ever-changing union of natural and supernatural. We have to write of it in an imaginal style and read it that way, too. Imagination is the essential element of genius.
"What haunts these contextual niches ... is the unconscious of the text itself, not our unconscious, but the unconscious of the otherness of the text that comes from the dimensions of the artifact that are not fully controlled consciously by the author nor fully interpreted by the critic." (Kent D. Palmer, Ph.D., Intratextuality: Exploring the Unconscious of the Text. Data Mining to Understand the sources in the Unconscious)
When we become an embodied symbol there is no definitive difference between human (unconscious) and non-human nature. The imaginative arts include ritual, vision, art, music, magic, oracles, and mysticism. They include the secret preparation of psychoactive incense and pharmakons.
In moments of heightened sensitivity, our thoughts are silenced; our awareness of self dissolves; we feel absorbed by the experience, and part of something greater than ourselves. We become one with the dance, one with the music, and one with the panoramic vista before us as an epiphany.
The mysterious encounters take many forms. Embodied archetypes become articulate. Sometimes people feel they’re in the presence of the Divine, or of a more nebulous entity like Ultimate Reality. A higher power reveals the truth of the universe. Or, they just feel a novel connectedness to everything from now back to the Primordial Origin.
Even quantum physics shows that nature is essentially non-material. While retaining their reality, Einstein denied the substantiality of matter and field. Bohm's holistic view, a radical metaphysics of nature, includes non-locality and entanglement of quantum systems.
Bohm writes "we may regard each of the “particles” constituting a system as a projection of a “higher-dimensional” reality, rather than as a separate particle, existing together with all the others in a common three-dimensional space." (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, p. 238)
Since each entangled particle is a projection of a single encompassing higher dimensional whole, particle properties are correlated. "[The] entire universe must, on a very accurate level, be regarded as a single indivisible unit in which separate parts appear as idealizations permissible only on a classical level of accuracy of description. (Quantum Theory, p. 167)
As Jung suggested, "Just remember to follow nature" are ancestral words of wisdom. As nature is the mirror of the psyche, our family tree is the mirror of our own nature, the instinct to reflect. The archaic, meaning more 'original' than 'ancient,' still lives in us buried beneath the persona."
He argued for the central role of the symbol in bringing together conscious and unconscious material, as the symbol is partly conscious and partly unconscious. Psyche has many voices:
transformational subjectivity, personally redemptive mysticism, and direct experience of the reality of the psyche.
In Psychological Types Jung describes the symbol as an extreme complex product. "The symbol is always a product of an extremely complex nature."
We seek the living Earth in all her complexity. The Earth is an organism, the ancestral mother of all life, an entity deemed worthy of supreme importance, a fathomless creativity. Creative imagination functions as water sources do in nature. In constant movement, they return to their original level once the water is removed.
Matar personifies the co-evolution of the biosphere. Gaia created the manifest universe, the first race of gods, and the first race of humans. She has the gift of foretelling the future, foresight on the germination of things that await us in time.
In her holistic theology, She is a prophetess, guardian of the sanctity of oaths, and ever-present origin. Systems exist in nature as parts of a larger whole. We come 'out of this world' like a leaf comes out of a tree arising naturally from it. A singular organism is a Gaian image.
Shimmering Symbols
The psychic nature of the living organism of imagination is protean, be it human, animal, or monster. Mytho-poeisis reshapes awareness long before it has a language. Soul creates itself by imagining itself, existing only as it imagines. This is not transcendence but transparency, not getting out, but seeing through.
Transparency, dimensionality, and depth dance with opacity, obscurity, and shadow. Seeing through psyche itself makes soul transparent, creating a drastic alteration of identity. We land in the hands of something far greater than ourselves, living the cycle of its own life.
In nonunitarian, discontinuous transformations, a system opens itself to novelty and potentiality by dissolving into a state of nonlocal communion with the whole. It reforms unconditioned by the past. Nonunitary transformation is based in the dissolution of all forms and structures, and creative emergence of unconditioned creativity--metamorphosis.
In this organic model of multiple universes and states of consciousness, everything is involved in a pattern of continuous rebirth, and everything is the manifestation of the underlying creative potential, transcending physical and spiritual boundaries.
The image is a self-limiting multiple relationship of meanings, moods, historical events, qualitative details, and expressive possibilities -- an inherently mystical, erotic, and transformational dimension of the unconscious.
These pre-thinking images prepare us for the mysteries. They show us in advance the path of transformation that we have to go through in mystery, the confluence of pre-thinking and pleasure. The image always implies more than it presents, “the depth of the image – its limitless ambiguities… can only be partly grasped as implications.” (Berry 1974, p. 98). Light is its own illuminating medium.
In this sense of the religious function of the psyche, we can imagine the goddess as ancestral and generative 'parent' and numinous 'transparent' -- a world of self-luminous forms and truths of imaginal reality, an inherently mystical, erotic, and transformational dimension of the unconscious.
Once we ourselves are rooted in this fertile earth of the deep unconscious, we can plant our potentially vital forms and structures and listen to souls being born in the future. We are ground in imaginal space. We learn to "stand our ground" in the deep interiority of the psychological field with new vigor.
Voluntary Contact with the Gods
Living mythologies play a profound role in the lives of their participants, consciously or unconsciously. Mythic imagination includes our inherent spiritual vision, creativity, magic, and healing. It may involve ritually enacting the shadow. Mother Goddess rituals included orgia, mysteria and teletai translated as mystic rites, mysteries and initiations.
Our basic understanding is that the gods could only be known indirectly. But every believer also shares the emotional urge to bridge that gap, to meet the divine face to face. Contact with the numinosum (the essence or presence of divinity) can be healing, terrifying, or deeply spiritual. This core of religious experience feels objective and outside the self.
Myth is ever new and always generative. The germinal image offers itself in transparency in everything in its visible form. As a primal legacy of the whole planet, it carries the human spirit forward. The myths we come to know continue living with in us.
Mythic narratives disclose "patterns of meaning that state and restate universal human activities" (Krippner). Mythological ideas permeate human consciousness. They spontaneously resurrect in the psychomythology of everyday life: dreams, reveries, sensations, play, passion, ritual, music, love, dance, writing, drawing, and painting which comprise our personal mythmaking.
It is important today to rediscover our mythic roots and spiritual connection to reconnect with the cosmos. In liminal mediation, down is good; depths are good. In her name, humans have consumed magic mushrooms for over 10,000 years as communion, “psychedelic symbiosis,” and medicine. Myth-infused vision and aesthetic arrest lead to even more realization of its own depth.
Myths involve us by stimulating and grabbing us emotionally. Some people get more glimpses, some get less. Mythic fragments are pieces of the gods. Dismemberment releases multiple stories of being.
We have to begin anew with the dismembered fragments of the archaic, perhaps enlivened by a significant dream, uncontaminated by conscious ideas. As Jung suggests, "You can enter only into your own mysteries." How do we explore the depths of our reality and experience, seeing underneath that which appears on the surface?
What do we really know about humanity's multi-millennial knowledge of the primordial religious tradition which we have inherited? Which technologies help us inhabit a shared world, rather than one in which we each see vastly different realities?
How can we heal our fractured relationship with the planet? Where and how do we reconnect with the instinctual primal experience of the shadowy, shimmering cave and the transformative experience of the otherworld?
What secrets echo down to us from archaic times? If a symbiotic relationship with plants influenced neural evolution, how did the loss of this lead to massive consequences? How were they entwined with and mediated by our own beating, pulsing, living bodies?
Theagenesis
Kybele became partially assimilated to aspects of the Earth-goddess Gaia and her possibly Minoan equivalent Rhea. Gaia/Kybele was both Earth Mother and mother goddess, the creative and visionary power of life itself. Pausanias equates these Phrygian gods with the Greek gods Zeus and Gaia. Greeks associated her with Gaia, Rhea and Demeter. She gives archaic testimony to the vitality of myth.
Gaia wasn't a universally-worshiped “Mother Earth” figure, but the Greek version of the Anatolian Mother Goddess, Kybele. Gaia’s cult worship was as an oracular goddess and as a mother figure is overstated. As the deep-breasted earth, Gaia is a personification of matter = matrix = mother of Uranos, the starry heavens. She was also the mother of the Titans.
She supports all physical life; in fact, she is the material or physical body. She is the somatic base of all psychosomatic phenomena, such as disease, the autonomic nervous system, and vagal rebound.
Gaia/Kybele created the manifest universe, the first race of gods, and the first race of humans. Even animals witness the silence of time and the depth of nature. There are thousands of ways to kneel down and kiss the ground.
She has the gift of foretelling the future. She is a prophetess. Oracular space is a timeless domain where ritual assists us in gaining insight and even 'seeing the goddess'. One of the deepest longings of the human soul is to see and be seen. We long to be wholly received, where soul is a divine echo whispering in the wellspring of the heart, awakening hidden worlds within.
A major characteristic is that she is the guardian of the sanctity of oaths, including magickal oaths and the Mystery of approach -- the Mystery of the presence in the Other. The knowing in imagination is that of exploring, not predetermined concepts or ideas. Form patiently emerges, including the form of our identity which emerges from experience.
Ruins are not empty. They are sacred places full of presence where heartful love flows out like water through a sacred shrine in the landscape, which has a soul and presence. The landscape is alive.
Landscape is its own natural subjectivity just as the unconscious terrain sets the scene for the dead and the other figures that occupy the same psychic space. The psychic nature is still the living organism of imagination.
The dead are a literal presence in the psyche who point to themselves as psychic material. In some sense, memory is within the clay of our being. The imaginal body has a sense of the eternal. Stone becomes a monument of memory, a primary form of mythic imaginaton. Caverns hold the memories and sounds.
Landscape belongs primarily to itself as a primal billions-year-old creation, preceding plants, animals, and humans. It is the living presence of an enormous pre-human memory -- a whole kind of narrative presence, unfolding, emerging and hiding itself in the shifting light and darkness.
Cosmic Mother, Mystery Goddess, & Consorts
In his poem "Mont Blanc", Percy Bysshe Shelley, expressed the oneness of Nature and his state of unity between mind and universe. The universe flows through his consciousness, both dark and light. He recognizes that Nature has a dark side, as well as being divine. He believed we can apprehend truth by experiencing Nature via the human imagination:
The everlasting universe of Things
Flows through the Mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark – now glittering – now reflecting gloom –
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters – with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the Mountains lone…
Solace in the Ground of Things
′′Psychologically the gods are never dead; and what interests archetypical psychology is not the revival of religion, but the survival of the soul". James Hillman, Re-Vision of Psychology, p. 290
The Archai are Universal principles, original forms. These fundamental essences and primordial forces animate the cosmos. Derived from the Greek word, arkhe, archai means beginning. In archetypal psychology, they are root metaphors of psychological function, an experience of a larger and greater personality into which nature would like to change us.
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). He said, "the nameless spirit of the depths evokes everything that man cannot."
The myths of the archaic mother concern Soul and the World, indwelling animated spirit. She is the ground of becoming and potential of emptiness and the encoding of interactional behavior. She carries meaning for our underworld psychic life. The archetypal great mountain always borders the spirit realm.
The archaic structure of primordial consciousness emerges from the "ever-present origin". The sacred vacuum is the essence which is behind and underlies consciousness, wakeful presence. She is not just nature, but nature in human experience. It builds on personal experience into a rich figural presence with phenomenal appearance in its field of awareness.
"The vacuum itself is shapeless but it may assume specific forms as it takes on the configurations of mass-energy resulting in what is conventionally called the “real world.” ..."Consciousness is empty for it is like space, intangible and unsubstantial. Consciousness is luminous in being clear cognizance, or knowing." (B. Alan Wallace)
The primal Mother is so because our soul is a resonant part of the world soul, encouraging experiential entry into the interactive field. The encounter as a psychic event occurs between abstract concepts and sensory phenomena. We must ask, "Who is the Earth?" "Who are the waters, the plants, the animals, the mountains?" or to whom do they correspond?
This is the face of an immense Mystery that can only be encountered and lived, but not understood. The cosmos is expressed in multilayered living Nature. The Earth is an angel of telluric glory linked with a psycho-spiritual structure. Her names have different complex and ambiguous lineage.
A descent into her underworld breeds visions. A magical drink programmed an initiatory experience of death and resurrection. Psychedelics catalyze the invention of better forms of life, imaginary and real. The sacred meal is the first ritual of Kybele, separate from later Greek and Roman forms of cult-worship.
We have to rediscover her through the frightening and transformative state of psychological uncertainty, even hysterical mourning, rapt frenzy, and descent into whatever cave produces the vision. This rebirth is a rock-birth. We struggle to interpret and live with forces in the psyche that are autonomous -- a constant psychic undercurrent.
Her stories are like poems where characters and events at the beginning and end form mirror images; they echo with her resonance. The dead live in the unconscious and may consider our lives more unconscious than themselves who are in an expanded domain -- the vastness of the unconscious. There are several different versions of each story.
The tales can be ugly and repulsive, too. Even Phrygian ritual tattooing is done with red hot needles. The result is the coexistence and active interaction of plots, motifs and poetic formulas of different origins. Worldviews cannot be taken literally.
The soul itself, objective psyche, is a source of knowledge, with imagination or inner vision mediating between reason and belief/faith to perceive fantasy creating reality. Psyche is a process capable of transformation of images in dynamic interrelationship to each other. The psychic field constellates around us through the energetic interconnections of psyche and matter.
This is about exceptional human experience, a remembering of a worldly soul and of an ensouled world. To whom do you belong? Where are you? How do you understand your world? Enacting a presence in a psychological or spiritual passage can alter our lives, or mode of being, and understanding of the meaning of life and the world.
Coming into the world is a recognition of the symbolic and metaphorical nature of reality, revealing the transcendent individuality of each human. To come into the imaginal world is to be born. Even the mountain cannot stand tall without the Earth.
Personal revelation is a rebirth of the individual through experience of the soul's relation to cosmos. Life-force is the driver of rebirth. Spiritual realism reveals the presences that inhabit us without our awareness. Dramaturgy opens the place of personally lived adventure.
As Avens puts it, "the whole of nature works through each thing, and each thing is a reflection of the whole" (New Gnosis, p. 26). Avens concludes that "we know the world because our personal soul is from the very outset related to the world soul" (p. 48).
Psyche produces by not making. Images only relate indirectly to external reality. The Myth of Kybele and Attis suggests the psyche has spiritual needs, which the puer part of us can fulfill. There is a spirit in our madness. Profound mystery envelopes our humanity.
Depth images, including the image of our own world, precede all perception. The entire image conveys its own mood and meaning instinctually and does not require analysis or interpretation.
The god was fully within the participant, who was infused with a deified A. muscaria. In a theophagic rite a priestess ingested Kybele's botanical embodiment, the A. muscaria. It rendered this priestess her human embodiment, after which the priestess used her mediumship to channel the divine voice to her supplicants.
The unconscious consists of mythological motifs or primordial images. An image carries its own inherent meaning which is sort of a ‘condensed expression of the psychic situation as a whole.’ Further, ‘the image is an expression of the unconscious as well as the conscious situation of the moment,’ according to Jung.
"Most people do not tend to think of "dark," "terrifying," or "shattering" experiences which originate in the underworld as "mystical," but often they are just that. Frightening hallucinations, states of terror, profound and devastating grief -- all are forms of altered states of consciousness. It is only our stereotypes and fantasies that tell us that mystical experiences are all bright, blissful, and ecstatic."
"Such underworld experiences are often accompanied by marked changes in one's bodily experience and can produce remarkable states of clarity. They may provide insight into suffering, impermanence, and death, among other things. The fact is that encounters with the underworld, and experience of the pain and suffering of humanity, are not so different from other forms of mystical experience." (Caplan, Halfway Up the Mountain: The Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment)
Images are self-revelatory. Imagination is a direct expression of psychic life. Imagination flows forth from the imaginal field continually, self-organizing its multisensory narrative and conditioning our experiences. In fact, this imaginal dimension is our experience. Everything we perceive of ourselves, others and world is filtered through it.
Psyche is a cornucopia of emergent imagery, spewing forth from the primal fount of creativity, ever born anew with each and every moment. ‘Images’ are soul, in that it is impossible to experience soul, except through the imagination. In a magical moment, consciousness is radically deepened.
Imagination has a discrete redemptive and regenerative power. Exploration of the soul is possible through imagination. Soul, or imagination, is both a realm or domain of experience and a human faculty. Patterned presences embody the energetic imprint of achetypes. Imagination embodies the power of transformation.
While we cannot compose a full or consistent picture, we can make a substantial contribution by touching directly on important segments, remythologizing with our explorations. We can speak in the present tense because in the sacred domain there is no past or future. The mind-altering effect remains the same.
There is mounting evidence for the role of spiritually significant entheogens in the origins of religion by becoming one with the god. Sacraments seal a communion and shared existence between human and divine. The divine resides within us and the plant brings it out as surely today as in prehistoric times.
Hellenistic reconfigurations veil the original ancient Near Eastern background. No contemporary text or myth survives to attest the original character and nature of Kybele's Phrygian cult but the ubiquity of her Phrygian name Matar ("Mother").
The Orgia (Orgiastic festivals) of the Phrygian Mother of the Gods were introduced to Greece by way the island of Samothrake. They were closely connected with the Orgies of the god Dionysos, whose Phrygian counterpart, Sabazios, was described as a son of the goddess.
We are sometimes in the awkward position of making up new myths about old myths. We have no way of imposing guidelines on the imagination. Our understanding lacks completeness and finality. What we understand is inseparable from who we are. Imaginal understanding is evocative and numinous. We ignore her at our peril:
"Western man has no need of more superiority over nature whether outside or inside. He has both in an almost devilish perfection. What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around him and within him. He must learn that he may not do exactly as he wills. If he does not not learn this,his own nature will destroy him. He does not know that his own soul is rebelling against him in a suicidal way."~C.G.Jung, CW II, Par. 869-70.
The tale to follow is living wisdom. Working with a therapeutic myth or story takes preparation for the experience. Then comes the experience itself with the potential of some kind of purifying catharsis to occur, making it part of yourself. Then comes reintegration and rejuvenation. Then the narrative is passed on.
Jung determined that these fantasies come from the mytho-poetic layer of the psyche, mediating the boundaries of the known and the unknown. New stories, maps for living, and interpretations of the primordial mother's myth and cult continue to emerge through evidence and understanding. The gnosis with the power to effect transformation is that we ourselves are the truth made flesh.
Direct inner vision is between believing and knowing. The divine ground expresses itself in our existence, letting your life speak. You answer to the vision given you. Memories of the Origin give rise to longing. When we exemplify that, we are raised to the archetypal dimension. Focus shifts from the earthly mortal to archetypal counterpart and the profound mutuality between them; it unveils the hidden.
The form of your vision and worship are equivalent to your essence. Being supersedes behavior as the basis of reciprocality. A mutually reinforcing relationship can take the form of a dialogue which verifies the authenticity of the vision and cyclic return.
Myths are quite heavily charged with religious significance. Equating prehension with imagination, Colin Wilson said, "This craving for greater intensity of imagination is the religious appetite." It accentuates the primary use of metaphorical thinking.
James Hillman states that "We can describe the psyche as a polycentric realm of nonverbal, nonspatial images. Myth offers the same kind of world. It too, is polycentric, with innumerable personifications in imaginal space. Just as dream images are not mere words in disguise...so the ancient personifications of myths are not concepts in disguise."
He states further that these "soul events are not parts of any system. They are independent of the tandems in which they are placed, inasmuch as there is an independent primacy of the imaginal that creates its fantasies automatically, ceaselessly, and spontaneously. Myth-making is not compensatory to anything else."
Nietzsche sought after metaphysical solace in the “revitalization of myth and activation of the myth-building potential of consciousness” (Safranski 86). In writing about Attic tragedy, Nietzsche states:
"The metaphysical solace which, I wish to suggest, we derive from every true tragedy, the solace that in the ground of things, and despite all changing appearances, life is indestructibly mighty and pleasurable, this solace appears with palpable clarity in the chorus of satyrs, a chorus of natural beings whose life goes on ineradicably behind and beyond all civilization, as it were, and who remain eternally the same despite all the changes of generations and in the history of nations" (Nietzsche 39).
Hillman said, "The gift of an image is a place to watch your soul." ..."It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it." ... The moment an angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one. ... We would like otherworldly visitations to come as distinct voices with clear instructions, but they may only give small signs in dreams, or as sudden hunches and insights that cannot be denied. They feel more as if they emerged from inside and steer you from within ... To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere."
It isn't a supernatural metaphysical system, but is simply 'beyond' the physical, a visible presence of archaic and ubiquitous invisible processes. A material ritual is less important than the beliefs, inspirations, and social purposes underpinning it, especially rituals relating to cult. Rumi suggested, "Wherever you stand be the soul of that place."
In Alchemy in a Modern Woman, Robert Grinnell says, "rites are performed by men and women, but their content emanates from the divine sphere which is past, present, and future. These rites unite the instinctual pattern or pole of the constellated archetype to its divine, spiritual pole: the animal shadow of the archetype and its superhuman, divine aspect are linked together."
A material ritual is less important than the beliefs, inspirations, and social purposes underpinning it, especially rituals relating to cult. Rumi suggested, "Wherever you stand be the soul of that place." We may venture into the wilderness of emotions and sexuality.
The "Mother of All Animals," the 'animal guardian' is the master of animals who is an animal themselves, the 'supreme being' in phenomenal form. Such displays of divinity present the dilemmas, agonies, and potentialities of the religious instinct.
But animals also bear unknown qualities other than religious instinct. In and of themselves, they have no set correlations or interpretations. Animals are restored to their roles as daimonic beings.
Animal Presence & Bestial Vision
James Hullman claimed, "Animals really wake up the imagination ... animal dreams can do this too. They really wake people up. Animal dreams provoke their feelings. get them thinking, interested, and curious. As we get more into imagining, we become more animal-like...more instinctively alive."
Stanton Marlan speaks about his imaginal experience of Animal Presence as its own quality of light, where "animal and human psyches present themselves to each other."
Animal behavior gives us insight into human society. Animal presence is immediately experienced as present to the human psyche, including images of animals as Greek gods, or an animal head, our reception of it as an idea.
We know them through images...a metaphysical forest, anima mundi, abstract and animated, "the flesh of the soul in the world," "the archetypal implications of delight in the flesh." He suggests perhaps imagination is a 'great animal,' human/animal presence, an expression of the Mystery between humans and animals -- the animal soul, 'animalistic animism'.
Gary Snyder said, "animals come into myth or dreams not as projections but as a way to speak to the human mind" (Radical Ecopsychology). "Exaggerated compulsive physicality is the very drive downward into the mystery of life's materiality" (Hillman, 2008). It can be related to the cult practices of the primal Mother.
Hillman asks a few specific questions that are relevant to our imaginal relationships in images, visions, or dreams without therapeutic intentions. What is the animal kingdom to the dreamer? "How does it behave? What does it want? What is the relation between the dream animal and dream human?"
Hillman saw animals as 'waking up the imaginal,' recognizing that animals own themselves but are intimately related to us. "The animal is not reducible to what it may correspond with in the psyche."
He made "the connection between the vitality of the psyche and the psyche's animal images -- that the "animal spirits" are indeed animal spirits!" He calls each animal a psychopompous, "leading human consciousness to yield its theriophobic exclusivity, restoring participation in the animal kingdom."
They come into dreams and imagination from the wild not to be caged or controlled but to teach us something through their qualities in nature, dreams, or art. They express the wild, nature, ongoing playfulness, joy, surprise, impermanence, and self-authenticating, complex, sacred, deep intelligence.
Hillman contends dream animals are not mere symbols of our instincts or dangerous subjective forces inside us, but are "motifs of learning from the animal, amazed by its beauty, touched by its pain, reconciliation with it, being borne, helped, saved by the animal." (Animal Kingdom in the Human Dream, p. 329. In Dream and the Underworld he contrasts how "they are not images of animals, but images as animals." (p. 150)
We are all in the service of life. In the past and today, we understand a religious experience transcends the physical surroundings and material objects associated with it. A symbolic mineral, plant, or animal presence or spirit can express the universal mind, which is a post-historical 'non-knowledge' outside of being.
"Yet it is increasingly clear that contemporary notions of such concepts as religion and the sacred may be of little help in understanding these concepts in prehistory. It is virtually impossible even to agree on the particular referents of ritual symbolism, let alone infer from those referents either the transcendent, ineffable experience of the ritual, or the tenets of the cult itself." (Blake & Knapp, 2005, The Archaeology of Mediterranean Prehistory)
Temples of Vanished Dreams
The root matter is the mother of all things. This is a complex view of the interaction of prehistorical, Anatolian, and Hellenized development of the cult.
Formerly taboo aspects of academic theories are under revision in light of new evidence, such as religious, medicinal, and entheogenic use of natural substances. This is not advocacy, but simple recognition of their role. Wandering initiators have been replaced by wandering scholars, sifting through the buried rubble of the past.
Centuries of earthquakes, floods, erosion, and wars shattered, stirred, and covered much of the detritus of millennia. It was a crossroads battleground, gatekeeper of Asia. The Romans clear-cut many of Anatolia's forests and gouged out countless mines.
Erosion ate away the thin topsoil of the region's highlands, choking rivers and inundating lowland sites of early habitation with tons of water-borne silt. The ruins not buried or thrown down by storm, earthquake, or marauders were chipped away by frost, wind, and rain.
The raw landscape was changing in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene to pastoral and agricultural. Evidence from caves shows that the key difference between late Pleistocene and early Holocene foraging is the evidence for intensive plant gathering in the latter period. The primary species represented are oats, lentils, pistachio, almond, barley, einkorn wheat, and various legumes.
Some information comes from artifacts, inferences, and interpolations of their cultures. We have to return to the archaeology of prehistory: the proto-religious, proto-scientific, and proto-philosophical roots of belief. Both artwork and physical remains of mystical mushrooms have been found in paleolithic caves.
Anatolia was a cauldron of cultures, including worship of a nameless Neolithic goddess and cavern deities. Close ties between religions and drugs are coming to light. To the ancients, devotion wasn't about the drugs, even though they embodied the divine, but the potential to experience the divine directly.
Ancient Greeks considered intoxication as a genuine possession by the gods. Such temporal insanity was credited to the gods instead of physiological or psychological causes. Mystery cult initiates thought that a god was manifesting their mind and making direct contact with the mortal world.
Distinguished from ordinary madness in Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates says that our biggest blessings are from madness with a divine origin. He describes four different kinds: Prophetic madness of Apollo, Telestic or ritual madness of Dionysos, Poetic madness from the Muses, and Erotic madness from Aphrodite and Eros.
These are “paradoxical” aspects of the benign and destructive Divine, “the loving and terrible mother,” who from the beginning had no other name. Her archaic cult was autochthonic, incomparable, existing where it was formed or born; native, aboriginal, indigenous. It is mystical in that it is open to Presence.
The mysteries mainly consisted of a procession that led the devotees out of the polis and a frenzied dancing-ritual out in the wild. In the processions were carried containers which held the sacred objects that were to be revealed during the culminating ritual and during the procession.
Thus, the normal sequence of events involved the public procession that led the followers outside of the polis. Anyone could witness and join in, followed by the culminating secret ritual out in the wild.
Rhythmic dance and music clearly played a major role in the bacchic mysteries as it did in the nighttime rituals of the Mother Goddess.
Although these rituals were collective acts, they can rightfully be called private group rituals. There was no strict time of the year for the ritual, no fixed sanctuary or sanctioned priests such as with the mysteries of Eleusis. A private organization of devotees went into the wild to worship at their own leisure.
There was a secret nature of the ritual and its nocturnal setting. We know that they were secret cults only accessible for initiates, but the exact nature of many of the rituals has been lost or never revealed at all -- a way to experience religion in a deeper, secret way, a way to experience the divine up close.
Some gods and goddesses appear in disguise, in animal forms, as a ghostly apparition or in abstract form, such as a sudden bright light, an igniting fire or the sudden appearance of water. Some ‘miracles’ and appearances in the form of animals were simply natural events that were given a religious interpretation.
Sometimes they can only be felt, or their presence could only be known by some ‘miracle’ happening such as a sudden lightning storm, large waves or a sudden onset of seizures. When a god was seen in a ghostly form, an abstract form or an unclear humanoid form, it was often between waking and sleeping or during ecstatic states.
Dionysos and the Mother Goddess were worshiped in
mystery-cults involving altered states. However, both gods were also known for their power of spontaneous intervention. Contact with the Mother Goddess could be an enlightening or a healing experience, but it could also be frightening.
An unwilling victim could be ‘possessed’ by the Mother Goddess. In Euripides’ Kippolytos, Phaedra acts strangely, so her nurse wonders if ‘the Mountain Mother' has possessed her. She was also one of the deities held responsible for the frenzied ‘Sacred Disease,’ (epilepsy). https://studylib.net/doc/7529336/
The possible dangerous nature of meeting a god face-to-face as was the intention of some of the rituals of worship (Bowden, Mystery Cults 21, 105-136.) Direct contact with the gods could be dangerous if not lethal, but was to be greatly desired.
Such direct contact was quite different from transactional sacrificial rituals or the public rituals of honor during festivals. These activities maintained the goodwill of the gods, a formal and distant relationship. Did ancient Greeks deliberately induce altered states in religious contexts?
Worship in mystery cults assisted possible relationships between gods and mortals that were intimate, personal, and not easily shared. Spontaneous altered states of mind, heavily charged with religious significance, were also often given a religious interpretation. Images are a way of seeing with a mythic sensibility. “To mythic consciousness, the persons of the imagination are real." (Hillman)
For Jung, the unconscious is how the non-human nature inhabits human nature. The non-human nature within us is our psychic nature. Generative images are the self-generative activity of the soul. Psyche generates its archetypal potentialities and imagery, that hold the imagination, move the heart, and influence us over a lifetime.
This imaginal representation of an experience of transformative knowing and learning is linked to human mythopoesis, which is the creation of significant life-interpreting and life-guiding stories. This metaphoric and imaginal representational process is usually carried in colorful, immediate stories.
Many cultures consider psyche or soul to be androgynous, having feminine and masculine energies. Soul also has a natural cycle of descents and integrations -- alchemical soul process.
Myth both describes and changes consciousness, the way to value, fantasy and emotion -- psyche's poetic impulse. The animal forces in human nature and the life of the polis find confluence.
What is imagined to be, is. Intuition is an instinct. Potential to be is the source and power of imagination. Phenomena speak in their own imagistic language. Hillman called the archetypal 'necessary patterns,' that are "ubiquitous, passionate, ever-recurring, inescapable patterns" of value and religious depth rooted in psychic life. (2006, 226)
We hear fractured voices where the world is coiled, gnarled, twisted, ruptured, broken, gapped, fissured, chasmed, and charmed. The sacred or divine inheres within the in-between places. The non-human in animism is a world divinely inspirited with a multitude of voices; mystical traditions are pluralistic and not unitary.
We are inside (immanent) and outside (transcendent) the animate and inanimate earth. Soul seeks its own diversity, perversity, and conversions as it uses us for its own purposes. Psyche has access to universals that the ego can only encounter in specific images -- the suggestive power of primordial images. Aesthetics becomes a means of noticing, a retreat from dichotomies.
Paul Bowles describes wilderness: "Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem fainthearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape. At sunset, the precise, curved shadow of the earth rises into it swiftly from the horizon, cutting into light section and dark section. When all daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intense and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, so that the night never really goes dark."
The baptism of solitude is a unique sensation, having nothing to do with loneliness, which presupposes memory. Here in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside, and we have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person we have always been, or letting it take its course.
No one is quite the same as when they came. Once we have been under the spell of the vast luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. We will go back, for the absolute has no price.
"Nothing disappears completely ... In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows ... Pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements, but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives."
(Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space)
Change in the soul, suggests Hillman, "requires recognition of history, an archaeology of the soul, a digging in the ruins, a recollecting. And – a planting in specific geographical and historical soil with its own smell and savor, in connection with the spirits of the dead..."
He and Jung both thought that unless we come to terms with the dead we cannot live because our life is dependent on finding answers to their unanswered questions. The dead are animating us.
Hillman suggests that a descent into the depths is a descent into human ancestry. It is not a metaphor; the dead still 'live on' in the anonymous and differentiated stream of the historical dead. Even specific historical figures are not actual but emerge as part of our flowing dialogue with the past.
Sticking to a precise description of what happens maintains our fidelity to fantastic but real events. A stream of self-generative imagery is enabled for our active engagement. "The underground stream comes closer to the surface. It comes up" (Lament for the Dead, pg. 1-5).
Gurdjieff wryly suggests that, "A considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror."
"We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us,"
said Liam Callanan in The Cloud Atlas. We are wholy in nature and inhabit her body. She is the anima mundi, the psyche of the world.
Soul craves and needs images, blurring the boundaries of mind and reality. The creative power of an image becomes part of reality, assimilated into our personal reality. Soul animates images and symbols by which psyche imagines.
We sense the animate, anima, and animal with the body -- being alive and alert to every interaction, feeling whatever feelings emerge, sensing whatever sensations arise. Our bodies capture external stimuli, relay those stimuli through our nervous system, parse them in our brains, and consolidate them into a variable “binding frame” of interpretation, or focus, an image. Specific cases lay within a general binding frame connecting content and image.
The void of the sublime stimulates our aesthetic perception. The sublime hovers between being and non-being, between life Eros and death Thanatos. It likes to hide itself. Beauty requires mater, form, color, rhythm, and sound to manifest.
Philosopher Fons Elders claims, "Humanity belongs first of all to the domain of creative imagination, and within creative imagination to the domains of beauty and the sublime. Only when the sublime and beautiful meet, something good and special will manifest itself, not otherwise."
These qualities and impulses extend, amplify, and coax us deeper into mythopoetic imagining and inflections, the inevitable connectedness of all living beings, and the ceaseless activity of our own inherent nature.
"Realizing the imperfection and weakness of ordinary language, the people who have possessed objective knowledge have tried to express the idea of unity in ‘myths,’ in ‘symbols,’ and in particular ‘verbal formulas,’ which, having been transmitted without alteration, have carried on the idea from one school to another, often from one epoch to another."
~ G. I. Gurdjieff
We all live within the body of the divine mother. Ancient Greeks did not have a monolithic, clear view of their gods. The Mother Goddess might well be the best example of this characteristic of ancient Greek religion. Diogenes claimed that the roaring of the Mother Goddess’ cymbals brings forth wisdom and healing.
Beside the original mountain shrines dedicated to the Mother Goddess in Anatolia, large temples called Metroön’s were dedicated to the mother goddess, in many Greek cities along the Ionian coastline and in mainland Greece.
The Mother of the gods figures prominently in Athenian social and political institutions. Athenian drama portrays the goddess and her rites as foreign. The formal public cults created and maintained Greek and non-Greek social boundaries while the ecstatic cults cut across those boundaries. Euripides stresses the necessity of the foreign deity to ‘break down barriers between public and private cult. (Roller)
Athens celebrated a spring festival in her name called the Galaxia, a 'mother's milk' ritual. However, she was most renowned for her powers of madness and disease, but also for the opposites: healing and inner calm. A summer festival Cronia, was addressed alone to the Mother of the Gods.
This festival isn't for Cronus but from the kernos, the vessel well-attested in rituals of the Mother. Various versions of the aetiological myths of this summer festival associated the frenzied and raucous festival with stories of the roaming Mother and various forms of raucous protective warriors.
The Greek cult of the mother goddess originated in Phrygia, where a mother goddess was worshiped as the most important (and also solely pictured) deity. Kybele as a ‘multifarious divinity.
The mother goddess was simultaneously identified with Ge or Gaea (the Greek earth goddess), Rhea (sister and wife of Kronos and mother of the Olympians), and Demeter. Worship of Demeter, the Mother Goddess, and Dionysos were known as mystery-cults in the ancient Greek world.
Most common, Meter Kybele, which can be translated as mother of the mountains, is a derivation from Matar Kubileya, an epitaph given to the mother goddess in Phrygia. There she was traditionally worshiped as the goddess that guided the conquering of the wild; a goddess of the hunt, of the mountains, but also as a protective goddess of mankind and its cities. However, in the Greek world, the Mother Goddess had an unclear and multidimensional character.
Homeric Hymns illustrate she was also connected with the wild nature and loud rhythmic music. Aspects of her cult, such as torchlit nighttime rituals of ecstatic dance and offerings in honor of the goddess were accompanied by loud music from Tympanum, flute and cymbals. The rituals and music are often described as roaring and resounding which illustrates its heavy repetitive character. Most vividly described however, is the frenzied, serpentine, encircling dance that accompanied the ritual.
Clarity about the personification was not that important in the worship of a mystery deity. Religious practice surrounding the mystery cults probably stemmed from an emotional urge for religious experience rather than a curiosity about the hierarchy of the divine. The need to feel the divine up close overshadowed the problem of identification.
A vase depicts a seated Mother Goddess with a consort. All around the gods human devoteesare pictured honoring the two gods with ritual dance and music. Some of them are holding snakes and all of the dancers are pictured with their heads tossed backward, their legs kicked upwards and with open mouths. The Mother goddess can be identified through her crowned head and the presence of lions.
The attending consort is a god posed as an equal next to the goddess. Dionysos seems the most logical possibility, because he is also associated with ecstatic cult rituals and because of the snake fillet. Snakes were a returning attribute of Dionysos' maenads. In Ion and the Phaedrus, Plato suggested that devotees of the Mother Goddess could find an inner peace in the trance-like state of consciousness that accompanied the dance.
These accounts all communicate the emotional content of the rituals, ‘for the individuals depicted are engaged in activities of deep personal intensity.’ The attraction of the Meter cult to her worshipers responds to a felt need, to cut through dry ceremony that normally surround the officially sanctioned religions of the state and seek direct contact with the divine.
We are always enmeshed in the nature of the psyche. Emotional memories embody the characteristics, propensities, and yearnings of the goddess. Blind longing is first transformed into the lower level of pleasure and recognized as soul in pleasure, informed by imagination.
Deep Personal Intensity
Magic and religion mediate the space between what is human and non-human, an ever-changing union of natural and supernatural. We have to write of it in an imaginal style and read it that way, too. Imagination is the essential element of genius.
"What haunts these contextual niches ... is the unconscious of the text itself, not our unconscious, but the unconscious of the otherness of the text that comes from the dimensions of the artifact that are not fully controlled consciously by the author nor fully interpreted by the critic." (Kent D. Palmer, Ph.D., Intratextuality: Exploring the Unconscious of the Text. Data Mining to Understand the sources in the Unconscious)
When we become an embodied symbol there is no definitive difference between human (unconscious) and non-human nature. The imaginative arts include ritual, vision, art, music, magic, oracles, and mysticism. They include the secret preparation of psychoactive incense and pharmakons.
In moments of heightened sensitivity, our thoughts are silenced; our awareness of self dissolves; we feel absorbed by the experience, and part of something greater than ourselves. We become one with the dance, one with the music, and one with the panoramic vista before us as an epiphany.
The mysterious encounters take many forms. Embodied archetypes become articulate. Sometimes people feel they’re in the presence of the Divine, or of a more nebulous entity like Ultimate Reality. A higher power reveals the truth of the universe. Or, they just feel a novel connectedness to everything from now back to the Primordial Origin.
Even quantum physics shows that nature is essentially non-material. While retaining their reality, Einstein denied the substantiality of matter and field. Bohm's holistic view, a radical metaphysics of nature, includes non-locality and entanglement of quantum systems.
Bohm writes "we may regard each of the “particles” constituting a system as a projection of a “higher-dimensional” reality, rather than as a separate particle, existing together with all the others in a common three-dimensional space." (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, p. 238)
Since each entangled particle is a projection of a single encompassing higher dimensional whole, particle properties are correlated. "[The] entire universe must, on a very accurate level, be regarded as a single indivisible unit in which separate parts appear as idealizations permissible only on a classical level of accuracy of description. (Quantum Theory, p. 167)
As Jung suggested, "Just remember to follow nature" are ancestral words of wisdom. As nature is the mirror of the psyche, our family tree is the mirror of our own nature, the instinct to reflect. The archaic, meaning more 'original' than 'ancient,' still lives in us buried beneath the persona."
He argued for the central role of the symbol in bringing together conscious and unconscious material, as the symbol is partly conscious and partly unconscious. Psyche has many voices:
transformational subjectivity, personally redemptive mysticism, and direct experience of the reality of the psyche.
In Psychological Types Jung describes the symbol as an extreme complex product. "The symbol is always a product of an extremely complex nature."
We seek the living Earth in all her complexity. The Earth is an organism, the ancestral mother of all life, an entity deemed worthy of supreme importance, a fathomless creativity. Creative imagination functions as water sources do in nature. In constant movement, they return to their original level once the water is removed.
Matar personifies the co-evolution of the biosphere. Gaia created the manifest universe, the first race of gods, and the first race of humans. She has the gift of foretelling the future, foresight on the germination of things that await us in time.
In her holistic theology, She is a prophetess, guardian of the sanctity of oaths, and ever-present origin. Systems exist in nature as parts of a larger whole. We come 'out of this world' like a leaf comes out of a tree arising naturally from it. A singular organism is a Gaian image.
Shimmering Symbols
The psychic nature of the living organism of imagination is protean, be it human, animal, or monster. Mytho-poeisis reshapes awareness long before it has a language. Soul creates itself by imagining itself, existing only as it imagines. This is not transcendence but transparency, not getting out, but seeing through.
Transparency, dimensionality, and depth dance with opacity, obscurity, and shadow. Seeing through psyche itself makes soul transparent, creating a drastic alteration of identity. We land in the hands of something far greater than ourselves, living the cycle of its own life.
In nonunitarian, discontinuous transformations, a system opens itself to novelty and potentiality by dissolving into a state of nonlocal communion with the whole. It reforms unconditioned by the past. Nonunitary transformation is based in the dissolution of all forms and structures, and creative emergence of unconditioned creativity--metamorphosis.
In this organic model of multiple universes and states of consciousness, everything is involved in a pattern of continuous rebirth, and everything is the manifestation of the underlying creative potential, transcending physical and spiritual boundaries.
The image is a self-limiting multiple relationship of meanings, moods, historical events, qualitative details, and expressive possibilities -- an inherently mystical, erotic, and transformational dimension of the unconscious.
These pre-thinking images prepare us for the mysteries. They show us in advance the path of transformation that we have to go through in mystery, the confluence of pre-thinking and pleasure. The image always implies more than it presents, “the depth of the image – its limitless ambiguities… can only be partly grasped as implications.” (Berry 1974, p. 98). Light is its own illuminating medium.
In this sense of the religious function of the psyche, we can imagine the goddess as ancestral and generative 'parent' and numinous 'transparent' -- a world of self-luminous forms and truths of imaginal reality, an inherently mystical, erotic, and transformational dimension of the unconscious.
Once we ourselves are rooted in this fertile earth of the deep unconscious, we can plant our potentially vital forms and structures and listen to souls being born in the future. We are ground in imaginal space. We learn to "stand our ground" in the deep interiority of the psychological field with new vigor.
Voluntary Contact with the Gods
Living mythologies play a profound role in the lives of their participants, consciously or unconsciously. Mythic imagination includes our inherent spiritual vision, creativity, magic, and healing. It may involve ritually enacting the shadow. Mother Goddess rituals included orgia, mysteria and teletai translated as mystic rites, mysteries and initiations.
Our basic understanding is that the gods could only be known indirectly. But every believer also shares the emotional urge to bridge that gap, to meet the divine face to face. Contact with the numinosum (the essence or presence of divinity) can be healing, terrifying, or deeply spiritual. This core of religious experience feels objective and outside the self.
Myth is ever new and always generative. The germinal image offers itself in transparency in everything in its visible form. As a primal legacy of the whole planet, it carries the human spirit forward. The myths we come to know continue living with in us.
Mythic narratives disclose "patterns of meaning that state and restate universal human activities" (Krippner). Mythological ideas permeate human consciousness. They spontaneously resurrect in the psychomythology of everyday life: dreams, reveries, sensations, play, passion, ritual, music, love, dance, writing, drawing, and painting which comprise our personal mythmaking.
It is important today to rediscover our mythic roots and spiritual connection to reconnect with the cosmos. In liminal mediation, down is good; depths are good. In her name, humans have consumed magic mushrooms for over 10,000 years as communion, “psychedelic symbiosis,” and medicine. Myth-infused vision and aesthetic arrest lead to even more realization of its own depth.
Myths involve us by stimulating and grabbing us emotionally. Some people get more glimpses, some get less. Mythic fragments are pieces of the gods. Dismemberment releases multiple stories of being.
We have to begin anew with the dismembered fragments of the archaic, perhaps enlivened by a significant dream, uncontaminated by conscious ideas. As Jung suggests, "You can enter only into your own mysteries." How do we explore the depths of our reality and experience, seeing underneath that which appears on the surface?
What do we really know about humanity's multi-millennial knowledge of the primordial religious tradition which we have inherited? Which technologies help us inhabit a shared world, rather than one in which we each see vastly different realities?
How can we heal our fractured relationship with the planet? Where and how do we reconnect with the instinctual primal experience of the shadowy, shimmering cave and the transformative experience of the otherworld?
What secrets echo down to us from archaic times? If a symbiotic relationship with plants influenced neural evolution, how did the loss of this lead to massive consequences? How were they entwined with and mediated by our own beating, pulsing, living bodies?
Theagenesis
Kybele became partially assimilated to aspects of the Earth-goddess Gaia and her possibly Minoan equivalent Rhea. Gaia/Kybele was both Earth Mother and mother goddess, the creative and visionary power of life itself. Pausanias equates these Phrygian gods with the Greek gods Zeus and Gaia. Greeks associated her with Gaia, Rhea and Demeter. She gives archaic testimony to the vitality of myth.
Gaia wasn't a universally-worshiped “Mother Earth” figure, but the Greek version of the Anatolian Mother Goddess, Kybele. Gaia’s cult worship was as an oracular goddess and as a mother figure is overstated. As the deep-breasted earth, Gaia is a personification of matter = matrix = mother of Uranos, the starry heavens. She was also the mother of the Titans.
She supports all physical life; in fact, she is the material or physical body. She is the somatic base of all psychosomatic phenomena, such as disease, the autonomic nervous system, and vagal rebound.
Gaia/Kybele created the manifest universe, the first race of gods, and the first race of humans. Even animals witness the silence of time and the depth of nature. There are thousands of ways to kneel down and kiss the ground.
She has the gift of foretelling the future. She is a prophetess. Oracular space is a timeless domain where ritual assists us in gaining insight and even 'seeing the goddess'. One of the deepest longings of the human soul is to see and be seen. We long to be wholly received, where soul is a divine echo whispering in the wellspring of the heart, awakening hidden worlds within.
A major characteristic is that she is the guardian of the sanctity of oaths, including magickal oaths and the Mystery of approach -- the Mystery of the presence in the Other. The knowing in imagination is that of exploring, not predetermined concepts or ideas. Form patiently emerges, including the form of our identity which emerges from experience.
Ruins are not empty. They are sacred places full of presence where heartful love flows out like water through a sacred shrine in the landscape, which has a soul and presence. The landscape is alive.
Landscape is its own natural subjectivity just as the unconscious terrain sets the scene for the dead and the other figures that occupy the same psychic space. The psychic nature is still the living organism of imagination.
The dead are a literal presence in the psyche who point to themselves as psychic material. In some sense, memory is within the clay of our being. The imaginal body has a sense of the eternal. Stone becomes a monument of memory, a primary form of mythic imaginaton. Caverns hold the memories and sounds.
Landscape belongs primarily to itself as a primal billions-year-old creation, preceding plants, animals, and humans. It is the living presence of an enormous pre-human memory -- a whole kind of narrative presence, unfolding, emerging and hiding itself in the shifting light and darkness.
Psychoidelic
The psychoid, psychophysical reality, is the land of psyche and mass. Some call it the soul. Matter and mind are not differentiated. At this level, the psyche, a microcosm, “reflects” the universe, the macrocosm, that which in the psyche is completely unknown or, unconscious material that never comes in contact with the conscious.
"Psychoid ” is not a 'psyche', but can only be described in terms analogous to those of psychology. Critical to a psychophysical vision is the discovery that both psyche and world share a single transcendental matrix identified as the psychoid.
This psychophysical whole not only contains psyche and world; it also acts autonomously. The psychoid activities are, in some way, made to reinforce each other until, as is clearly the case in higher animals, they reach a high level of intensity.
The psychoid has a morphogenetic aspect (producing the somatic structure) and the "psychoiď” (psychelike) aspect. This is the area of the soul where instinct and archetype shade into one another, the most unitary level of the unconscious, the root level of Being beyond even the division of mind and matter.
The psychoid substrate has effects from the psychological to the physical. Jung perceived four layers: the conscious layer, the personal unconscious, the collective unconscious, and the psychoid level. Deeper still is the unconscious of world soul.
Psychological and physiological manifestations can be combined in various proportions. The psychoid reality is often called “archetypal reality," as we may infer various archetypal components of the psychoid. That is, the psychoid is not absolutely unitary. Instinct is “attached” to the material organism. Its psychoid nature builds the bridge to matter.
The psychoid unconscious refers to a most fundamental level of the unconscious, which cannot be accessed by the conscious. Where instinct predominates, psychoid processes set in which pertain to the sphere of the unconscious as elements incapable of consciousness. The psychoid process is not the unconscious as such, for this has a far greater extension.
The most rudimentary part of the collective unconscious Jung called the psychoid unconscious. The psychoid is embedded deepest in the unconscious. This psychoid source refers to the material substrate of life: like calcium, inorganic by category, but, like bones.
The psychoid has nothing of a “psychical” nature, but relates to the willing of specific unexperienced realities, and to knowing the specific means of attaining them. The pre-psychoid level is a connection between physical and spiritual reality. The psyche has not yet achieved a distinctly psychological quality. In this inner space the spiritual and physical worlds overlap.
The most rudimentary part of the collective unconscious Jung called the psychoid unconscious. The psychoid is embedded deepest in the unconscious. The experience of this unitary reality culminates in an encounter with the deepest layer of the collective unconscious, the psychoid, archetypal layer, in which we meet all forms of otherness at this depth.
Psychoid refers to an entity in the unconscious that is potentially psyche as well as physis. Through a process of unfolding, this initially psychoid entity splits up into psyche and physis. The parapsychological theory argues that there is a radical interchange of energy between body, mind, and the psychoid or Jungian collective unconscious. No longer is one dealing with the bodymind duality per se.
The unconscious is the core of the psychoid sphere. This 'psychoid", this rudimentary feeling and willing, is aware of the form it desires to produce and must be psychially at least as complex as the phenomena it is designed to account for -- aeons of genetic, cellular, and phylogenic information and memory.
This is the realm of shamanic journeys and encounters with spirit. It is a very real world which subsumes the world of our everyday experience. It has been referred to in such terms as 'spirit', 'pneuma', or 'numinosum,' the unconscious archetype, not its conscious representation. (Fordham 1957a, p. 2)
Archetypes exist at the limit of our ability to observe and can be termed psychoid, meaning that one cannot determine whether in their essential nature they are physical or psychic or both. The organic levels of the psychoid become psychic patterns of archetypal images.
The psychoid (psychic-material) nature of the archetype as well as the relativity of time and space in the transpsychic reality of the unconscious were key factors in Jung's investigations of parapsychological phenomena.
By 'psychoid' Jung meant a supra - individual or 'transpsychic reality immediately underlying the psyche' (Jung 1928b, para 860), which can appear simultaneously as both a psychic and a physical phenomenon (Jung 1955b, para 964). At the psychoid level matter and mind appear to lose their separate identity. The archetype is the a priori ordering principle by virtue of which we experience synchronistic events that suggest "acausal orderedness."
Psychoid is the set of dynamic factors controlling vegetative and sub-psychic animal functions. The psychoid controls functions such as growth , digestion , blood circulation , respiration , temperature regulation , etc. The psychoid includes the subtle body, visionary experience, synchronicity, and the ultraviolet/infrared spectrum from energy to matter.
Living substance is striving from outside. With the world of reality separated from the psychoid, magical world in which transpersonal powers reside, there is no spontaneity, no life, and no genuine possibility for personal growth. Things dry up. There is no depth, no hope.
The entelechy of the real acts by external inorganic events. The psychoid archetype is almost impossible to explain because it is essentially a mystery, but its numinosity can be experienced through both body and psyche. Its healing power can radiate through the person who reveres it.
The archetypes for both matter and psyche are expressions of the psychoid process -- meaning , derived through consciousness of the archetypes. Thus this non - energetic factor, entelechy, psychoid regulates becoming and action in organisms.
Psychoid processes are unconscious in relation to the later developing consciousness associated with the psyche. "Spirit and instinct are by nature autonomous and both limit in equal measure the applied field of the will." (Jung, Vol. 8)
Nonpsychic information becomes psychized, passing from the unknowable into the unknown (the unconscious psyche) and then moving toward the known. So when awareness arises it always involves a relation of the psychoid to environment, either to its own essence or to another's.
Consciousness is an active process and can be defined only in relation to environment. Though spontaneous visions certainly occur, the capacity to relate to the psychoid on a regular basis is one that must be earned. Even madness is redeemed in its significance.
The 'psychoid' or 'organism' of the noumenal order is confronted with difficulties in its environment which it struggles to overcome. According to this view, the new consciousness differs from Jung's psychoid unconscious. While it is aware of the opposites, it nevertheless allows the androgynous male or female to decide to suppress or maintain them.
Jung described this domain as psychoid when he said: “We must completely give up the idea of the psyche being somehow connected with the brain and remember instead the ' meaningful ' or ' intelligent ' behavior of the lower organisms..."
Jung affirmed that the “psychoid' may also be the “basis of instinctive phenomena," the progressive synthesis of instinct and spirit. The psychoid is again related to the essence of the archetype and as such possesses “a transcendence” giving to it the numinous power of the “voice of God” (Jung 1958a: 453).
Infinite Duration
The biosphere is lived from within. Culture is inherent in biology. Embodied presence paves the way towards a radically different empathic relationship with our communities, and even the larger ‘body’ of the Earth. There is a continuity fed by, driven by the impulse to work at something that comes out of nature.
Just as we inhabit our bodies, we also inhabit the greater ‘body’ of the Earth. A journey to the underworld is associated with occult knowledge. Mutual accompaniment naturally includes trans-human, human, animal, plant, and mineral creatures.
Our active and dynamical interior is indistinguishable from the outer world. Kybele's primordial androgyny reflects both aspects of reality -- the objective and imaginal. Both have an imaginal root.
Humus is chemically complex, spongy, porous, and retains a high concentration of essential nutrients that are readily accessible to the roots of plants. Humus occurs naturally when plants and animals break down over the span of centuries.
In the majestic sacred grove, we feel our way down the tree’s rough trunk and along one of its roots into a mass of spongy debris where the finer roots are matted into a thick red and brown tangle from which the scarlet and white mushrooms grow. As our root dives into the ground, downward and outward we spread out in awarenesss like the mycelium.
We follow thin roots that proliferate wildly, knotted with their neighbors. Some roots smell sharp and nutty and others woody and bitter. Some have a spicy resinous odor when scratched with a fingernail.
We make sure we haven't lost the thread in this subterranean labyrinth as more filaments spring out from the root. We follow all the way to the tips, where they burrowed into fragments of rotting needles and twigs. The rootlets branch like a small tree and their surface is covered with a filmy layer that appears fresh and sticky.
From these roots, a fungal network laces out into the soil and around the roots of nearby trees. Without this fungal web, our sacred evergreen tree and its fungal fruit would not exist. Without similar fungal webs no plants would exist anywhere. All life on land, including our own, depends on these networks.
'Mother trees' protect the forest and 'recognize' their offspring. Fungal threads called hyphae create a highway and merge with tree roots. Then, trees can send and receive nitrogen, sugars, carbon, phosphorus, water, defense signals, chemicals, and hormones. Amazingly, one tree can connect to hundreds of other trees, sending out signals. Along the threads, bacteria and other microbes swap nutrients with the fungi and the tree roots.
Resplendent with drying mushrooms tied to them like ornaments, such trees were ceremonially worshiped. In the mythic sense, this original tree, the mother of all trees, is the essence, source, and sense of being rooted in life, so central to existence.
The tree and the mushroom are one. We don't know when paleolithic humans began to use them as medicines and within ritual environments. But Dionysus plants us in nature renewing our connection -- the Dionysian aspect of the human psyche is renewed.
As Dendrites, "he of the trees", Dionysus was a god of trees in general. Thought to have originated in Thrace or Asia Minor, Dionysus is a foreign deity believed to have been one of the older chthonic (subterranean) gods.
Symbols common to Kybele, Dionysus and Shiva include the snake, the Lady of the Mountains, the leopard skin, and the bull. Soul insists divine madness is incorporated into psyche. Plutarch believed that Osiris and Dionysus were identical dismemberment/rebirth myths -- renewed instinctual life through the primeval forces of nature.
His attributes included the thyrsos (a pine-cone tipped staff). The pinecone that tipped his thyrsus linked him to Kybele, primeval regeneration of nature. His ambiguous sexuality, wild passion, and orgiastic rites echoed that of Kybele's cultic tree-worship. He is worshiped using a sacramental tree pole.
The Delphic oracle commanded the Corinthians to worship a particular pine-tree "equally with the god," so they made two images of Dionysus out of it, with red faces and gilt bodies.
In later times, he was worshiped also as a theos chthonios, which may have arisen as an amalgamation of Phrygian and Lydian forms of worship with those of the ancient Greeks. (Paus. viii. 37, § 3; Arnob. adv. Gent. v. 19.) In the Greek pantheon, Dionysus (along with Zeus) absorbs the role of Sabazios, a Phrygian deity. Sabazius was an alternate name for Bacchus in Rome.
If we tug lightly on our root, we feel the ground move, enliven. Staying in the dark allows something to happen. Here we find the darkness in the light, the shine or shimmer that is both lightness and darkness conjoined.
Direct passionate participation with nature shapes community fantasy. Bloodstains attest to the penultimate sacrifice, living the unglamorous process of suffering and pain. We humbly enter to learn more about its mysteries. The 'new' does not lie ahead or elsewhere, but deeper into what is always present. The 'new' is timeless, but then, so is the 'old' as undead memory.
"… in the psyche there is nothing that is just a dead relic. Everything is alive, and our upper story, consciousness, is continually influenced by its living and active foundations." (Jung, CW 10 Par. 55)
In The Visible and the Invisible, Merlou-Ponty introduced his nuanced notion of the ‘flesh of the world’, a primordial and mysterious tissue that underlies, and gives rise to, both the perceiver and the perceived -- feeling with the innermost elements of being.
Flesh underlies not just our interwovenness into the world through looking and being looked at, but equally the eyes and cries of other beings. Flesh is the elemental tissue that gives rise to the web of Earthly life, organic and inorganic together.
The body is central to our understanding of our relationships with others and to the wider ecological context we are immersed within. We become more attentive not only to the lived body, but with it. We must live our animal on our mother planet.
We perceive the entirety (‘the gestalt’) of what actually appears before us. The god Pan now stands in for panexperientialism and the origin of human consciousness in the discovery of the sacred.
Mystical states are represented fundamentally in two forms. One involves the experience of another Sentient Being proximal to the experient while the other involves the perceived localization of the self within another frame of reference at times and distances significantly different from the experient’s location.
During these periods the person experiences information that is considered unattainable through the normal state and has been a major source of creativity and insight. They often transcend the formal education of the person or the contemporary sophistication of the culture. (Persinger) http://neurosciarchive.byethost12.com/2010-Persinger-Saroka-Koren-and-St-Pierre-Journal-of-Consciousness-Exploration-and-Research-The-electromagnetic-induction-of-mystica.pdf?i=1
The archetype is decisive for psychic life. We establish a relationship between conscious and unconscious systems (psychic energies) of the psyche, mediating life energy as important arbitors of life and behavior -- the transformation of compulsive instinctive drives.
Merleau-Ponty claimed that we gesture and connect with one another through an expressive, ambiguous space of ‘intercorporeality’. Connecting to the aliveness of the breathing body offers us something more basic. Here we meet directly with flashes of the joys, losses, hopes, dreams, interpretations and dedications of the lives of others.
Such moments literally re-source us, putting us in contact, as body-subjects, with our most primordial mode of being -- dwelling in a suspended state of embodied presence. Embodiment’s access to the heart is intimacy, connection and compassion resting on our directly perceiving one another.
Merleau-Ponty said the shared ‘interworld’ is where ‘our gazes cross and our perceptions overlap’. Here the ‘intertwining’ of your life with other people’s lives is revealed. This crisscrossing of lateral, overlapping relations with other people, other creatures and other things is an expressive space that exists between lived bodies, embodied psyches.
It is not that we are all ‘one’, but that we inhabit a world which the philosopher Glen Mazis saw as ‘things, people, creatures' who 'intertwine, interweave, yet do not lose the wonder that each is each and yet not without the others’.
"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." (James Hillman)
Staying alive to the depth and quality of our interactions with others, we notice intimacy depends upon our participation in a shared perceptual world in which our lived bodies ‘show up’. We simply slow down, to pause, to touch in with the pulsing, breathing lifeworld of the body. Then we can restore our presence, our aliveness, our precious connection with other beings.
Our language is, before all else, ‘the very voice of the trees, the waves, and the forest’ (Valery). It affirms ‘our corporeal immersion in the depths of a body much larger than our own’. Such an initiation is a dimension that can never again be closed.
Meanings elaborate and multiply through the integration of information. That information is infused through direct experience. Imagery invites entrainment--the evocation of beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and behavior. It invites experience by attracting our attention and evoking multiple associations.
Imagery invites us to experience by penetrating to the very core of natural process, through recognition of pattern, mediating available information. Images penetrate or directly affect unconscious intentionalities, often initiating habituation, ritualization, cycles.
The Great Goddess of Asia Minor is the oldest divinity known from artifacts, predating the Goddesses of the Sumerian and Egyptians by at least 5,000 years. Goddess figurines were found which date to 30,000 years ago, but we don't know their origin or character of the Goddess they represent.
Kybele controlled every aspect of life on Earth, from plants to animals to men. All fertility was her under control. People in Anatolia, who had a profound respect for nature, believed Kybele also had the power to spare mankind from destructive cycles of nature. She was regarded as a protectress of civilization itself. Her androgyny was symbolic of a wild and uncontrollable nature.
The Great Mother, Cybele, as the Greeks and Roman's knew Her, was originally worshiped in the mountains of Phrygia. The Romans honored her as a goddess of resurrection and rebirth. She was called the Mountain Mother and revered as "the womb of the gods," and "mistress of animals."
She was the universal mother of not only the gods but also of all humans, animals and plant life. How little in the past we understood, what's underfoot -- the social life of forests and their underground support and communication.
In her darkened shrines, Kybele reflected a new inward tendency, expressed a new reflective style, a new interiority, and intensification -- a return to mythical patterns and persons of the psyche, the forgotten knowledge of the imagination. Her music was song, lamentation, and trance-inducing mystical incantations.
Her way is one of seeking the nature of the world by cooperating and participating with the divine, a resonance between subtle beings and living creatures. There is a substratum of mythical mentality in every person. Imaginal figures are real to mythological consciousness. The numinous is autonomous, not merely our projection, concept, or construct.
Kybele is the depth of all that is present, the spirit of Life in everything, an inherent, unique, knowing, directive intelligence. Such custodians of the vegetal world forge a human-plant-fungi alliance. A loop of communication and meaning cycles from human to pine tree to mushroom and back.
Stories emerge out of a human-plant collaborative. We move from concept to numinous experience. She is an encounter, a radical phenomenological encounter, the autonomous, disruptive power of the psyche, a savage source. An archetypal content is embodied in us at that moment. ... a self-awareness which manifests as anticipation, desire, effort.
Disembodied Desire
Dionysus is about a change in consciousness—a tearing apart of the old god--for a mystical and erotic form of transformational subjectivity, and personally redemptive mysticism. Dualistic opposites become multiplicity, with a wider dispersal of the divine in matter.
A symbol's route to the unknown invokes the archetypal qualities of psyche, its raw tearing apart of disciplinary norms and artistic conventions. On the other hand, Dionysus, god of comic and tragic drama, also provides a pathway to a remembering of knowing and being that promises a renewed consciousness in touch with instinctual life or zoe.
Hillman tells us that, "Dismemberment becomes a way of discovering the puer spirit, for 'Dionysus, youngest of the gods' belongs to the theme of the renewal of the aging god. ...dismemberment refers to a psychological process that requires a body metaphor. The process of division is presented as a body experience, even as a horrifying torture.
If, however, dismemberment is ruled by the archetypal dominant of Dionysus, then the process, while beheading or dissolving the central control of the old king, may be at the same time activating the pneuma that is distributed throughout the materializations of our complexes. The background of Dionysus offers insight into the rending pain of self-division, especially as a body-experience."
"Dionysus was called Lysios, the loosener. The word is cognate with lysis, the last syllable of analysis. Lysis means loosening, setting free, deliverance, dissolution, collapse, breaking bonds and laws, the final unravelling as of a plot."
Psyche or soul is our intuited relationship with our own depths and reflection, purpose and longing for meaning, and participation in non-ordinary reality. Engagement with mystery is what she asks from all of us -- an impulse for reuniting with the source.
The psychoid, psychophysical reality, is the land of psyche and mass. Some call it the soul. Matter and mind are not differentiated. At this level, the psyche, a microcosm, “reflects” the universe, the macrocosm, that which in the psyche is completely unknown or, unconscious material that never comes in contact with the conscious.
"Psychoid ” is not a 'psyche', but can only be described in terms analogous to those of psychology. Critical to a psychophysical vision is the discovery that both psyche and world share a single transcendental matrix identified as the psychoid.
This psychophysical whole not only contains psyche and world; it also acts autonomously. The psychoid activities are, in some way, made to reinforce each other until, as is clearly the case in higher animals, they reach a high level of intensity.
The psychoid has a morphogenetic aspect (producing the somatic structure) and the "psychoiď” (psychelike) aspect. This is the area of the soul where instinct and archetype shade into one another, the most unitary level of the unconscious, the root level of Being beyond even the division of mind and matter.
The psychoid substrate has effects from the psychological to the physical. Jung perceived four layers: the conscious layer, the personal unconscious, the collective unconscious, and the psychoid level. Deeper still is the unconscious of world soul.
Psychological and physiological manifestations can be combined in various proportions. The psychoid reality is often called “archetypal reality," as we may infer various archetypal components of the psychoid. That is, the psychoid is not absolutely unitary. Instinct is “attached” to the material organism. Its psychoid nature builds the bridge to matter.
The psychoid unconscious refers to a most fundamental level of the unconscious, which cannot be accessed by the conscious. Where instinct predominates, psychoid processes set in which pertain to the sphere of the unconscious as elements incapable of consciousness. The psychoid process is not the unconscious as such, for this has a far greater extension.
The most rudimentary part of the collective unconscious Jung called the psychoid unconscious. The psychoid is embedded deepest in the unconscious. This psychoid source refers to the material substrate of life: like calcium, inorganic by category, but, like bones.
The psychoid has nothing of a “psychical” nature, but relates to the willing of specific unexperienced realities, and to knowing the specific means of attaining them. The pre-psychoid level is a connection between physical and spiritual reality. The psyche has not yet achieved a distinctly psychological quality. In this inner space the spiritual and physical worlds overlap.
The most rudimentary part of the collective unconscious Jung called the psychoid unconscious. The psychoid is embedded deepest in the unconscious. The experience of this unitary reality culminates in an encounter with the deepest layer of the collective unconscious, the psychoid, archetypal layer, in which we meet all forms of otherness at this depth.
Psychoid refers to an entity in the unconscious that is potentially psyche as well as physis. Through a process of unfolding, this initially psychoid entity splits up into psyche and physis. The parapsychological theory argues that there is a radical interchange of energy between body, mind, and the psychoid or Jungian collective unconscious. No longer is one dealing with the bodymind duality per se.
The unconscious is the core of the psychoid sphere. This 'psychoid", this rudimentary feeling and willing, is aware of the form it desires to produce and must be psychially at least as complex as the phenomena it is designed to account for -- aeons of genetic, cellular, and phylogenic information and memory.
This is the realm of shamanic journeys and encounters with spirit. It is a very real world which subsumes the world of our everyday experience. It has been referred to in such terms as 'spirit', 'pneuma', or 'numinosum,' the unconscious archetype, not its conscious representation. (Fordham 1957a, p. 2)
Archetypes exist at the limit of our ability to observe and can be termed psychoid, meaning that one cannot determine whether in their essential nature they are physical or psychic or both. The organic levels of the psychoid become psychic patterns of archetypal images.
The psychoid (psychic-material) nature of the archetype as well as the relativity of time and space in the transpsychic reality of the unconscious were key factors in Jung's investigations of parapsychological phenomena.
By 'psychoid' Jung meant a supra - individual or 'transpsychic reality immediately underlying the psyche' (Jung 1928b, para 860), which can appear simultaneously as both a psychic and a physical phenomenon (Jung 1955b, para 964). At the psychoid level matter and mind appear to lose their separate identity. The archetype is the a priori ordering principle by virtue of which we experience synchronistic events that suggest "acausal orderedness."
Psychoid is the set of dynamic factors controlling vegetative and sub-psychic animal functions. The psychoid controls functions such as growth , digestion , blood circulation , respiration , temperature regulation , etc. The psychoid includes the subtle body, visionary experience, synchronicity, and the ultraviolet/infrared spectrum from energy to matter.
Living substance is striving from outside. With the world of reality separated from the psychoid, magical world in which transpersonal powers reside, there is no spontaneity, no life, and no genuine possibility for personal growth. Things dry up. There is no depth, no hope.
The entelechy of the real acts by external inorganic events. The psychoid archetype is almost impossible to explain because it is essentially a mystery, but its numinosity can be experienced through both body and psyche. Its healing power can radiate through the person who reveres it.
The archetypes for both matter and psyche are expressions of the psychoid process -- meaning , derived through consciousness of the archetypes. Thus this non - energetic factor, entelechy, psychoid regulates becoming and action in organisms.
Psychoid processes are unconscious in relation to the later developing consciousness associated with the psyche. "Spirit and instinct are by nature autonomous and both limit in equal measure the applied field of the will." (Jung, Vol. 8)
Nonpsychic information becomes psychized, passing from the unknowable into the unknown (the unconscious psyche) and then moving toward the known. So when awareness arises it always involves a relation of the psychoid to environment, either to its own essence or to another's.
Consciousness is an active process and can be defined only in relation to environment. Though spontaneous visions certainly occur, the capacity to relate to the psychoid on a regular basis is one that must be earned. Even madness is redeemed in its significance.
The 'psychoid' or 'organism' of the noumenal order is confronted with difficulties in its environment which it struggles to overcome. According to this view, the new consciousness differs from Jung's psychoid unconscious. While it is aware of the opposites, it nevertheless allows the androgynous male or female to decide to suppress or maintain them.
Jung described this domain as psychoid when he said: “We must completely give up the idea of the psyche being somehow connected with the brain and remember instead the ' meaningful ' or ' intelligent ' behavior of the lower organisms..."
Jung affirmed that the “psychoid' may also be the “basis of instinctive phenomena," the progressive synthesis of instinct and spirit. The psychoid is again related to the essence of the archetype and as such possesses “a transcendence” giving to it the numinous power of the “voice of God” (Jung 1958a: 453).
Infinite Duration
The biosphere is lived from within. Culture is inherent in biology. Embodied presence paves the way towards a radically different empathic relationship with our communities, and even the larger ‘body’ of the Earth. There is a continuity fed by, driven by the impulse to work at something that comes out of nature.
Just as we inhabit our bodies, we also inhabit the greater ‘body’ of the Earth. A journey to the underworld is associated with occult knowledge. Mutual accompaniment naturally includes trans-human, human, animal, plant, and mineral creatures.
Our active and dynamical interior is indistinguishable from the outer world. Kybele's primordial androgyny reflects both aspects of reality -- the objective and imaginal. Both have an imaginal root.
Humus is chemically complex, spongy, porous, and retains a high concentration of essential nutrients that are readily accessible to the roots of plants. Humus occurs naturally when plants and animals break down over the span of centuries.
In the majestic sacred grove, we feel our way down the tree’s rough trunk and along one of its roots into a mass of spongy debris where the finer roots are matted into a thick red and brown tangle from which the scarlet and white mushrooms grow. As our root dives into the ground, downward and outward we spread out in awarenesss like the mycelium.
We follow thin roots that proliferate wildly, knotted with their neighbors. Some roots smell sharp and nutty and others woody and bitter. Some have a spicy resinous odor when scratched with a fingernail.
We make sure we haven't lost the thread in this subterranean labyrinth as more filaments spring out from the root. We follow all the way to the tips, where they burrowed into fragments of rotting needles and twigs. The rootlets branch like a small tree and their surface is covered with a filmy layer that appears fresh and sticky.
From these roots, a fungal network laces out into the soil and around the roots of nearby trees. Without this fungal web, our sacred evergreen tree and its fungal fruit would not exist. Without similar fungal webs no plants would exist anywhere. All life on land, including our own, depends on these networks.
'Mother trees' protect the forest and 'recognize' their offspring. Fungal threads called hyphae create a highway and merge with tree roots. Then, trees can send and receive nitrogen, sugars, carbon, phosphorus, water, defense signals, chemicals, and hormones. Amazingly, one tree can connect to hundreds of other trees, sending out signals. Along the threads, bacteria and other microbes swap nutrients with the fungi and the tree roots.
Resplendent with drying mushrooms tied to them like ornaments, such trees were ceremonially worshiped. In the mythic sense, this original tree, the mother of all trees, is the essence, source, and sense of being rooted in life, so central to existence.
The tree and the mushroom are one. We don't know when paleolithic humans began to use them as medicines and within ritual environments. But Dionysus plants us in nature renewing our connection -- the Dionysian aspect of the human psyche is renewed.
As Dendrites, "he of the trees", Dionysus was a god of trees in general. Thought to have originated in Thrace or Asia Minor, Dionysus is a foreign deity believed to have been one of the older chthonic (subterranean) gods.
Symbols common to Kybele, Dionysus and Shiva include the snake, the Lady of the Mountains, the leopard skin, and the bull. Soul insists divine madness is incorporated into psyche. Plutarch believed that Osiris and Dionysus were identical dismemberment/rebirth myths -- renewed instinctual life through the primeval forces of nature.
His attributes included the thyrsos (a pine-cone tipped staff). The pinecone that tipped his thyrsus linked him to Kybele, primeval regeneration of nature. His ambiguous sexuality, wild passion, and orgiastic rites echoed that of Kybele's cultic tree-worship. He is worshiped using a sacramental tree pole.
The Delphic oracle commanded the Corinthians to worship a particular pine-tree "equally with the god," so they made two images of Dionysus out of it, with red faces and gilt bodies.
In later times, he was worshiped also as a theos chthonios, which may have arisen as an amalgamation of Phrygian and Lydian forms of worship with those of the ancient Greeks. (Paus. viii. 37, § 3; Arnob. adv. Gent. v. 19.) In the Greek pantheon, Dionysus (along with Zeus) absorbs the role of Sabazios, a Phrygian deity. Sabazius was an alternate name for Bacchus in Rome.
If we tug lightly on our root, we feel the ground move, enliven. Staying in the dark allows something to happen. Here we find the darkness in the light, the shine or shimmer that is both lightness and darkness conjoined.
Direct passionate participation with nature shapes community fantasy. Bloodstains attest to the penultimate sacrifice, living the unglamorous process of suffering and pain. We humbly enter to learn more about its mysteries. The 'new' does not lie ahead or elsewhere, but deeper into what is always present. The 'new' is timeless, but then, so is the 'old' as undead memory.
"… in the psyche there is nothing that is just a dead relic. Everything is alive, and our upper story, consciousness, is continually influenced by its living and active foundations." (Jung, CW 10 Par. 55)
In The Visible and the Invisible, Merlou-Ponty introduced his nuanced notion of the ‘flesh of the world’, a primordial and mysterious tissue that underlies, and gives rise to, both the perceiver and the perceived -- feeling with the innermost elements of being.
Flesh underlies not just our interwovenness into the world through looking and being looked at, but equally the eyes and cries of other beings. Flesh is the elemental tissue that gives rise to the web of Earthly life, organic and inorganic together.
The body is central to our understanding of our relationships with others and to the wider ecological context we are immersed within. We become more attentive not only to the lived body, but with it. We must live our animal on our mother planet.
We perceive the entirety (‘the gestalt’) of what actually appears before us. The god Pan now stands in for panexperientialism and the origin of human consciousness in the discovery of the sacred.
Mystical states are represented fundamentally in two forms. One involves the experience of another Sentient Being proximal to the experient while the other involves the perceived localization of the self within another frame of reference at times and distances significantly different from the experient’s location.
During these periods the person experiences information that is considered unattainable through the normal state and has been a major source of creativity and insight. They often transcend the formal education of the person or the contemporary sophistication of the culture. (Persinger) http://neurosciarchive.byethost12.com/2010-Persinger-Saroka-Koren-and-St-Pierre-Journal-of-Consciousness-Exploration-and-Research-The-electromagnetic-induction-of-mystica.pdf?i=1
The archetype is decisive for psychic life. We establish a relationship between conscious and unconscious systems (psychic energies) of the psyche, mediating life energy as important arbitors of life and behavior -- the transformation of compulsive instinctive drives.
Merleau-Ponty claimed that we gesture and connect with one another through an expressive, ambiguous space of ‘intercorporeality’. Connecting to the aliveness of the breathing body offers us something more basic. Here we meet directly with flashes of the joys, losses, hopes, dreams, interpretations and dedications of the lives of others.
Such moments literally re-source us, putting us in contact, as body-subjects, with our most primordial mode of being -- dwelling in a suspended state of embodied presence. Embodiment’s access to the heart is intimacy, connection and compassion resting on our directly perceiving one another.
Merleau-Ponty said the shared ‘interworld’ is where ‘our gazes cross and our perceptions overlap’. Here the ‘intertwining’ of your life with other people’s lives is revealed. This crisscrossing of lateral, overlapping relations with other people, other creatures and other things is an expressive space that exists between lived bodies, embodied psyches.
It is not that we are all ‘one’, but that we inhabit a world which the philosopher Glen Mazis saw as ‘things, people, creatures' who 'intertwine, interweave, yet do not lose the wonder that each is each and yet not without the others’.
"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." (James Hillman)
Staying alive to the depth and quality of our interactions with others, we notice intimacy depends upon our participation in a shared perceptual world in which our lived bodies ‘show up’. We simply slow down, to pause, to touch in with the pulsing, breathing lifeworld of the body. Then we can restore our presence, our aliveness, our precious connection with other beings.
Our language is, before all else, ‘the very voice of the trees, the waves, and the forest’ (Valery). It affirms ‘our corporeal immersion in the depths of a body much larger than our own’. Such an initiation is a dimension that can never again be closed.
Meanings elaborate and multiply through the integration of information. That information is infused through direct experience. Imagery invites entrainment--the evocation of beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and behavior. It invites experience by attracting our attention and evoking multiple associations.
Imagery invites us to experience by penetrating to the very core of natural process, through recognition of pattern, mediating available information. Images penetrate or directly affect unconscious intentionalities, often initiating habituation, ritualization, cycles.
The Great Goddess of Asia Minor is the oldest divinity known from artifacts, predating the Goddesses of the Sumerian and Egyptians by at least 5,000 years. Goddess figurines were found which date to 30,000 years ago, but we don't know their origin or character of the Goddess they represent.
Kybele controlled every aspect of life on Earth, from plants to animals to men. All fertility was her under control. People in Anatolia, who had a profound respect for nature, believed Kybele also had the power to spare mankind from destructive cycles of nature. She was regarded as a protectress of civilization itself. Her androgyny was symbolic of a wild and uncontrollable nature.
The Great Mother, Cybele, as the Greeks and Roman's knew Her, was originally worshiped in the mountains of Phrygia. The Romans honored her as a goddess of resurrection and rebirth. She was called the Mountain Mother and revered as "the womb of the gods," and "mistress of animals."
She was the universal mother of not only the gods but also of all humans, animals and plant life. How little in the past we understood, what's underfoot -- the social life of forests and their underground support and communication.
In her darkened shrines, Kybele reflected a new inward tendency, expressed a new reflective style, a new interiority, and intensification -- a return to mythical patterns and persons of the psyche, the forgotten knowledge of the imagination. Her music was song, lamentation, and trance-inducing mystical incantations.
Her way is one of seeking the nature of the world by cooperating and participating with the divine, a resonance between subtle beings and living creatures. There is a substratum of mythical mentality in every person. Imaginal figures are real to mythological consciousness. The numinous is autonomous, not merely our projection, concept, or construct.
Kybele is the depth of all that is present, the spirit of Life in everything, an inherent, unique, knowing, directive intelligence. Such custodians of the vegetal world forge a human-plant-fungi alliance. A loop of communication and meaning cycles from human to pine tree to mushroom and back.
Stories emerge out of a human-plant collaborative. We move from concept to numinous experience. She is an encounter, a radical phenomenological encounter, the autonomous, disruptive power of the psyche, a savage source. An archetypal content is embodied in us at that moment. ... a self-awareness which manifests as anticipation, desire, effort.
Disembodied Desire
Dionysus is about a change in consciousness—a tearing apart of the old god--for a mystical and erotic form of transformational subjectivity, and personally redemptive mysticism. Dualistic opposites become multiplicity, with a wider dispersal of the divine in matter.
A symbol's route to the unknown invokes the archetypal qualities of psyche, its raw tearing apart of disciplinary norms and artistic conventions. On the other hand, Dionysus, god of comic and tragic drama, also provides a pathway to a remembering of knowing and being that promises a renewed consciousness in touch with instinctual life or zoe.
Hillman tells us that, "Dismemberment becomes a way of discovering the puer spirit, for 'Dionysus, youngest of the gods' belongs to the theme of the renewal of the aging god. ...dismemberment refers to a psychological process that requires a body metaphor. The process of division is presented as a body experience, even as a horrifying torture.
If, however, dismemberment is ruled by the archetypal dominant of Dionysus, then the process, while beheading or dissolving the central control of the old king, may be at the same time activating the pneuma that is distributed throughout the materializations of our complexes. The background of Dionysus offers insight into the rending pain of self-division, especially as a body-experience."
"Dionysus was called Lysios, the loosener. The word is cognate with lysis, the last syllable of analysis. Lysis means loosening, setting free, deliverance, dissolution, collapse, breaking bonds and laws, the final unravelling as of a plot."
Psyche or soul is our intuited relationship with our own depths and reflection, purpose and longing for meaning, and participation in non-ordinary reality. Engagement with mystery is what she asks from all of us -- an impulse for reuniting with the source.
Re-mythologizing & Deepening
Soul is primordial, autonomous, active, and unlimited by the objective world. Imagination penetrates everything as the central element of humanity, the cosmic element, and the mythical life of the soul. The subjective pole of being and objective pole of natural phenomena interpenetrate through imagination (Avens).
After a long exile, myth is making a comeback in our society. We open the questions of life and being to transpersonal and culturally imaginative reflection (Hillman). Images activate, summon, and direct libido and energy to serve our developmental and transcendent needs. We move to ancient rhythms and play out ancient dramas, whether we know it or not.
We recognize events against their mythic background as we perceive and experience the life of the soul mythically. Myth reveals the divine life in humanity. We only understand mythology from an immediate and direct experience of it.
The chthonic part of the psyche, undifferentiated consciousness, is our life-sustaining structure. Imagination includes all the powers of cognition and psychological dislocation. Even suffering enlarges us with the potential for spiritual enlargement.
This primal cult was a self-contained natural religion of orgiastic ecstasy, primordial vision and primal revelation induced through a chthonic sacrifice of self. Soul demands greater embodiment through us and makes us psychologically richer.
Feeding the Soul
Research strongly suggests the use of psychedelics in her worship. Kybele/Attis is a personified homolog for the sacred mushroom that feeds the soul, a plant of the gods. Drug or spiritual highs can produce the same sort of feelings and moods in people -- a living mythological system, rooted in ritualized 'death.' The insistent soul seek connection, transformation, and transcendence.
The principal difference between dreams and hallucinations is how the stages of wakefulness are organized, with the suppression of REM sleep and the intrusion of PGO waves in the arousal (waking) stage and in NREM (or slow) sleep.
The new organization becomes: waking (arousal) stage, stage of PGO waves, hallucination stage, sleep stage, and it appears possible that hallucinatory manifestations, the waking dream, eliminate “residues” stirred up by the PGO wave pattern in the absence of REM sleep.
These visions are analogous to those at the approach of death, or what are called near death experiences (NDEs) ; they are the same as those termed normative visions. They include the characteristics of two phases of NDEs (Sabom, 1982):
The Autoscopic phase includes 1) dismemberment; subjective feeling of being dead; 2) peace and well-being; 3) disembodiment; 4) visions of material objects and events. The Transcendental phase includes 5) tunnel or dark zone; 6) evaluation of one’s past life; 7) light; 8) access to a transcendental world, entering in light; 9) encounter with other beings; 10) return to life.
We are all governed by the presence of invisible forms -- spirits, ghosts, ancestral and parental influences, inner voices, dreams, impulses, untold stories, complexes, wounds, mysteries, and synchronicities.
Lives that construct meaning wound the soul. We are carriers of the same energy that animates the vitalistic cosmos and a larger life in ambient nature and the challenge of relationship with self, others, and cosmos.
These feelings might include an increased awareness of an inner world, sensed presence, or the impression of transcending time and space. This supraordinate reality is a timeless phantasmagoria of earthy and cosmic mythical figures, magical animals, animated plants, the daimones, and gods. As symbols of the gods, animals offered protection to the human soul in the underworld.
"Even when taken for the first time, psychedelics may occasion powerful subjective experiences that share many features with those described by mystics, dedicated meditators, and religious practitioners." "...undergoing a mystical-type experience may be linked to improved relationships with self, others, and the natural environment later on." (Samuli Kangaslampi).
Her original seat of power was in Colchis to the north, home of Medea. Her temples and shrines were always in mountains or caves and her guardians were lions (or leopards) as Her priestesses had a close affinity with nature. All of the Cybela rituals had an orgiastic nature.
Originally only priestesses served Cybele. However, when Crete was overthrown, the Cretan priests of Zeus, the Curates, migrated to Phrygia. There they joined the Corybantes and became the Galli, or priests of the Great Mother in the mysteries of the suffering gods. These priests lived mythical lives.
The priests were complete eunuchs with long hair, perfumed with fragrances and ointments and wore women's attire -- as did Dionysus. His pine-cone tipped thyrsus symbolically links him to Kybele's cult. Enthusiasm and frenzied ecstasy drove the Dionysian religious experience -- the frenzied impulse for self abandonment and intimate union with the god.
Danielou 1992 identifies Dionysus with the Shaivite soma cult.
all mystery cults share a Dionysian or Shivaite character (Danielou). Cybele and Dionysus share so many characteristics in their worship and legends. He was the orgiastic god of intoxication, ekstasis, divine madness, and kathartic process.
The psychophysical approach is rooted in our being, land, water, and air, including our very first to our final breath -- the fire of the breath of life, the divine spark. Along the way, we are learning to live and learning to die with wisdom and meaning.
Our human progenitors had to directly confront existential issues of survival, adaptation, stress, mating, birth, loss, and death. They gradually developed stories about the basics of life: social, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual existence (cosmological envisioning; aesthetic sensibility). Their rites confronted the primordial numinous experience. The way of instinct, of the power of healing is inherent in the natural forces and instinctual.
Prehistoric (Pre-pottery Neolithic) skull veneration, a cult of the skull, demonstrates the importance of skulls in burial practices in the antic Near East. They were plastered and decorated and interred in dwellings under the floors showing their special treatment.
Neolithic head-shaping with cradleboards has been found in Cypress, Anatolia, and the Balkins (also Italy, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and southern Levant). There was headshaping in prehistoric Greece. The intentional modification of bodies involved social differences in gender, status, and ethnicity.
Intentional cultural modification of head form, symmetrical shapes include circular-erect, circular oblique, and two-band circumferential types. The degree of morphological headshaping, perhaps from the previous Ubaid culture, signifies social differences.
Thirteen skulls in various stages of deformation have been found, as well as adult examples. A confederation of peoples (identified as “Mushki” in Assyrian records) dominated the entire Anatolian peninsula. They engaged in cranial deformation of their children's skulls.
The Phrygian capital of Gordion practiced circumferential binding, as did the Ubaid of fifth millennium B.C. and the Iranians. Body modification was used to denote status, heredity, and membership in a sociocultural group, a prestigious body form for privileged families, intentioned from infancy.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27759958
They created myths, beliefs about creation and our creation to give meaning to life. The mythological aspect suggests a religious attitude. They developed rituals, ceremonies, and practices to heal body and mind, mark life passages, and placate forces beyond their control. These accounted for their origins as well as voices, visions and experiences that seemed to come from the great Beyond.
The Phrygian capital and shrine were in Gordion. Midas Yazilikaya is a precious cultural treasure of the Phrygian Regions with its unique monumental structures. The capital city Gordion was the center of the political state but Midas was the religious center of the kingdom.
Dating back to the 9th-6th centuries B.C. the religious monuments carved into rocks reflect the deep respect and loyalty that Phyrigians felt for the Mother Goddess Matar Kubileya, "the Mother of the mountain."
Pessinus was the temple-state of the Mother of the Gods. The heart of every temple was regarded as the place where the deity resided, where heaven meets earth, the ‘Great Seat’ or Throne. The Great Mother personified creation, procreation, birth, death, and rebirth -- the rhythm of the seasons.
Huge rock-cut monuments were found in many old rock mesa settlements in the highlands. Their flat facades, including the Midas monument, had geometric designs, old Phrygian inscriptions, and niches for huge images of the deity. These were cultic landscapes.
Jung was clear, "we live myth before we understand it." "My whole endeavour has been to show that myth is something very real because it connects us with the instinctive bases of our existence." There are no unitary views of her myths, which differed by place and era. The Anatolian Kybele sits on a throne flanked by two lionesses. She is reputed to have sprung from the earth.
She loves the god, Attis, but drives him to such madness that he castrates himself and dies. This act echoes the mutilation by the Gods of the androgynous Kybele, who ceased to be a man without becoming a woman.
Attis mutilated himself under a pine tree and bled to death.
He was loved both by Acdestis, who infused fury and madness, and by the Mother of the Gods. Violets sprung forth from his blood and entwined the tree. The mother of the Gods took the pine to her cave and there Acdestis also joined in the lamentations. Arnobius continues:
Jupiter refuses Acdestis' request that Attis might come back to life. But what is possible by concession of fate, this he grants without objecting: that his body should not decay, that his hair should ever grow, that the very smallest of his fingers should live and alone react by continued motion. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326885491_The_Ritualized_Bodies_of_Cybele%27s_Galli_and_the_Methodological_Problem_of_the_Plurality_of_Explanations/fulltext/5b731e4192851ca6505da960/The-Ritualized-Bodies-of-Cybeles-Galli-and-the-Methodological-Problem-of-the-Plurality-of-Explanations.pdf
Satisfied with these favors, Acdestis, it is said, consecrated the body in Pessinus, and honored it with annual rites and with a sacred ministry.' The castration, which is the autumn equinox, marks the season when the sacred mushroom which is Attis springs up in the forest grottoes. That 'small living finger' was symbolic code for the Amanita muscaria mushroom that grows among the roots of pines.
Liminal gods are masters of altered state of consciousness. Kybele's Galli priests reputedly castrated themselves in a wild trance while worshiping her (Morford & Lenardon, 2003, pp.179, 364). Did the ancient ritualized body modification of skulls inspire their own radically-ritualized bodies?
Her initiates were washed in the blood of a sacrificed bull and thereby born into a new life (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).
Her Galli priests were dramatic performers who also presided over a shrine to Hades where they performed another prescribed dramatic religious role and Dionysian element. This was within their functions as daemons of death, as they performed much the same ritual of sending the castrated Attis to the underworld.
But, there is far more to the Galla's role of psychopomp guiding the return from the dead. They knew how to enter Hell's Gate and return without the death that met all sacrifices. They seemed to control the passage from life to death and life again, including a belief in rebirth.
Karl Kerenyi, in his book on Eleusis, clearly shows that many ancients revealed what the secret was, beginning with Euripedes in some of his plays. The secret was that Dionysus and Hades are the same. This meant that Dionysus is also the Lord of the Dead, the Lord of the Underworld.
Heraclitus says, 'Hades and Dionysus, for whom they go mad and rage, are one and the same.' Dionysus was worshiped in Hellenistic times (after 332 BC) from Italy to Greece and into Egypt and the Middle East. Dionysus is mentioned in Linear B tablets from roughly 1,200 BC. Herodotus describes initiation into the mysteries of Dionysus in the fifth century BC. [Herodotus Histories book 4, 78 80]
The cult of Dionysus was from Thrace in Europe, though Danielou would cite its origin in Shiva. Both may be so. Jung said, "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." (Psychology and Alchemy, Page 90.)
Hades or Pluto is in certain respects the most potent archetype. The archetype of power itself, it embodies the primordial forces of destruction and regeneration, the chthonic underworld in every sense, the secretive and subversive.
It is the shadow, the id, the broiling cauldron of the instincts, the violent and the demonic, the fiery and volcanic, the elemental energies of nature. This dynamic is Pluto-Hades-Dionysus in Greek mythic terms; in India, Kali and Shiva in both their destructive and regenerative aspects.
This god 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 Phrygian priestesses brought their cult back across the Hellespont and the Bosphorus into Asia Minor where it combined with the Mother Goddess as Cybele, about 150 years before Troy.
Cybele became the Goddess of Asia Minor while, Sibyl or Sybil, which means "Cavern-dweller" became the title for the distantly related Priestesses known as the Sibyllae in Greece. The function of the Sibyl, like the Shaman, was to give comfort to the Spirit of the dead as they made their journey to the underworld. They instructed the living on how to prepare for the journey into darkness.
The Ploutonion at Hierapolis, Phrygia (Ancient Greek: Πλουτώνειον Ploutōneion, lit "Place of Pluto"; Latin: Plutonium) or Pluto's Gate was a ploutonion (a religious site dedicated to Pluto. The Hell's Gate site is built on top of a cave which emits fatal gases, hence its use as a ritual passage to the underworld.
Animal sacrifices would be thrown into the cave and pulled back out with ropes that had been tied to them. The cavern still emits deadly carbon dioxide gas caused by underground geologic activity. Fast-flowing hot water releasing a sharp-smelling lethal gas thought sent by Pluto, god of the underworld.
Because the gas sinks, the priests learned to evade a lethal dose. When they descended into the Ploutonion they held their breath. They then came up to show that they were immune to the gas. People believed a miracle had happened and that therefore the priests were infused with superior powers and had divine protection.
Our part is to participate, to acknowledge the living relationship, nurture it with attention, and interpret it with intuition as a mental or spiritual relationship. We abandon the world of sensation and melt into the in-between where that relationship is foremost. But it is only in that "in between" place that we can access who we are at the heart of it all, laying bare the soul of the world.
"To leave the body behind and pass into the ether, to change our human nature into the purity of the gods…permits us to be restored to the same substance and cycle of the gods we had before entering the human form." -- Iamblichus, Protrepticus (16.1-7)
Soul is primordial, autonomous, active, and unlimited by the objective world. Imagination penetrates everything as the central element of humanity, the cosmic element, and the mythical life of the soul. The subjective pole of being and objective pole of natural phenomena interpenetrate through imagination (Avens).
After a long exile, myth is making a comeback in our society. We open the questions of life and being to transpersonal and culturally imaginative reflection (Hillman). Images activate, summon, and direct libido and energy to serve our developmental and transcendent needs. We move to ancient rhythms and play out ancient dramas, whether we know it or not.
We recognize events against their mythic background as we perceive and experience the life of the soul mythically. Myth reveals the divine life in humanity. We only understand mythology from an immediate and direct experience of it.
The chthonic part of the psyche, undifferentiated consciousness, is our life-sustaining structure. Imagination includes all the powers of cognition and psychological dislocation. Even suffering enlarges us with the potential for spiritual enlargement.
This primal cult was a self-contained natural religion of orgiastic ecstasy, primordial vision and primal revelation induced through a chthonic sacrifice of self. Soul demands greater embodiment through us and makes us psychologically richer.
Feeding the Soul
Research strongly suggests the use of psychedelics in her worship. Kybele/Attis is a personified homolog for the sacred mushroom that feeds the soul, a plant of the gods. Drug or spiritual highs can produce the same sort of feelings and moods in people -- a living mythological system, rooted in ritualized 'death.' The insistent soul seek connection, transformation, and transcendence.
The principal difference between dreams and hallucinations is how the stages of wakefulness are organized, with the suppression of REM sleep and the intrusion of PGO waves in the arousal (waking) stage and in NREM (or slow) sleep.
The new organization becomes: waking (arousal) stage, stage of PGO waves, hallucination stage, sleep stage, and it appears possible that hallucinatory manifestations, the waking dream, eliminate “residues” stirred up by the PGO wave pattern in the absence of REM sleep.
These visions are analogous to those at the approach of death, or what are called near death experiences (NDEs) ; they are the same as those termed normative visions. They include the characteristics of two phases of NDEs (Sabom, 1982):
The Autoscopic phase includes 1) dismemberment; subjective feeling of being dead; 2) peace and well-being; 3) disembodiment; 4) visions of material objects and events. The Transcendental phase includes 5) tunnel or dark zone; 6) evaluation of one’s past life; 7) light; 8) access to a transcendental world, entering in light; 9) encounter with other beings; 10) return to life.
We are all governed by the presence of invisible forms -- spirits, ghosts, ancestral and parental influences, inner voices, dreams, impulses, untold stories, complexes, wounds, mysteries, and synchronicities.
Lives that construct meaning wound the soul. We are carriers of the same energy that animates the vitalistic cosmos and a larger life in ambient nature and the challenge of relationship with self, others, and cosmos.
These feelings might include an increased awareness of an inner world, sensed presence, or the impression of transcending time and space. This supraordinate reality is a timeless phantasmagoria of earthy and cosmic mythical figures, magical animals, animated plants, the daimones, and gods. As symbols of the gods, animals offered protection to the human soul in the underworld.
"Even when taken for the first time, psychedelics may occasion powerful subjective experiences that share many features with those described by mystics, dedicated meditators, and religious practitioners." "...undergoing a mystical-type experience may be linked to improved relationships with self, others, and the natural environment later on." (Samuli Kangaslampi).
Her original seat of power was in Colchis to the north, home of Medea. Her temples and shrines were always in mountains or caves and her guardians were lions (or leopards) as Her priestesses had a close affinity with nature. All of the Cybela rituals had an orgiastic nature.
Originally only priestesses served Cybele. However, when Crete was overthrown, the Cretan priests of Zeus, the Curates, migrated to Phrygia. There they joined the Corybantes and became the Galli, or priests of the Great Mother in the mysteries of the suffering gods. These priests lived mythical lives.
The priests were complete eunuchs with long hair, perfumed with fragrances and ointments and wore women's attire -- as did Dionysus. His pine-cone tipped thyrsus symbolically links him to Kybele's cult. Enthusiasm and frenzied ecstasy drove the Dionysian religious experience -- the frenzied impulse for self abandonment and intimate union with the god.
Danielou 1992 identifies Dionysus with the Shaivite soma cult.
all mystery cults share a Dionysian or Shivaite character (Danielou). Cybele and Dionysus share so many characteristics in their worship and legends. He was the orgiastic god of intoxication, ekstasis, divine madness, and kathartic process.
The psychophysical approach is rooted in our being, land, water, and air, including our very first to our final breath -- the fire of the breath of life, the divine spark. Along the way, we are learning to live and learning to die with wisdom and meaning.
Our human progenitors had to directly confront existential issues of survival, adaptation, stress, mating, birth, loss, and death. They gradually developed stories about the basics of life: social, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual existence (cosmological envisioning; aesthetic sensibility). Their rites confronted the primordial numinous experience. The way of instinct, of the power of healing is inherent in the natural forces and instinctual.
Prehistoric (Pre-pottery Neolithic) skull veneration, a cult of the skull, demonstrates the importance of skulls in burial practices in the antic Near East. They were plastered and decorated and interred in dwellings under the floors showing their special treatment.
Neolithic head-shaping with cradleboards has been found in Cypress, Anatolia, and the Balkins (also Italy, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and southern Levant). There was headshaping in prehistoric Greece. The intentional modification of bodies involved social differences in gender, status, and ethnicity.
Intentional cultural modification of head form, symmetrical shapes include circular-erect, circular oblique, and two-band circumferential types. The degree of morphological headshaping, perhaps from the previous Ubaid culture, signifies social differences.
Thirteen skulls in various stages of deformation have been found, as well as adult examples. A confederation of peoples (identified as “Mushki” in Assyrian records) dominated the entire Anatolian peninsula. They engaged in cranial deformation of their children's skulls.
The Phrygian capital of Gordion practiced circumferential binding, as did the Ubaid of fifth millennium B.C. and the Iranians. Body modification was used to denote status, heredity, and membership in a sociocultural group, a prestigious body form for privileged families, intentioned from infancy.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27759958
They created myths, beliefs about creation and our creation to give meaning to life. The mythological aspect suggests a religious attitude. They developed rituals, ceremonies, and practices to heal body and mind, mark life passages, and placate forces beyond their control. These accounted for their origins as well as voices, visions and experiences that seemed to come from the great Beyond.
The Phrygian capital and shrine were in Gordion. Midas Yazilikaya is a precious cultural treasure of the Phrygian Regions with its unique monumental structures. The capital city Gordion was the center of the political state but Midas was the religious center of the kingdom.
Dating back to the 9th-6th centuries B.C. the religious monuments carved into rocks reflect the deep respect and loyalty that Phyrigians felt for the Mother Goddess Matar Kubileya, "the Mother of the mountain."
Pessinus was the temple-state of the Mother of the Gods. The heart of every temple was regarded as the place where the deity resided, where heaven meets earth, the ‘Great Seat’ or Throne. The Great Mother personified creation, procreation, birth, death, and rebirth -- the rhythm of the seasons.
Huge rock-cut monuments were found in many old rock mesa settlements in the highlands. Their flat facades, including the Midas monument, had geometric designs, old Phrygian inscriptions, and niches for huge images of the deity. These were cultic landscapes.
Jung was clear, "we live myth before we understand it." "My whole endeavour has been to show that myth is something very real because it connects us with the instinctive bases of our existence." There are no unitary views of her myths, which differed by place and era. The Anatolian Kybele sits on a throne flanked by two lionesses. She is reputed to have sprung from the earth.
She loves the god, Attis, but drives him to such madness that he castrates himself and dies. This act echoes the mutilation by the Gods of the androgynous Kybele, who ceased to be a man without becoming a woman.
Attis mutilated himself under a pine tree and bled to death.
He was loved both by Acdestis, who infused fury and madness, and by the Mother of the Gods. Violets sprung forth from his blood and entwined the tree. The mother of the Gods took the pine to her cave and there Acdestis also joined in the lamentations. Arnobius continues:
Jupiter refuses Acdestis' request that Attis might come back to life. But what is possible by concession of fate, this he grants without objecting: that his body should not decay, that his hair should ever grow, that the very smallest of his fingers should live and alone react by continued motion. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326885491_The_Ritualized_Bodies_of_Cybele%27s_Galli_and_the_Methodological_Problem_of_the_Plurality_of_Explanations/fulltext/5b731e4192851ca6505da960/The-Ritualized-Bodies-of-Cybeles-Galli-and-the-Methodological-Problem-of-the-Plurality-of-Explanations.pdf
Satisfied with these favors, Acdestis, it is said, consecrated the body in Pessinus, and honored it with annual rites and with a sacred ministry.' The castration, which is the autumn equinox, marks the season when the sacred mushroom which is Attis springs up in the forest grottoes. That 'small living finger' was symbolic code for the Amanita muscaria mushroom that grows among the roots of pines.
Liminal gods are masters of altered state of consciousness. Kybele's Galli priests reputedly castrated themselves in a wild trance while worshiping her (Morford & Lenardon, 2003, pp.179, 364). Did the ancient ritualized body modification of skulls inspire their own radically-ritualized bodies?
Her initiates were washed in the blood of a sacrificed bull and thereby born into a new life (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).
Her Galli priests were dramatic performers who also presided over a shrine to Hades where they performed another prescribed dramatic religious role and Dionysian element. This was within their functions as daemons of death, as they performed much the same ritual of sending the castrated Attis to the underworld.
But, there is far more to the Galla's role of psychopomp guiding the return from the dead. They knew how to enter Hell's Gate and return without the death that met all sacrifices. They seemed to control the passage from life to death and life again, including a belief in rebirth.
Karl Kerenyi, in his book on Eleusis, clearly shows that many ancients revealed what the secret was, beginning with Euripedes in some of his plays. The secret was that Dionysus and Hades are the same. This meant that Dionysus is also the Lord of the Dead, the Lord of the Underworld.
Heraclitus says, 'Hades and Dionysus, for whom they go mad and rage, are one and the same.' Dionysus was worshiped in Hellenistic times (after 332 BC) from Italy to Greece and into Egypt and the Middle East. Dionysus is mentioned in Linear B tablets from roughly 1,200 BC. Herodotus describes initiation into the mysteries of Dionysus in the fifth century BC. [Herodotus Histories book 4, 78 80]
The cult of Dionysus was from Thrace in Europe, though Danielou would cite its origin in Shiva. Both may be so. Jung said, "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." (Psychology and Alchemy, Page 90.)
Hades or Pluto is in certain respects the most potent archetype. The archetype of power itself, it embodies the primordial forces of destruction and regeneration, the chthonic underworld in every sense, the secretive and subversive.
It is the shadow, the id, the broiling cauldron of the instincts, the violent and the demonic, the fiery and volcanic, the elemental energies of nature. This dynamic is Pluto-Hades-Dionysus in Greek mythic terms; in India, Kali and Shiva in both their destructive and regenerative aspects.
This god 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 Phrygian priestesses brought their cult back across the Hellespont and the Bosphorus into Asia Minor where it combined with the Mother Goddess as Cybele, about 150 years before Troy.
Cybele became the Goddess of Asia Minor while, Sibyl or Sybil, which means "Cavern-dweller" became the title for the distantly related Priestesses known as the Sibyllae in Greece. The function of the Sibyl, like the Shaman, was to give comfort to the Spirit of the dead as they made their journey to the underworld. They instructed the living on how to prepare for the journey into darkness.
The Ploutonion at Hierapolis, Phrygia (Ancient Greek: Πλουτώνειον Ploutōneion, lit "Place of Pluto"; Latin: Plutonium) or Pluto's Gate was a ploutonion (a religious site dedicated to Pluto. The Hell's Gate site is built on top of a cave which emits fatal gases, hence its use as a ritual passage to the underworld.
Animal sacrifices would be thrown into the cave and pulled back out with ropes that had been tied to them. The cavern still emits deadly carbon dioxide gas caused by underground geologic activity. Fast-flowing hot water releasing a sharp-smelling lethal gas thought sent by Pluto, god of the underworld.
Because the gas sinks, the priests learned to evade a lethal dose. When they descended into the Ploutonion they held their breath. They then came up to show that they were immune to the gas. People believed a miracle had happened and that therefore the priests were infused with superior powers and had divine protection.
Our part is to participate, to acknowledge the living relationship, nurture it with attention, and interpret it with intuition as a mental or spiritual relationship. We abandon the world of sensation and melt into the in-between where that relationship is foremost. But it is only in that "in between" place that we can access who we are at the heart of it all, laying bare the soul of the world.
"To leave the body behind and pass into the ether, to change our human nature into the purity of the gods…permits us to be restored to the same substance and cycle of the gods we had before entering the human form." -- Iamblichus, Protrepticus (16.1-7)
Though we parted billions of years ago, humans share nearly 50 percent of their DNA with fungi. Fungi split from animals 9 million years after plants did. Fungi are also intriguing because their cells are surprisingly similar to human cells. In 1998 scientists discovered that fungi split from animals about 1.538 billion years ago, whereas plants split from animals about 1.547 billion years ago. We are also likely to call a mushroom a plant, whereas genetic comparisons place fungi closer to man than to plants. So, are humans just highly evolved mushrooms? We share a common, unique evolutionary history with fungi. From a single ancestral group of organisms, some split off to become fungi and some split off to become animals. The latter have become us. In other words, the DNA in fungi more closely resembles the DNA of the inhabitants of the animal kingdom. We are nearly 100% alike as humans and equally closely related to mushrooms.
mater, myth & Mycology
“Lo, I have come unto thee, Mother of the World. I am thy Child, thy suckling babe. Hear me, for I shall become you and dance your dance in the greater assembly of heavens. I am the Child, I am the Mother. I am She who carries thee within me.”
WILD LANDS / WILD PSYCHE
The Primordially Feminine is a Permanent Realm of the Psyche. The Dead are the Ground of the Living. The Dead are always with us. The earth is full of the lives of our ancestors and the feral nature of the primal intersex mind.
https://ancestorsandarchetypes.weebly.com/
Bearing signs and seals, we shall descend; we sweep through whole ages, we unravel all mysteries. And forms of Goddesses and Gods we reveal. We impart secrets of her "Gnosis."
The cosmic plant is the source of sacred water, beneath the cavernous secret parts of the holy earth, the living, moving mountain (literal, symbolic, or metaphorical; tepe, ziggurat, pyramid).
The devoted fondly interact with and love the water, trees, woods, and mountains which are alive. Animism is a natural and essential part of our experience of the world. Where there is soul there is anima, and where there is anima there is animism -- an ensouled anima mundi.
Kybele supplies the flow of living waters. We each absorb that for which our nature has attraction from her fractal patterns of fluid life force and its pulse. A life shaped by archetypal rhythms keeps us close to the gods.
Jung said, "The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body." When you lead with the soul the body follows. Dance is a form of active imagination combining physical sensation, feelings, dreams, imagination, and images.
Her image exists in many forms as far back as 7,000 or 8,000 years. The Mother Goddess is arguably the oldest deity in the archaeological record. Her manifestations are numerous, including likenesses of butterflies, toads, hedgehogs – and dancing Bees.
Like the bee, she communicates in dance. Dionysus assumed the form of a bull before being torn to pieces and reborn as a Bee. His cult consisted of frenzied female worshipers called Maenads (Greek) or Bacchantes (Roman), who were renowned for their dancing and believed to have wings.
We can explore the impact of folk practice in landscape interactions through the reunion of body and imaginal soul. It maps out the most incredible journey that leads into another state of reality, into the greatest mystery of all; the nature of the underworld lived in the soul. It is a descent into the unconscious and its impact.
A single flame gathered strength from the women who circled around it. Their spirit breathed as one into the crucible, and the flame leapt forth from the life-giving elixir of souls. These priestesses came not to praise a Goddess, but to sanctify the hallowed presence of Life within themselves, and in all that shared their world. This was Kybele to them...the Giver of Life.
A Naassene Psalm says, "Now holding sway, it eyes the light, And now it weeps on misery flung; Now it mourns, now it thrills with joy; Now it wails, now it hears its doom; Now it dies, and now it leaves us, never to return." Attis, the son/lover consort, represents the mediate deity, the higher self, the true self, a guide who meets the knower in many different mystery cults.
The Rites of Easter arose from the mysteries of Attis. Attis arose when the sun made the day longer than the night for the first time in the new cycle. Attis in the myth, is the God of Vegetation, from the Phrygian region of central Turkey. He was known as the Son of Zeus, the leader of the Pantheon. This myth has been traced to the 12th century B.C.
The day of Attis' death was also the day of His cyclic reconception. Symbolically, Attis represented a rejuvenation of spirit, but this became corrupted into a rejuvenation of earth and a cyclic salvation of crops, important to those people who depended on the production of crops.
Zeus was of the Godforce essence and was the Father (essence) of Orpheus, Apollo, Dionysus (Adonis) Hermes, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Moses and Jesus, as well as Mithra, Tammuz and Attis. Adonis (Dionysus) was equivalent to Tammuz. So, what we truly have is the same energy with different names. Agdistis – another name for Cybele, ‘Great Mother’ goddess of Rome – had been born of the Earth and father god Zeus, and had both a penis and a vagina.
There are dangers for those who undertake the arduous journey without spiritual preparation. The endurance of this journey takes us far into the abyss. No words nor lyricism can possibly describe it.
We travel deep into the frontier of the soul. Myths draw us into the past but their significance renews contact in the present. Myth is a taproot, a cosmic perspective on what anchors and sustains religion, psychology, and culture.
A new perspective with new resonances evokes the spacious imaginal realm. We turn to myth that conveys the depth and breadth of life as a baseline, a ground, a place of eternal return. It can also be fragmentary, skittish, and other-worldly. Myths reveal alternative worlds with no deepest layer.
Here we seek to explore the "darker" primordial matrix of chthonic energy that shapes or artifices the way we are. Psychedelics are a reliable way to enter into that state—between life and death. Approaching Kybele requires embracing paradox. If you 'die' before you die, you won't die when you die.
That's the key; navigating the liminal space between dreaming, and death to grasp a very different view of reality. The name Kybele stands for all the divine characteristics, (Mountain Mother, Mother of Beasts, Mother of the Gods), of the goddess invoked in the myths. Her archaic sanctuaries are natural grottoes. Sanctities precede divinities.
Her archaic meteoric icon was the petra genatrix. She is the as yet "unborn" figure "inside" a rock. In Kybele cult iconography, Hekate holds her torch pointing downward in the 'death' position, marking the transition of soul between life and death. Bodies were paths to the sacred.
The root of Western civilization is this very pharmakon. The ultimate purpose of using drugs and ritual magic to effect human sexual experience is the veneration of deities and ecstatic celebration of the gods by creating oracular visions.
Ritual spectacle belongs to the sphere of sacred things, incites unleashed religious experiences, and involves salvation of the entire community. Exhilarating states of consciousness can be powered by our own voices, exploring a hypnotic world of light, color, and sound.
Forgetting self entirely, the devotee plunges into the multiplicity of the objective world. Being suddenly ejected from the life process that keeps us going shocks us into a kind of cathartic or paralyzing psychological death. The initiate must learn to live, or at least survive, the death.
"The crystallization of the field of consciousness, with its consequent
narrowing of the possibilities of experience, produces a species of
living death. ... Consciousness is to be vivified utterly and is not separated from the Unconscious by a sharp and unnatural cleavage or partition from the other levels of the psyche. Thus the contents of the one part, by a reversal of values and functions, have full access of entry into the other, and vice versa" (Regardie 1970 p.18).
The symbolic and experiential death aspect is an inevitable consequence. Death intervenes in the reconstitution, more like being planted than buried. The union of the conscious mind with the autonomy of embodied unconscious, the unconscious personified as anima mundi, produces a rebirth compounded of both.
The killing of death is a stunning phrase. We imagine it might only be done by the penetration of lived consciousness into the mystery. Life must be re-instated there at the dark heart. We must inhabit death so that it is not a neglected polar opposite from life, so unnatural cleavages and partitions are not set up. The fullness of life cannot be experienced in the absence of death. Transformations will summon births and inevitable deaths, and death so that re-birth can follow.
Jung said, "There is no difference in principle between the animal and the human psyche. The kinship of the two is too obvious." (Letters Vol. II, Pages 372-373). "If one can stay in the middle, know one is human, relate to both the god and the animal of the god, one is all right. One must remember, over the animal is the god, with the god is the god's animal." (Jung, J.E.T., Page 112). Animal behavior demonstrates there is an instinct for altering consciousness.
Seeking healing plants or inebriation, animals drug themselves intentionally. The drug-seeking behavior of animals illuminates that of parallel human behavior as a mysterious natural function, not yet understood.
In ancient times primordial rites were a communal experience of shared metaphysical expectations. The power of collective emotion generates living myth, the potential for transformation available for everyone. Gods and goddesses embody the projections of the collective emotions of a whole group, a community with non-human members.
Kybele (Rhea) was a protean figure, known variously as the Great Mother, the Mother goddess, the Mother of the gods, and addressed by a whole host of titles and epithets. She was originally at home in archaic Phrygia. Culture crystallizes cult, as we later find in Rome.
"In the same way the myths and religious ceremonies of the Phrygians, in spite of certain differences, give for our understanding a similar account of the Mother of the Gods and of Attis; for earth, and the impetuous strength and ardor of the lions which draw her car are the properties of the sky which encloses and surrounds the air that carries the earth as in a car. And to the sun, under the name of Attis, are given the emblems of a shepherd's pipe and a wand, the pipe indicating a series of uneven blasts (because the winds derive their properties and essential nature from the sun and do not blow with uniformity) and the wand declaring the power of the sun which controls all things." (Macrobius, Saturnalia 1, 21:7-10).
The imaginal landscape, the invisible environment, is an attunement to Mother Nature, a lost cosmology of correspondences, a polytheistic psyche. Transformation is an epiphany with an image born of nature’s own workings, a natural symbol far removed from all conscious intention.
All phenomena are known in empty nature. This radical emptiness is the primordial ground of creation -- universal consciousness which forms the ground for our individual consciousness. All dependently originating forms are essentially conceptual constructs from potential reality -- these are holographic archetypes.
All matter is at once alive and sacred. The intuition of immortality is experience of the timelessness of the unconscious. The struggle with the unformed, with chaos, is in truth a primordial experience. The archaic use of psychedelics appear to be one method for unlocking this mystery.
“...primordial images have a secret power that works just as much on human reason as on the soul. Wherever they appear they stir something linked with the mysterious, the long gone, and heavy with foreboding. A string sounds whose vibration reverberates in every man’s breast; these primordial images dwell in everyone as they are the property of all mankind. This secret power is like a spell, like magic, and causes elevation just as much as seduction. It is characteristic of primordial images that they take hold of man where he is utterly human, and a power seizes him, as if the bustling throng were pushing him. And this happens even if individual understanding and feeling rise up against it. What is the power of the individual against the voice of the whole people in him? He is entranced, possessed, and consumed.” C.G. Jung, Red Book
WILD LANDS / WILD PSYCHE
The Primordially Feminine is a Permanent Realm of the Psyche. The Dead are the Ground of the Living. The Dead are always with us. The earth is full of the lives of our ancestors and the feral nature of the primal intersex mind.
https://ancestorsandarchetypes.weebly.com/
Bearing signs and seals, we shall descend; we sweep through whole ages, we unravel all mysteries. And forms of Goddesses and Gods we reveal. We impart secrets of her "Gnosis."
The cosmic plant is the source of sacred water, beneath the cavernous secret parts of the holy earth, the living, moving mountain (literal, symbolic, or metaphorical; tepe, ziggurat, pyramid).
The devoted fondly interact with and love the water, trees, woods, and mountains which are alive. Animism is a natural and essential part of our experience of the world. Where there is soul there is anima, and where there is anima there is animism -- an ensouled anima mundi.
Kybele supplies the flow of living waters. We each absorb that for which our nature has attraction from her fractal patterns of fluid life force and its pulse. A life shaped by archetypal rhythms keeps us close to the gods.
Jung said, "The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body." When you lead with the soul the body follows. Dance is a form of active imagination combining physical sensation, feelings, dreams, imagination, and images.
Her image exists in many forms as far back as 7,000 or 8,000 years. The Mother Goddess is arguably the oldest deity in the archaeological record. Her manifestations are numerous, including likenesses of butterflies, toads, hedgehogs – and dancing Bees.
Like the bee, she communicates in dance. Dionysus assumed the form of a bull before being torn to pieces and reborn as a Bee. His cult consisted of frenzied female worshipers called Maenads (Greek) or Bacchantes (Roman), who were renowned for their dancing and believed to have wings.
We can explore the impact of folk practice in landscape interactions through the reunion of body and imaginal soul. It maps out the most incredible journey that leads into another state of reality, into the greatest mystery of all; the nature of the underworld lived in the soul. It is a descent into the unconscious and its impact.
A single flame gathered strength from the women who circled around it. Their spirit breathed as one into the crucible, and the flame leapt forth from the life-giving elixir of souls. These priestesses came not to praise a Goddess, but to sanctify the hallowed presence of Life within themselves, and in all that shared their world. This was Kybele to them...the Giver of Life.
A Naassene Psalm says, "Now holding sway, it eyes the light, And now it weeps on misery flung; Now it mourns, now it thrills with joy; Now it wails, now it hears its doom; Now it dies, and now it leaves us, never to return." Attis, the son/lover consort, represents the mediate deity, the higher self, the true self, a guide who meets the knower in many different mystery cults.
The Rites of Easter arose from the mysteries of Attis. Attis arose when the sun made the day longer than the night for the first time in the new cycle. Attis in the myth, is the God of Vegetation, from the Phrygian region of central Turkey. He was known as the Son of Zeus, the leader of the Pantheon. This myth has been traced to the 12th century B.C.
The day of Attis' death was also the day of His cyclic reconception. Symbolically, Attis represented a rejuvenation of spirit, but this became corrupted into a rejuvenation of earth and a cyclic salvation of crops, important to those people who depended on the production of crops.
Zeus was of the Godforce essence and was the Father (essence) of Orpheus, Apollo, Dionysus (Adonis) Hermes, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Moses and Jesus, as well as Mithra, Tammuz and Attis. Adonis (Dionysus) was equivalent to Tammuz. So, what we truly have is the same energy with different names. Agdistis – another name for Cybele, ‘Great Mother’ goddess of Rome – had been born of the Earth and father god Zeus, and had both a penis and a vagina.
There are dangers for those who undertake the arduous journey without spiritual preparation. The endurance of this journey takes us far into the abyss. No words nor lyricism can possibly describe it.
We travel deep into the frontier of the soul. Myths draw us into the past but their significance renews contact in the present. Myth is a taproot, a cosmic perspective on what anchors and sustains religion, psychology, and culture.
A new perspective with new resonances evokes the spacious imaginal realm. We turn to myth that conveys the depth and breadth of life as a baseline, a ground, a place of eternal return. It can also be fragmentary, skittish, and other-worldly. Myths reveal alternative worlds with no deepest layer.
Here we seek to explore the "darker" primordial matrix of chthonic energy that shapes or artifices the way we are. Psychedelics are a reliable way to enter into that state—between life and death. Approaching Kybele requires embracing paradox. If you 'die' before you die, you won't die when you die.
That's the key; navigating the liminal space between dreaming, and death to grasp a very different view of reality. The name Kybele stands for all the divine characteristics, (Mountain Mother, Mother of Beasts, Mother of the Gods), of the goddess invoked in the myths. Her archaic sanctuaries are natural grottoes. Sanctities precede divinities.
Her archaic meteoric icon was the petra genatrix. She is the as yet "unborn" figure "inside" a rock. In Kybele cult iconography, Hekate holds her torch pointing downward in the 'death' position, marking the transition of soul between life and death. Bodies were paths to the sacred.
The root of Western civilization is this very pharmakon. The ultimate purpose of using drugs and ritual magic to effect human sexual experience is the veneration of deities and ecstatic celebration of the gods by creating oracular visions.
Ritual spectacle belongs to the sphere of sacred things, incites unleashed religious experiences, and involves salvation of the entire community. Exhilarating states of consciousness can be powered by our own voices, exploring a hypnotic world of light, color, and sound.
Forgetting self entirely, the devotee plunges into the multiplicity of the objective world. Being suddenly ejected from the life process that keeps us going shocks us into a kind of cathartic or paralyzing psychological death. The initiate must learn to live, or at least survive, the death.
"The crystallization of the field of consciousness, with its consequent
narrowing of the possibilities of experience, produces a species of
living death. ... Consciousness is to be vivified utterly and is not separated from the Unconscious by a sharp and unnatural cleavage or partition from the other levels of the psyche. Thus the contents of the one part, by a reversal of values and functions, have full access of entry into the other, and vice versa" (Regardie 1970 p.18).
The symbolic and experiential death aspect is an inevitable consequence. Death intervenes in the reconstitution, more like being planted than buried. The union of the conscious mind with the autonomy of embodied unconscious, the unconscious personified as anima mundi, produces a rebirth compounded of both.
The killing of death is a stunning phrase. We imagine it might only be done by the penetration of lived consciousness into the mystery. Life must be re-instated there at the dark heart. We must inhabit death so that it is not a neglected polar opposite from life, so unnatural cleavages and partitions are not set up. The fullness of life cannot be experienced in the absence of death. Transformations will summon births and inevitable deaths, and death so that re-birth can follow.
Jung said, "There is no difference in principle between the animal and the human psyche. The kinship of the two is too obvious." (Letters Vol. II, Pages 372-373). "If one can stay in the middle, know one is human, relate to both the god and the animal of the god, one is all right. One must remember, over the animal is the god, with the god is the god's animal." (Jung, J.E.T., Page 112). Animal behavior demonstrates there is an instinct for altering consciousness.
Seeking healing plants or inebriation, animals drug themselves intentionally. The drug-seeking behavior of animals illuminates that of parallel human behavior as a mysterious natural function, not yet understood.
In ancient times primordial rites were a communal experience of shared metaphysical expectations. The power of collective emotion generates living myth, the potential for transformation available for everyone. Gods and goddesses embody the projections of the collective emotions of a whole group, a community with non-human members.
Kybele (Rhea) was a protean figure, known variously as the Great Mother, the Mother goddess, the Mother of the gods, and addressed by a whole host of titles and epithets. She was originally at home in archaic Phrygia. Culture crystallizes cult, as we later find in Rome.
"In the same way the myths and religious ceremonies of the Phrygians, in spite of certain differences, give for our understanding a similar account of the Mother of the Gods and of Attis; for earth, and the impetuous strength and ardor of the lions which draw her car are the properties of the sky which encloses and surrounds the air that carries the earth as in a car. And to the sun, under the name of Attis, are given the emblems of a shepherd's pipe and a wand, the pipe indicating a series of uneven blasts (because the winds derive their properties and essential nature from the sun and do not blow with uniformity) and the wand declaring the power of the sun which controls all things." (Macrobius, Saturnalia 1, 21:7-10).
The imaginal landscape, the invisible environment, is an attunement to Mother Nature, a lost cosmology of correspondences, a polytheistic psyche. Transformation is an epiphany with an image born of nature’s own workings, a natural symbol far removed from all conscious intention.
All phenomena are known in empty nature. This radical emptiness is the primordial ground of creation -- universal consciousness which forms the ground for our individual consciousness. All dependently originating forms are essentially conceptual constructs from potential reality -- these are holographic archetypes.
All matter is at once alive and sacred. The intuition of immortality is experience of the timelessness of the unconscious. The struggle with the unformed, with chaos, is in truth a primordial experience. The archaic use of psychedelics appear to be one method for unlocking this mystery.
“...primordial images have a secret power that works just as much on human reason as on the soul. Wherever they appear they stir something linked with the mysterious, the long gone, and heavy with foreboding. A string sounds whose vibration reverberates in every man’s breast; these primordial images dwell in everyone as they are the property of all mankind. This secret power is like a spell, like magic, and causes elevation just as much as seduction. It is characteristic of primordial images that they take hold of man where he is utterly human, and a power seizes him, as if the bustling throng were pushing him. And this happens even if individual understanding and feeling rise up against it. What is the power of the individual against the voice of the whole people in him? He is entranced, possessed, and consumed.” C.G. Jung, Red Book
"The song of praise of death, the cry or laughter represent the primordial music that gives birth to the cosmos. [...] Sound is the original substance of all things, even where it is no longer perceptible to the common man. . The song of death is the creative act from which life is released. The abode of death is the darkness of the night, the open mouth of hunger. It is also referred to as an arch or as a water-filled cavity of sleep that gives strength, or of the dream (of the unconscious) that swallows everything up, to spit it out later in a rejuvenated and strengthened form. In the conception of primitive peoples, spirits (the souls of dead ancestors) inhabited the caves of the hills, the hollow trees or the old ships (used as tombs) and attracted every living thing, both to infuse it with new strength, and to regenerate themselves and bring them to life under new guises (as their own grandchildren and great-grandchildren). It is not possible for the common man to recognize these dead souls, who they can nevertheless be heard then for they moan in the dark of night or in mountain waterfalls. To many men, especially shamans, they also appear in the dream to give them a song of magical strength, which is mostly a medicine song. The dead man who sings symbolizes sleep that gives strength and becomes aware to provide new strength, that is, musical substance and inspiration. The dream as a source of inspiration is common to all the mythology of primitive peoples. Sound is now the vehicle of the dead, now the dead himself. It represents the moment when the first light (fire) of the day erupts from the waters of the night: the life-giving song flies from the mouth like an arrow, the dawn comes out of the dark cavity, the thunder follows the lightning. The luminous sound is between day and night, between brightness and darkness, between fire and water." --Marius Schneider, Il significato della musica
Utroba Cave, Bulgaria, a Thracian shrine carved around the 9th or 10th century BCE, depicts the vagina of the Goddess. There are other caves shaped this way in Bulgaria, but none are so spectacular. At 22 meters deep is an altar, possibly representing the cervix or the uterus of the goddess. At noon, light enters the cave from an opening in the ceiling, projecting the image of a phallus on the ground. When the sun is at the right angle, in February or March, the phallus stretches out to reach the altar (or cervix), symbolically fertilizing the uterus of the goddess before the spring sowing.
Inner Earth
"What the ancients did for their dead! You seem to believe that you can absolve yourself from the care of the dead, and from the work that they so greatly demand, since what is dead is past. You excuse yourself with your disbelief in the immortality of the soul. Do you think that the dead do not exist because you have' devised the impossibility of immortality? You believe in your idols of words. The dead produce effects, that is sufficient. In the inner world there is no explaining away, as little as you can explain away the sea in the outer world. You must finally understand your purpose in explaining away, namely to seek protection."
~Carl Jung; Red Book.
Our origins remain ever-present. The earth-human relationship remains the most pressing and encompassing issue of our time. Earth is an anagram of Heart. For archaic humanity, nature was sacred, like life and death. We grapple with the starkness of apprehension, loss. and the mystery of death. Our tears fertilize the earth.
Pre-Hellenic Kybele is psyche created from the mourning process, bereavement, and loss. She is noted for her cult caves and peak sanctuaries. Mourning is an intensely creative imaginal process. Beauty is present in melancholy, within a deep sadness that is not only personal, but a part of the world. Everything we mourn generates psyche or soul.
An eerie quality seems to be the hallmark of the kind of beauty that haunts us or stirs the soul. When it is specific it becomes strange. The everyday suddenly seems eerie, as if we have crossed a threshold into another dimension. Psyche mirrors nature with transparent vision.
Archetypes are psychoid factors that manifest physically, mentally, and in synchronicities. The objective unconscious is the timelessness where they exist, in the symbolic life that connects us with the ancients. We are the afterworld where our loved ones live on. The living and dead inhabit one community.
The end of life is not the end of soul and its imaginal images. The dead work in the grief of our bereavement. They were evoked in prehistoric times. Mushroom spores on ancient bones and cave paintings featuring the unique rounded shape of the mushroom have been found worldwide. They consolidate their value in the depths of our dreams and fantasies, underpinning our lives.
Humans responded to the instinctive transforming power of gods and ancestors with worshipful reciprocation, ‘biophily’ (deep connection to life), and building imaginal relationships with instincts. Here we find the imaginal dimension of the mourning process. Generation and regeneration are indissoluably bound up with the dead.
The dead do not just disappear because they have lost their outer bodily form. They remain in all that lies unacknowledged and unrecognized in the deepest layer of the collective psyche. Caves are timeless otherwordly places, portals to the underworld, the realm of the dead.
Our Promises to the Ancestors
The veneration of the dead, including our ancestors, is based on love and respect for the deceased. In some cultures, it is related to beliefs that the dead have a continued existence, and may possess the ability to influence the fortune of the living, to assure the possessor of the protection and help of the deceased.
The Kybele cult followed a long period of ancestral skull worship of plastered craniums kept in Early Paleolithic households as intercessors. There is evidence from Minoan Crete of "reverence for the dead alongside the worship of a female deity.' (Soles)
There was a preparation room for wine for the goddess. A skull played some function in these rites and domestic shrines. The existence of ancestor worship in Minoan Crete is based on the finds, which include skull retention, offerings made to the dead, and feasting with the dead, or a single composite ancestor.
Caves were first used in Crete as dwellings or at least as habitation sites in the Neolithic period. Toward the end of the Neolithic, they also began to be used extensively as cemeteries, and such usage continued throughout the Early Minoan period and in some areas even longer. Caves appear to have first been used as cult places early in the Middle Minoan (Protopalatial) period, at more or less the same time when the first Cretan palaces were being constructed. There may very well be some connection between the establishment of powerful central authorities in the palaces and the institution of worship in caves.
The evidence for the use of caves as cult places consists of pottery, animal figurines, and occasionally bronze objects. Such objects are found not only in caves which had previously served habitation or funerary purposes but also in caves which had as their earliest known function the housing of some religious activity. In addition to artifacts, some cult caves contain large quantities of animal bones, mostly from deer, oxen, and goats and no doubt derived from some form of animal sacrifice.
These are cult centers located at, or just below, the tops of prominent local hills, not necessarily “peaks” on true “mountains”. Such sites are characterized by deep layers of ash (without animal bones, hence interpreted as the remains of bonfires and not of blood sacrifices of some kind) and by large quantities of clay human and animal figurines. Like the cult caves discussed above, the earliest peak sanctuaries date from the MM I period and most of the two dozen or more confirmed examples of such cult locales have produced material of this date. Moreover, the cult caves and peak sanctuaries are virtually the only sites other than the palaces themselves to have produced certain artifactual types
Making sense of the darkness that the soul requires is deepening into life. Emotional suffering leeches ease and pleasure from life. Affects of archetypal proportions can act like tsunamis in the soul, the self-organizing routed dynamics of psyche.
"The hair on the back of our necks bristles in response to the horrors of the uncanny. Transfixed by shock, awe, dread, and fascination, we can neither dare the dangerous darkness nor turn away. The mysteries of the unknown take us into realms of transgression and taboo. Enthrallment and abhorrence mix in encounters with all that is alien and dispossessed. We face our own human monstrosities and the traumas that create them. We also meet the dark, nonhuman otherness of the collective unconscious; it threatens to possess us and can annihilate our sense of self. Whether we shudder in disgust, quiver in fright, or feel forbidden attraction, we are forced to more fully acknowledge the awful portent of ominous misfortune and confront the abyss. Only consciousness can break the spell."
When life rhythms and habits are suspended or upended, we may find ourselves adrift. What supports us then? The objective unconscious. Through all the dead of human history we get in touch with the deep influences or beings that are animating our being, our lives. We can address the images of the dead which animate our bereavement and inconsolable loss.
Perhaps they felt what Jung expressed: "You are my community. I live what I can live for the living. But I cannot live the excess of my longing with the living. It belongs to you, you shades. We need your living with us." (The Black Books, Vol. V, Page 256)
"Then turn to the dead/ listen to their lament and accept them with love. Be not their blind spokesman/ there are prophets who in the end have stoned themselves. But we seek salvation and hence we need to revere what has become and to accept the dead, who have fluttered through the air and lived like bats under our roofs since time immemorial. The new will be built on the old and the meaning of what has become will become manifold. Your poverty in what has becomeyou will thus deliver into the wealth of the future." (.Jung, Red Book)
Life lacks depth and meaningfulness guided by only outer facts and circumstances. We live more fully oriented toward totality and connected to our primal source, our mythic, imaginal, ancestral and mycelial network. All good myths are a trail of breadcrumbs that leads us through the dark forests of life. It shows us how we heal our own inner wounds.
Myth orients us toward 'eternal' values. Consciousness widens by confronting previously unconscious contents. Inner figures and their autonomous formation in the unconscious spontaneously arises. Transformation takes place through the exploration of visionary imagination.
The indigenous/primordial Kybele was the Mother of the Gods, borderland or liminal consciousness, and symbolic life, renewal, and rebirth -- as well as trauma and transformation.
What makes her important and deep are unbounded connections with other gods, themes, and symbols. The goddess has an archetypal and imaginal/virtual body or multiple bodies, each differing in gradation of energy and utility.
These bodies tend to change over time and in correlation with personal experience precisely because they exist relatively and not absolutely. But behind all these bodies is a Body that never changes because it is the source out of which everything arises.
Kybele has a relative existence extending to the subtle and physical levels, contributing as it does to the process of birth, life, death and renewal in this world. Seed symbols, such as "world image," represent a psychic dynamism that manifests in differentiated divine symbols -- the experiencable and inexperiencable.
Like archetypal psychology, Dane Rudyar thought, "The deepest core of life is poetry and symbol." A fusion of imaginal myth and personal life experience, one's notion of reality changes, shaping adjustment to inner life and outer life experience. The image we create as our experienced reality. Myths came into being from a magical and praeternatural worldview.
Earth was alive and special spots were engulfed with “power,” filled with “energy;’ or inhabited by “spirits.” Many, like the Anatolians who called her Kybele, regarded the Earth as their mother, a dark unknown goddess. There were hills that looked like breasts, crags that looked like faces, and rivers reminiscent of life-giving milk.
Soil, water, fire, and air all partook of the divine. Chanting, drumming, and vigils unite the elements together. Some spots were especially numinous and these sacred places, such as caves, springs, and mountaintops, were visited for renewal, communication with the “other world,” or entry into altered states of consciousness -- to slow down and enter the soul of things.
The plant based, shamanic origins of religion and visionary mythology arose as a means of access and emotional synchrony. Throughout the entire Paleolithic era, cultures operated in the magic mode of consciousness and synchronous events with natural phenomena, such as eclipses, lightning, rainbows, earthquakes, etc. -- and death.
Mythic imagination arose in the early Neolithic, though the archaic mode remained. Animism was a perspective that saw nature as alive and sacred. Animals and proto-humans imitate behavior. Intersubjective space became creative through mimesis and seers stripping away the cloak of time.
There is a contagious nature to mimetic desire. Its imaginal poetics are a 'making', 'revealing', and incorporation of soul -- internally generated and transformative realizations of loss, destruction, and rebirth.
Drumming, chanting, and singing deepened trance and ecstatic states, or drove travel in the netherworlds, full of color and shifting perspectives, surreal experiences and numbing horrors. Processions echoed the slow, twisted, and torturous movement of the soul.
Ritual is creative mimesis. Dance is another mimesis. Mimetic instinct was channeled into intentional repetitive movement in imitation of the gods -- agents of creation, as well as models of desire, action, and internal mediation.
“There is a mythical space where directions and positions are determined by the placement of great affective entities...In the dream, as in the myth, we learn where the phenomenon is located by sensing what our desire moves toward, what strikes fear in our hearts, and upon what our life depends.” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception)
Magic was the emerging awareness of nature, while mythical awareness became the emergent nature of soul. Rather than rational mental explanations, the magical perceived events as the operation of uncanny occult forces.
Even with thematic simplicity, myth can have bizarre, repulsive, and taboo features. Our mythical nature sought meaning through immersive experience, direct engagement, mystic images, and wisdom stories.
Creativity became a metaphysical aesthetic power. Novel rituals expressed the metaphysical side of desire. All such impulses were mobilized by mind-altering plants in an interspecies symbiosis.
Mythic thinking penetrates our sensuous imagination and soul. We follow through with the image, remaining true to it. Soul-making is soul making its way back into the world and the rhythm of ensouled culture, as the life of imagination. All ritual is a species of performance.
In our passion and judgment we can embrace and revel in the dynamic flow of life. Creating rites is a fluid process and dynamism of creative potential. Kybele's primordial rites center on consuming the interspecies molecules of fungi and plants, and re-membering our wild animal nature that links us to the world soul. An interdependent fusion of culture and biology, we are the bio-cultural companions of plants and beasts.
Ritualizing bridges animal and human ways. We are "ritualizing animals." Like other animals, humans have evolved to enact ritualizations. They "give stability to our behaviors and to serve as vehicles of communication." (Driver) Ritualization is the primary technique of communication and transmission, pathways through the unknown.
We ritualize ourselves into different ways of being human. We share this tendency with bees that dance, peacocks that display, and whales that breech and slap their flukes. Evidence suggests that the domestic dog developed its ritualizations to exploit the human need for a working companion.
Ritual displays the kinship between animals and humans. So ritualizing is evolutionarily adaptive for many animals, especially the human animal. But human rituals are unique in that they seem to be invariably connected with myth and lead to transformation. In transformation, formerly latent structures become vibrantly manifest though the primal remains and endures.
How do such myths arise? What is their adaptive significance and why do we relate them so closely with our ritual behavior? We react to unconscious stimuli we cannot see. Plants, too, have feelings and sense their environment. They responded to an ecologically-relevant 'sound' with an ecologically-relevant response flooding their tissues with chemical defenses.
Rituals are deeply rooted in our animal nature, a nonverbal communicative realm of gestural routines, necessary for survival. There is a relationship between ritual symbolism and poetic metaphor. Rituals display what words can only interpret. They provide meaningful interpretations for lived experience. They evolved many forms to cope with danger, communicate, and celebrate.
Myth is simply one way that the mind seeks to understand the world. Myths play upon these antinomies and propose solutions to them. So, we create myths to satisfy our need to understand our environment and to give us some sense of control over it, or at least an understood place within it. A given myth has stability (is an enduring structure of relationships of meaning) because it "is adaptive psychophysiologically for an individual or social group."
But understanding alone is not adaptive enough. Like other animals we seek to adapt ourselves physically to the environments in which we live. The veil of storytelling usually covers up the more sordid facts of life. Therefore we need a way to make the myth real to us, and that is the fundamental reason why we connect ritual to our myths.
Rituals can be described as motor actions that seek to enact the reality of the mythic structure of instinctually produced meaning. The ritual mode of "magic" or ritual is a means to an end. It is is a common anthropological explanation for the rise of ritual and religion in human history, making tangible the previously intangible.
In Imaginary Landscape, Making Worlds of Myth and Science, 198 pp., William Irwin Thompson says, "there is an archeological level of unconsciousness at which we are aware of the Earth's whole history. His approach is to take a dreamy, mythical view of reality, and to then push it hard into science. His most appealing idea is his notion that "the dwarves and 'little people' . . . are mythopoeic perceptions of what we prefer to call bacteria."
Goblins and dwarves are really bacteria? Yes! "The goblins are the anaerobic bacteria who live on and in our wastes and garbage, and the fairies, those air creatures of light, are the cyanobacteria that were the first to invent photosynthesis to feed on light to give off the oxygen that would become the new atmosphere of an illuminated world."
Other mythopoetic authors like James Lovelock have suggested a "Gaia hypothesis," where the Earth and all the things on it are part of "a self-regulating entity that can control the salinity of the seas, the temperature of the surface, and the level of oxygen in the atmosphere."
Francisco Varela's theories imply that a cell effectively "dreams up" the world outside it? This is the primacy of human experience and its direct, lived quality that is phenomenological. Is that what Thompson meant by "autopoiesis"? Autonomous systems are both endogenously controlled and self-organizing. Is it anything like the "metanoia" he's always talking about? Does it have anything to do with the place he calls Catal Huyuck?
Metanoia is the the Greek word made up of two words: meta & nous. Meta means "after" or "change", and nous is the Greek word for "mind". The word means "after-mind" and signifies a change of mind: thinking one way, but then afterwards thinking another.
Paranoia (para-nous), related to metanoia, is its own kind of eccentric madness. Literally, the word means to be beside-mind, or "out of your mind", or "beside yourself". Paranoia is not being in a right mind, but having a mind that is off center - that is, not where it should be.
By comparing metanoia and paranoia together, we get the idea that metanoia is to change ourselves with a radical mindshift to get where we should be. It's not what you intend it for but where that instinct comes from. This echoes Ralph Waldo Emerson who 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 beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior, as well as the 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.
Myth amplifies individual psychic consciousness. Inherent images in each myth reflect coherently and holographically in others while the central myth is held in imagination. We can watch incipient myths arising.
Nurit Bird-David’s book Us, Relatives, discusses ‘pluripresence’, coined to express the sense in which people in tiny-scale forager communities are all present to each other all the time. Everyone has a relationship to everyone else.
Bird-David documents specific ways of psychological interweaving relating to multiple presences. There are conversations (‘pluralogues’) that span multiple hearths, which aren’t necessarily addressed directly to specific individuals, nor to a single abstracted ‘collective’.
There is a sense of heavily connected plurality where connections never congeal into a mass ‘unity’. In Greek mythology, the gods never appear alone. Every tale of a god involves other gods. Likewise, each of the multifarious components of the psyche relate to other components of our 2 million year old inheritance.
Psychic abundance suggests cultural acts of the psyche -- reflection, desire, longing, and unconscious memory of the gods and goddesses that reside within the activity of the world -- dark, clear, and luminous.
Paying homage to the frightening realms of the soul activates healing potential. This is imagination's chthonic refuge in luminous darkness from the viewpoint of civilized consciousness. The unconscious, the gods, the archetypes, and the instincts are synonymous. Jung said, "pure Nature...expresses the given thing, it mirrors the state of our consciousness with complete detachment."
“Certainly this is an animated world, a world of the simplest things. No world of will-be or must-be, it seems to me, rather a world of maybe with entirely undetermined possibilities, a world of colorful twilight. It seems as if there are only modest waysides here, close at hand, no distant targets, no broad straight military roads. No heaven above, no hell below. A strange world in between--everything merges in soft shades--a colorful painting, harmonically fused in itself.” C.G. Jung, The Black Books
Kybele's anointed stone was a meteorite, which had successfully joined heaven and earth and become sacred, even divine. This stone didn't stand for the goddess. It was the goddess.
Likewise, she shared an identity with the holy fungi found in the roots of the forests on the holy mountain. The roots of imagination were entangled with the imagination of the roots and their companion mycelium.
Many plant molecules interact with and modulate key regulators of mammalian physiology in ways that are beneficial to health. Through inter-species transfer, stress-induced plant compounds tend to upregulate pathways that provide stress resistance in animals.
Plant consumers may have mechanisms to perceive these chemical cues and react to them in ways that are beneficial. Animals and fungi are able to sense chemical cues synthesized by plants in response to stress. Xenohormesis refers to inter-species hormesis, such that an animal or fungal species uses chemical cues from other species.
Can psychedelics, sensuality, and forbidden sensation-laden images illuminate the misty panorama of event and mirage which passes before us in the dawn of human history, lighted here and there by scenes of unusual vividness, its latent theme, its mystery, its secret, its unexpressed, unseen, nonliteral, or simply intelligible meaning?
′′Alchemy represents a laboratory project of drama at the same cosmic and psychological time." --C.G.Jung interview with Mircea Eliade, August 1952 in MCGUIRE, W.- HULL, R.F.C. (ed), 1995-Jung Speaks. Interviews and Meetings, Milan, Adelphi Editions, 1995.
As James Hillman says, "When the gods arrive on stage, everything becomes silent and the eyelids close. Plunged into oblivion by this experience, we re-emerge and without knowing exactly what is happened, we know only that we have been transformed."
"What the ancients did for their dead! You seem to believe that you can absolve yourself from the care of the dead, and from the work that they so greatly demand, since what is dead is past. You excuse yourself with your disbelief in the immortality of the soul. Do you think that the dead do not exist because you have' devised the impossibility of immortality? You believe in your idols of words. The dead produce effects, that is sufficient. In the inner world there is no explaining away, as little as you can explain away the sea in the outer world. You must finally understand your purpose in explaining away, namely to seek protection."
~Carl Jung; Red Book.
Our origins remain ever-present. The earth-human relationship remains the most pressing and encompassing issue of our time. Earth is an anagram of Heart. For archaic humanity, nature was sacred, like life and death. We grapple with the starkness of apprehension, loss. and the mystery of death. Our tears fertilize the earth.
Pre-Hellenic Kybele is psyche created from the mourning process, bereavement, and loss. She is noted for her cult caves and peak sanctuaries. Mourning is an intensely creative imaginal process. Beauty is present in melancholy, within a deep sadness that is not only personal, but a part of the world. Everything we mourn generates psyche or soul.
An eerie quality seems to be the hallmark of the kind of beauty that haunts us or stirs the soul. When it is specific it becomes strange. The everyday suddenly seems eerie, as if we have crossed a threshold into another dimension. Psyche mirrors nature with transparent vision.
Archetypes are psychoid factors that manifest physically, mentally, and in synchronicities. The objective unconscious is the timelessness where they exist, in the symbolic life that connects us with the ancients. We are the afterworld where our loved ones live on. The living and dead inhabit one community.
The end of life is not the end of soul and its imaginal images. The dead work in the grief of our bereavement. They were evoked in prehistoric times. Mushroom spores on ancient bones and cave paintings featuring the unique rounded shape of the mushroom have been found worldwide. They consolidate their value in the depths of our dreams and fantasies, underpinning our lives.
Humans responded to the instinctive transforming power of gods and ancestors with worshipful reciprocation, ‘biophily’ (deep connection to life), and building imaginal relationships with instincts. Here we find the imaginal dimension of the mourning process. Generation and regeneration are indissoluably bound up with the dead.
The dead do not just disappear because they have lost their outer bodily form. They remain in all that lies unacknowledged and unrecognized in the deepest layer of the collective psyche. Caves are timeless otherwordly places, portals to the underworld, the realm of the dead.
Our Promises to the Ancestors
The veneration of the dead, including our ancestors, is based on love and respect for the deceased. In some cultures, it is related to beliefs that the dead have a continued existence, and may possess the ability to influence the fortune of the living, to assure the possessor of the protection and help of the deceased.
The Kybele cult followed a long period of ancestral skull worship of plastered craniums kept in Early Paleolithic households as intercessors. There is evidence from Minoan Crete of "reverence for the dead alongside the worship of a female deity.' (Soles)
There was a preparation room for wine for the goddess. A skull played some function in these rites and domestic shrines. The existence of ancestor worship in Minoan Crete is based on the finds, which include skull retention, offerings made to the dead, and feasting with the dead, or a single composite ancestor.
Caves were first used in Crete as dwellings or at least as habitation sites in the Neolithic period. Toward the end of the Neolithic, they also began to be used extensively as cemeteries, and such usage continued throughout the Early Minoan period and in some areas even longer. Caves appear to have first been used as cult places early in the Middle Minoan (Protopalatial) period, at more or less the same time when the first Cretan palaces were being constructed. There may very well be some connection between the establishment of powerful central authorities in the palaces and the institution of worship in caves.
The evidence for the use of caves as cult places consists of pottery, animal figurines, and occasionally bronze objects. Such objects are found not only in caves which had previously served habitation or funerary purposes but also in caves which had as their earliest known function the housing of some religious activity. In addition to artifacts, some cult caves contain large quantities of animal bones, mostly from deer, oxen, and goats and no doubt derived from some form of animal sacrifice.
These are cult centers located at, or just below, the tops of prominent local hills, not necessarily “peaks” on true “mountains”. Such sites are characterized by deep layers of ash (without animal bones, hence interpreted as the remains of bonfires and not of blood sacrifices of some kind) and by large quantities of clay human and animal figurines. Like the cult caves discussed above, the earliest peak sanctuaries date from the MM I period and most of the two dozen or more confirmed examples of such cult locales have produced material of this date. Moreover, the cult caves and peak sanctuaries are virtually the only sites other than the palaces themselves to have produced certain artifactual types
Making sense of the darkness that the soul requires is deepening into life. Emotional suffering leeches ease and pleasure from life. Affects of archetypal proportions can act like tsunamis in the soul, the self-organizing routed dynamics of psyche.
"The hair on the back of our necks bristles in response to the horrors of the uncanny. Transfixed by shock, awe, dread, and fascination, we can neither dare the dangerous darkness nor turn away. The mysteries of the unknown take us into realms of transgression and taboo. Enthrallment and abhorrence mix in encounters with all that is alien and dispossessed. We face our own human monstrosities and the traumas that create them. We also meet the dark, nonhuman otherness of the collective unconscious; it threatens to possess us and can annihilate our sense of self. Whether we shudder in disgust, quiver in fright, or feel forbidden attraction, we are forced to more fully acknowledge the awful portent of ominous misfortune and confront the abyss. Only consciousness can break the spell."
When life rhythms and habits are suspended or upended, we may find ourselves adrift. What supports us then? The objective unconscious. Through all the dead of human history we get in touch with the deep influences or beings that are animating our being, our lives. We can address the images of the dead which animate our bereavement and inconsolable loss.
Perhaps they felt what Jung expressed: "You are my community. I live what I can live for the living. But I cannot live the excess of my longing with the living. It belongs to you, you shades. We need your living with us." (The Black Books, Vol. V, Page 256)
"Then turn to the dead/ listen to their lament and accept them with love. Be not their blind spokesman/ there are prophets who in the end have stoned themselves. But we seek salvation and hence we need to revere what has become and to accept the dead, who have fluttered through the air and lived like bats under our roofs since time immemorial. The new will be built on the old and the meaning of what has become will become manifold. Your poverty in what has becomeyou will thus deliver into the wealth of the future." (.Jung, Red Book)
Life lacks depth and meaningfulness guided by only outer facts and circumstances. We live more fully oriented toward totality and connected to our primal source, our mythic, imaginal, ancestral and mycelial network. All good myths are a trail of breadcrumbs that leads us through the dark forests of life. It shows us how we heal our own inner wounds.
Myth orients us toward 'eternal' values. Consciousness widens by confronting previously unconscious contents. Inner figures and their autonomous formation in the unconscious spontaneously arises. Transformation takes place through the exploration of visionary imagination.
The indigenous/primordial Kybele was the Mother of the Gods, borderland or liminal consciousness, and symbolic life, renewal, and rebirth -- as well as trauma and transformation.
What makes her important and deep are unbounded connections with other gods, themes, and symbols. The goddess has an archetypal and imaginal/virtual body or multiple bodies, each differing in gradation of energy and utility.
These bodies tend to change over time and in correlation with personal experience precisely because they exist relatively and not absolutely. But behind all these bodies is a Body that never changes because it is the source out of which everything arises.
Kybele has a relative existence extending to the subtle and physical levels, contributing as it does to the process of birth, life, death and renewal in this world. Seed symbols, such as "world image," represent a psychic dynamism that manifests in differentiated divine symbols -- the experiencable and inexperiencable.
Like archetypal psychology, Dane Rudyar thought, "The deepest core of life is poetry and symbol." A fusion of imaginal myth and personal life experience, one's notion of reality changes, shaping adjustment to inner life and outer life experience. The image we create as our experienced reality. Myths came into being from a magical and praeternatural worldview.
Earth was alive and special spots were engulfed with “power,” filled with “energy;’ or inhabited by “spirits.” Many, like the Anatolians who called her Kybele, regarded the Earth as their mother, a dark unknown goddess. There were hills that looked like breasts, crags that looked like faces, and rivers reminiscent of life-giving milk.
Soil, water, fire, and air all partook of the divine. Chanting, drumming, and vigils unite the elements together. Some spots were especially numinous and these sacred places, such as caves, springs, and mountaintops, were visited for renewal, communication with the “other world,” or entry into altered states of consciousness -- to slow down and enter the soul of things.
The plant based, shamanic origins of religion and visionary mythology arose as a means of access and emotional synchrony. Throughout the entire Paleolithic era, cultures operated in the magic mode of consciousness and synchronous events with natural phenomena, such as eclipses, lightning, rainbows, earthquakes, etc. -- and death.
Mythic imagination arose in the early Neolithic, though the archaic mode remained. Animism was a perspective that saw nature as alive and sacred. Animals and proto-humans imitate behavior. Intersubjective space became creative through mimesis and seers stripping away the cloak of time.
There is a contagious nature to mimetic desire. Its imaginal poetics are a 'making', 'revealing', and incorporation of soul -- internally generated and transformative realizations of loss, destruction, and rebirth.
Drumming, chanting, and singing deepened trance and ecstatic states, or drove travel in the netherworlds, full of color and shifting perspectives, surreal experiences and numbing horrors. Processions echoed the slow, twisted, and torturous movement of the soul.
Ritual is creative mimesis. Dance is another mimesis. Mimetic instinct was channeled into intentional repetitive movement in imitation of the gods -- agents of creation, as well as models of desire, action, and internal mediation.
“There is a mythical space where directions and positions are determined by the placement of great affective entities...In the dream, as in the myth, we learn where the phenomenon is located by sensing what our desire moves toward, what strikes fear in our hearts, and upon what our life depends.” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception)
Magic was the emerging awareness of nature, while mythical awareness became the emergent nature of soul. Rather than rational mental explanations, the magical perceived events as the operation of uncanny occult forces.
Even with thematic simplicity, myth can have bizarre, repulsive, and taboo features. Our mythical nature sought meaning through immersive experience, direct engagement, mystic images, and wisdom stories.
Creativity became a metaphysical aesthetic power. Novel rituals expressed the metaphysical side of desire. All such impulses were mobilized by mind-altering plants in an interspecies symbiosis.
Mythic thinking penetrates our sensuous imagination and soul. We follow through with the image, remaining true to it. Soul-making is soul making its way back into the world and the rhythm of ensouled culture, as the life of imagination. All ritual is a species of performance.
In our passion and judgment we can embrace and revel in the dynamic flow of life. Creating rites is a fluid process and dynamism of creative potential. Kybele's primordial rites center on consuming the interspecies molecules of fungi and plants, and re-membering our wild animal nature that links us to the world soul. An interdependent fusion of culture and biology, we are the bio-cultural companions of plants and beasts.
Ritualizing bridges animal and human ways. We are "ritualizing animals." Like other animals, humans have evolved to enact ritualizations. They "give stability to our behaviors and to serve as vehicles of communication." (Driver) Ritualization is the primary technique of communication and transmission, pathways through the unknown.
We ritualize ourselves into different ways of being human. We share this tendency with bees that dance, peacocks that display, and whales that breech and slap their flukes. Evidence suggests that the domestic dog developed its ritualizations to exploit the human need for a working companion.
Ritual displays the kinship between animals and humans. So ritualizing is evolutionarily adaptive for many animals, especially the human animal. But human rituals are unique in that they seem to be invariably connected with myth and lead to transformation. In transformation, formerly latent structures become vibrantly manifest though the primal remains and endures.
How do such myths arise? What is their adaptive significance and why do we relate them so closely with our ritual behavior? We react to unconscious stimuli we cannot see. Plants, too, have feelings and sense their environment. They responded to an ecologically-relevant 'sound' with an ecologically-relevant response flooding their tissues with chemical defenses.
Rituals are deeply rooted in our animal nature, a nonverbal communicative realm of gestural routines, necessary for survival. There is a relationship between ritual symbolism and poetic metaphor. Rituals display what words can only interpret. They provide meaningful interpretations for lived experience. They evolved many forms to cope with danger, communicate, and celebrate.
Myth is simply one way that the mind seeks to understand the world. Myths play upon these antinomies and propose solutions to them. So, we create myths to satisfy our need to understand our environment and to give us some sense of control over it, or at least an understood place within it. A given myth has stability (is an enduring structure of relationships of meaning) because it "is adaptive psychophysiologically for an individual or social group."
But understanding alone is not adaptive enough. Like other animals we seek to adapt ourselves physically to the environments in which we live. The veil of storytelling usually covers up the more sordid facts of life. Therefore we need a way to make the myth real to us, and that is the fundamental reason why we connect ritual to our myths.
Rituals can be described as motor actions that seek to enact the reality of the mythic structure of instinctually produced meaning. The ritual mode of "magic" or ritual is a means to an end. It is is a common anthropological explanation for the rise of ritual and religion in human history, making tangible the previously intangible.
In Imaginary Landscape, Making Worlds of Myth and Science, 198 pp., William Irwin Thompson says, "there is an archeological level of unconsciousness at which we are aware of the Earth's whole history. His approach is to take a dreamy, mythical view of reality, and to then push it hard into science. His most appealing idea is his notion that "the dwarves and 'little people' . . . are mythopoeic perceptions of what we prefer to call bacteria."
Goblins and dwarves are really bacteria? Yes! "The goblins are the anaerobic bacteria who live on and in our wastes and garbage, and the fairies, those air creatures of light, are the cyanobacteria that were the first to invent photosynthesis to feed on light to give off the oxygen that would become the new atmosphere of an illuminated world."
Other mythopoetic authors like James Lovelock have suggested a "Gaia hypothesis," where the Earth and all the things on it are part of "a self-regulating entity that can control the salinity of the seas, the temperature of the surface, and the level of oxygen in the atmosphere."
Francisco Varela's theories imply that a cell effectively "dreams up" the world outside it? This is the primacy of human experience and its direct, lived quality that is phenomenological. Is that what Thompson meant by "autopoiesis"? Autonomous systems are both endogenously controlled and self-organizing. Is it anything like the "metanoia" he's always talking about? Does it have anything to do with the place he calls Catal Huyuck?
Metanoia is the the Greek word made up of two words: meta & nous. Meta means "after" or "change", and nous is the Greek word for "mind". The word means "after-mind" and signifies a change of mind: thinking one way, but then afterwards thinking another.
Paranoia (para-nous), related to metanoia, is its own kind of eccentric madness. Literally, the word means to be beside-mind, or "out of your mind", or "beside yourself". Paranoia is not being in a right mind, but having a mind that is off center - that is, not where it should be.
By comparing metanoia and paranoia together, we get the idea that metanoia is to change ourselves with a radical mindshift to get where we should be. It's not what you intend it for but where that instinct comes from. This echoes Ralph Waldo Emerson who 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 beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior, as well as the 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.
Myth amplifies individual psychic consciousness. Inherent images in each myth reflect coherently and holographically in others while the central myth is held in imagination. We can watch incipient myths arising.
Nurit Bird-David’s book Us, Relatives, discusses ‘pluripresence’, coined to express the sense in which people in tiny-scale forager communities are all present to each other all the time. Everyone has a relationship to everyone else.
Bird-David documents specific ways of psychological interweaving relating to multiple presences. There are conversations (‘pluralogues’) that span multiple hearths, which aren’t necessarily addressed directly to specific individuals, nor to a single abstracted ‘collective’.
There is a sense of heavily connected plurality where connections never congeal into a mass ‘unity’. In Greek mythology, the gods never appear alone. Every tale of a god involves other gods. Likewise, each of the multifarious components of the psyche relate to other components of our 2 million year old inheritance.
Psychic abundance suggests cultural acts of the psyche -- reflection, desire, longing, and unconscious memory of the gods and goddesses that reside within the activity of the world -- dark, clear, and luminous.
Paying homage to the frightening realms of the soul activates healing potential. This is imagination's chthonic refuge in luminous darkness from the viewpoint of civilized consciousness. The unconscious, the gods, the archetypes, and the instincts are synonymous. Jung said, "pure Nature...expresses the given thing, it mirrors the state of our consciousness with complete detachment."
“Certainly this is an animated world, a world of the simplest things. No world of will-be or must-be, it seems to me, rather a world of maybe with entirely undetermined possibilities, a world of colorful twilight. It seems as if there are only modest waysides here, close at hand, no distant targets, no broad straight military roads. No heaven above, no hell below. A strange world in between--everything merges in soft shades--a colorful painting, harmonically fused in itself.” C.G. Jung, The Black Books
Kybele's anointed stone was a meteorite, which had successfully joined heaven and earth and become sacred, even divine. This stone didn't stand for the goddess. It was the goddess.
Likewise, she shared an identity with the holy fungi found in the roots of the forests on the holy mountain. The roots of imagination were entangled with the imagination of the roots and their companion mycelium.
Many plant molecules interact with and modulate key regulators of mammalian physiology in ways that are beneficial to health. Through inter-species transfer, stress-induced plant compounds tend to upregulate pathways that provide stress resistance in animals.
Plant consumers may have mechanisms to perceive these chemical cues and react to them in ways that are beneficial. Animals and fungi are able to sense chemical cues synthesized by plants in response to stress. Xenohormesis refers to inter-species hormesis, such that an animal or fungal species uses chemical cues from other species.
Can psychedelics, sensuality, and forbidden sensation-laden images illuminate the misty panorama of event and mirage which passes before us in the dawn of human history, lighted here and there by scenes of unusual vividness, its latent theme, its mystery, its secret, its unexpressed, unseen, nonliteral, or simply intelligible meaning?
′′Alchemy represents a laboratory project of drama at the same cosmic and psychological time." --C.G.Jung interview with Mircea Eliade, August 1952 in MCGUIRE, W.- HULL, R.F.C. (ed), 1995-Jung Speaks. Interviews and Meetings, Milan, Adelphi Editions, 1995.
As James Hillman says, "When the gods arrive on stage, everything becomes silent and the eyelids close. Plunged into oblivion by this experience, we re-emerge and without knowing exactly what is happened, we know only that we have been transformed."
A KYBELE OF THE SOUL
MYSTERIOSOPHY
Kybele & Mycology; Entheogenic Theory
The cave is the fundamental metaphor. The womb of the archetypal mother is the psyche or soul, including the animate natural world. It is millions of years of instinctive animal life, the dwelling place of the dead, places of burial, transformer of life cycles, and the renewal of our existential essence. Nature is a mirror of the psyche.
Life itself is psyche. Her realm is imagination. We can go there even though it doesn't exist. When the images change, behavior changes. For Kybele, a uniform character never existed mythically, historically, or otherwise, even in our conceptualizations of her place and space. Her wildness reflects in our bewilderment, transforming between sublime beauty and frightening wilderness.
Preparation of the dead has long been linked with hallucinogenic drinks. She personifies the indeterminate states of the archaic abyss of unconsciousness and her furious potential, at once beautiful and terrifying. Her arc resists being captured in any attempt to unify or define a prevalent direction.
Her origin may be the surviving remnants of a psychedelic cult of the dead with sacred foods and drink, much less the creepy animality and viscous sexual violence reverberating in the liminosity of an otherwordly medium. The scenes take place in an imaginal realm.
This primitive alchemy is a "project of drama at the same cosmic and psychological time." (Jung) It is an approach to knowing & experiencing the powers of our being as symbolic representations of dimensions of human experience that cannot be fitted into our ordinary categories of knowledge.
The unconscious is supra-personal and transcends understanding. It arises from primordial experience, grotesque, demonic, beyond historical and mythological events -- an inspired, "seized" activity.
They came together to unite, dance, consume the potion, and revel in its revelatory effects together. Those who took part realized a powerful sense of connection to friends, family, and the wider world. So, the Mysteries provided a potent antidote to feelings of isolation, depression, grief, trauma, and social disenfranchisement.
"Only at times the pupil's curtain slides up soundlessly - An image enters then, goes through the tensioned stillness of the limbs - and in the heart ceases to be." (Rainer Maria Rilke; Excerpt from the Panther poem)
Gordon Wasson suggested the origins of religion and Greek mythology were in prehistoric mushroom cults. They used hallucinogenic substances to contact the dead and divine, like the prehistoric Minoans of ancient Crete who sacrificed humans to produce sacred foods and oils for use in religious rites.
Zeus and Dionysus were born there, and mushroom cults associated with honey and mead were associated with the goddess and the dead. Mushroom were grown on corpses and their fluids, transforming them into god-plants, a way to commune with the dead, have visions of the spirit world and receive divine revelation. From the Bodies of the Gods: Psychoactive Plants and the Cults of the Dead; Earl Lee
We are speaking about evolving god-images. We have to entertain her symbols and generate association to reveal meaning. Our desire is to save the phenomena of the imaginal human and planetary psyche. In our own mythology, this is to re-animate the memory that each of us carries.
′′ If Dionysus means the undivided, then his consciousness mode brings back to an ancient meaning of this word ′′ to know with ". The English adjective 'conscious' used to allude to a ′′ know together ", to a shared con-know Like a secret among those who are part of it. How we can't proceed alone, so we can't know for ourselves. Our consciousness cannot be divided by the other. The other is made necessary, not only because the soul cannot live without its ′′ other ′′ side, but also because the consciousness itself has an erotic, dionisiac components that tends to participate ". (James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, pp. 303-304)
Liberation from the separate self is a divorce from the alienation and disenchantment of the objective world. It restores the loss of virtually all
of the primal world view. “In the primal world view,” Richard Tarnas suggests (2006, 18), “intelligence and soul … pervade all of nature and the cosmos, and a permeable human self directly participates in that larger matrix of meaning … within which he is fully embedded.”
Approaching myth requires embracing paradox, the lived character of imaginal experience. Entering the paradox calls forth the imaginal realm. Myth is the gravity of imagination.
They are found in every drama, life passage, ritual, passionate undertaking and gesture of love. Myth is elusive, fragmentary, skittish, and otherwordly. They suggest alternative worlds with endless receding depths. They draw us into the past and renew contact with the present. The fluid range of mythology doesn't need to be reduced or fixed to persons, places, or times to instill wisdom and insight.
Her Phrygian rock-cut monuments, jut into the sky and stand for her concealed origins. They call her matar kubileya, meaning "Mother of the Mountain." Such sacred places draw us back into the very earth from which they emerged. For us, she is liminal -- the very nature and self-evident significance of imaginative autonomy, the continuities and discontinuities of imagination and perceiving.
Kybele is the fertility from which we harvest darkness. Imagining, memory, and place are absolutely central to our lived experience at every level -- perceptual, practical, cognitive, aesthetic, emotional, intersubjective. Sensing your environment triggers things -- the source and flow of life, the awakening to the divinity within ourselves.
Her mode of memory is not fictitious, but the imaginative production of a world sensed as a plenum of places; a unique mode of insight. The everyday world of space, time, and mass does not exist at all except as a background for perceptual images.
Where sensory information is separable into distinct realms, dimensions exist; where they merge, dimensions do not exist. Re-membering and reimagining what has been forgotten reconnects our animal nature with the world in which it is embedded.
Remembering is a function of ritual lamentations, which involved movement, sometimes slow and solemn, sometimes wild and ecstatic. There was wailing, and singing -- tearing the hair, face, and clothes -- offerings at the tombs. This allowed direct communication between the relatives and the dead with a refrain of cries, improvisations of the grief of the occasion.
Walter Burkert, in Greek Religion (1985, section III.3,4) says: "The cult of the Great Mother, Meter, presents a complex picture insofar as indigenous, Minoan-Mycenean tradition is here intertwined with a cult taken over directly from the Phrygian kingdom of Asia Minor" (p 177). Roman mythology named her Magna Mater deorum Idaea ("great Idaean mother of the gods"), in recognition of her Phrygian origins.
She remains pregnant with the inexhaustible potentials of life as if none had ever been used up. Kybele (Greek Κυβέλη) occupies a cave or adyton with echoing resonances, in which she gives oracles. Jung teaches that when we awaken to the need to probe the unconscious, the archetype most needed by the psyche will appear. The ancients spontaneously spoke or gesticulated a series of mnemonics that would trigger off imprinted states of consciousness that acted as doorways into deeper seats of consciousness.
The botanical psyche reveals an encoded, vegetal intelligence inherent in plant forms. Such patterns can be thought of as blueprints for the natural world. An alliance with the forest itself and a way of life is grounded in ancestral wisdom traditions and practical knowledge. They represent a pathway between worlds that is often also marked by the form of the serpent.
Plants symbolize this transformative potential and embody it at the core of their being. Siberian shamans still equate the fly agaric with the Axis Mundi.
These same designs relate to an ancient metaphysics found across civilizations and through time – characterized by the connected principles of the micro- and macro-cosmos, sacred and fractal geometries, as well as the psychoactive visions induced by mind-manifesting (entheogenic) plant medicines.
"The word "psychedelic" is uniformly translated as "mind manifesting," however that is a significant and unfortunate misnomer. "Psyche" only means mind in the broadest Eastern philosophical sense and is more accurately translated from the Greek as breath, life, or soul. (The Greek "delos" means visible or clear, from the Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to shine.”) Psychedelics don’t manifest our thinking mind so much as they illuminate our fundamental soul. Psyche + delos: soul manifesting." (Neal Goldsmith)
The plant kingdom is significant to human life, consciousness and spirituality across cultures and through time. We can re-engage with both sacred and secular aspects of plant-thinking and being, finding in the plant kingdom new models for thinking about life, consciousness, and plant intelligence, as well as aesthetic approaches to a more-than-human world.
We can glimpse the boundless mystery, richness, cultural, and spiritual significance of the vegetal kingdom. As centers of intelligence, plant sentience is often dismissed. They invite us to reflect on our own relationship with plants – what they can teach us about ourselves, and how we might share our world with them.
Jung perceived continuities between the forms of physical as well as psychic reality, essential patterns - regularities of form and structure - that appear in nature and arise naturally in the mind. Psychic movement is essential to Hermetic psychology. Hermes is the connection-maker. He carried messages to the realm of the dead and world below.
Kybele is associated with Hermes in her myths, through their mutual androgyny (ritualized bodies), spells, and other themes. She possesses formidable magical powers with knowledge of herbs and poisonous plants.
Hermes Kadmilos (the demi-god father of the Kabeiroi (Cabeiri) of Samothrake) and Hekate tend her on the pillars of a throned icon in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin. Juggling and magic are closely related to religious frenzies, worship, and intoxications. James Hillman spoke of 'Hermetic intoxication.'
Hermes is part of the dominant myth of the millennia. Millennial thinking, the Myth of The Future, is another name for the unconscious, the mirror in which we see our own subjectivity. The myth behind Hermes is the psychic value of the hidden or seemingly irrelevant.
As part of the mysteries, secrets could not be revealed, the emperor Julian wrote: "Shall I utter the unutterable? Who is Attis or Gallus? Who then is the Mother of the Gods? She is the source of the intellectual and creative gods, who in their turn guide the visible gods: she is both mother and the spouse of mighty Zeus. ...she is in control of every form of life, and the cause of all generation."
Kybele & Mycology; Entheogenic Theory
The cave is the fundamental metaphor. The womb of the archetypal mother is the psyche or soul, including the animate natural world. It is millions of years of instinctive animal life, the dwelling place of the dead, places of burial, transformer of life cycles, and the renewal of our existential essence. Nature is a mirror of the psyche.
Life itself is psyche. Her realm is imagination. We can go there even though it doesn't exist. When the images change, behavior changes. For Kybele, a uniform character never existed mythically, historically, or otherwise, even in our conceptualizations of her place and space. Her wildness reflects in our bewilderment, transforming between sublime beauty and frightening wilderness.
Preparation of the dead has long been linked with hallucinogenic drinks. She personifies the indeterminate states of the archaic abyss of unconsciousness and her furious potential, at once beautiful and terrifying. Her arc resists being captured in any attempt to unify or define a prevalent direction.
Her origin may be the surviving remnants of a psychedelic cult of the dead with sacred foods and drink, much less the creepy animality and viscous sexual violence reverberating in the liminosity of an otherwordly medium. The scenes take place in an imaginal realm.
This primitive alchemy is a "project of drama at the same cosmic and psychological time." (Jung) It is an approach to knowing & experiencing the powers of our being as symbolic representations of dimensions of human experience that cannot be fitted into our ordinary categories of knowledge.
The unconscious is supra-personal and transcends understanding. It arises from primordial experience, grotesque, demonic, beyond historical and mythological events -- an inspired, "seized" activity.
They came together to unite, dance, consume the potion, and revel in its revelatory effects together. Those who took part realized a powerful sense of connection to friends, family, and the wider world. So, the Mysteries provided a potent antidote to feelings of isolation, depression, grief, trauma, and social disenfranchisement.
"Only at times the pupil's curtain slides up soundlessly - An image enters then, goes through the tensioned stillness of the limbs - and in the heart ceases to be." (Rainer Maria Rilke; Excerpt from the Panther poem)
Gordon Wasson suggested the origins of religion and Greek mythology were in prehistoric mushroom cults. They used hallucinogenic substances to contact the dead and divine, like the prehistoric Minoans of ancient Crete who sacrificed humans to produce sacred foods and oils for use in religious rites.
Zeus and Dionysus were born there, and mushroom cults associated with honey and mead were associated with the goddess and the dead. Mushroom were grown on corpses and their fluids, transforming them into god-plants, a way to commune with the dead, have visions of the spirit world and receive divine revelation. From the Bodies of the Gods: Psychoactive Plants and the Cults of the Dead; Earl Lee
We are speaking about evolving god-images. We have to entertain her symbols and generate association to reveal meaning. Our desire is to save the phenomena of the imaginal human and planetary psyche. In our own mythology, this is to re-animate the memory that each of us carries.
′′ If Dionysus means the undivided, then his consciousness mode brings back to an ancient meaning of this word ′′ to know with ". The English adjective 'conscious' used to allude to a ′′ know together ", to a shared con-know Like a secret among those who are part of it. How we can't proceed alone, so we can't know for ourselves. Our consciousness cannot be divided by the other. The other is made necessary, not only because the soul cannot live without its ′′ other ′′ side, but also because the consciousness itself has an erotic, dionisiac components that tends to participate ". (James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, pp. 303-304)
Liberation from the separate self is a divorce from the alienation and disenchantment of the objective world. It restores the loss of virtually all
of the primal world view. “In the primal world view,” Richard Tarnas suggests (2006, 18), “intelligence and soul … pervade all of nature and the cosmos, and a permeable human self directly participates in that larger matrix of meaning … within which he is fully embedded.”
Approaching myth requires embracing paradox, the lived character of imaginal experience. Entering the paradox calls forth the imaginal realm. Myth is the gravity of imagination.
They are found in every drama, life passage, ritual, passionate undertaking and gesture of love. Myth is elusive, fragmentary, skittish, and otherwordly. They suggest alternative worlds with endless receding depths. They draw us into the past and renew contact with the present. The fluid range of mythology doesn't need to be reduced or fixed to persons, places, or times to instill wisdom and insight.
Her Phrygian rock-cut monuments, jut into the sky and stand for her concealed origins. They call her matar kubileya, meaning "Mother of the Mountain." Such sacred places draw us back into the very earth from which they emerged. For us, she is liminal -- the very nature and self-evident significance of imaginative autonomy, the continuities and discontinuities of imagination and perceiving.
Kybele is the fertility from which we harvest darkness. Imagining, memory, and place are absolutely central to our lived experience at every level -- perceptual, practical, cognitive, aesthetic, emotional, intersubjective. Sensing your environment triggers things -- the source and flow of life, the awakening to the divinity within ourselves.
Her mode of memory is not fictitious, but the imaginative production of a world sensed as a plenum of places; a unique mode of insight. The everyday world of space, time, and mass does not exist at all except as a background for perceptual images.
Where sensory information is separable into distinct realms, dimensions exist; where they merge, dimensions do not exist. Re-membering and reimagining what has been forgotten reconnects our animal nature with the world in which it is embedded.
Remembering is a function of ritual lamentations, which involved movement, sometimes slow and solemn, sometimes wild and ecstatic. There was wailing, and singing -- tearing the hair, face, and clothes -- offerings at the tombs. This allowed direct communication between the relatives and the dead with a refrain of cries, improvisations of the grief of the occasion.
Walter Burkert, in Greek Religion (1985, section III.3,4) says: "The cult of the Great Mother, Meter, presents a complex picture insofar as indigenous, Minoan-Mycenean tradition is here intertwined with a cult taken over directly from the Phrygian kingdom of Asia Minor" (p 177). Roman mythology named her Magna Mater deorum Idaea ("great Idaean mother of the gods"), in recognition of her Phrygian origins.
She remains pregnant with the inexhaustible potentials of life as if none had ever been used up. Kybele (Greek Κυβέλη) occupies a cave or adyton with echoing resonances, in which she gives oracles. Jung teaches that when we awaken to the need to probe the unconscious, the archetype most needed by the psyche will appear. The ancients spontaneously spoke or gesticulated a series of mnemonics that would trigger off imprinted states of consciousness that acted as doorways into deeper seats of consciousness.
The botanical psyche reveals an encoded, vegetal intelligence inherent in plant forms. Such patterns can be thought of as blueprints for the natural world. An alliance with the forest itself and a way of life is grounded in ancestral wisdom traditions and practical knowledge. They represent a pathway between worlds that is often also marked by the form of the serpent.
Plants symbolize this transformative potential and embody it at the core of their being. Siberian shamans still equate the fly agaric with the Axis Mundi.
These same designs relate to an ancient metaphysics found across civilizations and through time – characterized by the connected principles of the micro- and macro-cosmos, sacred and fractal geometries, as well as the psychoactive visions induced by mind-manifesting (entheogenic) plant medicines.
"The word "psychedelic" is uniformly translated as "mind manifesting," however that is a significant and unfortunate misnomer. "Psyche" only means mind in the broadest Eastern philosophical sense and is more accurately translated from the Greek as breath, life, or soul. (The Greek "delos" means visible or clear, from the Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to shine.”) Psychedelics don’t manifest our thinking mind so much as they illuminate our fundamental soul. Psyche + delos: soul manifesting." (Neal Goldsmith)
The plant kingdom is significant to human life, consciousness and spirituality across cultures and through time. We can re-engage with both sacred and secular aspects of plant-thinking and being, finding in the plant kingdom new models for thinking about life, consciousness, and plant intelligence, as well as aesthetic approaches to a more-than-human world.
We can glimpse the boundless mystery, richness, cultural, and spiritual significance of the vegetal kingdom. As centers of intelligence, plant sentience is often dismissed. They invite us to reflect on our own relationship with plants – what they can teach us about ourselves, and how we might share our world with them.
Jung perceived continuities between the forms of physical as well as psychic reality, essential patterns - regularities of form and structure - that appear in nature and arise naturally in the mind. Psychic movement is essential to Hermetic psychology. Hermes is the connection-maker. He carried messages to the realm of the dead and world below.
Kybele is associated with Hermes in her myths, through their mutual androgyny (ritualized bodies), spells, and other themes. She possesses formidable magical powers with knowledge of herbs and poisonous plants.
Hermes Kadmilos (the demi-god father of the Kabeiroi (Cabeiri) of Samothrake) and Hekate tend her on the pillars of a throned icon in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin. Juggling and magic are closely related to religious frenzies, worship, and intoxications. James Hillman spoke of 'Hermetic intoxication.'
Hermes is part of the dominant myth of the millennia. Millennial thinking, the Myth of The Future, is another name for the unconscious, the mirror in which we see our own subjectivity. The myth behind Hermes is the psychic value of the hidden or seemingly irrelevant.
As part of the mysteries, secrets could not be revealed, the emperor Julian wrote: "Shall I utter the unutterable? Who is Attis or Gallus? Who then is the Mother of the Gods? She is the source of the intellectual and creative gods, who in their turn guide the visible gods: she is both mother and the spouse of mighty Zeus. ...she is in control of every form of life, and the cause of all generation."
Dionysus
Kybele's cult in Greece was closely associated with, and apparently resembled, the cult of Dionysus, whom Kybele is said to have initiated, and cured of madness. Both were androgynous, non-conforming, liminal, or marginal figures. The relation between Anatolian and Sumerian religion is very close.
Dionysus is poison. He is the liberator from madness and likewise the cause of madness. Heraclitus said that Dionysus was the god of death, Hades, and excused the obscene phallic songs of the worshipers because of the divine nature of their inspiration.
Dionysus is the pharmakos, the fertility scapegoat who descends into the underworld and brings forth spring. Or Amanita muscaria, red head breaking through the vulva, foreskin stretched, a sanguinary infant at the moment of birth. The mushroom echoed the redheaded trait of the Thracians.
Bisexual plants, which bore their own seed, were regarded as androgynous or parthenogenetic. Both Tammuz and Ishtar were often androgynous; several of the names of Tammuz are feminine. These gods of fertility are practically interchangeable. Vegetational ways spring from the severed members of Attis. The grain stalk is severed below the ear, which is associated with the male member.
This androgynous nature, this ability to beget, this self-existence is inherent in each and every god of the Sumerians. Inanna was the archetypal prototype of gender-blurring: ‘Though I am a woman I am a noble young man’” (pp. 160, 163).. Among her powers was this from a Sumerian poem: “To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna” (p. 160).
Rivkah Harris (2000) states: “Their transvestitism simulated the androgyny of Inanna-Ishtar. It was perhaps the inversion of the male/female binary opposition that thereby neutralized this opposition. By emulating their goddess who was both female and male, they shattered the boundary between the sexes” (pp. 170-171). This was seen as a way of rising above the prison of the flesh.
All Sumerian gods were androgynous or gender fluid, the mythic primordial state. Inanna-Ishtar is considered androgynous queen of Heaven and Earth. In her male role she never becomes fully male, but appears female with male gender characteristics. In Samsu-iluna A 1, she is referred to as “the great knife of masculinity”. In the Neo-Babylonian omen collection, Ištar is feminine as the morning star and masculine as the evening star.
Inanna/Ištar, a goddess who is only endowed with masculine power and attributes (like the beard), is equal with the male gods. She is bipolar in many aspects. She combines and mediates opposites. She is connected with heaven and the netherworld, or erotic sex and castration. Her androgynous nature is merely one of these aspects, symbolizing sublime virgin/maiden, 'male-virgin', or 'virgin man.'
The goddess is the greater principle, free from the bounds of body, society, convention, responsibility or judgment. In Sumerian and Akkadian (Babylonian and Assyrian) mythology, the Gallus (also called gallu demons or gallas (Akkadian: gallû) were great demons/devils of the underworld. They hauled unfortunate victims off to the underworld. Two `galla’, androgynous demons, aid Inanna in returning to the earth. They revive Inanna with the "food and water of life" and she rises from the dead. Enki's Galla (Galaturra or Kurgarra), are sexless beings that may be the origin of the Greco-Roman Galli.
Kybele and Dionysus shared similar processional rites. Maenads climbed sacred mountaintops to gather mushrooms, roots, and seeds, the wild botanical version of Dionysus. The ecstatic state was synchronized by drum rhythm and amplified by physical exertion, high altitude, lack of sleep, lower oxygen, low temperature and sexual abandon.
Mushrooms were fundamental in the celebration of Dionysus. They can be described as males or females both male and female as the mushroom itself is a hermaphrodite and alludes to both male and female genitalia. Both divinities share the issue of liminal genders and deliberate cultivation of ecstatic states.
The soul makes noise. Outside the cave, devotees clash cymbals and beat upon her tympanon, moving the entire universe in an ecstatic dance to the rhythm of her chanting as the ancient rite is performed. Devotees sang to the deities of ecstasy, evoe saboe, and hyes attes, attes hyes in the ritual of Sabazios (Phrygian Dionysos) and the Mother.
The connection of Sabazius with the Phrygian mother of the gods accounts for the fact that he was identified, to a certain extent, with Zeus. Lynn Roller strongly identifies him as an oriental Zeus, sharing iconography with Attis. Lynn Roller, The Anatolian Cult of Sabazios
She cites, "lack of evidence for Sabazios before the fourth century BCE. There is no cult image of any mature male figure, or indeed of any male figure at all, in central or western Anatolia that might be identified as Sabazios. Nor does his name appear in any Paleo-Phrygian text. One might claim that Sabazios did exist in indigenous Anatolian cult practice but that no visible evidence survives of him, but this seems unlikely when one contrasts Sabazios's absence from texts and cult monuments with the abundant testimonia, both written and visual, for the principal Phrygian divinity Matar, the Mother. Indeed, the Phrygian Mother's absolute prominence in Phrygian cult and her lack of a consort are among her most distinguishing features."
Roller notes, "apart from the cap, the general form and costume of the mature bearded male are quite similar to Greek representations of Zeus, further suggesting the connection of Sabazios with Zeus." Sabazios is linked with the Anatolian deities Agdistis (an alternate name for the Phrygian Mother). http://www.stoa.org/texts/2001/01/0008/
One of numerous conflicting and conflated tales says, "Kybele was the mother of the Phrygian god Sabazios--who the Greeks identified with Dionysos. As the Greek god had a different genealogy, the Phrygian myths were adapted to describe Mother Rhea as his nurse and mentor. The Orgiastic Cult (Orgia) of Dionysos-Sabazios was derived from that of Kybele."
Sabazius (Σαβάζιος—but numerous other spellings occur), a god first attested in several slighting allusions in *Aristophanes (1); there are also 4th-cent. references to his unofficial cult in *Attica. Aristophanes treats him as a Phrygian; the bulk of the surviving dedications derive from Anatolia, particularly from Phrygia;
*Attalus III in 135/4 bce claimed to be incorporating ‘Zeus Sabazios’ (cf. zeus) into the state cult of *Pergamum (a rare instance of official recognition for Sabazius) as an ‘ancestral god’ of his mother, Stratonice of *Cappadocia (OGIS331). Later, Sabazius also appears as an ‘ancestral god’ of Thrace. Except in Attica, the cult is little attested until the late Hellenistic period.
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3. 33 (trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) : "He [Dionysos in his madness driven wanderings] went to Kybela (Cybele) in Phrygia. There he was purified by Rhea [Phrygian Kybele] and taught the mystic rites of initiation, after which he received from her his gear and set out eagerly through Thrake (Thrace) [to instruct men in his orgiastic cult]."
Strabo, Geography 10. 3. 13 (trans. Jones) (Greek geographer C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) : "[According to Strabo the Orgies of Dionysos were derived from those of the Meter Theon Kybele (Cybele) :] When Pindaros (Pindar) [Greek poet], in the dithyramb which begins with these words, ‘In earlier times there marched the lay of the dithyrambs long drawn out,’ mentions the hymns sung in honor of Dionysos, both the ancient and the later ones, and then, passing on from these, says, ‘To perform the prelude in thy honor, Megale Meter (Great Mother) [i.e. Kybele (Cybele)], 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,’ he bears witness to the common relationship between the rites exhibited in the worship of Dionysos among the Greeks and those in the worship of the Meter Theon (Mother of the Gods) among the Phrygians, for he makes these rites closely akin to one another.
And Euripides does likewise, in his Bakkhai (Bacchae), citing the Lydian usages at the same time with those of Phrygia, because of their similarity : ‘But ye who left Mount Tmolos (Tmolus), fortress of Lydia, revel-band of mine [Dionysos], women whom I brought from the land of barbarians as my assistants and travelling companions, uplift the tambourines native to Phrygian cities, inventions of mine and mother Rhea [i.e. Kybele].’
And again, ‘happy he who, blest man, initiated in the mystic rites, is pure in his life . . ((lacuna)) who, preserving the righteous Orgia (Orgies) of the great mother Kybele, and brandishing the thyrsos on high, and wreathed with ivy, doth worship Dionysos. Come, ye Bakkhai, come, ye Bakkhai, bringing down Bromios, god the child of god, out of the Phrygian mountains into the broad highways of Greece.’
And again . . . ‘the triple-crested Korybantes in their caverns invented this hide-stretched circlet [the tambourine], and blent its Bacchic revelry with the high-pitched, sweet-sounding breath of Phrygian flutes, and in Rhea's hands placed its resounding noise, to accompany the shouts of the Bakkhai, and from Meter (Mother) Rhea frenzied Satyroi (Satyrs) obtained it and joined it to the choral dances of the Trieterides, in whom Dionysos takes delight.’"
Mad women running on top of the mountains, ingestion of mind-altering concoctions, ecstatic nocturnal dancing to the rhythm of the frame drum, ritual sexuality are ingredients in the early worship of both Dionysus and Kybele. They shared animate and divine plants. There is a Cretan linear b inscription about Dionysus dating to 13th century BCE. The Minoans worshiped a mountain-top dwelling goddess of wild nature with ecstatic rites.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, "To sing means to use the soul-voice. It means to say on the breath the truth of one's power and one's need, to breathe soul over the thing that is ailing or in need of restoration. This is done by descending into the deepest mood of great love and feeling, till one's desire for relationship with the wildish Self overflows, then to speak one's soul from that frame of mind. That is singing over the bones."
Did soma apply to many different plants, as David Frawley suggests? Soma is a name for the moon & in Bhagavad Gita there is mentions that the Moon supplies the 'juice of life' to plants. Cannabis preparations, including ephedra and opium have been discovered. Arguing for an attribution of cannabis to soma/hoama, Chris Bennett cites J. Wohlberg, 1990, in Cannabis and the Soma Solution:
"While Iranian and Indian peoples preserved their original worship in their final settlements, Indo-European tribes, including the Thracians, the Phrygians, and the Greeks, after settling in Europe and Asia Minor, abandoned their ancestral worship of Soma (Sabazios) and substituted the Semitic (alcoholic) Dionysos. However, they retained traces of the original Soma worship in Dionysiac rituals. This modified Dionysiac worship spread throughout the Western world. Evidence of the worship of (nonalcoholic) Haoma-Soma in Iran and India... can be found in Greece and its neighboring lands. (Wohlberg, 1990)
Wohlberg used Six formal criteria to establish the identity of Soma with Dionysos (Sabazios): “(1) both cults had the same aim (to cause ecstatic behavior); (2) both cults required the attainment of the same spiritual state (purity); (3) both cults had an idiosyncratic myth in common; (4) both cults showed the identical word root in the name of the worshiped god; (5) both cults had identical zoological and botanical associations with their god; and (6) the alcoholic god (Dionysos) was depicted as having the same physical effects on human beings as that of the ancient non-alcoholic god (Soma)” (Wohlberg, 1990)." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2286867/
Kybele was the mistress of wild nature, symbolized by her constant companion, the lion. She both cured and caused disease, and even offered immortality to her adherents. Phrygian Cabeirian mysteries echoed other mystic divinities and korybantic daimones including the Cretan Kouretes (Curetes), the Trojan Daktyloi (Dactyls), and the Phrygian Korybantes (Corybantes). Attis was an early dying-and-reviving god figure.
Mushroom God-Plant
Nature holds the power of resurgence and the possibility of healing even the deepest of wounds. Living symbols present multimodal expressions. Psychoactive substances had a strong cultic significance. This mushroom, which contains the powerful hallucinogen muscimol, can cause elevated mood, euphoria, auditory and visual hallucinations, as well as feelings of increased strength and stamina.
The visible Amanita Muscaria life cycle starts with a 'stone' or an egg truffle, grows into a youth, matures into a slouchy hat (Phrygian cap) speckled with remains of the universal veil, and finally into the long beard "mycelium". Is this why Cybele meant 'stone' or 'hair? They can be described as males or females both male and female as the mushroom itself is a hermaphrodite and alludes to both male and female genitalia.
Fresh Amanita Muscaria must be dried before consumption. Anciently it was threaded onto a string and hung up to dry, having no wisdom or knowledge in it when fresh. Maga is one of the oldest names for Amanita Muscaria. Its effects vary, since "it comprises numerous subspecies or geographical races, which differ in their isoxazole composition." (Eliade) Variations occur in different clones accounting for varied responses.
Mircea Eliade said, "the magical and pharmaceutical value of certain herbs... is due to a celestial prototype of the plant, or to the fact that it was first gathered by a god. No plant is precious itself, but only through its participation in an archetype, or through the repetition of certain gestures and words which, by isolating it from profane space, consecrate it" (Eliade 1965).
Plant drugs result from the coevolution of plants and animals. Did a psychedelic substance lead to one of the oldest religions? Kybele's visionary love potion is a metaphor of depth, a descent into human ancestry that heals the abyss of trauma.
More than a metaphor, the dead, these ancestors are present as they live on in images. A change of personal perspective allows rooting in the deep psychic matrix, where thousands of generations have faced the same challenges, connecting life with divine images that inform it with transcendental meaning. Images assert their sovereignty to this day.
“Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers...he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.” (C.G. Jung)
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. The ecosystem provides feedback for human systems. By inviting the natural world more intimately into our lives, we recognize the deep wisdom it holds, and Mystery shows itself.
Hillman says, "Soul-making must be reimagined. We have to go back before Romanticism, back to medieval alchemy and Renaissance Neoplatonism, back to Plato, back to Egypt, and also especially out of Western history to tribal animistic psychologies that are always mainly concerned, not with individualities, but with the soul of things (“environmental concerns,” “deep ecology,” as it’s now called) and propitiatory acts that keep the world on its course." (100 Years of Therapy)
Kybele is mentioned in Pindar, Euripides, Strabo, Herodotus, and Demosthenes. The ancient myths are not dead; they live on in the stories we tell about our own lives. While the old gods do not show up by name, they are there in spirit, in the struggles and triumphs that we depict as the key episodes in our lives.
In telling our life stories, we invent a personal myth, a tale that, like the myths of old, explains the meaning and goals of our lives. In doing so, we unwittingly match the characters and themes of the old myths. Every myth has a creative side and a dark side. A mythos is an interlocking set of beliefs, attitudes, values, and practices...a worldview or vision of reality.
We see what we do not see when we simply "use” nature—merely for personal recreation. Kybele is an embodiment of intrinsic vital connections among all life, a mystical mode of seeing. Its roots -- psychoactive brews, holy gender change, and rituals of intoxication could very well be prehistoric, stretching back to the Upper Paleolithic, or further. Brewing mind-altering potions may be older than bread-making.
We love the world by listening to what it has to say and by acts of participation. Soul is a landscape of mind that contains awareness of the unchanging eternal. The land dreams, too. Our ancestors descended into caves to listen to the whisperings of the Otherworld, a place for entering into the mystery to seek out signs of destiny. Unconscious perception is intuition.
The gods found, ground, establish, and substantiate reality. The return to primordial origins is fundamental to all mythologies. They express a spontaneous regression to the ground that pierces through the world of appearances to 'reality', to immediacy.
Processes below the threshold of sensory awareness are associated with the autonomic nervous system. There is a cycle of meaning and understanding that plays out in symbols, mythology, rituals, and physical experience. Recurrent patterns are embodied in form and functionality.
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. In this way we are "grounding" ourselves.
Kybele's cult in Greece was closely associated with, and apparently resembled, the cult of Dionysus, whom Kybele is said to have initiated, and cured of madness. Both were androgynous, non-conforming, liminal, or marginal figures. The relation between Anatolian and Sumerian religion is very close.
Dionysus is poison. He is the liberator from madness and likewise the cause of madness. Heraclitus said that Dionysus was the god of death, Hades, and excused the obscene phallic songs of the worshipers because of the divine nature of their inspiration.
Dionysus is the pharmakos, the fertility scapegoat who descends into the underworld and brings forth spring. Or Amanita muscaria, red head breaking through the vulva, foreskin stretched, a sanguinary infant at the moment of birth. The mushroom echoed the redheaded trait of the Thracians.
Bisexual plants, which bore their own seed, were regarded as androgynous or parthenogenetic. Both Tammuz and Ishtar were often androgynous; several of the names of Tammuz are feminine. These gods of fertility are practically interchangeable. Vegetational ways spring from the severed members of Attis. The grain stalk is severed below the ear, which is associated with the male member.
This androgynous nature, this ability to beget, this self-existence is inherent in each and every god of the Sumerians. Inanna was the archetypal prototype of gender-blurring: ‘Though I am a woman I am a noble young man’” (pp. 160, 163).. Among her powers was this from a Sumerian poem: “To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna” (p. 160).
Rivkah Harris (2000) states: “Their transvestitism simulated the androgyny of Inanna-Ishtar. It was perhaps the inversion of the male/female binary opposition that thereby neutralized this opposition. By emulating their goddess who was both female and male, they shattered the boundary between the sexes” (pp. 170-171). This was seen as a way of rising above the prison of the flesh.
All Sumerian gods were androgynous or gender fluid, the mythic primordial state. Inanna-Ishtar is considered androgynous queen of Heaven and Earth. In her male role she never becomes fully male, but appears female with male gender characteristics. In Samsu-iluna A 1, she is referred to as “the great knife of masculinity”. In the Neo-Babylonian omen collection, Ištar is feminine as the morning star and masculine as the evening star.
Inanna/Ištar, a goddess who is only endowed with masculine power and attributes (like the beard), is equal with the male gods. She is bipolar in many aspects. She combines and mediates opposites. She is connected with heaven and the netherworld, or erotic sex and castration. Her androgynous nature is merely one of these aspects, symbolizing sublime virgin/maiden, 'male-virgin', or 'virgin man.'
The goddess is the greater principle, free from the bounds of body, society, convention, responsibility or judgment. In Sumerian and Akkadian (Babylonian and Assyrian) mythology, the Gallus (also called gallu demons or gallas (Akkadian: gallû) were great demons/devils of the underworld. They hauled unfortunate victims off to the underworld. Two `galla’, androgynous demons, aid Inanna in returning to the earth. They revive Inanna with the "food and water of life" and she rises from the dead. Enki's Galla (Galaturra or Kurgarra), are sexless beings that may be the origin of the Greco-Roman Galli.
Kybele and Dionysus shared similar processional rites. Maenads climbed sacred mountaintops to gather mushrooms, roots, and seeds, the wild botanical version of Dionysus. The ecstatic state was synchronized by drum rhythm and amplified by physical exertion, high altitude, lack of sleep, lower oxygen, low temperature and sexual abandon.
Mushrooms were fundamental in the celebration of Dionysus. They can be described as males or females both male and female as the mushroom itself is a hermaphrodite and alludes to both male and female genitalia. Both divinities share the issue of liminal genders and deliberate cultivation of ecstatic states.
The soul makes noise. Outside the cave, devotees clash cymbals and beat upon her tympanon, moving the entire universe in an ecstatic dance to the rhythm of her chanting as the ancient rite is performed. Devotees sang to the deities of ecstasy, evoe saboe, and hyes attes, attes hyes in the ritual of Sabazios (Phrygian Dionysos) and the Mother.
The connection of Sabazius with the Phrygian mother of the gods accounts for the fact that he was identified, to a certain extent, with Zeus. Lynn Roller strongly identifies him as an oriental Zeus, sharing iconography with Attis. Lynn Roller, The Anatolian Cult of Sabazios
She cites, "lack of evidence for Sabazios before the fourth century BCE. There is no cult image of any mature male figure, or indeed of any male figure at all, in central or western Anatolia that might be identified as Sabazios. Nor does his name appear in any Paleo-Phrygian text. One might claim that Sabazios did exist in indigenous Anatolian cult practice but that no visible evidence survives of him, but this seems unlikely when one contrasts Sabazios's absence from texts and cult monuments with the abundant testimonia, both written and visual, for the principal Phrygian divinity Matar, the Mother. Indeed, the Phrygian Mother's absolute prominence in Phrygian cult and her lack of a consort are among her most distinguishing features."
Roller notes, "apart from the cap, the general form and costume of the mature bearded male are quite similar to Greek representations of Zeus, further suggesting the connection of Sabazios with Zeus." Sabazios is linked with the Anatolian deities Agdistis (an alternate name for the Phrygian Mother). http://www.stoa.org/texts/2001/01/0008/
One of numerous conflicting and conflated tales says, "Kybele was the mother of the Phrygian god Sabazios--who the Greeks identified with Dionysos. As the Greek god had a different genealogy, the Phrygian myths were adapted to describe Mother Rhea as his nurse and mentor. The Orgiastic Cult (Orgia) of Dionysos-Sabazios was derived from that of Kybele."
Sabazius (Σαβάζιος—but numerous other spellings occur), a god first attested in several slighting allusions in *Aristophanes (1); there are also 4th-cent. references to his unofficial cult in *Attica. Aristophanes treats him as a Phrygian; the bulk of the surviving dedications derive from Anatolia, particularly from Phrygia;
*Attalus III in 135/4 bce claimed to be incorporating ‘Zeus Sabazios’ (cf. zeus) into the state cult of *Pergamum (a rare instance of official recognition for Sabazius) as an ‘ancestral god’ of his mother, Stratonice of *Cappadocia (OGIS331). Later, Sabazius also appears as an ‘ancestral god’ of Thrace. Except in Attica, the cult is little attested until the late Hellenistic period.
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3. 33 (trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) : "He [Dionysos in his madness driven wanderings] went to Kybela (Cybele) in Phrygia. There he was purified by Rhea [Phrygian Kybele] and taught the mystic rites of initiation, after which he received from her his gear and set out eagerly through Thrake (Thrace) [to instruct men in his orgiastic cult]."
Strabo, Geography 10. 3. 13 (trans. Jones) (Greek geographer C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) : "[According to Strabo the Orgies of Dionysos were derived from those of the Meter Theon Kybele (Cybele) :] When Pindaros (Pindar) [Greek poet], in the dithyramb which begins with these words, ‘In earlier times there marched the lay of the dithyrambs long drawn out,’ mentions the hymns sung in honor of Dionysos, both the ancient and the later ones, and then, passing on from these, says, ‘To perform the prelude in thy honor, Megale Meter (Great Mother) [i.e. Kybele (Cybele)], 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,’ he bears witness to the common relationship between the rites exhibited in the worship of Dionysos among the Greeks and those in the worship of the Meter Theon (Mother of the Gods) among the Phrygians, for he makes these rites closely akin to one another.
And Euripides does likewise, in his Bakkhai (Bacchae), citing the Lydian usages at the same time with those of Phrygia, because of their similarity : ‘But ye who left Mount Tmolos (Tmolus), fortress of Lydia, revel-band of mine [Dionysos], women whom I brought from the land of barbarians as my assistants and travelling companions, uplift the tambourines native to Phrygian cities, inventions of mine and mother Rhea [i.e. Kybele].’
And again, ‘happy he who, blest man, initiated in the mystic rites, is pure in his life . . ((lacuna)) who, preserving the righteous Orgia (Orgies) of the great mother Kybele, and brandishing the thyrsos on high, and wreathed with ivy, doth worship Dionysos. Come, ye Bakkhai, come, ye Bakkhai, bringing down Bromios, god the child of god, out of the Phrygian mountains into the broad highways of Greece.’
And again . . . ‘the triple-crested Korybantes in their caverns invented this hide-stretched circlet [the tambourine], and blent its Bacchic revelry with the high-pitched, sweet-sounding breath of Phrygian flutes, and in Rhea's hands placed its resounding noise, to accompany the shouts of the Bakkhai, and from Meter (Mother) Rhea frenzied Satyroi (Satyrs) obtained it and joined it to the choral dances of the Trieterides, in whom Dionysos takes delight.’"
Mad women running on top of the mountains, ingestion of mind-altering concoctions, ecstatic nocturnal dancing to the rhythm of the frame drum, ritual sexuality are ingredients in the early worship of both Dionysus and Kybele. They shared animate and divine plants. There is a Cretan linear b inscription about Dionysus dating to 13th century BCE. The Minoans worshiped a mountain-top dwelling goddess of wild nature with ecstatic rites.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, "To sing means to use the soul-voice. It means to say on the breath the truth of one's power and one's need, to breathe soul over the thing that is ailing or in need of restoration. This is done by descending into the deepest mood of great love and feeling, till one's desire for relationship with the wildish Self overflows, then to speak one's soul from that frame of mind. That is singing over the bones."
Did soma apply to many different plants, as David Frawley suggests? Soma is a name for the moon & in Bhagavad Gita there is mentions that the Moon supplies the 'juice of life' to plants. Cannabis preparations, including ephedra and opium have been discovered. Arguing for an attribution of cannabis to soma/hoama, Chris Bennett cites J. Wohlberg, 1990, in Cannabis and the Soma Solution:
"While Iranian and Indian peoples preserved their original worship in their final settlements, Indo-European tribes, including the Thracians, the Phrygians, and the Greeks, after settling in Europe and Asia Minor, abandoned their ancestral worship of Soma (Sabazios) and substituted the Semitic (alcoholic) Dionysos. However, they retained traces of the original Soma worship in Dionysiac rituals. This modified Dionysiac worship spread throughout the Western world. Evidence of the worship of (nonalcoholic) Haoma-Soma in Iran and India... can be found in Greece and its neighboring lands. (Wohlberg, 1990)
Wohlberg used Six formal criteria to establish the identity of Soma with Dionysos (Sabazios): “(1) both cults had the same aim (to cause ecstatic behavior); (2) both cults required the attainment of the same spiritual state (purity); (3) both cults had an idiosyncratic myth in common; (4) both cults showed the identical word root in the name of the worshiped god; (5) both cults had identical zoological and botanical associations with their god; and (6) the alcoholic god (Dionysos) was depicted as having the same physical effects on human beings as that of the ancient non-alcoholic god (Soma)” (Wohlberg, 1990)." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2286867/
Kybele was the mistress of wild nature, symbolized by her constant companion, the lion. She both cured and caused disease, and even offered immortality to her adherents. Phrygian Cabeirian mysteries echoed other mystic divinities and korybantic daimones including the Cretan Kouretes (Curetes), the Trojan Daktyloi (Dactyls), and the Phrygian Korybantes (Corybantes). Attis was an early dying-and-reviving god figure.
Mushroom God-Plant
Nature holds the power of resurgence and the possibility of healing even the deepest of wounds. Living symbols present multimodal expressions. Psychoactive substances had a strong cultic significance. This mushroom, which contains the powerful hallucinogen muscimol, can cause elevated mood, euphoria, auditory and visual hallucinations, as well as feelings of increased strength and stamina.
The visible Amanita Muscaria life cycle starts with a 'stone' or an egg truffle, grows into a youth, matures into a slouchy hat (Phrygian cap) speckled with remains of the universal veil, and finally into the long beard "mycelium". Is this why Cybele meant 'stone' or 'hair? They can be described as males or females both male and female as the mushroom itself is a hermaphrodite and alludes to both male and female genitalia.
Fresh Amanita Muscaria must be dried before consumption. Anciently it was threaded onto a string and hung up to dry, having no wisdom or knowledge in it when fresh. Maga is one of the oldest names for Amanita Muscaria. Its effects vary, since "it comprises numerous subspecies or geographical races, which differ in their isoxazole composition." (Eliade) Variations occur in different clones accounting for varied responses.
Mircea Eliade said, "the magical and pharmaceutical value of certain herbs... is due to a celestial prototype of the plant, or to the fact that it was first gathered by a god. No plant is precious itself, but only through its participation in an archetype, or through the repetition of certain gestures and words which, by isolating it from profane space, consecrate it" (Eliade 1965).
Plant drugs result from the coevolution of plants and animals. Did a psychedelic substance lead to one of the oldest religions? Kybele's visionary love potion is a metaphor of depth, a descent into human ancestry that heals the abyss of trauma.
More than a metaphor, the dead, these ancestors are present as they live on in images. A change of personal perspective allows rooting in the deep psychic matrix, where thousands of generations have faced the same challenges, connecting life with divine images that inform it with transcendental meaning. Images assert their sovereignty to this day.
“Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers...he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.” (C.G. Jung)
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. The ecosystem provides feedback for human systems. By inviting the natural world more intimately into our lives, we recognize the deep wisdom it holds, and Mystery shows itself.
Hillman says, "Soul-making must be reimagined. We have to go back before Romanticism, back to medieval alchemy and Renaissance Neoplatonism, back to Plato, back to Egypt, and also especially out of Western history to tribal animistic psychologies that are always mainly concerned, not with individualities, but with the soul of things (“environmental concerns,” “deep ecology,” as it’s now called) and propitiatory acts that keep the world on its course." (100 Years of Therapy)
Kybele is mentioned in Pindar, Euripides, Strabo, Herodotus, and Demosthenes. The ancient myths are not dead; they live on in the stories we tell about our own lives. While the old gods do not show up by name, they are there in spirit, in the struggles and triumphs that we depict as the key episodes in our lives.
In telling our life stories, we invent a personal myth, a tale that, like the myths of old, explains the meaning and goals of our lives. In doing so, we unwittingly match the characters and themes of the old myths. Every myth has a creative side and a dark side. A mythos is an interlocking set of beliefs, attitudes, values, and practices...a worldview or vision of reality.
We see what we do not see when we simply "use” nature—merely for personal recreation. Kybele is an embodiment of intrinsic vital connections among all life, a mystical mode of seeing. Its roots -- psychoactive brews, holy gender change, and rituals of intoxication could very well be prehistoric, stretching back to the Upper Paleolithic, or further. Brewing mind-altering potions may be older than bread-making.
We love the world by listening to what it has to say and by acts of participation. Soul is a landscape of mind that contains awareness of the unchanging eternal. The land dreams, too. Our ancestors descended into caves to listen to the whisperings of the Otherworld, a place for entering into the mystery to seek out signs of destiny. Unconscious perception is intuition.
The gods found, ground, establish, and substantiate reality. The return to primordial origins is fundamental to all mythologies. They express a spontaneous regression to the ground that pierces through the world of appearances to 'reality', to immediacy.
Processes below the threshold of sensory awareness are associated with the autonomic nervous system. There is a cycle of meaning and understanding that plays out in symbols, mythology, rituals, and physical experience. Recurrent patterns are embodied in form and functionality.
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. In this way we are "grounding" ourselves.
When we dive down to our own foundations we find the world of our common divine origin. The Kybele cult provided the sacred and transformational framework to explore imagination and transformation -- in a so-called 'madness.' Pain and madness become offerings, strengthening the connection between the devotee and the daemon and nourishing both with that connection.
Ceremony translates the mythological value into an act. The meaning in life is inherent in the archetypal experience of myth. The aesthetic experience and its 'meaning' are identical. The world of the ancestors is a subterranean storehouse of everything that grows and comes to birth. We access the noumenal via archetypal phenomena.
The Greek ex-stasis, means ‘outside of yourself’, outside of the everyday world. The ecstatic trance is a shift in our perception, a way of becoming aware of a reality outside of the world of the ordinary, and the mundane. The trance makes us perceive the non-ordinary continuum of life, which has been known to co-exist with our physical reality throughout time.
We find our way back to that imaginal world in which these archetypal patterns live. We imagine and reimagine the world through the abyss of the transcendent imagination. Grief or ritual mourning expresses our gratitude for being alive, deepening our relationships. Where our feet are planted, right now is our mythic ground.
James Hillman, states that "We can describe the psyche as a polycentric realm of nonverbal, nonspatial images. Myth offers the same kind of world. It too, is polycentric, with innumerable personifications in imaginal space. Just as dream images are not mere words in disguise...so the ancient personifications of myths are not concepts in disguise."
He states further that these "soul events are not parts of any system. They are independent of the tandems in which they are placed, inasmuch as there is an independent primacy of the imaginal that creates its fantasies automatically, ceaselessly, and spontaneously. Myth-making is not compensatory to anything else."
"Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words––in short, what we call transcendence. Without that you don't have a mythology. Any system of thinking, ideologies of one kind or another, that does not open to transcendence cannot be understood or classified mythologically." (Joseph Campbell, "The Hero’s Journey")
Mythical figures are eternal metaphors of the imagination, the dynamics of psychic reality. Jung suggested myth is a revelation of the divine life in humanity, our unconscious grasp of the history of the world, the wild energies of creation, and our sense of embodiment. Mind is not separate from bodily experience, but is naturally more than our conceptual experience, more than metaphor.
For the ancients, the divine did not reside in an unfathomable Paradise of faith but in primordial knowing. Nature was the awesome, all-powerful and the ever-present countenance of divine reality. This is the direct relationship of minds to worlds or environments -- a philosophy of the flesh.
Robert de Ropp suggested, "unlocked the doors of memory, a memory that can be as impersonal as the memory of the race, linking him to the great patterns of living forms, green plants and fungi, invertebrates and vertebrates. Against so expansive a back ground personal memories appeared trivial." (de Ropp 1968).
In Phrygia, Cybele was venerated as Agdistis, with a temple at the great trading city Pessinos, mentioned by the geographer Strabo. We must look for the essence, the experience, behind the narrative, part of which creates a trauma bond between the double-sexed Kybele, Agdistis, and Dionysos.
Dionysos’ role is clarified as the infatuated and reluctant agent of the pantheon’s trans panic. He describes what he refers to as the death of Agdistis, but we might refer to that moment as their traumatic splintering, through which he finds himself infected by his own actions with their uncontrollable blood-borne madness. This madness catapults him into a journey that ends with his own initiation into the cult of Cybele, atonement through self-castration, service as one of Cybele’s transgender priestesses, the Gallae, and his aspect as Thelumorphos, or “Womanly One.” This insight also extends to the ongoing relationship of Dionysos and Agdistis: the trauma and madness, and the dance of fury, pain, desire, and sex that has bound them together through the centuries. https://www.academia.edu/36762984/The_Passion_of_Agdistis_Gender_Transgression_Sexual_Trauma_Time_Travel_and_Ritualized_Madness_in_Greco_Anatolian_Revival_Cultus
But, entheogenic anthropology is sadly lacking. There is evidence for graveyard beer and sacred mushrooms, but it has been largely ignored. It can be argued that they were mixed together. Hallucinogenic spiked beer, mead, and wine with herbs, plants, and toxins were common in ancient times, evidenced in archeobotany journals. Anatolia has long been linked with the origins of viticulture and wine-making.
At the beginning of the Hellenistic period in some Greek centers, Cybele, the great goddess was involved in the process of Hellenization characteristic of the age. She assumed traits typical of mystery cults. In its essence, the Mysteries represent a ritual encounter with death by its worshipers.
These would persist with different forms and methods up until the imperial period. But you can't look to later syncretic Greek or Roman worship for how endemic Anatolian rites were conducted.
Matar's rites may or may not have been a mystery religion, but ingesting Amanitas carried the prospect of actual death and the feelings of a death/rebirth experience. It is well known that the Mysteries continued for almost two thousand years, during which time the Greek world evolved tremendously in both intellectual and religious aspects.
The greatest intellects of the ancient world testified repeatedly to the salvific power of participation in the Mysteries. Why then assume that those secret rites and teachings would not also have adapted to the times, containing allusions to the deepest spiritual insights of which their devotees were capable?
https://www.google.com/books/edition/From_the_Bodies_of_the_Gods/PFwoDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Incense+and+Poison+Ordeals+in+the+Ancient+Orient,+Alan+Godbey&pg=PT195&printsec=frontcover
Ceremony translates the mythological value into an act. The meaning in life is inherent in the archetypal experience of myth. The aesthetic experience and its 'meaning' are identical. The world of the ancestors is a subterranean storehouse of everything that grows and comes to birth. We access the noumenal via archetypal phenomena.
The Greek ex-stasis, means ‘outside of yourself’, outside of the everyday world. The ecstatic trance is a shift in our perception, a way of becoming aware of a reality outside of the world of the ordinary, and the mundane. The trance makes us perceive the non-ordinary continuum of life, which has been known to co-exist with our physical reality throughout time.
We find our way back to that imaginal world in which these archetypal patterns live. We imagine and reimagine the world through the abyss of the transcendent imagination. Grief or ritual mourning expresses our gratitude for being alive, deepening our relationships. Where our feet are planted, right now is our mythic ground.
James Hillman, states that "We can describe the psyche as a polycentric realm of nonverbal, nonspatial images. Myth offers the same kind of world. It too, is polycentric, with innumerable personifications in imaginal space. Just as dream images are not mere words in disguise...so the ancient personifications of myths are not concepts in disguise."
He states further that these "soul events are not parts of any system. They are independent of the tandems in which they are placed, inasmuch as there is an independent primacy of the imaginal that creates its fantasies automatically, ceaselessly, and spontaneously. Myth-making is not compensatory to anything else."
"Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words––in short, what we call transcendence. Without that you don't have a mythology. Any system of thinking, ideologies of one kind or another, that does not open to transcendence cannot be understood or classified mythologically." (Joseph Campbell, "The Hero’s Journey")
Mythical figures are eternal metaphors of the imagination, the dynamics of psychic reality. Jung suggested myth is a revelation of the divine life in humanity, our unconscious grasp of the history of the world, the wild energies of creation, and our sense of embodiment. Mind is not separate from bodily experience, but is naturally more than our conceptual experience, more than metaphor.
For the ancients, the divine did not reside in an unfathomable Paradise of faith but in primordial knowing. Nature was the awesome, all-powerful and the ever-present countenance of divine reality. This is the direct relationship of minds to worlds or environments -- a philosophy of the flesh.
Robert de Ropp suggested, "unlocked the doors of memory, a memory that can be as impersonal as the memory of the race, linking him to the great patterns of living forms, green plants and fungi, invertebrates and vertebrates. Against so expansive a back ground personal memories appeared trivial." (de Ropp 1968).
In Phrygia, Cybele was venerated as Agdistis, with a temple at the great trading city Pessinos, mentioned by the geographer Strabo. We must look for the essence, the experience, behind the narrative, part of which creates a trauma bond between the double-sexed Kybele, Agdistis, and Dionysos.
Dionysos’ role is clarified as the infatuated and reluctant agent of the pantheon’s trans panic. He describes what he refers to as the death of Agdistis, but we might refer to that moment as their traumatic splintering, through which he finds himself infected by his own actions with their uncontrollable blood-borne madness. This madness catapults him into a journey that ends with his own initiation into the cult of Cybele, atonement through self-castration, service as one of Cybele’s transgender priestesses, the Gallae, and his aspect as Thelumorphos, or “Womanly One.” This insight also extends to the ongoing relationship of Dionysos and Agdistis: the trauma and madness, and the dance of fury, pain, desire, and sex that has bound them together through the centuries. https://www.academia.edu/36762984/The_Passion_of_Agdistis_Gender_Transgression_Sexual_Trauma_Time_Travel_and_Ritualized_Madness_in_Greco_Anatolian_Revival_Cultus
But, entheogenic anthropology is sadly lacking. There is evidence for graveyard beer and sacred mushrooms, but it has been largely ignored. It can be argued that they were mixed together. Hallucinogenic spiked beer, mead, and wine with herbs, plants, and toxins were common in ancient times, evidenced in archeobotany journals. Anatolia has long been linked with the origins of viticulture and wine-making.
At the beginning of the Hellenistic period in some Greek centers, Cybele, the great goddess was involved in the process of Hellenization characteristic of the age. She assumed traits typical of mystery cults. In its essence, the Mysteries represent a ritual encounter with death by its worshipers.
These would persist with different forms and methods up until the imperial period. But you can't look to later syncretic Greek or Roman worship for how endemic Anatolian rites were conducted.
Matar's rites may or may not have been a mystery religion, but ingesting Amanitas carried the prospect of actual death and the feelings of a death/rebirth experience. It is well known that the Mysteries continued for almost two thousand years, during which time the Greek world evolved tremendously in both intellectual and religious aspects.
The greatest intellects of the ancient world testified repeatedly to the salvific power of participation in the Mysteries. Why then assume that those secret rites and teachings would not also have adapted to the times, containing allusions to the deepest spiritual insights of which their devotees were capable?
https://www.google.com/books/edition/From_the_Bodies_of_the_Gods/PFwoDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Incense+and+Poison+Ordeals+in+the+Ancient+Orient,+Alan+Godbey&pg=PT195&printsec=frontcover
The Mother Tongue
More than 75 percent of the DNA retrieved from nineteen ancient Minoan and Mycenaean specimens belonged to “the first Neolithic farmers” from Anatolia, who apparently began seeding Greece in the seventh millennium BC—four thousand years earlier than the traditional dating of the Minoans.
The journal Science reported that “we found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin.” Both the timing and the root of the tree of Indo-European languages “fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8,000 to 9,500 years ago.” https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/science/indo-european-languages-originated-in-anatolia-analysis-suggests.html
The data matches Renfrew’s Anatolian Hypothesis. Renfrew's revised views place only Pre-Proto-Indo-European in 7th millennium BC Anatolia. Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis suggested that modern Indo-European languages originated in Anatolia in Neolithic times, and linked their arrival in Europe with the spread of farming. The alternative view was that Indo-European languages originated around 3,000 years later in the Steppes of Russia (the Kurgan hypothesis).
Psychedelic Religious Rites
The provincial goddess spread throughout the Mediterranean as the mother deity. If the Proto-Indo-European homeland was Anatolia, then whatever experimental sacraments or "graveyard brews" came from there could be related to both the Greek kukeon and the Indian soma. But, here we aren't trying to solve the Soma-Hoama riddle.
"By its nature, an ‘entheogen’ is surrounded by taboos, because it gives access to the deity, and the tremendous power it transmutes must be controlled.” (Luck, 1985/2006)
We suggest a psychedelic brew or brews were used in the archaic Anatolian orgiastic Kybele cult -- specifically, psychoactive mushroom infused wine or mead, since she is strongly associated with bees. An entheogen was in use, even if we don't know exactly what created that frenzied enthusiasmos.
Psychoactive plants consumed in rituals or brews might include opium, cannabis, magic mushrooms, ephedra, wormwood, phalaris, ergot, henbane, scopalamines, datura, mandrake, blue lotus, ivy, Syrian rue, mad honey, and blue honey. Nothing prevented mixing or substituting them.
"While there is no question that “in wine, Dionysus found his greatest blessing” and the commonly held association with this substance is accurate, there is ample suggestive evidence that “ancient wine . . . did not contain alcohol as its sole inebriant but was ordinarily a variable infusion of herbal toxins in a vinous liquid”.
Ruck; Harner; Ott; and Wasson emphasized the experience and behaviors associated with the consumption of hallucinogens, which function to alter experience, the perception of reality, time, space, and consciousness itself, as opposed to psychotropic substances, which “act normally only to calm or stimulate” (Schultes). A re-view of such observations in the context of ancient Mediterranean texts further suggests that in some cases, an intoxication other than alcohol inebriation may be indicated" (Ott).
(PDF) Intoxication on the Wine Dark Sea:: Investigating Psychoactive Substances in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Sayin claims. "there is a massive amount of evidence to prove that many psychoactive plants were consumed during the ancient religious rituals, pagan rites, shamanic ceremonies and healing sacramental ceremonies in many cults, religions or believer groups, all over the world, throughout hundreds of centuries, since 5000-10 000 B.C."
"Mystical illusions and delusions may occur frequently; religious figures, shapes, symbols and images are usually seen (Sayin, 2012a). The self may perceive that there is another reality. Paranoid thinking is not uncommon."
"We may derive the conclusion that the ancient pagan cultures, which created the old myths and the old religions, consumed psychoactive plants during sacred and religious rituals, even before the invention of the alphabet, and therefore most of the religious abstract figures, such as ghosts, angels, nymphs, spirits, demons, monsters, mythical creatures, supra-natural creatures, gods and goddesses etc. could have been perceived or envisioned during the H-ASCs, induced by psychoactive plants." (Sayin) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269526783_The_Consumption_of_Psychoactive_Plants_in_Ancient_Global_and_Anatolian_Cultures_During_Religious_Rituals_The_Roots_of_the_Eruption_of_Mythological_Figures_and_Common_Symbols_in_Religions_and_Myths
Greek and Hellenic cultures psychoactive plant use was a serious part of Dionysian and other religious rituals (Sayin). There is hidden symbolic meaning in the Amanita muscaria associated with the cult, and an early connection with Dionysus.
"the practice of these plants were: spiritual healing; to contact with spirits; to contact with the souls of ancestors; to reach enlightenment (Nirvana or Satori); to become a master shaman, pagan or witch; to reach so-called-other realities, etc. Such “psychedelic-philosophical plant rituals” changed participating persons’ psychology, philosophy and personality to a great degree. In these two successive articles, the consumption of psychedelic plants during religious rituals is reviewed and it is hypothesized that the images, figures, illusions and hallucinations experienced during these “plant trips” had a great impact on the formation and creation of many figures, characters, creatures, archetype images that exist not only in the mythology, but also in many religions, as well, such as angels, demons, Satan, mythological creatures, gods, goddesses etc. In the Middle East and Anatolia, within many hermetic and pagan religions, Greek and Hellenic cultures psychoactive plant use was a serious part of the religious rituals, such as Dionysian rituals or Witch’s’ Sabbaths. Although the impact of the “psychedelic experience and imagination” was enormous to the configuration of many religious and mythological characters, and archetypes, this fact has been underestimated and even unnoticed by many historians and anthropologists...What those chemicals did in the brain was actually induce the consciousness to recognize the inner self, to unravel the subconscious and the collective unconscious, to open some of the doors of perception, to disentangle entoptic images and perhaps explicate some unknown functions of the brain and the human psyche which may have many other means to contact other –hypothetical-- realities."
(PDF) Psychoactive Plants Consumed in Religious Rituals: Common Archetypal Symbols & Figures in Myths & Religions Psychoactive Plants Consumed In Religious Rituals: Common Archetypal Symbols & Figures in Myths & Religions. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330779013_Psychoactive_Plants_Consumed_in_Religious_Rituals_Common_Archetypal_Symbols_Figures_in_Myths_Religions_Psychoactive_Plants_Consumed_In_Religious_Rituals_Common_Archetypal_Symbols_Figures_in_Myths_Reli [accessed Oct 10 2020].
Implausible as it seems, the Anatolian graveyard beer, with psychoactive additions, just might be the secret inspiration behind European civilization, use of psychedelic drugs to connect with the realm of the spiritual (Muraresku). Beer vats were found at Gobekli Tepe. DNA analysis suggests that Stone Age farmers first domesticated the wine grape in Anatolia as a 'diversity center', between 5,000 and 8,500 BC (Vouillamoz).
Here we must look for the oldest religion and the cult practices of the oldest goddess with no name, who came to be called Meter (from the root mehter, womb, the first creative substance), then Kybele by the first millennium BC. Her enduring and defining sacred symbols came from the Anatolian landscape, her home ground: the mountains, the water, and the predators that roamed the mountains.
The Mother of the Cybileian mountains in Phrygia. Cybele (Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya “Kubeleyan Mother”, perhaps “Mountain Mother”) was the Phrygian deification of the Earth Mother. As with Greek Gaia (the “Earth”), or her Minoan equivalent Rhea, Cybele embodies the fertile Earth, a goddess of caverns and mountains, walls and fortresses, nature, wild animals (especially lions and bees).
Phrygian Cybele is often identified with the Hittite-Hurrian goddess Hebat, though this latter deity might have been the origin of only Anatolian Kubaba.Cybele was a powerful goddess, who existed long before the “birth” of Zeus, and she would have been worshiped in that area from antiquity, so this new legend may contain elements of much older myths that have been lost — such as the trees that turned into sea nymphs.
Followers of Cybele, the Phrygian Corybantes, expressed her ecstatic and orgiastic cult in music, especially drumming, clashing of shields and spears, dancing, singing, and shouting—all at night. Did her rites provide ritual mourning and katharsis for healing a line of ancestors, a source of healing for living and recently dead descendants?
“Together come and follow to the Phrygian home of Cybele, to the Phrygian forests of the goddess, where the clash of cymbals ring, where tambourines resound, where the Phrygian flute-player blows deeply on his curved reed, where ivy-crowned maenads toss their heads wildly.” (Catullus).
The great madness is involuntary and destructive; it overwhelms its victims, irreversibly diminishing or removing their ability to function in the world. It can manifest as severe episodes of mental illness, suicidality, emotional breakdown, and other types of significant psychic suffering. Ritual katharsis warded off the great madness with a lesser, entheogenic madness, or freedom from the need to remain sane.
The small madness can be understood as certain types of katharsis, frenzy, or voluntary surrender. It can be accessed through a variety of conduits, including entheogens, dance, sex, pain, and channeling. When directed devotionally through a relationship with Agdistis, through these conduits, and through the couplet, the small madness acts as a pressure valve, inoculating practitioners against the great madness.
The practice of the small madness falls primarily under the domains of Cybele and Dionysos. Each deity had mystery cults involving ecstatic dancing, booming drums and crashing cymbals, frenzied bloodletting, orgies, gender transgression, and other ecstatic and socially deviant practices. Dionysos' maenad followers were recruited from respectable village women, who, under his influences, defied the rules of acceptable feminine behavior. They would tear through the woods, dancing and singing, hunting wild animals as prey.
The cult of Dionysos took its lead from the cult of Cybele, where his own youthful madness after his interaction with Agdistis was healed. The transgender priestesses of the cult of Cybele in Anatolia and Greece, the Gallae, used the small madness extensively in their practice. Many of the practices of the Gallae were lost as Mysteries, and what remains was mostly recorded by Roman scholars outraged by their public deviance and gender non-conformity. During the festivals and rituals associated with the cult, the priestesses would drum and dance ecstatically, rub their hair in the dirt, whip themselves into a frenzy, and, as part of their initiations, mutilate their genitals and paint the streets with their makeup and blood. Agdistis, bridging these two mystery cults and holding within them the madness of both, holds a unique ability to guide their followers in walking the delicate line between the great madness and the small.
The list of places in Phrygia that show evidence of devotion to the Mother of the Gods basically covers the map. In Phrygia the Mother of the Gods was also called Agdistis, her Phrygian name. She was a deity of awesome power in the role of a guardian goddess dominating the lives of her subjects as well as the landscape.
A number of cities ruled by Anatolian enforcer deities were temple states, including Pessinus, the major cult center of the Mother of the Gods. The worship of Cybele spread from inland areas of Anatolia to the Aegean coast, to Crete and other Aegean islands, and to mainland Greece. In 203 BCE, Rome adopted her cult as well. She also figures in Rome’s developing self-identification with “Phrygian-Trojan” origins, a theme that imperial propaganda continued to promote from the Augustan era on.
"Thus the Phrygians, earliest of races, call me Pessinuntia, Mother of the Gods; thus the Athenians, sprung from their own soil, call me Cecropeian Minerva; and the sea-tossed Cyprians call me Paphian Venus, the archer Cretans Diana Dictynna, and the trilingual Sicilians Ortygian Proserpine; to the Eleusinians I am Ceres, the ancient goddesses, to others Iuno, to others Bellona and Hecate and Rhamnusia. But the Ethiopians … together with the Africans and the Egyptians who excel through having the original doctrine, honor me with my distinctive rites and give me my true name of Queen Isis." (Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11, 1–5)
https://ionamiller2017.weebly.com/philosophers-stone.html
https://ionamiller2017.weebly.com/diamond-body.html
More than 75 percent of the DNA retrieved from nineteen ancient Minoan and Mycenaean specimens belonged to “the first Neolithic farmers” from Anatolia, who apparently began seeding Greece in the seventh millennium BC—four thousand years earlier than the traditional dating of the Minoans.
The journal Science reported that “we found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin.” Both the timing and the root of the tree of Indo-European languages “fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8,000 to 9,500 years ago.” https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/science/indo-european-languages-originated-in-anatolia-analysis-suggests.html
The data matches Renfrew’s Anatolian Hypothesis. Renfrew's revised views place only Pre-Proto-Indo-European in 7th millennium BC Anatolia. Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis suggested that modern Indo-European languages originated in Anatolia in Neolithic times, and linked their arrival in Europe with the spread of farming. The alternative view was that Indo-European languages originated around 3,000 years later in the Steppes of Russia (the Kurgan hypothesis).
Psychedelic Religious Rites
The provincial goddess spread throughout the Mediterranean as the mother deity. If the Proto-Indo-European homeland was Anatolia, then whatever experimental sacraments or "graveyard brews" came from there could be related to both the Greek kukeon and the Indian soma. But, here we aren't trying to solve the Soma-Hoama riddle.
"By its nature, an ‘entheogen’ is surrounded by taboos, because it gives access to the deity, and the tremendous power it transmutes must be controlled.” (Luck, 1985/2006)
We suggest a psychedelic brew or brews were used in the archaic Anatolian orgiastic Kybele cult -- specifically, psychoactive mushroom infused wine or mead, since she is strongly associated with bees. An entheogen was in use, even if we don't know exactly what created that frenzied enthusiasmos.
Psychoactive plants consumed in rituals or brews might include opium, cannabis, magic mushrooms, ephedra, wormwood, phalaris, ergot, henbane, scopalamines, datura, mandrake, blue lotus, ivy, Syrian rue, mad honey, and blue honey. Nothing prevented mixing or substituting them.
"While there is no question that “in wine, Dionysus found his greatest blessing” and the commonly held association with this substance is accurate, there is ample suggestive evidence that “ancient wine . . . did not contain alcohol as its sole inebriant but was ordinarily a variable infusion of herbal toxins in a vinous liquid”.
Ruck; Harner; Ott; and Wasson emphasized the experience and behaviors associated with the consumption of hallucinogens, which function to alter experience, the perception of reality, time, space, and consciousness itself, as opposed to psychotropic substances, which “act normally only to calm or stimulate” (Schultes). A re-view of such observations in the context of ancient Mediterranean texts further suggests that in some cases, an intoxication other than alcohol inebriation may be indicated" (Ott).
(PDF) Intoxication on the Wine Dark Sea:: Investigating Psychoactive Substances in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Sayin claims. "there is a massive amount of evidence to prove that many psychoactive plants were consumed during the ancient religious rituals, pagan rites, shamanic ceremonies and healing sacramental ceremonies in many cults, religions or believer groups, all over the world, throughout hundreds of centuries, since 5000-10 000 B.C."
"Mystical illusions and delusions may occur frequently; religious figures, shapes, symbols and images are usually seen (Sayin, 2012a). The self may perceive that there is another reality. Paranoid thinking is not uncommon."
"We may derive the conclusion that the ancient pagan cultures, which created the old myths and the old religions, consumed psychoactive plants during sacred and religious rituals, even before the invention of the alphabet, and therefore most of the religious abstract figures, such as ghosts, angels, nymphs, spirits, demons, monsters, mythical creatures, supra-natural creatures, gods and goddesses etc. could have been perceived or envisioned during the H-ASCs, induced by psychoactive plants." (Sayin) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269526783_The_Consumption_of_Psychoactive_Plants_in_Ancient_Global_and_Anatolian_Cultures_During_Religious_Rituals_The_Roots_of_the_Eruption_of_Mythological_Figures_and_Common_Symbols_in_Religions_and_Myths
Greek and Hellenic cultures psychoactive plant use was a serious part of Dionysian and other religious rituals (Sayin). There is hidden symbolic meaning in the Amanita muscaria associated with the cult, and an early connection with Dionysus.
"the practice of these plants were: spiritual healing; to contact with spirits; to contact with the souls of ancestors; to reach enlightenment (Nirvana or Satori); to become a master shaman, pagan or witch; to reach so-called-other realities, etc. Such “psychedelic-philosophical plant rituals” changed participating persons’ psychology, philosophy and personality to a great degree. In these two successive articles, the consumption of psychedelic plants during religious rituals is reviewed and it is hypothesized that the images, figures, illusions and hallucinations experienced during these “plant trips” had a great impact on the formation and creation of many figures, characters, creatures, archetype images that exist not only in the mythology, but also in many religions, as well, such as angels, demons, Satan, mythological creatures, gods, goddesses etc. In the Middle East and Anatolia, within many hermetic and pagan religions, Greek and Hellenic cultures psychoactive plant use was a serious part of the religious rituals, such as Dionysian rituals or Witch’s’ Sabbaths. Although the impact of the “psychedelic experience and imagination” was enormous to the configuration of many religious and mythological characters, and archetypes, this fact has been underestimated and even unnoticed by many historians and anthropologists...What those chemicals did in the brain was actually induce the consciousness to recognize the inner self, to unravel the subconscious and the collective unconscious, to open some of the doors of perception, to disentangle entoptic images and perhaps explicate some unknown functions of the brain and the human psyche which may have many other means to contact other –hypothetical-- realities."
(PDF) Psychoactive Plants Consumed in Religious Rituals: Common Archetypal Symbols & Figures in Myths & Religions Psychoactive Plants Consumed In Religious Rituals: Common Archetypal Symbols & Figures in Myths & Religions. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330779013_Psychoactive_Plants_Consumed_in_Religious_Rituals_Common_Archetypal_Symbols_Figures_in_Myths_Religions_Psychoactive_Plants_Consumed_In_Religious_Rituals_Common_Archetypal_Symbols_Figures_in_Myths_Reli [accessed Oct 10 2020].
Implausible as it seems, the Anatolian graveyard beer, with psychoactive additions, just might be the secret inspiration behind European civilization, use of psychedelic drugs to connect with the realm of the spiritual (Muraresku). Beer vats were found at Gobekli Tepe. DNA analysis suggests that Stone Age farmers first domesticated the wine grape in Anatolia as a 'diversity center', between 5,000 and 8,500 BC (Vouillamoz).
Here we must look for the oldest religion and the cult practices of the oldest goddess with no name, who came to be called Meter (from the root mehter, womb, the first creative substance), then Kybele by the first millennium BC. Her enduring and defining sacred symbols came from the Anatolian landscape, her home ground: the mountains, the water, and the predators that roamed the mountains.
The Mother of the Cybileian mountains in Phrygia. Cybele (Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya “Kubeleyan Mother”, perhaps “Mountain Mother”) was the Phrygian deification of the Earth Mother. As with Greek Gaia (the “Earth”), or her Minoan equivalent Rhea, Cybele embodies the fertile Earth, a goddess of caverns and mountains, walls and fortresses, nature, wild animals (especially lions and bees).
Phrygian Cybele is often identified with the Hittite-Hurrian goddess Hebat, though this latter deity might have been the origin of only Anatolian Kubaba.Cybele was a powerful goddess, who existed long before the “birth” of Zeus, and she would have been worshiped in that area from antiquity, so this new legend may contain elements of much older myths that have been lost — such as the trees that turned into sea nymphs.
Followers of Cybele, the Phrygian Corybantes, expressed her ecstatic and orgiastic cult in music, especially drumming, clashing of shields and spears, dancing, singing, and shouting—all at night. Did her rites provide ritual mourning and katharsis for healing a line of ancestors, a source of healing for living and recently dead descendants?
“Together come and follow to the Phrygian home of Cybele, to the Phrygian forests of the goddess, where the clash of cymbals ring, where tambourines resound, where the Phrygian flute-player blows deeply on his curved reed, where ivy-crowned maenads toss their heads wildly.” (Catullus).
The great madness is involuntary and destructive; it overwhelms its victims, irreversibly diminishing or removing their ability to function in the world. It can manifest as severe episodes of mental illness, suicidality, emotional breakdown, and other types of significant psychic suffering. Ritual katharsis warded off the great madness with a lesser, entheogenic madness, or freedom from the need to remain sane.
The small madness can be understood as certain types of katharsis, frenzy, or voluntary surrender. It can be accessed through a variety of conduits, including entheogens, dance, sex, pain, and channeling. When directed devotionally through a relationship with Agdistis, through these conduits, and through the couplet, the small madness acts as a pressure valve, inoculating practitioners against the great madness.
The practice of the small madness falls primarily under the domains of Cybele and Dionysos. Each deity had mystery cults involving ecstatic dancing, booming drums and crashing cymbals, frenzied bloodletting, orgies, gender transgression, and other ecstatic and socially deviant practices. Dionysos' maenad followers were recruited from respectable village women, who, under his influences, defied the rules of acceptable feminine behavior. They would tear through the woods, dancing and singing, hunting wild animals as prey.
The cult of Dionysos took its lead from the cult of Cybele, where his own youthful madness after his interaction with Agdistis was healed. The transgender priestesses of the cult of Cybele in Anatolia and Greece, the Gallae, used the small madness extensively in their practice. Many of the practices of the Gallae were lost as Mysteries, and what remains was mostly recorded by Roman scholars outraged by their public deviance and gender non-conformity. During the festivals and rituals associated with the cult, the priestesses would drum and dance ecstatically, rub their hair in the dirt, whip themselves into a frenzy, and, as part of their initiations, mutilate their genitals and paint the streets with their makeup and blood. Agdistis, bridging these two mystery cults and holding within them the madness of both, holds a unique ability to guide their followers in walking the delicate line between the great madness and the small.
The list of places in Phrygia that show evidence of devotion to the Mother of the Gods basically covers the map. In Phrygia the Mother of the Gods was also called Agdistis, her Phrygian name. She was a deity of awesome power in the role of a guardian goddess dominating the lives of her subjects as well as the landscape.
A number of cities ruled by Anatolian enforcer deities were temple states, including Pessinus, the major cult center of the Mother of the Gods. The worship of Cybele spread from inland areas of Anatolia to the Aegean coast, to Crete and other Aegean islands, and to mainland Greece. In 203 BCE, Rome adopted her cult as well. She also figures in Rome’s developing self-identification with “Phrygian-Trojan” origins, a theme that imperial propaganda continued to promote from the Augustan era on.
"Thus the Phrygians, earliest of races, call me Pessinuntia, Mother of the Gods; thus the Athenians, sprung from their own soil, call me Cecropeian Minerva; and the sea-tossed Cyprians call me Paphian Venus, the archer Cretans Diana Dictynna, and the trilingual Sicilians Ortygian Proserpine; to the Eleusinians I am Ceres, the ancient goddesses, to others Iuno, to others Bellona and Hecate and Rhamnusia. But the Ethiopians … together with the Africans and the Egyptians who excel through having the original doctrine, honor me with my distinctive rites and give me my true name of Queen Isis." (Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11, 1–5)
https://ionamiller2017.weebly.com/philosophers-stone.html
https://ionamiller2017.weebly.com/diamond-body.html
Kybele's rock-cut shrines are common in the region of Gordion, Ankara,
and Boğazköy, and also further west in the Phrygian highlands.
and Boğazköy, and also further west in the Phrygian highlands.
"And shall I write about things not to be spoken of and divulge what ought
not to be divulged? Shall I utter the unutterable?"
"...Goddesses [of music] come down from heaven and sing with me a hymn to the Mother of the Gods: how she came wandering over the hills and vales, trailing her hair in the dirt, distraught in her senses. Zeus the king observed her -- the Mother of the Gods -- aimed his thunderbolt and made to take her drums, he split rocks in two and -- made to take her drums. "Mother, be off to the gods! Don't wander over the hills in case green-eyed lions and grey wolves catch you...Hail Great Queen, Mother of All Olympus." --Epidaurus
O Mother of gods and men, thou that art the assessor of Zeus and sharest his throne, O source of the intellectual gods, that pursuest thy course with the stainless substance of the intelligible gods; that dost receive from them all the common cause of things and dost thyself bestow it on the intellectual gods; [180] O life-giving goddess that art the counsel and the providence and the creator of our souls; O thou that lovest great Dionysus, and didst save Attis when exposed at birth, and didst lead him back when he had descended into the cave of the nymph; O thou that givest all good things to the intellectual gods and fillest with all things this sensible world, and with all the rest givest us all things good! Do thou grant to all men happiness, and that highest happiness of all, the knowledge of the gods...And for myself, grant me as fruit of my worship of thee that I may have true knowledge in the doctrines about the gods. Make me perfect in theurgy. And in all that I undertake, in the affairs of the state and the army, grant me virtue and good fortune, and that the close of my life may be painless and glorious, in the good hope that it is to you, the gods, that I journey!
not to be divulged? Shall I utter the unutterable?"
"...Goddesses [of music] come down from heaven and sing with me a hymn to the Mother of the Gods: how she came wandering over the hills and vales, trailing her hair in the dirt, distraught in her senses. Zeus the king observed her -- the Mother of the Gods -- aimed his thunderbolt and made to take her drums, he split rocks in two and -- made to take her drums. "Mother, be off to the gods! Don't wander over the hills in case green-eyed lions and grey wolves catch you...Hail Great Queen, Mother of All Olympus." --Epidaurus
O Mother of gods and men, thou that art the assessor of Zeus and sharest his throne, O source of the intellectual gods, that pursuest thy course with the stainless substance of the intelligible gods; that dost receive from them all the common cause of things and dost thyself bestow it on the intellectual gods; [180] O life-giving goddess that art the counsel and the providence and the creator of our souls; O thou that lovest great Dionysus, and didst save Attis when exposed at birth, and didst lead him back when he had descended into the cave of the nymph; O thou that givest all good things to the intellectual gods and fillest with all things this sensible world, and with all the rest givest us all things good! Do thou grant to all men happiness, and that highest happiness of all, the knowledge of the gods...And for myself, grant me as fruit of my worship of thee that I may have true knowledge in the doctrines about the gods. Make me perfect in theurgy. And in all that I undertake, in the affairs of the state and the army, grant me virtue and good fortune, and that the close of my life may be painless and glorious, in the good hope that it is to you, the gods, that I journey!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDNtvDim0eM&feature=emb_title
DIVINE DARKNESS
Kybele, (Meter Oreia, Meter Theon, Mater Deum Magna Idaea, Mother of the Gods, Great Mother, Cybele) originated in Phrygian Anatolia, where her name was simply Matar (Mother).
"Because we have separated humanity from nature, subject from object, values from analysis, knowledge from myth, and universities from the universe, it is enormously difficult for anyone but a poet or a mystic to understand what is going on in the holistic and mythopoeic thought of Ice Age humanity. The very language we use to discuss the past speaks of tools, hunters, and men, when every statue and painting we discover cries out to us that this Ice Age humanity was a culture of art, the love of animals, and women." --William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture
DIVINE DARKNESS
Kybele, (Meter Oreia, Meter Theon, Mater Deum Magna Idaea, Mother of the Gods, Great Mother, Cybele) originated in Phrygian Anatolia, where her name was simply Matar (Mother).
"Because we have separated humanity from nature, subject from object, values from analysis, knowledge from myth, and universities from the universe, it is enormously difficult for anyone but a poet or a mystic to understand what is going on in the holistic and mythopoeic thought of Ice Age humanity. The very language we use to discuss the past speaks of tools, hunters, and men, when every statue and painting we discover cries out to us that this Ice Age humanity was a culture of art, the love of animals, and women." --William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture
THE CALL OF THE WILD
Kybele as Mythological Presence & Mythic Imagination
"Blessed is he who, being fortunate and knowing the rites of the gods, keeps his life pure and has his soul initiated into the Bacchic revels, dancing in inspired frenzy over the mountains with holy purifications, and who, revering the mysteries of great mother Kybele, brandishing the thyrsos, garlanded with ivy, serves Dionysus." --Euripides, Bacchae 72-82 (tr. T.A. Buckley):
Revitalization through Disorder
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. In this way we are "grounding" ourselves. 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. The world of the ancestors is a subterranean storehouse of everything that grows and comes to birth.
The worship of Kybele-Attis and the Asiatic Sabazios-Dionysos in Thrace, Phrygia, and Greece shows remnants of the original Indo-European cult of Haoma-Soma (god and sacred beverage). Some Buddhist adepts from the 2nd- and 9th- centuries consumed psychedelic Amanita muscaria mushrooms to achieve illumination.
A psychologically rich life invokes and engages heightened situations, psychic needs, complex mental engagement, an expanded range of intense, deep emotions, with diverse, novel, enriching experiences. Animated reality, a union of psyche and matter, spans from living beings down to lively matter. The deepest levels of psyche merge with the body and physical stuff of reality.
This way of the soul is labyrinthine. The primal patterns repeat endlessly, but vary aesthetically from one occasion or atmosphere to another through continual mutual transformation. The shadow of the senex is the puer, related to Kybele's companions, Hermes or Dionysus—unbounded instinct, disorder, intoxication, whimsy.
Kybele's rites were about renewal, the adaptation to the deep self, to the unconscious world, and the organic and inorganic natural world. Visionary plants and imaginal animals were among the first trance-induced images. Neolithics lived much closer to animals than we do and had reason to fear and totemize some of them, as they had done long before at Gobekli Tepe.
Animals play a great part in myths and fall into three categories: (1) the transformation of human into animal or vice versa, (2) the totemization of a feared animal, and (3) the animal-twin of individuals. Interconnected, they all represent attempts to extract the numinous quality from the animal and incorporate it into the individual (in character) or in society (in totem).
Mushrooms were among the first and may be the last lifeforms. As emissaries from the underworld and creatures of the in-between, mushrooms defy the binaries by which we organize the universe.
The phallic-mother is an image of a woman (or mother) endowed with a phallus or a phallic attribute. She has a phallic child, which raises itself toward the light. In technological symbolism, the child and the phallus are really one.
Neither plants nor animals, the fungi and animal kingdoms shared a common ancestor somewhere between 650 million and 1.5 billion years. They were one of the first sacred relics and technologies that symbiotically inspired civilization in the Ice Age, visible in cave art. Red, the color of blood and the scarlet mushroom is represented by ocher indicating the numinous.
Gordon Wasson identified this ritual intoxicant as the scarlet-capped, whitespotted fly agaric. The ancients thought the mushrooms were engendered by lightning, as witnessed by their electrifying effects when ingested. The alchemical elixir allowed realization to arise. Hillman (2005) says, every archetypal image has its own excess and intensity.
Like the amanita mushrooms, Kybele has a radically creative and destructive aspect. Dionysus, is deeply rooted in the life-cycle, cultivation, treatment, and consumption of a tree-born hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria. Mystery religions bloomed where the psychedelic mushrooms grew. Answers are hidden in the underworld. The underworld gives life and psyche depth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQo3GvXO-VI
The physical isn't split from the spiritual or psychical in the participatory process. Ordinary experience harbors mythic potential. Myths describe psychic processes as well as creation myths.
The archetypal intrudes into normal perception, not just dreams, visions, and non-ordinary states revealing the primordial self. Primal myths remain alive in the psyche, a relationship to the gods themselves, not something beyond them.
Numinous experiences express poetic and emotional potential, remythologizing religion, whether as psychological image or metaphysical fact. Myth is the link between primal and modern psychological life. It is based not on philosophy nor belief, but on direct inner experience given by fate, transformed into individual tasks and duties.
The worship of Sabazios (Dionysos) shows remnants of the original Indo-European plant cult of Haoma-Soma. The Soma cult was the prototype of Dionysiac worship. Dionysus was identified with the Thraco-Phrygian god Sabazios, Egyptian Osiris, and Phoenician Tammuz.
The first-century B.C. historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus compares the customs of Phrygian rites of Attis to that of Dionysus. The third-century philosopher Porphyry compares Dionysus with Adonis and Attis. Although widely attested in the imperial period, the association of Attis with Dionysus seems to be much more difficult to prove for earlier periods. Demosthenes mentions Attis and Sabazius in a ' Dionysiac' cult context.
Dionysus is an extremely old God whose name was found on a fired clay tablet written in pre-alphabet Linear B script, and dates to about 1450 BC. In the older Minoan stratum, Dionysus, son of the Great Mother Goddess, is totally subservient to her.
Dionysus' female followers went into the woods in a sacred hunt for the God himself who was in the form of “little spotted animals” who later were torn to pieces by the women with their bare hands. The human partakes of or incorporates him, acquiring some of the god's divine essence, reconnecting the soul with the primitive world of beasts and the chthonic underworld.
The Phrygian divinity, commonly described as a son of Rhea or Kybele was identified with the mystic Dionysus, called Dionysus Sabazius, god of death and resurrection. He appears as a Lion and a Serpent.
Sabazios was equivalent to Dionysus, who personified the sacred mushroom, as did Kybele-Attis. Dionysos teaches us proximity, contact, intimacy with ourselves, nature, and others.
After dismemberment, remembering is a commemoration, “a ritual recall of our lives to the images in the background of the soul” (Hillman, Healing Fiction). "Healing is not due to the fact that you are whole, integrated and unitary, instead comes from a consciousness that breaks through dismemberment.′′ (Hillman, Essays on the Puer, p. 46
Graves, Wasson and others have also suggested that hallucinogenic mushrooms may have been expressed and drunk in wine by the Maenads, worshipers of Dionysus, during their orgiastic revels. Sabazios was also portrayed as both the son and lover of the Great Goddess, otherwise known as Kybele.
Both mystic cults were characterized by enthusiastic orgies, public initiatory festivals with esoteric mystery rites. Soul suffers meaning. Difficult and uncomfortable feelings are associated with the darkness. Ritually, Dionysos is
a tonic, not a poison. "Raven's Bread" and “Golden Fleece” are often interpreted as symbols or epithets of fly agaric.
Only in excess and addiction, does Dionysos become a poison. However, he is also the cure for that poison through catharsis, an intense purge of the emotions. The orgiastic experience took them out of their bodies, free of the shackles of mortality, and societal control. Archetypal passion is a kind of madness that opens the yawning depths.
Evidence of the worship of (nonalcoholic) Haoma-Soma in Iran and India can be found in Greece and its neighboring lands. Fly agaric hallucinations may also lie behind shamanistic shape-changing, the divine metamorphosis of humans into animals, plants, and polysexual beings. The erect evergreen erect pine which cloaks Mediterranean mountain sides had an important phallic meaning to these seemingly related religious mystery cults.
Iranian and Indie peoples preserved their original worship in their final settlements: Indo-European tribes included the Thracians, Phrygians, and Greeks. After settling in Europe and Asia Minor, they abandoned their ancestral worship of Soma (Sabazios/Attis) and substituted alcoholic Dionysiac rituals.
The fungal traces are widespread in the modern world. The Amanita or fly agaric mushroom is the core of Kybele's symbolism. Alternatively, it is the penis of the god. Is this what was eaten from her tympanum, the heart of her identity? The heart is the sumtotal of all desires, which can be transformed. We can milk this image as the ancients milked the pressed juice of the mushrooms.
The anguish and despair of the beginning are the the seeds of rejuvenation, rebirth and promised illumination of the final stages of the alchemical process. Kybele shares traits with the autonomous prima materia, as described by Waite in the Theatrum Chemicum:
"They have compared the "prima materia" to everything, to male and female, to the hermaphroditic monster, to heaven and earth, to body and spirit, chaos, microcosm, and the confused mass; it contains in itself all colors and potentially all metals; there is nothing more wonderful in the world, for it begets itself, conceives itself, and gives birth to itself."
We live the images so that they live in us. Polyphasic consciousness is a way of modeling such altered or non-ordinary states of consciousness, which allow us to explore psyche more deeply.
The unconscious expresses itself in the emergent mythopoetic function, a glimpse into the transcendent dimension and fidelity to the dark side of the psyche. Libido, the generalized life instinct, is spiritualized by the numinous energy of the living myth, by intention, thought, and desire.
Mythogenic themes are rooted in mushroom-related beliefs, a complex mythological and religious syncretism between mushrooms and humankind. Such pharmacologically-induced trans-species communications also engage the animal kingdom through the dark and wild animal presences within, the animals of the imagination.
Kybele as Mythological Presence & Mythic Imagination
"Blessed is he who, being fortunate and knowing the rites of the gods, keeps his life pure and has his soul initiated into the Bacchic revels, dancing in inspired frenzy over the mountains with holy purifications, and who, revering the mysteries of great mother Kybele, brandishing the thyrsos, garlanded with ivy, serves Dionysus." --Euripides, Bacchae 72-82 (tr. T.A. Buckley):
Revitalization through Disorder
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. In this way we are "grounding" ourselves. 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. The world of the ancestors is a subterranean storehouse of everything that grows and comes to birth.
The worship of Kybele-Attis and the Asiatic Sabazios-Dionysos in Thrace, Phrygia, and Greece shows remnants of the original Indo-European cult of Haoma-Soma (god and sacred beverage). Some Buddhist adepts from the 2nd- and 9th- centuries consumed psychedelic Amanita muscaria mushrooms to achieve illumination.
A psychologically rich life invokes and engages heightened situations, psychic needs, complex mental engagement, an expanded range of intense, deep emotions, with diverse, novel, enriching experiences. Animated reality, a union of psyche and matter, spans from living beings down to lively matter. The deepest levels of psyche merge with the body and physical stuff of reality.
This way of the soul is labyrinthine. The primal patterns repeat endlessly, but vary aesthetically from one occasion or atmosphere to another through continual mutual transformation. The shadow of the senex is the puer, related to Kybele's companions, Hermes or Dionysus—unbounded instinct, disorder, intoxication, whimsy.
Kybele's rites were about renewal, the adaptation to the deep self, to the unconscious world, and the organic and inorganic natural world. Visionary plants and imaginal animals were among the first trance-induced images. Neolithics lived much closer to animals than we do and had reason to fear and totemize some of them, as they had done long before at Gobekli Tepe.
Animals play a great part in myths and fall into three categories: (1) the transformation of human into animal or vice versa, (2) the totemization of a feared animal, and (3) the animal-twin of individuals. Interconnected, they all represent attempts to extract the numinous quality from the animal and incorporate it into the individual (in character) or in society (in totem).
Mushrooms were among the first and may be the last lifeforms. As emissaries from the underworld and creatures of the in-between, mushrooms defy the binaries by which we organize the universe.
The phallic-mother is an image of a woman (or mother) endowed with a phallus or a phallic attribute. She has a phallic child, which raises itself toward the light. In technological symbolism, the child and the phallus are really one.
Neither plants nor animals, the fungi and animal kingdoms shared a common ancestor somewhere between 650 million and 1.5 billion years. They were one of the first sacred relics and technologies that symbiotically inspired civilization in the Ice Age, visible in cave art. Red, the color of blood and the scarlet mushroom is represented by ocher indicating the numinous.
Gordon Wasson identified this ritual intoxicant as the scarlet-capped, whitespotted fly agaric. The ancients thought the mushrooms were engendered by lightning, as witnessed by their electrifying effects when ingested. The alchemical elixir allowed realization to arise. Hillman (2005) says, every archetypal image has its own excess and intensity.
Like the amanita mushrooms, Kybele has a radically creative and destructive aspect. Dionysus, is deeply rooted in the life-cycle, cultivation, treatment, and consumption of a tree-born hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria. Mystery religions bloomed where the psychedelic mushrooms grew. Answers are hidden in the underworld. The underworld gives life and psyche depth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQo3GvXO-VI
The physical isn't split from the spiritual or psychical in the participatory process. Ordinary experience harbors mythic potential. Myths describe psychic processes as well as creation myths.
The archetypal intrudes into normal perception, not just dreams, visions, and non-ordinary states revealing the primordial self. Primal myths remain alive in the psyche, a relationship to the gods themselves, not something beyond them.
Numinous experiences express poetic and emotional potential, remythologizing religion, whether as psychological image or metaphysical fact. Myth is the link between primal and modern psychological life. It is based not on philosophy nor belief, but on direct inner experience given by fate, transformed into individual tasks and duties.
The worship of Sabazios (Dionysos) shows remnants of the original Indo-European plant cult of Haoma-Soma. The Soma cult was the prototype of Dionysiac worship. Dionysus was identified with the Thraco-Phrygian god Sabazios, Egyptian Osiris, and Phoenician Tammuz.
The first-century B.C. historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus compares the customs of Phrygian rites of Attis to that of Dionysus. The third-century philosopher Porphyry compares Dionysus with Adonis and Attis. Although widely attested in the imperial period, the association of Attis with Dionysus seems to be much more difficult to prove for earlier periods. Demosthenes mentions Attis and Sabazius in a ' Dionysiac' cult context.
Dionysus is an extremely old God whose name was found on a fired clay tablet written in pre-alphabet Linear B script, and dates to about 1450 BC. In the older Minoan stratum, Dionysus, son of the Great Mother Goddess, is totally subservient to her.
Dionysus' female followers went into the woods in a sacred hunt for the God himself who was in the form of “little spotted animals” who later were torn to pieces by the women with their bare hands. The human partakes of or incorporates him, acquiring some of the god's divine essence, reconnecting the soul with the primitive world of beasts and the chthonic underworld.
The Phrygian divinity, commonly described as a son of Rhea or Kybele was identified with the mystic Dionysus, called Dionysus Sabazius, god of death and resurrection. He appears as a Lion and a Serpent.
Sabazios was equivalent to Dionysus, who personified the sacred mushroom, as did Kybele-Attis. Dionysos teaches us proximity, contact, intimacy with ourselves, nature, and others.
After dismemberment, remembering is a commemoration, “a ritual recall of our lives to the images in the background of the soul” (Hillman, Healing Fiction). "Healing is not due to the fact that you are whole, integrated and unitary, instead comes from a consciousness that breaks through dismemberment.′′ (Hillman, Essays on the Puer, p. 46
Graves, Wasson and others have also suggested that hallucinogenic mushrooms may have been expressed and drunk in wine by the Maenads, worshipers of Dionysus, during their orgiastic revels. Sabazios was also portrayed as both the son and lover of the Great Goddess, otherwise known as Kybele.
Both mystic cults were characterized by enthusiastic orgies, public initiatory festivals with esoteric mystery rites. Soul suffers meaning. Difficult and uncomfortable feelings are associated with the darkness. Ritually, Dionysos is
a tonic, not a poison. "Raven's Bread" and “Golden Fleece” are often interpreted as symbols or epithets of fly agaric.
Only in excess and addiction, does Dionysos become a poison. However, he is also the cure for that poison through catharsis, an intense purge of the emotions. The orgiastic experience took them out of their bodies, free of the shackles of mortality, and societal control. Archetypal passion is a kind of madness that opens the yawning depths.
Evidence of the worship of (nonalcoholic) Haoma-Soma in Iran and India can be found in Greece and its neighboring lands. Fly agaric hallucinations may also lie behind shamanistic shape-changing, the divine metamorphosis of humans into animals, plants, and polysexual beings. The erect evergreen erect pine which cloaks Mediterranean mountain sides had an important phallic meaning to these seemingly related religious mystery cults.
Iranian and Indie peoples preserved their original worship in their final settlements: Indo-European tribes included the Thracians, Phrygians, and Greeks. After settling in Europe and Asia Minor, they abandoned their ancestral worship of Soma (Sabazios/Attis) and substituted alcoholic Dionysiac rituals.
The fungal traces are widespread in the modern world. The Amanita or fly agaric mushroom is the core of Kybele's symbolism. Alternatively, it is the penis of the god. Is this what was eaten from her tympanum, the heart of her identity? The heart is the sumtotal of all desires, which can be transformed. We can milk this image as the ancients milked the pressed juice of the mushrooms.
The anguish and despair of the beginning are the the seeds of rejuvenation, rebirth and promised illumination of the final stages of the alchemical process. Kybele shares traits with the autonomous prima materia, as described by Waite in the Theatrum Chemicum:
"They have compared the "prima materia" to everything, to male and female, to the hermaphroditic monster, to heaven and earth, to body and spirit, chaos, microcosm, and the confused mass; it contains in itself all colors and potentially all metals; there is nothing more wonderful in the world, for it begets itself, conceives itself, and gives birth to itself."
We live the images so that they live in us. Polyphasic consciousness is a way of modeling such altered or non-ordinary states of consciousness, which allow us to explore psyche more deeply.
The unconscious expresses itself in the emergent mythopoetic function, a glimpse into the transcendent dimension and fidelity to the dark side of the psyche. Libido, the generalized life instinct, is spiritualized by the numinous energy of the living myth, by intention, thought, and desire.
Mythogenic themes are rooted in mushroom-related beliefs, a complex mythological and religious syncretism between mushrooms and humankind. Such pharmacologically-induced trans-species communications also engage the animal kingdom through the dark and wild animal presences within, the animals of the imagination.
vMycelial Messages
Expert mycologist Paul Stamets also finds that mushrooms have a hidden agenda to bring us into communication with other species. Neither plants nor animals, fungi have a billion years of evolution as masters of survival. Plants and terrestrial animals would not exist without them.
They drove evolution on land, mining rocks for mineral nourishment, slowly turning them into the first soil. Tiny edgewater plants turned into large forests and ecosystems from the minerals. Fungi are part of the reason we exist back to the earliest mammals.
They break down dead, organic matter so everything is reborn. The entire web of life is connected through the fungi that consume death to create new life. Mycelial networks connect trees and plants in an underground fungal highway. They paved the way for human civilization as medicines. We built civilizations around bread, beer, and psychoactive fungi that made us who we are.
In studying the taxonomy of the Psilocybe genus, Stamets notes that psychoactive mushrooms proliferate in destructive taming of the land, such as through “...chopping down trees, breaking ground to create roads and trails, and domesticating livestock.” (Stamets, 2007, p. 138).
Stamets believes, the mushrooms become available to those who most need to speak to Nature through them. This dialogue carries the message “that we are part of an ‘ecology of consciousness,’ that the Earth is in peril, that time is short, and that we’re part of a huge, universal bio-system.” Many people who have taken these substances report receiving this same message.
Encountering the consciousness of the ingested plant/fungus was the most widely reported phenomenon in a range of 17 paranormal and transpersonal experiences occurring with those taking psilocybin-containing mushrooms. Approximately one third of magic mushroom users reported encounter experiences with the spirit or intelligence of the ingested mushroom.
Additionally, the plant consciousness encounter was the most widely reported transpersonal event for several other plant substances too, such as the Amanita muscaria mushroom (Luke & Kittenis, 2005). Animists believe the plants, and especially the mushrooms are clearly trying to tell us something.
Marion Woodman (1996), Jungian analyst and author, says that “rebirth to a higher level of consciousness... is recovered through encountering the chthonic devourer, the dark side of the Great Mother” (p. 58).
When the ancients fed on Kybele's mushroom they were fed to it -- a self-sacrifice where the proto-self experienced raw consciousness. This naked experience reconnects the environ with the psychedelically-inspired, forging an environmental way of thought and action. Masters and Houston (1966)
noted that,
“...the [psychedelic] subject, almost from the start, already has achieved a kind of empathy with his surroundings as a whole... That is to say, nature seems to the subject a whole of which he is an integral part, and from this characteristic feeling of being a part of the organic ‘body of nature’ the subject readily goes on to identify with nature in its physical particulars and processes.”
But if we empathize with Nature in this state, whose feelings are we feeling? The notion that something is empathized with implies that the thing itself has emotions, and the idea forms that Nature itself and the beings who inhabit it—be they animal, vegetable or perhaps even mineral—are also conscious.
Amanita muscaria itself was deified as a cultic object and was actually worshiped. Amanita muscaria is probably “the oldest and once most widespread in use of the hallucinogenic mushrooms.” Gordon Wasson observes that since the earliest times, mushrooms…
"have been worshiped by certain primitive peoples scattered from Mexico to Borneo and Siberia, and we think formerly in Europe, too. The visions […] are staggering in their subjective impact. […] If we are right in one conjecture that the secret of these mushrooms was discovered by early man, perhaps very early as he was emerging from his bestial past […] Our hallucinogenic mushrooms opened to him conceptions and emotions theretofore beyond his reach … yes, perhaps the very idea of a Superior Being."
Animism is the at the root of all shamanic religions, a communication with the spirits of plant and animal species: “Shamanism is all about attempting to dialogue with nature” (Narby, 2006,p.16). In shamanism, of course, this communication is frequently achieved through the ingestion of psychedelic plants. Subjective animaphany appears to transgress a fundamental societal boundary by communicating with spirits and becomes labelled as “madness.”
Taboo is completed by boundary-blurring transgression, orgyia, between a fungus and a human. Kybele was queen of the Stone Age, the original chemistry and black art, a psychic influence beneath the surface -- that which is germinally inherent. We resolve into the cosmic dance of energy patterns, webs of relationships, and flows.
Humans are storytelling creatures. Since the dawn of history, humanity has attempted to relate the seen and the unseen worlds. The key to personal transformation is story transformation. We track the gods through the wilderness of our dreams with the torch of enlightenment.
We dream of atmospheres and 'characters', which include people, animals, plants, and imaginary figures. The best story always circles back. It is symbolic, life-changing -- a massive reorganization of attitudes, behaviors, and meaning.
The existence of a Paleolithic-Neolithic universal mother goddess and prehistoric matriarchy remains controversial and is largely debunked by Roller (1999). The research is tainted by prejudice and biased presuppositions about undomesticated libido.
Belief in a mother goddess doesn't imply a matriarchal society. Ritual castration in Stone age Anatolia is very dubious. Internal tensions within the story demand a new narrative for this culturally-specific example that has gaps and inconsistencies. https://www.google.com/books/edition/In_Search_of_God_the_Mother/e9r2semlxPwC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=,cybele&printsec=frontcover
Lacking documentation from the times, some is evidenced, some interpretation, and much modern politics, even faddish movements, projecting modern values into prehistory, rationalizing a culturally-constructed narrative. We need to seek what has been missing or excluded from the story, its mystery. If we know it and value it, we engage it.
We carry our ancestors and histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies. Myths do not tell us how to live but provide an invisible background for imagining, personifying, questioning, 'seeing through', and going deeper. The rebirth archetype is a symbol of transformation with participatory ordeals.
Hillman claims, “radical shedding happens in those crises that move in on the soul and cannot be easily fixed,” that come “unannounced” with “a specific and immediate cause . . . or no apparent cause at all” (p. 55). ...“the crisis which forces shedding also forces a philosophical re-visioning, as if the crisis were demanding a discrimination between what must be held and what can be let go” (p. 57).
'Shedding pseudoskins, crusted stuff that you've accumulated. Shedding dead wood. ...Things that don't work anymore, things that don't keep you - keep you alive. Sets of ideas that you've had too long. People that you don't really like to be with, habits of thought, habits of sexuality. ...All that changes. The imagination changes."
Anytime we grow, we lose something. We lose what we are hanging onto to keep safe. We lose habits that we're comfortable with. We lose familiarity. We begin to move into the unfamiliar. This vision of shedding is stripping away the false and inessential -- and prodding at whatever is beneath it. We shed our skin to undergo rebirth.
The prevalence of twilight-state thinking, our very susceptibility to the condition, argues for its evolutionary importance. In extreme cases it results in pathology, derangements and delusions, persisting hallucinations and fanaticism. But it is also the driving force behind efforts to see things whole ...
There must have been an enormous selective premium on the twilight state during prehistoric times. If the pressures of the Upper Paleolithic demanded fervid belief and the following of leaders for survival's sake, then individuals endowed with such qualities, with a capacity to fall readily into trances, would out-reproduce more resistant individuals.
Telluric Currents
The telluric force of the planet originates on or in the earth or soil, arising from the heat and energy within. Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embodied. The unconscious telluric represents drives. Earthquake storms raged through the Mediterranean during the 12th c. BCE, and likely contributed to Bronze Age collapse.
This interpretation of Kybele's dynamics offers a new image placed among the existing ones. Kybele is the dimension of unconscious psychic activity and great soil web of all life, the eruptive spirit of below, the terrors of the unchained powers of nature, transformations, and dramatic settings.
Her cosmic aspect is reflected in Panprotopsychism and Panexperientialism, which describe emergence of primal non-conscious processes. Panprotopsychism suggests proto-consciousness may exist in the universe as a “fundamental property” without depending at all on anything physical.
Focusing on experience rather than mentality, panexperientialism, absolute space is the noumenal source of phenomenal consciousness, a fundamental quality, and Mind is a higher order hyperspace field outside brain's EM field. Fundamental proto-consciousness finds more particular expression when matter comes together in a certain way.
Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records, including the fact that most European genetics trace back to Anatolia, the source of the Neolithic gene pool and the epicenter of the Neolithic expansion.
Now, ancient DNA suggests that living Greeks are indeed the descendants of Mycenaeans, with only a small proportion of DNA from later migrations to Greece. And the Mycenaeans themselves were closely related to the earlier Minoans, the study reveals, another great civilization that flourished on the island of Crete from 2600 B.C.E. to 1400 B.C.E. But the archetype is located in myth within the “process of imagination” rather than in a physiological source in the genes.
Primal, nocturnal, ritualistic and dark, our bond with our ancestral kin is in our blood. Kybele is "Mother of the Gods," "Mother of the Mountains, and "Mistress of Animals." The world is alive and beyond our rational capacity to comprehend it. The Mistress was largely identified with the Mountain Mothers of antiquity. Lions and leopards were especially consecrated to Kybele; Rhea is often shown seated between two lions in Greek statuary.
It is not important which name she bore at Catal Huyuk. Rhea, Kybele, and such regional counterparts as the Cappadocian Ma are believed by many scholars to have been one and the same goddess, a deity of the pre-Greek populations of the Aegean and Anatolia, 6000 B.C. (Plato)
The cult arose naturally because, true or not, it served our ancestors. She is our wilderness soul. But sometimes we are forced into unnatural rhythms. We forget how it feels to dance and sing, to surrender and release, to tell upwelling stories and embrace the stillness. Sacred rhythms lead to unseen realms, trances encouraging new probabilities.
As Hesse says, in The Glass Bead Game, "In prehistoric times, music, like dance and every other artistic endeavor, was a branch of magic, one of the old and legitimate instruments of wonder-working. Beginning with rhythm (clapping of hands, tramping, beating of sticks and primitive drums) it was a powerful, tried-and-true device for putting large number of people “in tune” with one another, engendering the same mood, co-coordinating the pace of their breathing and heartbeats, encouraging them to invoke and conjure up the eternal powers, to dance, to compete, to make war, to worship. And music has retained this original, pure, primordially powerful character, its magic, far longer than the other arts."
Our pristine wilderness and virgin forests disappear with the understanding of our own inner wild natures. How does the human soul interact with its environment? Where does the wild woman live?
"At the bottom of the well, in the headwaters, in the ether before time. She lives in the tear and in the ocean. She lives in the cambria of trees, which pings as it grows. She is from the future and from the beginning of time." "When we immerse ourselves in nature, we reclaim our innate power and natural instincts." (Pinkola Estes)
This is a work of 'historical empathy.' Historical empathy is the cognitive and affective engagement with historical or mythic figures to better contextualize their lived experiences, decisions, or actions. We have to think about how pieces of evidence fit together and attempts to imagine what historical characters might have felt about their circumstances and actions.
When we engage this process, we are influenced by identification, shared human experience, affective connections, and many perspectives. Historical empathy involves understanding how people from the past worshiped, thought, felt, and acted as they did. We gain insight into their blessings and sacrifices. Imagination works on the evidence as we attempt to enter a past experience.
Mistress of Animals
Can we understand an ancient way of thinking within that context? our ancient connection to our animal kin is the animal within us all. Shared lore connects our disparate cultures. Animalistic imagery occupies in our dreams. Part of us all is drawn to both the majesty of animals and the more visceral aspects of our ancient selves.
Psyche speaks and fills in the gaps, as an animal in our dreams or a numinous experience of the power of raw nature. What does this animal do to you; what does it call forth in you? What resonates with it; what rises up within?
Clarissa Pinkola Estés says, “What does this wildish intuition do for women? Like the wolf, intuition has claws that pry things open and pin things down, it has eyes that can through the shields of persona, it has ears that hear beyond the range of mundane human hearing. With these formidable psychic tools a woman takes on a shrewd and even precognitive animal consciousness, one that deepens her femininity and sharpens her ability to move confidently in the outer world.”
(Women Who Run With the Wolves)
Animal mythos is a different kind of natural history. What does the dream animal want of you? What is the background, the environment, or landscape of the dream? Can we just stay with that resonant presence while it informs us? They may express unexpected effects on us beyond our ideas of them as symbols, myth, and history.
“All creatures must learn that there exist predators. Without this knowing, a woman will be unable to negotiate safely within her own forest without being devoured. To understand the predator is to become a mature animal who is not vulnerable out of naivete, inexperience, or foolishness.” (Pinkola Estés)
The dream animal and our felt-sense of the experience are inherently connected. Meaning is inherent. Yet we never know what the dream animal really wants or if anything we try truly meets it. As a living spirit the animal gives birth to something with us. (Lockhart)
Simple remembrance keeps that dream animal alive, free of extinction, as in the dreams we ignore or forget. We keep it alive in the face of death, the perennial background. Anima mundi is 'animal mundi' as psyche or soul is an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet. It relates to the world in much the same way as the soul is connected to the human body.
We can engage with the 'timeless' past, how the ancients made decisions and faced consequences, to understand our own role in the world today. We can use use source evidence and personal experiences to better understand difficult situations.
The paradoxical is the nature of dream, archetypal, and mythic material. We learn to feel psychic reality when spiritual and bodily imagery merge into an intimate wholeness transcending conscious comprehension.
Once we ourselves are rooted in this fertile earth of the deep unconscious, we can plant our contemporary and traditional Family Tree with its potentially vital forms and structures and listen to souls being born in the future. The Tree grounds us in imaginal space and ecology of souls. We learn to "stand our ground" in the deep interiority of the psychological field with new vigor.
We can activate the deep knowing of the psyche as it is nourished and animated by intimacy with the natural world. Research suggests that 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. In the powerful and visceral sense of engagement we feel with the natural world, we resonate with the the thickets of the forest and the freedom of the mountains, transported to a magical world.
Encountering Greater Reality
The nourishing yet fearsome cult spread far and wide, was wildly popular yet feared, despised, and marginalized. But the myth suggests ecstasy is not always pathological, primitive, regressive, degenerate, dissociative, or hysterical. Religious ecstasy is a “stretching” of soul, an expansion into the realm of “spirit,” which requires a subsequent descent into and reconciliation with tradition, society, outer world, and body.
Ecstasy can be the supreme human experience of human existence. It leads to primal knowledge, the innermost heart of the world, her darkening beauty. A potential uprush of archetypal material opens the subliminal sense of memory, creativity, wisdom, and healing, release of shadow material, and reconfiguration or rebirth of the self.
We enter a true wilderness excursion with a mythic motion. True wildness is to go into alien and unfamiliar territory. First, from what is known and familiar, until in that alien space there is blending together of psyche-world through animal image.
It is a moment of poetic experience with a deep correspondence of emotions. It's not so much the weird experience but the context or frame in which it takes place, accepting the ambiguity of the painful and beautiful at the same time.
Empathy is the ability to perceive, emotionally experience, and thus better contextualize lived experience. Empathy is the ability to see and understand events from the point of view of those who experienced the events firsthand. It allows us to appreciate the feelings, based upon intuition and imagination. This allows us to see Kybele and her culture more generously.
To truly bring ourselves into harmony with the natural world, we must return to seeing humanity as part of it. We can use the power of trees to reforest our soul. We don't come from primates, we are primates. We are not a race, we are a species. We are animals. We are mammals. We are a product of nature. We belong to it and we are a part of it. Through our own body we may experience the entire history and consciousness of the living Earth.
Paganism generally considers all of nature sacred, with humanity thoroughly enmeshed within it. The soul is the seat of psychological experience, just as the body is the seat of sense perception and the mind that of conception.
Psychopathology is fundamental to the soul: hurt, affliction, disorder, peculiarity, eccentricity -- we are able to establish a link between the body and identity, the wound/scar and the self. We find our mythic voice.
Why can't we imagine how the land feels? Does our heart remain in the deep wild lands? Our grief comes from passion for what we're losing. In her sanctuaries we befriend and transmute our despair. Our health is tied to the health of the land. If we lose that connection, we lose ourselves. We can ask: What does soul want? What is it trying to say (in this dream, this symptom, experience, problem)? Where is my fate going?
“The soul can become a reality again only when each of us has the courage to take it as the first reality in our own lives, to stand for it and not just ‘believe’ in it” (Hillman, cited in Russell, 2013, p. 497).
Her Story
Legends agree in locating the rise of the worship of the Great Mother in the general area of Phrygia in Asia Minor (west-central Turkey). During classical times her cult center was at Pessinus, located on the slopes of Mount Dindymus, or Agdistis (hence her names Dindymene and Agdistis).
The existence, however, of many similar non-Phrygian deities indicates that she was the original primal Phrygian form of the nature deity of all Asia Minor. The cult related to many spirits, gods, and ancestors -- both menacing and protective.
Kybele was worshiped as Earth-Mother, Mother of Nature, of wild animals and mainly as Mountain Goddess in Asia Minor. She was the creator of agriculture, livestock breeding, music and the founder and protector of towns and fortresses. According to I. Kakridis, this Phrygian goddess of earth, vegetation, maternity and crop, was also protector of families because she used to hold in her arms the people from the time of their birth till they died. Her cult had a rural character and she was worshiped at the mountains, under a noisy music of tympanums, cymbals and flutes and howlings with ecstatic dances. She (Pontia) also was protector of sailors in the Black Sea region, a function attested in Herodotus, Book IV, 76.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/dfa8/62f306929f456c8345af456fb4bd6bedcace.pdf
Expert mycologist Paul Stamets also finds that mushrooms have a hidden agenda to bring us into communication with other species. Neither plants nor animals, fungi have a billion years of evolution as masters of survival. Plants and terrestrial animals would not exist without them.
They drove evolution on land, mining rocks for mineral nourishment, slowly turning them into the first soil. Tiny edgewater plants turned into large forests and ecosystems from the minerals. Fungi are part of the reason we exist back to the earliest mammals.
They break down dead, organic matter so everything is reborn. The entire web of life is connected through the fungi that consume death to create new life. Mycelial networks connect trees and plants in an underground fungal highway. They paved the way for human civilization as medicines. We built civilizations around bread, beer, and psychoactive fungi that made us who we are.
In studying the taxonomy of the Psilocybe genus, Stamets notes that psychoactive mushrooms proliferate in destructive taming of the land, such as through “...chopping down trees, breaking ground to create roads and trails, and domesticating livestock.” (Stamets, 2007, p. 138).
Stamets believes, the mushrooms become available to those who most need to speak to Nature through them. This dialogue carries the message “that we are part of an ‘ecology of consciousness,’ that the Earth is in peril, that time is short, and that we’re part of a huge, universal bio-system.” Many people who have taken these substances report receiving this same message.
Encountering the consciousness of the ingested plant/fungus was the most widely reported phenomenon in a range of 17 paranormal and transpersonal experiences occurring with those taking psilocybin-containing mushrooms. Approximately one third of magic mushroom users reported encounter experiences with the spirit or intelligence of the ingested mushroom.
Additionally, the plant consciousness encounter was the most widely reported transpersonal event for several other plant substances too, such as the Amanita muscaria mushroom (Luke & Kittenis, 2005). Animists believe the plants, and especially the mushrooms are clearly trying to tell us something.
Marion Woodman (1996), Jungian analyst and author, says that “rebirth to a higher level of consciousness... is recovered through encountering the chthonic devourer, the dark side of the Great Mother” (p. 58).
When the ancients fed on Kybele's mushroom they were fed to it -- a self-sacrifice where the proto-self experienced raw consciousness. This naked experience reconnects the environ with the psychedelically-inspired, forging an environmental way of thought and action. Masters and Houston (1966)
noted that,
“...the [psychedelic] subject, almost from the start, already has achieved a kind of empathy with his surroundings as a whole... That is to say, nature seems to the subject a whole of which he is an integral part, and from this characteristic feeling of being a part of the organic ‘body of nature’ the subject readily goes on to identify with nature in its physical particulars and processes.”
But if we empathize with Nature in this state, whose feelings are we feeling? The notion that something is empathized with implies that the thing itself has emotions, and the idea forms that Nature itself and the beings who inhabit it—be they animal, vegetable or perhaps even mineral—are also conscious.
Amanita muscaria itself was deified as a cultic object and was actually worshiped. Amanita muscaria is probably “the oldest and once most widespread in use of the hallucinogenic mushrooms.” Gordon Wasson observes that since the earliest times, mushrooms…
"have been worshiped by certain primitive peoples scattered from Mexico to Borneo and Siberia, and we think formerly in Europe, too. The visions […] are staggering in their subjective impact. […] If we are right in one conjecture that the secret of these mushrooms was discovered by early man, perhaps very early as he was emerging from his bestial past […] Our hallucinogenic mushrooms opened to him conceptions and emotions theretofore beyond his reach … yes, perhaps the very idea of a Superior Being."
Animism is the at the root of all shamanic religions, a communication with the spirits of plant and animal species: “Shamanism is all about attempting to dialogue with nature” (Narby, 2006,p.16). In shamanism, of course, this communication is frequently achieved through the ingestion of psychedelic plants. Subjective animaphany appears to transgress a fundamental societal boundary by communicating with spirits and becomes labelled as “madness.”
Taboo is completed by boundary-blurring transgression, orgyia, between a fungus and a human. Kybele was queen of the Stone Age, the original chemistry and black art, a psychic influence beneath the surface -- that which is germinally inherent. We resolve into the cosmic dance of energy patterns, webs of relationships, and flows.
Humans are storytelling creatures. Since the dawn of history, humanity has attempted to relate the seen and the unseen worlds. The key to personal transformation is story transformation. We track the gods through the wilderness of our dreams with the torch of enlightenment.
We dream of atmospheres and 'characters', which include people, animals, plants, and imaginary figures. The best story always circles back. It is symbolic, life-changing -- a massive reorganization of attitudes, behaviors, and meaning.
The existence of a Paleolithic-Neolithic universal mother goddess and prehistoric matriarchy remains controversial and is largely debunked by Roller (1999). The research is tainted by prejudice and biased presuppositions about undomesticated libido.
Belief in a mother goddess doesn't imply a matriarchal society. Ritual castration in Stone age Anatolia is very dubious. Internal tensions within the story demand a new narrative for this culturally-specific example that has gaps and inconsistencies. https://www.google.com/books/edition/In_Search_of_God_the_Mother/e9r2semlxPwC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=,cybele&printsec=frontcover
Lacking documentation from the times, some is evidenced, some interpretation, and much modern politics, even faddish movements, projecting modern values into prehistory, rationalizing a culturally-constructed narrative. We need to seek what has been missing or excluded from the story, its mystery. If we know it and value it, we engage it.
We carry our ancestors and histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies. Myths do not tell us how to live but provide an invisible background for imagining, personifying, questioning, 'seeing through', and going deeper. The rebirth archetype is a symbol of transformation with participatory ordeals.
Hillman claims, “radical shedding happens in those crises that move in on the soul and cannot be easily fixed,” that come “unannounced” with “a specific and immediate cause . . . or no apparent cause at all” (p. 55). ...“the crisis which forces shedding also forces a philosophical re-visioning, as if the crisis were demanding a discrimination between what must be held and what can be let go” (p. 57).
'Shedding pseudoskins, crusted stuff that you've accumulated. Shedding dead wood. ...Things that don't work anymore, things that don't keep you - keep you alive. Sets of ideas that you've had too long. People that you don't really like to be with, habits of thought, habits of sexuality. ...All that changes. The imagination changes."
Anytime we grow, we lose something. We lose what we are hanging onto to keep safe. We lose habits that we're comfortable with. We lose familiarity. We begin to move into the unfamiliar. This vision of shedding is stripping away the false and inessential -- and prodding at whatever is beneath it. We shed our skin to undergo rebirth.
The prevalence of twilight-state thinking, our very susceptibility to the condition, argues for its evolutionary importance. In extreme cases it results in pathology, derangements and delusions, persisting hallucinations and fanaticism. But it is also the driving force behind efforts to see things whole ...
There must have been an enormous selective premium on the twilight state during prehistoric times. If the pressures of the Upper Paleolithic demanded fervid belief and the following of leaders for survival's sake, then individuals endowed with such qualities, with a capacity to fall readily into trances, would out-reproduce more resistant individuals.
Telluric Currents
The telluric force of the planet originates on or in the earth or soil, arising from the heat and energy within. Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embodied. The unconscious telluric represents drives. Earthquake storms raged through the Mediterranean during the 12th c. BCE, and likely contributed to Bronze Age collapse.
This interpretation of Kybele's dynamics offers a new image placed among the existing ones. Kybele is the dimension of unconscious psychic activity and great soil web of all life, the eruptive spirit of below, the terrors of the unchained powers of nature, transformations, and dramatic settings.
Her cosmic aspect is reflected in Panprotopsychism and Panexperientialism, which describe emergence of primal non-conscious processes. Panprotopsychism suggests proto-consciousness may exist in the universe as a “fundamental property” without depending at all on anything physical.
Focusing on experience rather than mentality, panexperientialism, absolute space is the noumenal source of phenomenal consciousness, a fundamental quality, and Mind is a higher order hyperspace field outside brain's EM field. Fundamental proto-consciousness finds more particular expression when matter comes together in a certain way.
Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records, including the fact that most European genetics trace back to Anatolia, the source of the Neolithic gene pool and the epicenter of the Neolithic expansion.
Now, ancient DNA suggests that living Greeks are indeed the descendants of Mycenaeans, with only a small proportion of DNA from later migrations to Greece. And the Mycenaeans themselves were closely related to the earlier Minoans, the study reveals, another great civilization that flourished on the island of Crete from 2600 B.C.E. to 1400 B.C.E. But the archetype is located in myth within the “process of imagination” rather than in a physiological source in the genes.
Primal, nocturnal, ritualistic and dark, our bond with our ancestral kin is in our blood. Kybele is "Mother of the Gods," "Mother of the Mountains, and "Mistress of Animals." The world is alive and beyond our rational capacity to comprehend it. The Mistress was largely identified with the Mountain Mothers of antiquity. Lions and leopards were especially consecrated to Kybele; Rhea is often shown seated between two lions in Greek statuary.
It is not important which name she bore at Catal Huyuk. Rhea, Kybele, and such regional counterparts as the Cappadocian Ma are believed by many scholars to have been one and the same goddess, a deity of the pre-Greek populations of the Aegean and Anatolia, 6000 B.C. (Plato)
The cult arose naturally because, true or not, it served our ancestors. She is our wilderness soul. But sometimes we are forced into unnatural rhythms. We forget how it feels to dance and sing, to surrender and release, to tell upwelling stories and embrace the stillness. Sacred rhythms lead to unseen realms, trances encouraging new probabilities.
As Hesse says, in The Glass Bead Game, "In prehistoric times, music, like dance and every other artistic endeavor, was a branch of magic, one of the old and legitimate instruments of wonder-working. Beginning with rhythm (clapping of hands, tramping, beating of sticks and primitive drums) it was a powerful, tried-and-true device for putting large number of people “in tune” with one another, engendering the same mood, co-coordinating the pace of their breathing and heartbeats, encouraging them to invoke and conjure up the eternal powers, to dance, to compete, to make war, to worship. And music has retained this original, pure, primordially powerful character, its magic, far longer than the other arts."
Our pristine wilderness and virgin forests disappear with the understanding of our own inner wild natures. How does the human soul interact with its environment? Where does the wild woman live?
"At the bottom of the well, in the headwaters, in the ether before time. She lives in the tear and in the ocean. She lives in the cambria of trees, which pings as it grows. She is from the future and from the beginning of time." "When we immerse ourselves in nature, we reclaim our innate power and natural instincts." (Pinkola Estes)
This is a work of 'historical empathy.' Historical empathy is the cognitive and affective engagement with historical or mythic figures to better contextualize their lived experiences, decisions, or actions. We have to think about how pieces of evidence fit together and attempts to imagine what historical characters might have felt about their circumstances and actions.
When we engage this process, we are influenced by identification, shared human experience, affective connections, and many perspectives. Historical empathy involves understanding how people from the past worshiped, thought, felt, and acted as they did. We gain insight into their blessings and sacrifices. Imagination works on the evidence as we attempt to enter a past experience.
Mistress of Animals
Can we understand an ancient way of thinking within that context? our ancient connection to our animal kin is the animal within us all. Shared lore connects our disparate cultures. Animalistic imagery occupies in our dreams. Part of us all is drawn to both the majesty of animals and the more visceral aspects of our ancient selves.
Psyche speaks and fills in the gaps, as an animal in our dreams or a numinous experience of the power of raw nature. What does this animal do to you; what does it call forth in you? What resonates with it; what rises up within?
Clarissa Pinkola Estés says, “What does this wildish intuition do for women? Like the wolf, intuition has claws that pry things open and pin things down, it has eyes that can through the shields of persona, it has ears that hear beyond the range of mundane human hearing. With these formidable psychic tools a woman takes on a shrewd and even precognitive animal consciousness, one that deepens her femininity and sharpens her ability to move confidently in the outer world.”
(Women Who Run With the Wolves)
Animal mythos is a different kind of natural history. What does the dream animal want of you? What is the background, the environment, or landscape of the dream? Can we just stay with that resonant presence while it informs us? They may express unexpected effects on us beyond our ideas of them as symbols, myth, and history.
“All creatures must learn that there exist predators. Without this knowing, a woman will be unable to negotiate safely within her own forest without being devoured. To understand the predator is to become a mature animal who is not vulnerable out of naivete, inexperience, or foolishness.” (Pinkola Estés)
The dream animal and our felt-sense of the experience are inherently connected. Meaning is inherent. Yet we never know what the dream animal really wants or if anything we try truly meets it. As a living spirit the animal gives birth to something with us. (Lockhart)
Simple remembrance keeps that dream animal alive, free of extinction, as in the dreams we ignore or forget. We keep it alive in the face of death, the perennial background. Anima mundi is 'animal mundi' as psyche or soul is an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet. It relates to the world in much the same way as the soul is connected to the human body.
We can engage with the 'timeless' past, how the ancients made decisions and faced consequences, to understand our own role in the world today. We can use use source evidence and personal experiences to better understand difficult situations.
The paradoxical is the nature of dream, archetypal, and mythic material. We learn to feel psychic reality when spiritual and bodily imagery merge into an intimate wholeness transcending conscious comprehension.
Once we ourselves are rooted in this fertile earth of the deep unconscious, we can plant our contemporary and traditional Family Tree with its potentially vital forms and structures and listen to souls being born in the future. The Tree grounds us in imaginal space and ecology of souls. We learn to "stand our ground" in the deep interiority of the psychological field with new vigor.
We can activate the deep knowing of the psyche as it is nourished and animated by intimacy with the natural world. Research suggests that 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. In the powerful and visceral sense of engagement we feel with the natural world, we resonate with the the thickets of the forest and the freedom of the mountains, transported to a magical world.
Encountering Greater Reality
The nourishing yet fearsome cult spread far and wide, was wildly popular yet feared, despised, and marginalized. But the myth suggests ecstasy is not always pathological, primitive, regressive, degenerate, dissociative, or hysterical. Religious ecstasy is a “stretching” of soul, an expansion into the realm of “spirit,” which requires a subsequent descent into and reconciliation with tradition, society, outer world, and body.
Ecstasy can be the supreme human experience of human existence. It leads to primal knowledge, the innermost heart of the world, her darkening beauty. A potential uprush of archetypal material opens the subliminal sense of memory, creativity, wisdom, and healing, release of shadow material, and reconfiguration or rebirth of the self.
We enter a true wilderness excursion with a mythic motion. True wildness is to go into alien and unfamiliar territory. First, from what is known and familiar, until in that alien space there is blending together of psyche-world through animal image.
It is a moment of poetic experience with a deep correspondence of emotions. It's not so much the weird experience but the context or frame in which it takes place, accepting the ambiguity of the painful and beautiful at the same time.
Empathy is the ability to perceive, emotionally experience, and thus better contextualize lived experience. Empathy is the ability to see and understand events from the point of view of those who experienced the events firsthand. It allows us to appreciate the feelings, based upon intuition and imagination. This allows us to see Kybele and her culture more generously.
To truly bring ourselves into harmony with the natural world, we must return to seeing humanity as part of it. We can use the power of trees to reforest our soul. We don't come from primates, we are primates. We are not a race, we are a species. We are animals. We are mammals. We are a product of nature. We belong to it and we are a part of it. Through our own body we may experience the entire history and consciousness of the living Earth.
Paganism generally considers all of nature sacred, with humanity thoroughly enmeshed within it. The soul is the seat of psychological experience, just as the body is the seat of sense perception and the mind that of conception.
Psychopathology is fundamental to the soul: hurt, affliction, disorder, peculiarity, eccentricity -- we are able to establish a link between the body and identity, the wound/scar and the self. We find our mythic voice.
Why can't we imagine how the land feels? Does our heart remain in the deep wild lands? Our grief comes from passion for what we're losing. In her sanctuaries we befriend and transmute our despair. Our health is tied to the health of the land. If we lose that connection, we lose ourselves. We can ask: What does soul want? What is it trying to say (in this dream, this symptom, experience, problem)? Where is my fate going?
“The soul can become a reality again only when each of us has the courage to take it as the first reality in our own lives, to stand for it and not just ‘believe’ in it” (Hillman, cited in Russell, 2013, p. 497).
Her Story
Legends agree in locating the rise of the worship of the Great Mother in the general area of Phrygia in Asia Minor (west-central Turkey). During classical times her cult center was at Pessinus, located on the slopes of Mount Dindymus, or Agdistis (hence her names Dindymene and Agdistis).
The existence, however, of many similar non-Phrygian deities indicates that she was the original primal Phrygian form of the nature deity of all Asia Minor. The cult related to many spirits, gods, and ancestors -- both menacing and protective.
Kybele was worshiped as Earth-Mother, Mother of Nature, of wild animals and mainly as Mountain Goddess in Asia Minor. She was the creator of agriculture, livestock breeding, music and the founder and protector of towns and fortresses. According to I. Kakridis, this Phrygian goddess of earth, vegetation, maternity and crop, was also protector of families because she used to hold in her arms the people from the time of their birth till they died. Her cult had a rural character and she was worshiped at the mountains, under a noisy music of tympanums, cymbals and flutes and howlings with ecstatic dances. She (Pontia) also was protector of sailors in the Black Sea region, a function attested in Herodotus, Book IV, 76.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/dfa8/62f306929f456c8345af456fb4bd6bedcace.pdf
"The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity"
Martin Luther King, Jr. (Crozer Theological Seminary)
Date: November 29, 1949 to February 15, 1950
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/influence-mystery-religions-christianity?fbclid=IwAR3J5cSy3AV1xrb2t0VDGkORDpVj0QmnhNSt8ICa2ORSS-UTaNHLKbIq8FI
The Influence Of The Cult Of Cybele and Attis
The first Oriental religion to invade the west was the cult of the Great Mother of the Gods. The divine personage in whom this cult centered was the Magna Mater Deum who was conceived as the source of all life as well as the personification of all the powers of nature.\[Footnote:] Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, p. 114.\7 She was the “Great Mother” not only “of all the gods,” but of all men” as well.8 “The winds, the sea, the earth, and the snowy seat of Olympus are hers, and when from her mountains she ascends into the great heavens, the son of Cronus himself gives way before her, and in like manner do also the other immortal blest honor the dread goddess.”\[Footnote:] Quoted in Willoughby’s, Pagan Regeneration, p. 115.9\
At an early date there was associated with Cybele, the Great Mother, a hero-divinity called Attic who personified the life of the vegetable world particularly. Around these two divinities there grew up a “confused tangle of myths” in explanation of their cult rites. Various writers gave different Versions of the Cybele-Attis myth. However these specific differences need not concern us, for the most significant aspects are common in all the various versions.10 We are concerned at this point with showing how this religion influenced the thought of early Christians.
Attis was the Good Shepard, the son of Cybele, the Great Mother, who gave birth to him without union with mortal man, as in the story of the virgin Mary.11 According to the myth, Attis died, either slain by another or by his own hand. At the death of Attis, Cybele mourned vehemently until he arose to life again in the springtime. The central theme of the myth was the triumph of Attis over death, and the participant in the rites of the cult undoubtedly believed that his attachment to the victorious deity would insure a similar triumph in his life.
It is evident that in Rome there was a festival celebrating the death and resurrection of Attis. This celebration was held annually from March 22nd to 25th.\[Footnote:] Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, p. 166.\ The influence of this religion on Christianity is shown by the fact that in Phrygia, Gaul, Italy, and other countries where Attis-worship was powerful, the Christians adapted the actual date, March 25th, as the anniversary of our Lord’s passion.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 199\12
Again we may notice that at this same Attis festival on March 22nd, an effigy of the god was fastened to the trunk of a pine tree, Attis thus being “slain and hanged on a tree.” This effigy was later buried in a tomb. On March 24th, known as the Day of Blood, the High Priest, impersonating Attic, drew blood from him arm and offered it up in place of the blood of a human sacrifice, thus, as it were, sacrificing himself. It is this fact that immediately brings to mind the words in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “But Christ being come an High Priest … neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood … obtained eternal redemption for us.”\[Footnote:] Heb. 9:11, 12.\ Now to get back to the festival. That night the priests went back to the tomb and found it empty, the god having risen on the third day from the dead; and on the 25th the resurrection was celebrated with great rejoicing. During this great celebration a sacramental meal of some kind was taken, and initiates were baptised with blood, whereby their sins were washed away and they were said to be “born again.”\[Footnote:] Weigall, The Paganism In Our Christianity, pp. 116, 117.\13
There can hardly be any doubt of the fact that these ceremonies and beliefs strongly coloured the interpretation placed by the first Christians upon the life and death of the historic Jesus.14 Moreover, “the merging of the worship of Attis into that of Jesus was effected without interruption, for these pagan ceremonies were enacted in a sanctuary on the Vatican Hill, which was afterwards taken over by the Christians, and the mother church of St. Peter now stands upon the very spot.”\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 117.\ --Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (Crozer Theological Seminary)
Date: November 29, 1949 to February 15, 1950
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/influence-mystery-religions-christianity?fbclid=IwAR3J5cSy3AV1xrb2t0VDGkORDpVj0QmnhNSt8ICa2ORSS-UTaNHLKbIq8FI
The Influence Of The Cult Of Cybele and Attis
The first Oriental religion to invade the west was the cult of the Great Mother of the Gods. The divine personage in whom this cult centered was the Magna Mater Deum who was conceived as the source of all life as well as the personification of all the powers of nature.\[Footnote:] Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, p. 114.\7 She was the “Great Mother” not only “of all the gods,” but of all men” as well.8 “The winds, the sea, the earth, and the snowy seat of Olympus are hers, and when from her mountains she ascends into the great heavens, the son of Cronus himself gives way before her, and in like manner do also the other immortal blest honor the dread goddess.”\[Footnote:] Quoted in Willoughby’s, Pagan Regeneration, p. 115.9\
At an early date there was associated with Cybele, the Great Mother, a hero-divinity called Attic who personified the life of the vegetable world particularly. Around these two divinities there grew up a “confused tangle of myths” in explanation of their cult rites. Various writers gave different Versions of the Cybele-Attis myth. However these specific differences need not concern us, for the most significant aspects are common in all the various versions.10 We are concerned at this point with showing how this religion influenced the thought of early Christians.
Attis was the Good Shepard, the son of Cybele, the Great Mother, who gave birth to him without union with mortal man, as in the story of the virgin Mary.11 According to the myth, Attis died, either slain by another or by his own hand. At the death of Attis, Cybele mourned vehemently until he arose to life again in the springtime. The central theme of the myth was the triumph of Attis over death, and the participant in the rites of the cult undoubtedly believed that his attachment to the victorious deity would insure a similar triumph in his life.
It is evident that in Rome there was a festival celebrating the death and resurrection of Attis. This celebration was held annually from March 22nd to 25th.\[Footnote:] Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, p. 166.\ The influence of this religion on Christianity is shown by the fact that in Phrygia, Gaul, Italy, and other countries where Attis-worship was powerful, the Christians adapted the actual date, March 25th, as the anniversary of our Lord’s passion.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 199\12
Again we may notice that at this same Attis festival on March 22nd, an effigy of the god was fastened to the trunk of a pine tree, Attis thus being “slain and hanged on a tree.” This effigy was later buried in a tomb. On March 24th, known as the Day of Blood, the High Priest, impersonating Attic, drew blood from him arm and offered it up in place of the blood of a human sacrifice, thus, as it were, sacrificing himself. It is this fact that immediately brings to mind the words in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “But Christ being come an High Priest … neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood … obtained eternal redemption for us.”\[Footnote:] Heb. 9:11, 12.\ Now to get back to the festival. That night the priests went back to the tomb and found it empty, the god having risen on the third day from the dead; and on the 25th the resurrection was celebrated with great rejoicing. During this great celebration a sacramental meal of some kind was taken, and initiates were baptised with blood, whereby their sins were washed away and they were said to be “born again.”\[Footnote:] Weigall, The Paganism In Our Christianity, pp. 116, 117.\13
There can hardly be any doubt of the fact that these ceremonies and beliefs strongly coloured the interpretation placed by the first Christians upon the life and death of the historic Jesus.14 Moreover, “the merging of the worship of Attis into that of Jesus was effected without interruption, for these pagan ceremonies were enacted in a sanctuary on the Vatican Hill, which was afterwards taken over by the Christians, and the mother church of St. Peter now stands upon the very spot.”\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 117.\ --Martin Luther King, Jr.
dromos
MOTHER CULTS AND MUSHROOMS
Archaic Phrygian “Mountain Mother”
Anatolian Deity of Prehistoric Times
by Iona Miller, (c)2020
"Apuleius in the eleventh book of The Golden Ass ascribes to the goddess the following statement concerning her powers and attributes: "Behold, * *, I, moved by thy prayers, am present with thee; I, who am Nature, the parent of things, the queen of all the elements, the primordial progeny of ages, the supreme of Divinities, the sovereign of the spirits of the dead, the first of the celestials, and the uniform resemblance of Gods and Goddesses. I, who rule by my nod the luminous summits of the heavens, the salubrious breezes of the sea, and the deplorable silences of the realms beneath, and whose one divinity the whole orb of the earth venerates under a manifold form, by different rites and a variety of appellations. Hence the primogenial Phrygians call me Pessinuntica, the mother of the Gods, the Attic Aborigines, Cecropian Minerva; the floating Cyprians, Paphian Venus; the arrow-bearing Cretans, Diana Dictynna; the three-tongued Sicilians, Stygian Proserpine; and the Eleusinians, the ancient Goddess Ceres. Some also call me Juno, others Bellona, others Hecate, and others Rhamnusia. And those who are illuminated by the incipient rays of that divinity the Sun, when he rises, viz. the Ethiopians, the Arii, and the Egyptians skilled in ancient learning, worshiping me by ceremonies perfectly appropriate, call me by my true name, Queen Isis." - Manly P. Hall The Secret Teachings of All Ages
Joseph Campbell explains that "it is the artist who brings the images of mythology to manifestation, and without images (whether mental or visual) there is no mythology’ (1986:xxii). When art produces the visionary images necessary to perceive the world differently, it taps into dominant psychic archetypes that hold the potential healing energy to transform the individual and transpersonal psyches."
Myth is the language of the autonomous psyche -- innate organic spiritualty. Kybele began as a goddess with no name in a religious cult of no name with many varieties. Thus our aims are to engage at depth with Kybele to discover whether it reveals changes in dominant archetypes and, if it does, to bring their potential meanings toward our consciousness and, should the gods favor our labors, a wider culture.
Kybele's ancient Neolithic roots were as "Mistress of the Animals." At no point in our evolution have we ceased to be mammals or primates. "More significant in this consciousness is that wherever you look into polytheistic religions -- Egypt, Eskimo, India, Mesopotamia, tribal societies -- you find that animals are divinities. Anything one does with them must be with their accord, else one is alienated from them (as we are). So, polytheistic consciousness implies religious respect for animals--all animals." (James Hillman interview on animals by John Stockwell : "A correspondence")
In Myth of Analysis p.258, Hillman reveals that archetypal energy of hysteria is Dionysian. His theory of archetypal psychology is based on the relationship of mythology and psychology. "The mythical is the speculum of the psychological, its reflection beyond the personal. Myth provides the objective aspect for the subjective meanings in psychic events. Without myth it would all be me, personally narrowed to the history of a case. Myth stands back of psyche, acting as a foil for objective reflection."
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Great_Cosmic_Mother/KAseAgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=,Mor,+great+cosmic+mother&printsec=frontcover
Archaic Phrygian “Mountain Mother”
Anatolian Deity of Prehistoric Times
by Iona Miller, (c)2020
"Apuleius in the eleventh book of The Golden Ass ascribes to the goddess the following statement concerning her powers and attributes: "Behold, * *, I, moved by thy prayers, am present with thee; I, who am Nature, the parent of things, the queen of all the elements, the primordial progeny of ages, the supreme of Divinities, the sovereign of the spirits of the dead, the first of the celestials, and the uniform resemblance of Gods and Goddesses. I, who rule by my nod the luminous summits of the heavens, the salubrious breezes of the sea, and the deplorable silences of the realms beneath, and whose one divinity the whole orb of the earth venerates under a manifold form, by different rites and a variety of appellations. Hence the primogenial Phrygians call me Pessinuntica, the mother of the Gods, the Attic Aborigines, Cecropian Minerva; the floating Cyprians, Paphian Venus; the arrow-bearing Cretans, Diana Dictynna; the three-tongued Sicilians, Stygian Proserpine; and the Eleusinians, the ancient Goddess Ceres. Some also call me Juno, others Bellona, others Hecate, and others Rhamnusia. And those who are illuminated by the incipient rays of that divinity the Sun, when he rises, viz. the Ethiopians, the Arii, and the Egyptians skilled in ancient learning, worshiping me by ceremonies perfectly appropriate, call me by my true name, Queen Isis." - Manly P. Hall The Secret Teachings of All Ages
Joseph Campbell explains that "it is the artist who brings the images of mythology to manifestation, and without images (whether mental or visual) there is no mythology’ (1986:xxii). When art produces the visionary images necessary to perceive the world differently, it taps into dominant psychic archetypes that hold the potential healing energy to transform the individual and transpersonal psyches."
Myth is the language of the autonomous psyche -- innate organic spiritualty. Kybele began as a goddess with no name in a religious cult of no name with many varieties. Thus our aims are to engage at depth with Kybele to discover whether it reveals changes in dominant archetypes and, if it does, to bring their potential meanings toward our consciousness and, should the gods favor our labors, a wider culture.
Kybele's ancient Neolithic roots were as "Mistress of the Animals." At no point in our evolution have we ceased to be mammals or primates. "More significant in this consciousness is that wherever you look into polytheistic religions -- Egypt, Eskimo, India, Mesopotamia, tribal societies -- you find that animals are divinities. Anything one does with them must be with their accord, else one is alienated from them (as we are). So, polytheistic consciousness implies religious respect for animals--all animals." (James Hillman interview on animals by John Stockwell : "A correspondence")
In Myth of Analysis p.258, Hillman reveals that archetypal energy of hysteria is Dionysian. His theory of archetypal psychology is based on the relationship of mythology and psychology. "The mythical is the speculum of the psychological, its reflection beyond the personal. Myth provides the objective aspect for the subjective meanings in psychic events. Without myth it would all be me, personally narrowed to the history of a case. Myth stands back of psyche, acting as a foil for objective reflection."
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Great_Cosmic_Mother/KAseAgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=,Mor,+great+cosmic+mother&printsec=frontcover
CAUTION: For Educational Purposes Only
This article does not suggest or recommend ingesting any dangerous plants.
“Have You Forgotten? I Am Your Mother. You Are Under My Protection.”
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 Kybele; in Phoenicia, Ashtaroth [Astarte]; in Assyria, Ishtar; in Egypt, Isis; in Crete Rhea; in Athens Athena; in the Caucasus 'The Bird-Headed Mother'...Agdistis, Mariamne, Hekate, Hera"..."the cruel, capricious, incontinent [lacking self-restraint; uncontrolled] White Goddess.”
--Graves, The Golden Fleece
This article does not suggest or recommend ingesting any dangerous plants.
“Have You Forgotten? I Am Your Mother. You Are Under My Protection.”
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 Kybele; in Phoenicia, Ashtaroth [Astarte]; in Assyria, Ishtar; in Egypt, Isis; in Crete Rhea; in Athens Athena; in the Caucasus 'The Bird-Headed Mother'...Agdistis, Mariamne, Hekate, Hera"..."the cruel, capricious, incontinent [lacking self-restraint; uncontrolled] White Goddess.”
--Graves, The Golden Fleece
“No one should deny the danger of the descent, but it can be risked. No one need risk it, but it is certain that someone will. And let those who go down the sunset way do so with open eyes, for it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods. Yet every descent is followed by an ascent; the vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears new witness in new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put into new bottles.”
― Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation
― Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation
Neolithics who used mushrooms made figures resembling them. The were found in Danube Vinca culture of 5000 BC.
MOTHER MYCELIUM
Phrygian Ma - Kibela
Iona Miller, 2020
“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.” --CG Jung
"The power of memory exceeds representation because it is primary to it, a *kosmogonos* that uses the brain’s interpretations of the world to make representations—icons and syntax—through which more world can be created. Mind, in this vision, is itself a recoil. It is a recoil of the universe back upon itself." (p. 230) --G. Mercurius Nixon, *The Coil of Time and the Recoil of Memory: A Phenomenology of Autobiographic Recall*. Makyō* Press, 1995.
"To be one with everything that lives, to return in blissful self-oblivion into the all of nature, that is the summit of thoughts and joys, that is the holy mountain pinnacle, the place of eternal peace..." (From Hölderlin's "Hyperion")
"Ascend above any height, descend further than any depth; receive all sensory impressions of the created: water, fire, dryness and wetness. Think that you are present everywhere: in the sea, on earth and in heaven; think that you were never born and that you are still in the embryonic state: young and old, dead and in the hereafter. Understand everything at the same time: time, place, things: quality and quantity." (Corpus Hermeticum, 1460).
******
Psychic Archeology:
The Aegians
Kybele was intelligence and soul that pervades all of nature and the cosmos. Her frame drum was the trance-inducing heartbeat. The drum beat marks the rhythm of life. The permeable human self directly participates in that larger matrix of meaning within which we are fully embedded and entangled with all life. Like libido, she is “self manifesting” and constantly “self renewing”.
Her story is still told, re-awakening an age-old worship, because she still inhabits the psyche -- the world of autonomous images and imaginative perception -- our souls struggling with pleasures, fears, and other emotions of embodied existence. To transfer energy from the earth's waveguide you must be in resonance with it. When we sing together with her voice in resonance, maximum energy transfer happens.
The indigenous Thracian population existed since the early Stone Age between 65,000 and 55,000 BC. The Old European goddesses preceded the Hellenes by 5,000 years. There was never a shortage of collective traumas to spur on religious supplication to transmute pain and suffering.
There is evidence the ancient freshwater Black Sea shoreline formed in the end of the Ice Age, and was submerged by the encroaching Mediterranean as recently as the Bronze Age. Collective trauma such as wars, genocide, climate change, and natural disasters always affect society.
Worship became a critical human activity. Nature mystics experience the sacred in the wilderness. Rituals create alternate and transpersonal states. A shrine is "a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, or representing it and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it" (Hillman). Without aesthetic appreciation there is nothing to incite a bodily reaction, much less sublime encounter.
The antiquity of the soul is synonymous with Middle Paleolithic spirituality. As evident from their cave art and symbolic accomplishments, the nether world of the the Cro-Magnon and other peoples of the Upper Paleolithic, was also haunted by the spirits and souls of the living, the dead, and those yet to be born, both animal and human (Brandon 1967; Campbell 1988).
The ineffable gods were a daimonic expression of creating the world. Even thought and speech arise from embodied perception. The sparks of soul are germinal images. Soul illuminates the body which becomes transparent to the gods within.
Dionysus has the ability to descend and ascend from the underworld. Soul is identified by the Neoplatonists with the dismembered Dionysus, who is himself anciently identified with the fly agaric, which reflects the darker side of the mushroom world, the depths in the darkness of psyche.
Hillman describes the danger of a societal culture that does not allow reconciliation with dark forces within. He states, “If a culture’s philosophy does not allow enough place for the other, give credit to the invisible, then the other must squeeze itself into our psychic system in distorted form” (Hillman, Soul's Code, p. 184).
The ancients knew themselves through myth, an adaptation to primordial psychic reality that brings all aspects of life to the soul. The "dark", "feminine" and corporeal that are habitually dissociated from the psyche, the abysmal side of bodily nature with animal passions and instinctual nature.
Like Dionysus dismembered by the Titans, the embodied soul gradually recollects its immortal identity by discovering its fragments in nature. What does the earth ask of us to ensure justice for all of creation? Now a 'great grief' arises in us all for the Earth itself -- eco-anxiety, anger, despair, and depression.
No wonder Kybele still laments. So let us make her an altar, a shrine. We may find it in our wounds and scars, our intersections or transitions, that frame the wounding scene as they bind past, present, and future. Healing is consciousness breaking through dismemberment.
Enchanting Territory
Nature is the domain of psyche, a mysterious communication with our inner feelings and an influence on our imagination. There are correlations between the external world and our moods.
The very land on which we stand is our foundation. What could be more common and shared than the land, water, and air that gives us all life? To tend the earth and our relationship to the earth is always to tend our destiny and what has decayed.
That is tending, rather than willful intending. The living process of the psyche gives preference to a dramatic, mythological way of thinking and speaking, and encountering imaginal entities. Our embodied imagination is a simultaneous multiplicity of emotional embodied states (Boznak), mirrored in the deep field, high mountain, and dark cave.
The nature mystic experience is one of the most awesome and easily accessed non-ordinary states. Every landscape resonates with soulful stories. Untainted wilderness is possibly one of the least realized yet most valuable healing resources we have, particularly pristine areas of desert, water or mountains where we can enjoy solitude as time and concerns seem to melt away.
Our experience of the numinous transforms from a dreadful and uncanny mysterium tremendum to aesthetic arrest and expression, and finally to a transpersonal, universalist or integral perspective. Our spiritual voltage rises culminating in greater degrees of existential freedom. The transformed becomes a transformer.
We have to follow Kybele's rhythm and flow to grow more comfortable in the liminal spaces, the divine mountain woodland. Phenomenological intuiting is a flow and spiral, described by the unpredictability and serendipity of the process.
We have no clear sense of what we will find or how discoveries will arise fluidly and unfold in a rich, unstructured, multidimensional way. A certain uncertainty and spontaneity must be accepted and creatively transformed into possibility and pattern.
Dreams are spatial structures with their own dream reality -- the dream field. Thomas Moore says, "dreaming is indeed a wilderness that should be explored but not tamed." They are the portal to our cavern of the Source, the underground stream.
Our soul seeks the encounter, participation in the gods. It feels called by the god through the sensate image. We make tracks in the wilderness of our dreaming, our personal dream landscapes, renewing our life and our relationship with the earth, sensing shifts in our bodily sensations -- the embodied psyche, where the gods work on us.
Reciprocity declares the earth sustains us and we sustain her in return with gratitude, paying homage in the dark, lit by the torches of our tending in dark times. We enter the activity of the gods divine action, conforming our action to divine action. Archetypal images, change the “what” of an archetype into a “how,” an activity experienced by the soul.
The invisible powers of the gods work through visible shapes and images. Then the soul re-members itself without our interpretation or understanding. Soul is transformed in the subtle or imaginal body. The agonies of the soul allow it to recover its divine body. Through our own body we may experience the entire history and consciousness of the living Earth.
Ultimately nature rules. No race, class, or gender can keep any of us from dying into that death where we are made one, the fate of all entangled life. We have a life-oriented libidinal self and a death-oriented somatic self. The desire for life and death are paradoxically yoked.
Soul mediates and reconciles ordinary consciousness (life instinct) and unconsciousness (death instinct). Soul consciousness is the undifferentiated life/death instinct, identical to the function of intuition, the primal instinct. Soul is the archetype, intuition is the instinct. (Hillman)
When things go wrong or “fall apart,” we’re drawn into the psychic depths. Descent to the underworld reclaims those darknesses for the psyche -- a hidden power of life that exceeds the needs of self-preservation. Descent dramatizes the encounter of the psyche with dissociated characteristics. The dark-adapted eye attunes our awareness to the language of the deep psyche and adaptation to psychic reality.
Psychic material arises from the unconscious or sinks down into the unconscious. Descent enacts a longing for the darkness that must be encountered in order to emerge renewed. 'To have seen the holy' is a way of speaking about Mystery. The sacrament was the heart of the Mystery. Gathering plants was a hunt for earth's children, the source of ecstatic possession.
Widespread displacement could stimulate religious fervor that helped with depression and anxiety while connecting back with the ancestors. This had to effect the population and migrations heavily. That time had different flora and fauna, rivers of double size and wildly lush forests with a cooler climate. The Black Sea harbored the Thracians, Scythians, and Cimmerians, with Anatolia to the south.
A chthonic deity, Kybele is an archaic Anatolian mother goddess with possible forerunners in the earliest Neolithic. Phrygia's national goddess spread into the ethnically Greek colonies of western Anatolia, mainland Greece, the Aegean islands and the westerly colonies of classical Magna Graecia, and later to Rome around 204 BCE.
Kybele’s cult was practiced as early as the first millennium BCE in Phrygia. It was practiced by the Greeks in the sixth century BCE and in Rome in the late third century BCE. During this time the cult changed dramatically.
The holy mycelial sacrament, once open to all, became taboo, reserved for priests, kings and other privileged people. To prevent the unprivileged from eating a sacred mushroom, a taboo was put on mushroom-eating and reinforced by treating all mushrooms as poisonous.
You have to be ready for unusual experiences, to be frightened with awe and dread, and see the strange without running away. Space and time are shredded. Some are 'lifted up' in out-of-body experiences.
Phrygian Ma - Kibela
Iona Miller, 2020
“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.” --CG Jung
"The power of memory exceeds representation because it is primary to it, a *kosmogonos* that uses the brain’s interpretations of the world to make representations—icons and syntax—through which more world can be created. Mind, in this vision, is itself a recoil. It is a recoil of the universe back upon itself." (p. 230) --G. Mercurius Nixon, *The Coil of Time and the Recoil of Memory: A Phenomenology of Autobiographic Recall*. Makyō* Press, 1995.
"To be one with everything that lives, to return in blissful self-oblivion into the all of nature, that is the summit of thoughts and joys, that is the holy mountain pinnacle, the place of eternal peace..." (From Hölderlin's "Hyperion")
"Ascend above any height, descend further than any depth; receive all sensory impressions of the created: water, fire, dryness and wetness. Think that you are present everywhere: in the sea, on earth and in heaven; think that you were never born and that you are still in the embryonic state: young and old, dead and in the hereafter. Understand everything at the same time: time, place, things: quality and quantity." (Corpus Hermeticum, 1460).
******
Psychic Archeology:
The Aegians
Kybele was intelligence and soul that pervades all of nature and the cosmos. Her frame drum was the trance-inducing heartbeat. The drum beat marks the rhythm of life. The permeable human self directly participates in that larger matrix of meaning within which we are fully embedded and entangled with all life. Like libido, she is “self manifesting” and constantly “self renewing”.
Her story is still told, re-awakening an age-old worship, because she still inhabits the psyche -- the world of autonomous images and imaginative perception -- our souls struggling with pleasures, fears, and other emotions of embodied existence. To transfer energy from the earth's waveguide you must be in resonance with it. When we sing together with her voice in resonance, maximum energy transfer happens.
The indigenous Thracian population existed since the early Stone Age between 65,000 and 55,000 BC. The Old European goddesses preceded the Hellenes by 5,000 years. There was never a shortage of collective traumas to spur on religious supplication to transmute pain and suffering.
There is evidence the ancient freshwater Black Sea shoreline formed in the end of the Ice Age, and was submerged by the encroaching Mediterranean as recently as the Bronze Age. Collective trauma such as wars, genocide, climate change, and natural disasters always affect society.
Worship became a critical human activity. Nature mystics experience the sacred in the wilderness. Rituals create alternate and transpersonal states. A shrine is "a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, or representing it and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it" (Hillman). Without aesthetic appreciation there is nothing to incite a bodily reaction, much less sublime encounter.
The antiquity of the soul is synonymous with Middle Paleolithic spirituality. As evident from their cave art and symbolic accomplishments, the nether world of the the Cro-Magnon and other peoples of the Upper Paleolithic, was also haunted by the spirits and souls of the living, the dead, and those yet to be born, both animal and human (Brandon 1967; Campbell 1988).
The ineffable gods were a daimonic expression of creating the world. Even thought and speech arise from embodied perception. The sparks of soul are germinal images. Soul illuminates the body which becomes transparent to the gods within.
Dionysus has the ability to descend and ascend from the underworld. Soul is identified by the Neoplatonists with the dismembered Dionysus, who is himself anciently identified with the fly agaric, which reflects the darker side of the mushroom world, the depths in the darkness of psyche.
Hillman describes the danger of a societal culture that does not allow reconciliation with dark forces within. He states, “If a culture’s philosophy does not allow enough place for the other, give credit to the invisible, then the other must squeeze itself into our psychic system in distorted form” (Hillman, Soul's Code, p. 184).
The ancients knew themselves through myth, an adaptation to primordial psychic reality that brings all aspects of life to the soul. The "dark", "feminine" and corporeal that are habitually dissociated from the psyche, the abysmal side of bodily nature with animal passions and instinctual nature.
Like Dionysus dismembered by the Titans, the embodied soul gradually recollects its immortal identity by discovering its fragments in nature. What does the earth ask of us to ensure justice for all of creation? Now a 'great grief' arises in us all for the Earth itself -- eco-anxiety, anger, despair, and depression.
No wonder Kybele still laments. So let us make her an altar, a shrine. We may find it in our wounds and scars, our intersections or transitions, that frame the wounding scene as they bind past, present, and future. Healing is consciousness breaking through dismemberment.
Enchanting Territory
Nature is the domain of psyche, a mysterious communication with our inner feelings and an influence on our imagination. There are correlations between the external world and our moods.
The very land on which we stand is our foundation. What could be more common and shared than the land, water, and air that gives us all life? To tend the earth and our relationship to the earth is always to tend our destiny and what has decayed.
That is tending, rather than willful intending. The living process of the psyche gives preference to a dramatic, mythological way of thinking and speaking, and encountering imaginal entities. Our embodied imagination is a simultaneous multiplicity of emotional embodied states (Boznak), mirrored in the deep field, high mountain, and dark cave.
The nature mystic experience is one of the most awesome and easily accessed non-ordinary states. Every landscape resonates with soulful stories. Untainted wilderness is possibly one of the least realized yet most valuable healing resources we have, particularly pristine areas of desert, water or mountains where we can enjoy solitude as time and concerns seem to melt away.
Our experience of the numinous transforms from a dreadful and uncanny mysterium tremendum to aesthetic arrest and expression, and finally to a transpersonal, universalist or integral perspective. Our spiritual voltage rises culminating in greater degrees of existential freedom. The transformed becomes a transformer.
We have to follow Kybele's rhythm and flow to grow more comfortable in the liminal spaces, the divine mountain woodland. Phenomenological intuiting is a flow and spiral, described by the unpredictability and serendipity of the process.
We have no clear sense of what we will find or how discoveries will arise fluidly and unfold in a rich, unstructured, multidimensional way. A certain uncertainty and spontaneity must be accepted and creatively transformed into possibility and pattern.
Dreams are spatial structures with their own dream reality -- the dream field. Thomas Moore says, "dreaming is indeed a wilderness that should be explored but not tamed." They are the portal to our cavern of the Source, the underground stream.
Our soul seeks the encounter, participation in the gods. It feels called by the god through the sensate image. We make tracks in the wilderness of our dreaming, our personal dream landscapes, renewing our life and our relationship with the earth, sensing shifts in our bodily sensations -- the embodied psyche, where the gods work on us.
Reciprocity declares the earth sustains us and we sustain her in return with gratitude, paying homage in the dark, lit by the torches of our tending in dark times. We enter the activity of the gods divine action, conforming our action to divine action. Archetypal images, change the “what” of an archetype into a “how,” an activity experienced by the soul.
The invisible powers of the gods work through visible shapes and images. Then the soul re-members itself without our interpretation or understanding. Soul is transformed in the subtle or imaginal body. The agonies of the soul allow it to recover its divine body. Through our own body we may experience the entire history and consciousness of the living Earth.
Ultimately nature rules. No race, class, or gender can keep any of us from dying into that death where we are made one, the fate of all entangled life. We have a life-oriented libidinal self and a death-oriented somatic self. The desire for life and death are paradoxically yoked.
Soul mediates and reconciles ordinary consciousness (life instinct) and unconsciousness (death instinct). Soul consciousness is the undifferentiated life/death instinct, identical to the function of intuition, the primal instinct. Soul is the archetype, intuition is the instinct. (Hillman)
When things go wrong or “fall apart,” we’re drawn into the psychic depths. Descent to the underworld reclaims those darknesses for the psyche -- a hidden power of life that exceeds the needs of self-preservation. Descent dramatizes the encounter of the psyche with dissociated characteristics. The dark-adapted eye attunes our awareness to the language of the deep psyche and adaptation to psychic reality.
Psychic material arises from the unconscious or sinks down into the unconscious. Descent enacts a longing for the darkness that must be encountered in order to emerge renewed. 'To have seen the holy' is a way of speaking about Mystery. The sacrament was the heart of the Mystery. Gathering plants was a hunt for earth's children, the source of ecstatic possession.
Widespread displacement could stimulate religious fervor that helped with depression and anxiety while connecting back with the ancestors. This had to effect the population and migrations heavily. That time had different flora and fauna, rivers of double size and wildly lush forests with a cooler climate. The Black Sea harbored the Thracians, Scythians, and Cimmerians, with Anatolia to the south.
A chthonic deity, Kybele is an archaic Anatolian mother goddess with possible forerunners in the earliest Neolithic. Phrygia's national goddess spread into the ethnically Greek colonies of western Anatolia, mainland Greece, the Aegean islands and the westerly colonies of classical Magna Graecia, and later to Rome around 204 BCE.
Kybele’s cult was practiced as early as the first millennium BCE in Phrygia. It was practiced by the Greeks in the sixth century BCE and in Rome in the late third century BCE. During this time the cult changed dramatically.
The holy mycelial sacrament, once open to all, became taboo, reserved for priests, kings and other privileged people. To prevent the unprivileged from eating a sacred mushroom, a taboo was put on mushroom-eating and reinforced by treating all mushrooms as poisonous.
You have to be ready for unusual experiences, to be frightened with awe and dread, and see the strange without running away. Space and time are shredded. Some are 'lifted up' in out-of-body experiences.
Paradoxical Dual Natures
Her's was The Temple of the Imaginal. The temple, the altar and the presence of water are the main characteristics of open air sanctuaries of the prehistoric and historic times. The 'wilderness effect' alone is where people rapidly and deeply reconnect - with each other, and with 'nature'. Rushing through the wooded mountains, soul comingles with subtle atmospheres, shadowy ravines, mist, rock, and torch light. The landscape of the heart is the narrative of primordial nature and self.
The herder’s observation of the effect of the plants grazed upon by the notoriously indiscriminate goats was an indication of psychoactive potency; and goats as satyrs represent the intoxicating revel in the primordial landscape of the wilderness, before the evolution of the civilizing art of agriculture. The milk from animals that graze upon psychoactive plants is psychoactive.
There are many split-sex-gyandromorphs and animals in nature and we find the divine hermaphrodite in alchemy and the psyche. Kybele and Dionysus share paradocxial dual natures. Sabazios-Dionysos (Sabazius-Dionysus), sexually-ambiguous god of wine and vegetation was mentored by the Mother of the Gods who instructed him in the frenzied rites of the Orgia. Not just wanton revels, orgia are specific religious experiences, acts of devotion. Group as an artform coming together, exploring essence, share experiences of the imaginal realm.
Dionysus is a Hellenized version of the Thracian-Phrygian Sabazius, whose worship has significant common elements of Haoma and Soma worship. Dionysus must have made his way into the Greek mainland from Thrace as well as from Phrygia, once in his old-Thracian form, the other time in a form modified by the influence of Asia Minor.
The name of his mother Semele is a Thracian-Phrygian root for earth mother. The worship of Sabazius, a Thracian-Phrygian god, was known across Greece from the 5th century, whereas in Phrygia they used to worship him as Zeus Sabazius. He is the tragic paradox of a suffering and dying god. Tradition and order are shattered with ecstasies of blessedness and terror -- a force animating belief in a most blessed deliverance.
Even earlier in Asia Minor, from the Pre-Christian era they identified him with Attis and Mithras. He was also associated with Kybele. Both were worshiped from time immemorial. Dionysus endures the brokenness of embodied dismemberment as well as the beatitude of a unified multiplicity; each agony, each poison of the soul, is also a medicine.
The soul in the body is fragmented and needs to recover itself not by withdrawal, introspection, and escape but by creating proper receptacles to contain the gods, to give these deepest impulses of the soul a divine shape. Cult rites were so frightening because they presented supernatural occurrences that the myth expressed in words.
The stipe of the mushroom was called its thyrsus, the trunk of the mushroom, therefore metaphorically a tree. The thyrsus was a staff of altered mystical vision and emblematic of the psychoactive and magical herbs it contained. Prime among these were the psychoactive Amanita muscaria or fly agaric
mushroom and related species.
Sabazius, of the Early Iron Age, embodied an entheogenic mushroom god, Amanita Muscaria, identified with Haoma-Soma, the god of the ancient Indian-Iranian people. Haoma-Soma was also the source of the sacred immortality drink. The pinecone was an emblem of the god, but also suggestive of altered vision, since the pineal gland was so named for its resemblance to the pinecone and commonly considered the visionary organ of mystical transcendence.
Gordon Wasson found Soma, the Food of the Gods, in the Vedic hymns (written in Sanskrit about the time of the Trojan War). Also called 'Ambrosia' and 'Nectar' it was the immortality food and drink of the Greek Olympian gods. Sappho and Alcman preserved the ancient tradition of Ambrosia as a drink, not a food. It was squeezed out between boards, then mixed with milk or curds; and the pulp was thrown away. According to these Vedic hymns, Agni, the god of mystic illumination and holy fire, who was also expressly identified with Soma, had been created when the Father God Indra threw a lightning bolt at the Earth.
Dionysus (Bacchus), the Greek god of mystic illumination, was similarly born when his father the God Zeus (Jove) threw a lightning bolt at the Earth Goddess Semele. Dionysus eventually conducted his mother to Heaven where she changed her name to Thyone, meaning 'Queen of the Maenads' (or raging women) and presided over Dionysus's ecstatic October festival, called The Ambrosia. October was the mushroom season.
The pre-Classical priests of Dionysus claimed the sole rights in the scarlet mushroom, the memory of which they had brought from their original homes in Central Asia and which is not found growing south of the fortieth parallel, except at a great height and always in birch and fir groves. The effect of the Amanita muscaria taken without other intoxicants gives delightful hallucinations, if they are in a state of grace, but horrible nightmares otherwise. Fortified, however, with beer and the juice of yellow ivy it would send Greek men and women raging mad.
That Dionysus was Ambrosia, as his Indian counterpart Agni was Soma, is echoed by the legend of his birth from Zeus's thigh. The Vedic hymns describe two different ways of taking Soma. The first was a simple drinking of the juice pressed from the mushrooms between boards and mixed with milk or curds. The hallucinogenic indoles entered the stomach and kidneys and were later discharged with the urine. It has been known for at least two centuries that the Korjaks do so after drinking the mushroom juice, and that their friends strain the urine through wool and, after drinking it, enjoy the same ecstasies. This explains Dionysus's second birth from the thigh of his father Zeus and his subsequent release to worshippers in a stream of hallucinogenic urine. Yet Dionysus's source of intoxication has always been politely attributed by Greek scholars to wine.
https://www.math.uci.edu/~vbaranov/nicetexts/eng/mushrooms.html
The plant entheogenic mushroom-deity worshiped in Thrace as Sabazius, was adopted and incorporated in the deity the Greeks called Dionysus. Heraclitus considered Hades and Dionysus one and the same. Stone mushrooms-deities are found in cemeteries, which denotes the association of the mushroom-deity with the buried dead people. The Dionysian Anthesteria festival was actually an ecstatic festival which had to do with visions of the dead.
"Dionysian illustrations depict wine and clusters of grapes. The frame of these clusters in some cases looks more like a mushroom than a cluster. A hypothesis exists that the ancient entheogenic Dionysian mushrooms became a religious taboo hidden under a layer esoteric symbolism. At this time a unification of both symbols, the mushroom and the cluster takes place."
"The escorts of the God, initiated in Dionysian mysteries, intentionally tried to conceal the occult knowledge of the mushroom behind widely recognizable interpretative forms. They created images that were subject to dual reading
interpretation, one the sacred (mushroom) and the other the non religious (cluster of grapes)." (Samorini - Camilla 1995, 307-326)
This view is much more complex than stereotypes, redictions, or misuse of evidence. No deity was conceived of in the same way by everyone at any single time or place in antiquity. Thus there often was considerable variance between cities concerning divine attributes and companions.
Our own descent from the roots of mankind reveals the instinct, opinion, and knowledge of original thought. Rational comes from 'ratio' - from relationship. The bones of our mother are the stones of the Earth. The body of the Earth and her water is our water, our body, as primordial as it ever was.
This Mother of the Gods is a fertile darkness. Kybele has rural, funerary, initiatory, and urban contexts. The initiate shares same fate as Attis, death & resurrection via life-giving power of goddess Kybele. She appears not only with Attis, a Phrygian god of nature and viticulture, but in the company of a number of deities. Dionysus, Hermes, Eros, Pan and Zeus and the Thracian Horseman appear.
Dionysos was related to ecstatic rituals and worshiped in both city and wild places. Pan, a mountain god, appears with syrinx, shepherd’s pipes and all the characteristics of a pastoral role. Dionysus, god of dismemberment and sponsor of the lost or abandoned feminine, is characterized by spontaneity, fluid boundaries, sexuality, embodiment, wild nature, ecstasy and chaos.
Greek language didn't distinguish between madness and intoxication as Dionysos meant all inebriants and psychotropic plants. His wine was fortified by other intoxicants before distillation was invented. Greek wine could be hallucinogenic and had to be diluted.
Female deities appearing with Kybele include Demeter, Artemis, Aphrodite, Hekate and Kore-Persephone. She was equated with preexisting Greek deities such as Rhea, Demeter (especially in Asia Minor), and less with Gaia-Earth.
The cult of the female deity is entwined with the birth of religion, concepts of death and funeral rituals, widowhood rites and the ancestral world. There are three absolute certainties in life – birth, change and death. As human beings we are terrified of all of them. When we grieve we are dealing with all three at the same time.
The funerary context of the Phrygian Mother's worship is stressed. The power and madness of the grieving mind, the emotion of grief is its ritual performance, as mirrored in Kybele's rites. Special dance gestures and expressions of feelings are representations of grieving and mourning, raw primordial human emotions.
Raised arms in the air or to the head, banging the head, or dramatically waving or tearing long hair express the pathos of images in motion with identification and active subjectivication. Gestural, mythical, and and ritual modalities of grieving and mourning contrast her ecstatic dance, the lament as a way of channeling and renewing energy.
Mircea Eliade thought archaic societies lived as much as they can in the sacred, because it is equivalent to power, which is reality saturated with being. To begin to put ourselves in their place, we have to reimagine their specific culture and environment.
We don't need to take it apart, dismember or dissect it to examine it more closely. We can approach with Kybele's own imaginal vision, reviving our awareness of the in-between realm where myth, religion, and art had always bridged the upper and lower reaches of the psyche. Raising collective archetypal awareness of the psyche’s relationship with Earth is an ecopsychological framework.
From the dreamworld we learn what psychic nature really is. Jung says, "Our unconscious existence is the real one, and the conscious world is a kind of illusion, an apparent reality constructed for a specific purpose like a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it."
This is the most ancient immersive approach to engagement with the imaginal realm. The objective psyche, like nature, reacts powerfully to any attempt to manipulate it with will, to attempt shifting archetypal reality to what we want it to be.
Is not the speculative operation a function of the soul and necessary to psyche? We create an image of what that society was like and what worship arose from it -- the greater psychic, mythological context. This is the Orient of the soul, beyond the normal senses.
The psychedelic experience removes such impediments with its own imperatives -- the innate wisdom of psyche and nature. It is pre-logical and pre-dialogical, imagistic. Images self-arise, flicker, morph, and evaporate. We seek to evoke and engage through enactive imagination, soulful experiences that are behind the ancient stories.
Motions, movements, bodily movements, and actions are central for grasping how we empathize with natural environments. Enactive imagination discloses more depth of perceptual content and phenomenal character. Physical movement is a means to achieve flow experiences and immersion in the natural world from the action-oriented nature of perception.
Projective imagination is a type of embodied and embedded activity of emulating or rehearsing movements while participating in the natural environment. Aesthetic experiences of nature are experienced as sublime, wild, or awesome, involving properties such as powerfulness, grandness, spontaneity, and raw agency beyond our control.
According to Herodotus (Herodotus, History, V, 2, Matica Srpska, Belgrade, 1988), Poseidon was the main Thracian god but other deities they celebrated included Dionysus Arei and Artemis [Kybele]. Dionysus was originally a god of the Underworld, associated with suffering, darkness, dirt, descent, and death.
The Egyptians equated him with Hades and Osiris. Jung said all of us are 'dismembered,' fragmented, divided, and ruled by unconscious forces. “The Hades within Dionysus says that there is an invisible meaning in sexual acts, a significance for the soul in the phallic parade, that all of our life force, including the polymorphic and pornographic desires of the psyche, refer to the underworld of images.” (James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, p. 45)
Orpheus taught the divine nature of the human soul. Its doctrine was that the soul, because of its sins, wandered around, but with ecstasy, asceticism and initiation it cleansed itself and returned to the stars.
Six or eight thousand years ago, the proto-Greeks were storytelling with gods and goddesses, personified manifestations of invisible archetypes. Mythic themes appear again and again, following their own sacred history. Living symbols embody and activate meaning. When it dies only the historical value is preserved. Our species has only coincided with 0.01% of Earth's history.
The external, historical, material-physical world, and its socio-cultural structures, keeps changing, and knowledge advances. A disjunction between the Imaginal and the Historical Myth expresses the Imaginal as material-physical, historical, and personal narrative. We can explore her vision while staying close to psyche’s native tongue -- myth.
Because of this disjunction, myths, our representations of the sacred, have to be constantly reinvented and re-envisaged in each historical period. The deeper reaches of the unconscious remain foreign and unruly, generating tension between the reasonable and untamable.
"Engagement with other earthlings does not assuage the unearthly longings. These are not longings for the world and they are not satisfied by anything we do any where with any body." (Hillman, Force of Character, pg 129)
History reveals that the aggregate body of Neolithic figurines urges us to contemplate gender ascriptions, including more than traditional male/female, either/or dichotomies. If we jettison the conventional binary opposition we are left with the possibility that the early preliterate communities of Neolithic Greece employed multiple or even fluid gender categories, at least in their visual repertoire. Liminal personae combine qualities of religion, sexuality, and self-aggression.
Such categories include male, female, neuter, dual-sexed, and possibly a dynamic classification that move in and out of sexual/gender identities. In some ways, this conclusion should not come as a surprise: the existence of several genders, gender-crossing and shifting categories is known from a variety of cultures and there is no reason to doubt that such melding of identities were part of life in the distant past.
The mere existence of these multiple categories suggests that gendered identities were not uncomplicated choices in Neolithic Greece. Some levels or realms of Neolithic Greek society, sacred or profane, may have encouraged a conscious and self-constructed determination of gender that remained open to alteration during a lifetime.
The point is to see the point from the inside, to show that the mythic image is cytheric (referring to Venus) and tropological (a figurative interpretation stressing moral metaphor). How did Neolithics imagine the world they lived in?
We don't wish to explain as much as 'enliven.' We are forced toward what anthropologists call competitive plausibility among hypothetical postulations. There is mythical factor and figures at work in our lives, styles of existence. It's a deliteralized Greece of the mind we seek. Myth acts as a foil for objective reflection.
Every culture has acknowledged and incorporated the imaginal psyche. Cosmos once referred to the anima mundi, the world soul, the appearance of things -- multiple simultaneous consciousness exists. We are sensate image-making creatures.
Image and imagination are primordial, the interpentration of all sensation and imagination. Every image is sensate. Every sensation is image. We perceive things as images. Cosmology is analogous to psyche, knowledge of relationship with the gods. What we love, live, and die for is not be expressed in words. It is mythical.
Soul has a need for cosmological vision, inspiration, enthusiasm, divine intervention. Cultures share in the idea of a [psychotropic] 'elixir vitae' and the contra-sexual Androgyne.
Theological Process
That multi-sensory eucharist may have begun as Amanita muscaria and devolved into a variety of visionary brews and psychophysical ordeals, initiations, and rites conjured by wandering initiators. There are several kinds of mania. Powerful alteration lead to powerful discharges of psychosensory representational visions. Sometimes the trance entirely obliterated discursive awareness.
We are struck by the goddess. The essential characteristics of the feminine outlook are a holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete view of the world, grasped all at once. Thus, the feminine is associated with images, trance, and out-of-body experiences. The supernatural is sacred and spiritual. Feeling states are authentic. Once we experience love or ecstatic states, we know it. Inspiration is possession by a god.
The Greeks perceived intense mental/mystical, magical/mental, experiences as divine intervention. Divine knowledge came by liberating the soul from the burden of the mortal body through ecstasis, mania, or enthousiasmos, that is, by merging with a superhuman being or possession by a deity.
Whatever was perceived or uttered in such states – prophecy, poetry, or mystical insights – was considered inspired by the gods -- a valued channel of communication with the gods. In mystery initiations, alteration of consciousness was a means of attaining revelation leading to the peak experience, defined by the ancients as eudaimonia, blessedness.
Such altered states of consciousness involve the sensation of ineffable revelation of superhuman truth, a part of human natural potential. These states are multifarious, can involve various subjective and objective manifestations, and induced by many methods, including entheogens, rhythmic drumming and music, isolation, and exhaustion. We descend the underground grotto to drink from the sacred spring, the ultimate source of divine wisdom.
Kybele remains an active Presence, an encounter with awe, the numinous, the ineffable and irreducible mysteriousness of life and the psyche. Today, Kybele can be seen in contemporary nature religion and ecosophy, "The Feminine" in depth psychology, the psychedelic movement, and New Age practices. Kybele still openly mourns, grieves our life losses, and calls us to her torch-lit mountain sanctuaries.
"True action, good and radiant action, my friends, does not spring from activity, from busy bustling, it does not spring from industrious hammering. It grows in the solitude of the mountains, it grows on the summits where silence and danger dwell. It grows out of the suffering which you have not yet learned to suffer," said Hermann Hesse.
Ecosophy is wisdom of place, an ecological wisdom manifest in jar,pmopis ecp;pgoca; actions. Home, the spirit of place, and our personal relationship to this place, can be a natural location or part of the built environment—urban, rural, wilderness, jungle, desert, arctic, ocean.
A new way of knowing about our home/place and way of being embodies calls us to reawaken humankind’s participating consciousness. Likewise it represents a waking up from geomantic amnesia and a renewal of our sense of communion with our earthbody.
Kybele embodies a kinship with beasts and gods, with crystals and with stars. She is the seductiveness of the metaxy as a mystical medium, the liminal space where soul is made, an immediacy without names, labels, and meaning -- an interval between good and evil. The symbolic “exercise of severance” from the external to the internal world, becomes literal in radical bloodrites.
Her's was The Temple of the Imaginal. The temple, the altar and the presence of water are the main characteristics of open air sanctuaries of the prehistoric and historic times. The 'wilderness effect' alone is where people rapidly and deeply reconnect - with each other, and with 'nature'. Rushing through the wooded mountains, soul comingles with subtle atmospheres, shadowy ravines, mist, rock, and torch light. The landscape of the heart is the narrative of primordial nature and self.
The herder’s observation of the effect of the plants grazed upon by the notoriously indiscriminate goats was an indication of psychoactive potency; and goats as satyrs represent the intoxicating revel in the primordial landscape of the wilderness, before the evolution of the civilizing art of agriculture. The milk from animals that graze upon psychoactive plants is psychoactive.
There are many split-sex-gyandromorphs and animals in nature and we find the divine hermaphrodite in alchemy and the psyche. Kybele and Dionysus share paradocxial dual natures. Sabazios-Dionysos (Sabazius-Dionysus), sexually-ambiguous god of wine and vegetation was mentored by the Mother of the Gods who instructed him in the frenzied rites of the Orgia. Not just wanton revels, orgia are specific religious experiences, acts of devotion. Group as an artform coming together, exploring essence, share experiences of the imaginal realm.
Dionysus is a Hellenized version of the Thracian-Phrygian Sabazius, whose worship has significant common elements of Haoma and Soma worship. Dionysus must have made his way into the Greek mainland from Thrace as well as from Phrygia, once in his old-Thracian form, the other time in a form modified by the influence of Asia Minor.
The name of his mother Semele is a Thracian-Phrygian root for earth mother. The worship of Sabazius, a Thracian-Phrygian god, was known across Greece from the 5th century, whereas in Phrygia they used to worship him as Zeus Sabazius. He is the tragic paradox of a suffering and dying god. Tradition and order are shattered with ecstasies of blessedness and terror -- a force animating belief in a most blessed deliverance.
Even earlier in Asia Minor, from the Pre-Christian era they identified him with Attis and Mithras. He was also associated with Kybele. Both were worshiped from time immemorial. Dionysus endures the brokenness of embodied dismemberment as well as the beatitude of a unified multiplicity; each agony, each poison of the soul, is also a medicine.
The soul in the body is fragmented and needs to recover itself not by withdrawal, introspection, and escape but by creating proper receptacles to contain the gods, to give these deepest impulses of the soul a divine shape. Cult rites were so frightening because they presented supernatural occurrences that the myth expressed in words.
The stipe of the mushroom was called its thyrsus, the trunk of the mushroom, therefore metaphorically a tree. The thyrsus was a staff of altered mystical vision and emblematic of the psychoactive and magical herbs it contained. Prime among these were the psychoactive Amanita muscaria or fly agaric
mushroom and related species.
Sabazius, of the Early Iron Age, embodied an entheogenic mushroom god, Amanita Muscaria, identified with Haoma-Soma, the god of the ancient Indian-Iranian people. Haoma-Soma was also the source of the sacred immortality drink. The pinecone was an emblem of the god, but also suggestive of altered vision, since the pineal gland was so named for its resemblance to the pinecone and commonly considered the visionary organ of mystical transcendence.
Gordon Wasson found Soma, the Food of the Gods, in the Vedic hymns (written in Sanskrit about the time of the Trojan War). Also called 'Ambrosia' and 'Nectar' it was the immortality food and drink of the Greek Olympian gods. Sappho and Alcman preserved the ancient tradition of Ambrosia as a drink, not a food. It was squeezed out between boards, then mixed with milk or curds; and the pulp was thrown away. According to these Vedic hymns, Agni, the god of mystic illumination and holy fire, who was also expressly identified with Soma, had been created when the Father God Indra threw a lightning bolt at the Earth.
Dionysus (Bacchus), the Greek god of mystic illumination, was similarly born when his father the God Zeus (Jove) threw a lightning bolt at the Earth Goddess Semele. Dionysus eventually conducted his mother to Heaven where she changed her name to Thyone, meaning 'Queen of the Maenads' (or raging women) and presided over Dionysus's ecstatic October festival, called The Ambrosia. October was the mushroom season.
The pre-Classical priests of Dionysus claimed the sole rights in the scarlet mushroom, the memory of which they had brought from their original homes in Central Asia and which is not found growing south of the fortieth parallel, except at a great height and always in birch and fir groves. The effect of the Amanita muscaria taken without other intoxicants gives delightful hallucinations, if they are in a state of grace, but horrible nightmares otherwise. Fortified, however, with beer and the juice of yellow ivy it would send Greek men and women raging mad.
That Dionysus was Ambrosia, as his Indian counterpart Agni was Soma, is echoed by the legend of his birth from Zeus's thigh. The Vedic hymns describe two different ways of taking Soma. The first was a simple drinking of the juice pressed from the mushrooms between boards and mixed with milk or curds. The hallucinogenic indoles entered the stomach and kidneys and were later discharged with the urine. It has been known for at least two centuries that the Korjaks do so after drinking the mushroom juice, and that their friends strain the urine through wool and, after drinking it, enjoy the same ecstasies. This explains Dionysus's second birth from the thigh of his father Zeus and his subsequent release to worshippers in a stream of hallucinogenic urine. Yet Dionysus's source of intoxication has always been politely attributed by Greek scholars to wine.
https://www.math.uci.edu/~vbaranov/nicetexts/eng/mushrooms.html
The plant entheogenic mushroom-deity worshiped in Thrace as Sabazius, was adopted and incorporated in the deity the Greeks called Dionysus. Heraclitus considered Hades and Dionysus one and the same. Stone mushrooms-deities are found in cemeteries, which denotes the association of the mushroom-deity with the buried dead people. The Dionysian Anthesteria festival was actually an ecstatic festival which had to do with visions of the dead.
"Dionysian illustrations depict wine and clusters of grapes. The frame of these clusters in some cases looks more like a mushroom than a cluster. A hypothesis exists that the ancient entheogenic Dionysian mushrooms became a religious taboo hidden under a layer esoteric symbolism. At this time a unification of both symbols, the mushroom and the cluster takes place."
"The escorts of the God, initiated in Dionysian mysteries, intentionally tried to conceal the occult knowledge of the mushroom behind widely recognizable interpretative forms. They created images that were subject to dual reading
interpretation, one the sacred (mushroom) and the other the non religious (cluster of grapes)." (Samorini - Camilla 1995, 307-326)
This view is much more complex than stereotypes, redictions, or misuse of evidence. No deity was conceived of in the same way by everyone at any single time or place in antiquity. Thus there often was considerable variance between cities concerning divine attributes and companions.
Our own descent from the roots of mankind reveals the instinct, opinion, and knowledge of original thought. Rational comes from 'ratio' - from relationship. The bones of our mother are the stones of the Earth. The body of the Earth and her water is our water, our body, as primordial as it ever was.
This Mother of the Gods is a fertile darkness. Kybele has rural, funerary, initiatory, and urban contexts. The initiate shares same fate as Attis, death & resurrection via life-giving power of goddess Kybele. She appears not only with Attis, a Phrygian god of nature and viticulture, but in the company of a number of deities. Dionysus, Hermes, Eros, Pan and Zeus and the Thracian Horseman appear.
Dionysos was related to ecstatic rituals and worshiped in both city and wild places. Pan, a mountain god, appears with syrinx, shepherd’s pipes and all the characteristics of a pastoral role. Dionysus, god of dismemberment and sponsor of the lost or abandoned feminine, is characterized by spontaneity, fluid boundaries, sexuality, embodiment, wild nature, ecstasy and chaos.
Greek language didn't distinguish between madness and intoxication as Dionysos meant all inebriants and psychotropic plants. His wine was fortified by other intoxicants before distillation was invented. Greek wine could be hallucinogenic and had to be diluted.
Female deities appearing with Kybele include Demeter, Artemis, Aphrodite, Hekate and Kore-Persephone. She was equated with preexisting Greek deities such as Rhea, Demeter (especially in Asia Minor), and less with Gaia-Earth.
The cult of the female deity is entwined with the birth of religion, concepts of death and funeral rituals, widowhood rites and the ancestral world. There are three absolute certainties in life – birth, change and death. As human beings we are terrified of all of them. When we grieve we are dealing with all three at the same time.
The funerary context of the Phrygian Mother's worship is stressed. The power and madness of the grieving mind, the emotion of grief is its ritual performance, as mirrored in Kybele's rites. Special dance gestures and expressions of feelings are representations of grieving and mourning, raw primordial human emotions.
Raised arms in the air or to the head, banging the head, or dramatically waving or tearing long hair express the pathos of images in motion with identification and active subjectivication. Gestural, mythical, and and ritual modalities of grieving and mourning contrast her ecstatic dance, the lament as a way of channeling and renewing energy.
Mircea Eliade thought archaic societies lived as much as they can in the sacred, because it is equivalent to power, which is reality saturated with being. To begin to put ourselves in their place, we have to reimagine their specific culture and environment.
We don't need to take it apart, dismember or dissect it to examine it more closely. We can approach with Kybele's own imaginal vision, reviving our awareness of the in-between realm where myth, religion, and art had always bridged the upper and lower reaches of the psyche. Raising collective archetypal awareness of the psyche’s relationship with Earth is an ecopsychological framework.
From the dreamworld we learn what psychic nature really is. Jung says, "Our unconscious existence is the real one, and the conscious world is a kind of illusion, an apparent reality constructed for a specific purpose like a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it."
This is the most ancient immersive approach to engagement with the imaginal realm. The objective psyche, like nature, reacts powerfully to any attempt to manipulate it with will, to attempt shifting archetypal reality to what we want it to be.
Is not the speculative operation a function of the soul and necessary to psyche? We create an image of what that society was like and what worship arose from it -- the greater psychic, mythological context. This is the Orient of the soul, beyond the normal senses.
The psychedelic experience removes such impediments with its own imperatives -- the innate wisdom of psyche and nature. It is pre-logical and pre-dialogical, imagistic. Images self-arise, flicker, morph, and evaporate. We seek to evoke and engage through enactive imagination, soulful experiences that are behind the ancient stories.
Motions, movements, bodily movements, and actions are central for grasping how we empathize with natural environments. Enactive imagination discloses more depth of perceptual content and phenomenal character. Physical movement is a means to achieve flow experiences and immersion in the natural world from the action-oriented nature of perception.
Projective imagination is a type of embodied and embedded activity of emulating or rehearsing movements while participating in the natural environment. Aesthetic experiences of nature are experienced as sublime, wild, or awesome, involving properties such as powerfulness, grandness, spontaneity, and raw agency beyond our control.
According to Herodotus (Herodotus, History, V, 2, Matica Srpska, Belgrade, 1988), Poseidon was the main Thracian god but other deities they celebrated included Dionysus Arei and Artemis [Kybele]. Dionysus was originally a god of the Underworld, associated with suffering, darkness, dirt, descent, and death.
The Egyptians equated him with Hades and Osiris. Jung said all of us are 'dismembered,' fragmented, divided, and ruled by unconscious forces. “The Hades within Dionysus says that there is an invisible meaning in sexual acts, a significance for the soul in the phallic parade, that all of our life force, including the polymorphic and pornographic desires of the psyche, refer to the underworld of images.” (James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, p. 45)
Orpheus taught the divine nature of the human soul. Its doctrine was that the soul, because of its sins, wandered around, but with ecstasy, asceticism and initiation it cleansed itself and returned to the stars.
Six or eight thousand years ago, the proto-Greeks were storytelling with gods and goddesses, personified manifestations of invisible archetypes. Mythic themes appear again and again, following their own sacred history. Living symbols embody and activate meaning. When it dies only the historical value is preserved. Our species has only coincided with 0.01% of Earth's history.
The external, historical, material-physical world, and its socio-cultural structures, keeps changing, and knowledge advances. A disjunction between the Imaginal and the Historical Myth expresses the Imaginal as material-physical, historical, and personal narrative. We can explore her vision while staying close to psyche’s native tongue -- myth.
Because of this disjunction, myths, our representations of the sacred, have to be constantly reinvented and re-envisaged in each historical period. The deeper reaches of the unconscious remain foreign and unruly, generating tension between the reasonable and untamable.
"Engagement with other earthlings does not assuage the unearthly longings. These are not longings for the world and they are not satisfied by anything we do any where with any body." (Hillman, Force of Character, pg 129)
History reveals that the aggregate body of Neolithic figurines urges us to contemplate gender ascriptions, including more than traditional male/female, either/or dichotomies. If we jettison the conventional binary opposition we are left with the possibility that the early preliterate communities of Neolithic Greece employed multiple or even fluid gender categories, at least in their visual repertoire. Liminal personae combine qualities of religion, sexuality, and self-aggression.
Such categories include male, female, neuter, dual-sexed, and possibly a dynamic classification that move in and out of sexual/gender identities. In some ways, this conclusion should not come as a surprise: the existence of several genders, gender-crossing and shifting categories is known from a variety of cultures and there is no reason to doubt that such melding of identities were part of life in the distant past.
The mere existence of these multiple categories suggests that gendered identities were not uncomplicated choices in Neolithic Greece. Some levels or realms of Neolithic Greek society, sacred or profane, may have encouraged a conscious and self-constructed determination of gender that remained open to alteration during a lifetime.
The point is to see the point from the inside, to show that the mythic image is cytheric (referring to Venus) and tropological (a figurative interpretation stressing moral metaphor). How did Neolithics imagine the world they lived in?
We don't wish to explain as much as 'enliven.' We are forced toward what anthropologists call competitive plausibility among hypothetical postulations. There is mythical factor and figures at work in our lives, styles of existence. It's a deliteralized Greece of the mind we seek. Myth acts as a foil for objective reflection.
Every culture has acknowledged and incorporated the imaginal psyche. Cosmos once referred to the anima mundi, the world soul, the appearance of things -- multiple simultaneous consciousness exists. We are sensate image-making creatures.
Image and imagination are primordial, the interpentration of all sensation and imagination. Every image is sensate. Every sensation is image. We perceive things as images. Cosmology is analogous to psyche, knowledge of relationship with the gods. What we love, live, and die for is not be expressed in words. It is mythical.
Soul has a need for cosmological vision, inspiration, enthusiasm, divine intervention. Cultures share in the idea of a [psychotropic] 'elixir vitae' and the contra-sexual Androgyne.
Theological Process
That multi-sensory eucharist may have begun as Amanita muscaria and devolved into a variety of visionary brews and psychophysical ordeals, initiations, and rites conjured by wandering initiators. There are several kinds of mania. Powerful alteration lead to powerful discharges of psychosensory representational visions. Sometimes the trance entirely obliterated discursive awareness.
We are struck by the goddess. The essential characteristics of the feminine outlook are a holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete view of the world, grasped all at once. Thus, the feminine is associated with images, trance, and out-of-body experiences. The supernatural is sacred and spiritual. Feeling states are authentic. Once we experience love or ecstatic states, we know it. Inspiration is possession by a god.
The Greeks perceived intense mental/mystical, magical/mental, experiences as divine intervention. Divine knowledge came by liberating the soul from the burden of the mortal body through ecstasis, mania, or enthousiasmos, that is, by merging with a superhuman being or possession by a deity.
Whatever was perceived or uttered in such states – prophecy, poetry, or mystical insights – was considered inspired by the gods -- a valued channel of communication with the gods. In mystery initiations, alteration of consciousness was a means of attaining revelation leading to the peak experience, defined by the ancients as eudaimonia, blessedness.
Such altered states of consciousness involve the sensation of ineffable revelation of superhuman truth, a part of human natural potential. These states are multifarious, can involve various subjective and objective manifestations, and induced by many methods, including entheogens, rhythmic drumming and music, isolation, and exhaustion. We descend the underground grotto to drink from the sacred spring, the ultimate source of divine wisdom.
Kybele remains an active Presence, an encounter with awe, the numinous, the ineffable and irreducible mysteriousness of life and the psyche. Today, Kybele can be seen in contemporary nature religion and ecosophy, "The Feminine" in depth psychology, the psychedelic movement, and New Age practices. Kybele still openly mourns, grieves our life losses, and calls us to her torch-lit mountain sanctuaries.
"True action, good and radiant action, my friends, does not spring from activity, from busy bustling, it does not spring from industrious hammering. It grows in the solitude of the mountains, it grows on the summits where silence and danger dwell. It grows out of the suffering which you have not yet learned to suffer," said Hermann Hesse.
Ecosophy is wisdom of place, an ecological wisdom manifest in jar,pmopis ecp;pgoca; actions. Home, the spirit of place, and our personal relationship to this place, can be a natural location or part of the built environment—urban, rural, wilderness, jungle, desert, arctic, ocean.
A new way of knowing about our home/place and way of being embodies calls us to reawaken humankind’s participating consciousness. Likewise it represents a waking up from geomantic amnesia and a renewal of our sense of communion with our earthbody.
Kybele embodies a kinship with beasts and gods, with crystals and with stars. She is the seductiveness of the metaxy as a mystical medium, the liminal space where soul is made, an immediacy without names, labels, and meaning -- an interval between good and evil. The symbolic “exercise of severance” from the external to the internal world, becomes literal in radical bloodrites.
Inhuman Relations
Kybele keeps a middle gender between the two, ceasing to be a man without becoming a woman -- androgyne as self-image. 'O Self-Luminous Image of the chaste and obscene, the androgyne and the gynander have passed beyond the boundaries.' The dark-skinned goddess survives in the Black Madonna, which echoes the black meteoric form of the original Kybele.
Dionysus cavorts wildly with his whirling and ravaging Maenads. For two or three days and nights, the ancient participants mourned and searched for Attys with abandoned rites and ritualized bodies, phenomena that do not conform with our world-view. The Androgyne, both male and female together, symbolized a concept largely alien to all of conformity. The non-binary path to self discovery, of mediation, invokes the mythic androgyne.
The dominant deity of the New Age is the Earth Goddess or the Mother Goddess, imaged as Gaia, Demeter, Kybele, Aphrodite, Astarte, or other cultural and historical forms. It almost seems “any God(dess) will do,” though each has her own context and depth.
The Earth Goddess is always featured with her consort, son-lover, or priest, whose phallic capacities are emphasized, as in Attis, Dionysus, Adonis, Tammuz, Pan, and Priapus. We are panicked by the Dionysian flow. The dead were transformed by rite into ancestors. We get info from our ancestors and our descendants, which might mean DNA is more of a tuner than a repository.
We still reverence the dark green religion and tragic insight. Jung (1959/1980) regarded death-rebirth as the “archetype of transformation” (p. 81). He equates rebirth with a psychic transformation through a process resembling initiatory ordeals. A rite of passage is a crisis and transition, suffering initiatory torture, death, and resurrection.
New myths are built from older ones, or even created from scratch. This is the task of the mythopoeticist, the myth-maker. Hillman reminds us that, “…behavior cannot help but be mythic. Plot is always going on. All things are full of daimones. We cannot fall out of the hands of the Gods, nor they out of our hands, for they are in our actual physical hands, in the moves they make."
Things constantly change. We always require mythic narratives, so there will always be the need for mythopoeticists, to readjust the Imaginal narratives in a way that is applicable to the historical and socio-cultural forms of the day.
Where pathos is manifest, a certain formula or pattern from antiquity can be retraced as an emotional charge. In its recovery of the passionate nature expressed in images it finds expression in iconic formula that repeats itself over time. (Warburg, 1932)
Archetypal Psychology affirms this notion. Hillman especially looked to Greek religion for a polytheistic way of reading the psyche. That is, a way of living multiple-mindedly rather than single-mindedly, fragmentedly rather than holistically, archetypally rather than moralistically.
Cultural vitality depends less on aspirations and history than mythic sensibility, willingly entertaining the divine and daimonic force of ideas. Myth-making can be considered the highest form of story-telling. We still do it.
https://www.academia.edu/506404/Mythopoesis_in_the_Modern_World?email_work_card=view-paper
Kybele keeps a middle gender between the two, ceasing to be a man without becoming a woman -- androgyne as self-image. 'O Self-Luminous Image of the chaste and obscene, the androgyne and the gynander have passed beyond the boundaries.' The dark-skinned goddess survives in the Black Madonna, which echoes the black meteoric form of the original Kybele.
Dionysus cavorts wildly with his whirling and ravaging Maenads. For two or three days and nights, the ancient participants mourned and searched for Attys with abandoned rites and ritualized bodies, phenomena that do not conform with our world-view. The Androgyne, both male and female together, symbolized a concept largely alien to all of conformity. The non-binary path to self discovery, of mediation, invokes the mythic androgyne.
The dominant deity of the New Age is the Earth Goddess or the Mother Goddess, imaged as Gaia, Demeter, Kybele, Aphrodite, Astarte, or other cultural and historical forms. It almost seems “any God(dess) will do,” though each has her own context and depth.
The Earth Goddess is always featured with her consort, son-lover, or priest, whose phallic capacities are emphasized, as in Attis, Dionysus, Adonis, Tammuz, Pan, and Priapus. We are panicked by the Dionysian flow. The dead were transformed by rite into ancestors. We get info from our ancestors and our descendants, which might mean DNA is more of a tuner than a repository.
We still reverence the dark green religion and tragic insight. Jung (1959/1980) regarded death-rebirth as the “archetype of transformation” (p. 81). He equates rebirth with a psychic transformation through a process resembling initiatory ordeals. A rite of passage is a crisis and transition, suffering initiatory torture, death, and resurrection.
New myths are built from older ones, or even created from scratch. This is the task of the mythopoeticist, the myth-maker. Hillman reminds us that, “…behavior cannot help but be mythic. Plot is always going on. All things are full of daimones. We cannot fall out of the hands of the Gods, nor they out of our hands, for they are in our actual physical hands, in the moves they make."
Things constantly change. We always require mythic narratives, so there will always be the need for mythopoeticists, to readjust the Imaginal narratives in a way that is applicable to the historical and socio-cultural forms of the day.
Where pathos is manifest, a certain formula or pattern from antiquity can be retraced as an emotional charge. In its recovery of the passionate nature expressed in images it finds expression in iconic formula that repeats itself over time. (Warburg, 1932)
Archetypal Psychology affirms this notion. Hillman especially looked to Greek religion for a polytheistic way of reading the psyche. That is, a way of living multiple-mindedly rather than single-mindedly, fragmentedly rather than holistically, archetypally rather than moralistically.
Cultural vitality depends less on aspirations and history than mythic sensibility, willingly entertaining the divine and daimonic force of ideas. Myth-making can be considered the highest form of story-telling. We still do it.
https://www.academia.edu/506404/Mythopoesis_in_the_Modern_World?email_work_card=view-paper
The Objective Psyche
Classical mythic archetypes have been re-shaped according to the understanding and worldview of contemporary authors and readers. Here we "re-mythologize consciousness" to connect us to our mythical patterns. For James Hillman, mythic figures are the preconditions of our imagination. Do we imagine them or do they imagine us? In any case, they are real with real consequences.
There is an inter-relationship of popular culture with the Imaginal world. Themes of contemporary myth making include Otherworldliness, Encounter with the Other, and Transcendence. "Raw emotions or bodily sensations become images as soon as they are psychically registered. Feelings become images as soon as any significant awareness of them occurs." (Slater)
With Kybele, we feel "at home in the imaginal realm" (RP 37). She is the ritual space in the caverns of the unconscious. She soothes the spirits of the dead, living, and yet-unborn -- the individual genius, the heavenly image and celestial archetype of each creature collectively. She is mother of the primeval forest.
There is immediacy to mythic sensibility, felt experience, and direct and unmediated knowledge that is clear, quick, and full. There is immediacy of imaginal content or the polytheistic meaning of presence. "Like a revelation it comes all at once, and fast. It is quite independent of time – just as myths are timeless," (Hillman, Soul's Code).
Anima, or anima mundi as the soul of the world is the archetype of psychic consciousness that makes us aware of our areas of unconsciousness. Soul, in its relationship with spirit constantly invades the day-world consciousness with images, fears, moods, and mystery. It is elusive, paradoxical, and ambiguous. This mode of perception is conscious of its unconsciousness and can recognize the potential latent in the unknown aspect.
"Mythical consciousness is a mode of being in the world that brings with it imaginal persons," notes Hillman (RVP, 13). Everything we are, our instincts, our experiences, our existence is imaginal. In the beginning, there was imagination which then created soul. Soul-making is dehumanizing, overcoming egoic ways of life; it reconciles the fullness of life.
Imaginative possibility is the way human nature recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical. Mind is linked with matter, the rational with the emotional. But soul never settles into an objective reality because, by nature, soul is the “blowing spirit,” the breath of constant change, transformation, and reformation.
Soul’s purpose is to “unsettle all forms.” This unsettling occurs through re-visioning the soul. The Unconscious itself is also part of the Imaginal. Imagination and the sacred are infused with the numinous, uplifting, wondrous, awe-inspiring, magical and miraculous.
The dark side of a goddess is most intimately associated with transformation. Emotions are the felt immediacy of the gods in our bodily lives -- metamorphic chemistries and energy events. We attend to moments when soul appears.
Kybele is a mediatrix to the unknown, the unconscious, through images, not words or dialogue. Imagination, with “light” and “dark” aspects called Apollonian and Dionysian, is the world or realm of story telling, dreams and fantasy, epic, meaning, and archetype -- and non-ordinary states of consciousness. soul-making, the artistry of the unconscious is the best mode of perception to nurse along this moment-to-moment unfolding.
Do psychedelic worlds exist? Are they psychic landscapes? It is so in theophanic ecstasy. Nothing promises more certain awakening to psychic reality: a powerful body high, tingly sensations, heavy-feeling limbs, euphoria, fatigue, enhanced color and pattern perception, time distortion, auditory or visual hallucinations, images, visions, light trails, shift in perspective, personal insights, and heightened sense of interconnection and oneness.
A parallel supernatural world becomes part of everyday life. Entering the other world is a threshold passage that opens the door between the conscious and unconscious. Psychedelics offer presentational immediacy. The body is felt more deeply at home in the self-revealing psyche. Logos or reason deals with external reality.
Mythos – represented by Greek myths – is an early form of psychology, a worldview of living archetypal dimensions. Some report profound realizations, having their egos smashed into oblivion, or visiting new worlds. And often, they report these experiences as being ‘more real than real’. In this case, blood is both symbolic and very real.
A meaningful katabasis, or Orphic descent, into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge is for the restoration of the whole person. There are many motivations for a katábasis and many kinds of descent. Emphasis is placed on the distinction between mundane-personal/profane egoic and transpersonal/mythic/sacred storytelling.
The body is grounded in the soul. For some time now, researchers have been aware of the Default Mode Network. Various regions in the brain work in synchrony producing the feeling of self-referential autobiography, having an ‘ego’ or a ‘sense of self’.
Switching it off tends to correlate with mystical experiences -- feelings of ego dissolution, or loss of one’s sense of self. We open to perceiving ‘other realities’. In this sense, psychedelic worlds feel real may be because they are an imaginal and experiential reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network
The only way out is through. The fact that they can be attained, whether on or off psychedelics, means that they can be as real as any state of mind. In the therapeutic sense, they are as real as their impact, ideally, for the better. Real world effects supersede unactionable ‘truth'.
Different kinds of stories from the Orphic katabáseis are tales about the power of poetry and the ultimate finality of death or provide a vision of the cosmic system that includes both the worlds of the living and the dead. The continuing bond with the deceased exists outside our subjectivity as an autonomous image (Becker). Not all descents to the Underworld are the same; they differ in genre, in tone, in outlook, depending on who is undertaking the journey and how the Underworld appears.
Nor does the journey to the other world always have the same meaning, but the messages about the relation of life and death, of the living to the dead, and of the world of the living to the world of the dead all vary with the particular telling of the tale. This liminal world is the deep realm of Kybele. Dionysus also went to the underworld and back, like Orpheus, in the shamanic traditions preceding the Greek Mystery Religions.
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)." (James Hillman)
"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 that tends to jump down, on any occasion we are not up to. They are the gravity force of the psyche." (Hillman)
“There is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them.” C.G. Jung
Victor Turner claims, “Sooner or later, no one is exempt from ritual duty, just as no one is exempt from economic, legal, or political duty. Communal participation, obligation, the passage of the whole society through crises, collective and individual, directly or by proxy, are the hallmarks of 'the work of the gods' and sacred human work.”
Primary Perception
How did such a primordial goddess myth emerge from “unconscious primal impulses”? Emotions are the felt immediacy of the gods in our bodily lives. Campbell (2004) summarized that “the only way to affirm life is to affirm it to the root, to the rotten, horrendous base. It is this kind of affirmation that one finds in the primitive rites.” (Pathways to Bliss: p. 4)
Our perspective is grounded in the historical past with erotico-mystical strands. Archetypes give us the impression of immediacy. The Whole and the Fragmented are implicated in the area of immediate concern.
We reimagine the mutually interpenetrating Kybele and Dionysus existing from the same time, belonging to the same period of time, and alive in the present as the same psychic dynamics. Recognized or not, they are alive or denied in therapies, ideas, and cultures of the present -- planting intentions in the soil and soul.
A transformational encounter with the 'feminine' psyche, shifts consciousness into an emotionally toned and embodied awareness of the many voices of psyche. “Mystical, erotic, [or] depressive” experience is no longer something that one “has,” but is rather integrated within a multivalent and “bisexual” psyche (Hillman, Myth of Analysis, 290).
Hillman revisions psychology with Dionysian tropes, emphasizing “prolonged moistening, a life in the child, hysterical attempts at incarnation through symptoms, and erotic compulsion toward soul-making (294). The
“therapeutic goal” is a “weakening of consciousness,” rather than heroic “increase”; a “loosening and a forgetting…” (295).
Hillman says, “Dionysus offers new insight into the rending pain of self-division, especially as a body experience.” This “rending…can be understood as [a] particular kind of renewal…. necessary for awakening the consciousness of the body.” Hillman evokes Dionysus as god of drama. Healing (catharsis) occurs through finding “freedom in playing parts, partial, dismembered…never being whole but participating in the whole that is a play” of one’s own life" (38).
Dionysus dis- and re-membered initiates psyche into the “archetypal consciousness of the body”, through a Dionysian hermeneutic of renewal. Psychological dismembering frees the multiple consciousnesses which reside in our belly, feet, sex organs, and elsewhere. They gain recognition, and are given voice again. In dramatic tension, “we are composed of agonies not polarities” (Healing Fiction, 40).
Kybele, as 'the feminine,' is characterized as “the earth, darkness, the abysmal side of bodily animal passions and instinctual nature, and ‘matter’ in general” (Jung 1954, 195; Hillman 1972, 215). Consciousness itself is multivalent, with many interpretations, meanings, or values. A variety of actors invoke numerous gods through multiple masks.
Psychopathology and mythology depend on one another. Dionysus is the shadow of madness witnessed by spirit, hysteria, and pathologies of repression of emotionality, eros, the body, and materiality in general. Dionysian bisexuality and “androgynous consciousness", even our fantasies of Kybele and Dionysus cults bring another perspective. They share movement, dance, and flow. They can be freed from psychiatric distortions.
This view is unconventional, embodied, multidimensional, and transformative, with a viscerality of the depths of the body. It is polyphonic, theatrical, and a “Dionysian” hermeneutic of enactment, personae, movement, and flow. The body and imaginal body conjoin with with deep, visceral feeling, linked to the action of the image. This is the domain of the sapiential "feminine", the natural fusion of the imaginative approach and imaginal body. The "feminine" in us feels the evocative and transformative power of the image itself.
There are identifiable patterns in myth. “Contextual meaning” is embedded within the narrative architecture of story images. They tell us where we come from and where we are going. We cannot force a materialization of actual history upon the (representational) symbolic or (virtual) archetypal substrate. However, to us, many of the initiatory features sound like psychically co-created trauma.
The archetypal approach is a way of living reflectively, imaginatively, questioning, noticing, soul versus the ravages of spirit. Primordial Kybele is solitary but her bloody interactions tell the tale. Instinct in its daemonic form, entirely non-human, lives through her.
James Hillman notes that the unconscious anima is a creature without relationships, an autoerotic being whose aim is to take total possession of the individual (1985: 116). "But one thing is essential to the notion of archetypes: their emotional possessive effect, their bedazzlement of consciousness so that it becomes blind to its own stance.”
Her earliest forms are rough and formless. She doesn't possess
the psychological characteristic of projection because she is embedded in an archaic identity as her first statue is in a stone. Her numinous significance is chthonic, tied to the reflective nature of water and the provocative nature of caverns -- the “night conditions” or “night states” of the soul: intoxication, dream, trance, unconsciousness, and death.
Kybele is also the vibrantly animated presence of the world at the center of our being, how the world gets into our heart, even through drying creek beds, dwindling creatures, particular flora and fauna, earth and rock formations.
We dimly sense the secrets of the dead, images that look like living acts, symbols that hide what they claim to show, wandering spirits and souls that strive vainly for birth. The wind comes alive with invisible presences. Such moments can live forever, continuing to inform us. The urgency of nature brims with vitality.
We carry our histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies. Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embedded, embodied.
Our bodies' sensory apparatus is the only way we experience the larger world. It is the medium through which we meet and respond to that world, feeling its reciprocal impact on us. Thus our symptoms can reflect our cultural as well as personal attitudes.
Kybele is visceral engagement, a twilight beauty throbbing with a sense of wider life. We sense our self-world connection in the environment, the ferment of existence, even in the psychopathy of the world. We become intimate with nature and our interdependent nature in a 'rebearth.' Kybele rocked the cradle of civilization in the heartland of ancient Anatolia and was the mother of all gnostic-fractal goddesses. She is a bridge to the other gods.
Animate presences tell us where we come from and where we are going, re-enchanting our relationship with self, world, and others. Everything converses. We are immersed in the discourse of place, element, landscape. We may have forgotten their presence consciously, but they have not forgotten us.
The origins of inhuman relations are lost in the mists of archaic times. The root syllable 'ki' meant earth in Sumerian. Ki gave birth to the Anunnaki as Kybele did to the Olympians. Ki's mother Nammu, like Kybele, was also called “the lady of the mountains.”
Several poems describe her creation of mankind by making a clay figurine which she brought to life. Ki became the ruler of earth. This “earth” or “ground” was known in antiquity as a goddess., Kibele or Kybele, who means emplaced, located, grounded: in other words, here, whether local, regional, or farther out; immanent rather than transcendent or otherworldly.
Her symbol is the tree, the pine, under which little spirits grow from the mycelial mulch. The tree means vegetative life, according to Jung:
"It is the tree that nourishes all the stars and planets; and it is the tree out of which come the first parents, the primordial parents of humanity, and in which the last couple, also representing the whole of humanity, are buried. ... consciousness comes from the tree and dissolves into the tree again -- the consciousness of human life... So the tree stands for a particular kind of life of the collective unconscious, namely, vegetative life." (Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1432-1434.)
Carl Ruck, Robert Attrell, and others argue that the ancient mystery cults practiced by the Greeks and their neighbors were derived from the prehistoric use of psychoactive mushrooms in caverns, which appeared to have permeable walls. A way of life is a religious devotion to an idea’s higher values and their unknown future. Evolution is a modern mythical narrative.
Ancient Anatolia has a 4,000 year old history. Gobekli Tepe is dated to 12,000 years ago, the transition of hunter-gatherers to settled farmers. Shepherds and farmers had Bronze Age rivalries. The agricultural transition was a period of momentous cultural and demographic change. The flow state is correlated with influences of plant and animal sentience. Harmonic resonance “interactivity” is multi-functional.
These were not people who routinely overlooked plants, especially those identified with mythological elements. Their paradigm was a dialogue with the vegetal world. "Or one can say that the plant is the kind of life which is nearest to the elements, a transition as it were, or the bridge, between the animal and inorganic nature." (CG Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1432-1434.)
The European Neolithic period was marked by the cultivation of crops and the raising of livestock. Increased numbers of settlements and the widespread use of pottery began around 7000 BC in Greece and the Balkans, probably influenced by earlier farming practices in Anatolia and the Near East. It spread from South Eastern Europe along the valleys of the Danube and the Rhine.
A sheer explosion of imagery—a “revolution of symbols”—took place predating the adoption of agriculture by millennia. This shift marked a changing worldview, tied to the beginning of cult or religion, then led to the domestication of plants and animals. It led to the mother of all cults, with the goddess as the balance of life/death/rebirth; good/evil; and, predator/prey.
Psychedelics break the frame of ordinary waking awareness. They provide direct experience of re-enchantment for living in an animate world. The altered reality is dreamlike, but amplified by the spontaneous generation of nature.
When dismembered or dissolved, consciousness self-organizes in a self-healing act of renewal. This fungal sacrament figured in the various Mystery cults of the Anatolian Goddess and her male attendant, a psychoactive substance animate with deity.
Such a sense of Mystery cannot be lost. The stype of the mushrooms was called the thyrsus with its psychoactive cap stuffed into its stalk. In Amanita mushrooms, the toxins are largely present in the cap. Prominent in the metaphoric accounts of the mountain revels is the encounter with the mooing and bellowing bovine.
Through this altered reality, they awoke to the 'true reality' of the Goddess, commemorating her primordial identity as resident in these wild plants. As neither an animal nor plant, mushrooms became mythic. Mushroom sacraments of the drink goddess propitiated the chthonic deities. In Thrace a mushroom cult existed daring back at least to the generation before the Trojan War.
The Kybele-Attis cult is explicitly associated by artifacts with Amanita muscaria, fly agaric or fly amanita, a muscimol mushroom. It is also symbolically linked by the Phrygian 'liberty cap' headgear of Attis, which bears no resemblance to the spotted red-capped mushrooms with deadly or mind altering wild and primordial toxins. Visionary materializations from other dimension.
It is an accurate image of Psilocybe semilanceata, found in cow dung. We can also presume the Cubensis species of magic mushrooms also sprang from abundant cow manure on the Phrygian plains. Nothing would prevent the ritual mixing of such types of psychoactives.
Attis/Dionysus/Sabeus was a fungal persona with an embodied, emotional, and erotic nature that knows itself through myth. Carl Ruck notes,
"naturally occurring megalithic structures that resemble mushrooms throughout the region identified as Thrace in antiquity were the foci of religious observances, sometime with the fungal likeness of the stone structures intensified by human intervention. Thrace was considered the probable origin of Dionysian rites. Wine was recognized in antiquity as the product of fungal growth and the drink was a cultivated version of wild intoxicants, among which was the mushroom."
"The rituals in celebration of the deity commemorated his primordial identity as resident in these wild plants and mediated his evolution into the intoxicant grown upon the cultivated grapevine, and the wine itself was fortified beyond its alcoholic content by the addition of these wild antecedents of viticulture. The legendary wine of Thrace was particularly potent through the addition of a psychoactive mushroom." (2016, The Wolves of War)
This cult-sensibility is a lost way of knowing, the most primordial liminal approach. Besides possessing psychedelics, we have entirely lost the meaning context that is the vitality of such worship. It may or may not have provided the first ideological identity. This is not a metaphor of feminine psychology in women, but of the pure generative force prior to polarization. Archetypes transcend biological differences.
We have to be honest, that we can only construct a historioplastic metafiction, exposing the infinite mutability of a paradoxically finite truth. Symbols and hunting signs join us to the nonhuman, to the the wildness of the universe. The intoxicant provided an immediate experiential bond with the past and present.
What we don't find in Kybele's artifacts is a pregnant vegetation goddess, mother and child iconography, nor maiden forms. What we find are rough hewn rock-cut images, a seated matron on a throne or in her chariot, or pillar goddess forms with legs covered in animal glyphs.
We can pretend to but always fail to understand the powers that live us. What gets planted in the merger with a plant-god? What outgrowths, what extensions, are there.? Wild memory is enfolded in the plants and they speak for themselves. This is re-discovery of nature's wisdom within a plant intelligence. http://www.sexusjournal.com/FileUpload/bs566760/File/ruck-thracian-mystery-religions-sexus-fall-2018-v3-no-10.pdf
Classical mythic archetypes have been re-shaped according to the understanding and worldview of contemporary authors and readers. Here we "re-mythologize consciousness" to connect us to our mythical patterns. For James Hillman, mythic figures are the preconditions of our imagination. Do we imagine them or do they imagine us? In any case, they are real with real consequences.
There is an inter-relationship of popular culture with the Imaginal world. Themes of contemporary myth making include Otherworldliness, Encounter with the Other, and Transcendence. "Raw emotions or bodily sensations become images as soon as they are psychically registered. Feelings become images as soon as any significant awareness of them occurs." (Slater)
With Kybele, we feel "at home in the imaginal realm" (RP 37). She is the ritual space in the caverns of the unconscious. She soothes the spirits of the dead, living, and yet-unborn -- the individual genius, the heavenly image and celestial archetype of each creature collectively. She is mother of the primeval forest.
There is immediacy to mythic sensibility, felt experience, and direct and unmediated knowledge that is clear, quick, and full. There is immediacy of imaginal content or the polytheistic meaning of presence. "Like a revelation it comes all at once, and fast. It is quite independent of time – just as myths are timeless," (Hillman, Soul's Code).
Anima, or anima mundi as the soul of the world is the archetype of psychic consciousness that makes us aware of our areas of unconsciousness. Soul, in its relationship with spirit constantly invades the day-world consciousness with images, fears, moods, and mystery. It is elusive, paradoxical, and ambiguous. This mode of perception is conscious of its unconsciousness and can recognize the potential latent in the unknown aspect.
"Mythical consciousness is a mode of being in the world that brings with it imaginal persons," notes Hillman (RVP, 13). Everything we are, our instincts, our experiences, our existence is imaginal. In the beginning, there was imagination which then created soul. Soul-making is dehumanizing, overcoming egoic ways of life; it reconciles the fullness of life.
Imaginative possibility is the way human nature recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical. Mind is linked with matter, the rational with the emotional. But soul never settles into an objective reality because, by nature, soul is the “blowing spirit,” the breath of constant change, transformation, and reformation.
Soul’s purpose is to “unsettle all forms.” This unsettling occurs through re-visioning the soul. The Unconscious itself is also part of the Imaginal. Imagination and the sacred are infused with the numinous, uplifting, wondrous, awe-inspiring, magical and miraculous.
The dark side of a goddess is most intimately associated with transformation. Emotions are the felt immediacy of the gods in our bodily lives -- metamorphic chemistries and energy events. We attend to moments when soul appears.
Kybele is a mediatrix to the unknown, the unconscious, through images, not words or dialogue. Imagination, with “light” and “dark” aspects called Apollonian and Dionysian, is the world or realm of story telling, dreams and fantasy, epic, meaning, and archetype -- and non-ordinary states of consciousness. soul-making, the artistry of the unconscious is the best mode of perception to nurse along this moment-to-moment unfolding.
Do psychedelic worlds exist? Are they psychic landscapes? It is so in theophanic ecstasy. Nothing promises more certain awakening to psychic reality: a powerful body high, tingly sensations, heavy-feeling limbs, euphoria, fatigue, enhanced color and pattern perception, time distortion, auditory or visual hallucinations, images, visions, light trails, shift in perspective, personal insights, and heightened sense of interconnection and oneness.
A parallel supernatural world becomes part of everyday life. Entering the other world is a threshold passage that opens the door between the conscious and unconscious. Psychedelics offer presentational immediacy. The body is felt more deeply at home in the self-revealing psyche. Logos or reason deals with external reality.
Mythos – represented by Greek myths – is an early form of psychology, a worldview of living archetypal dimensions. Some report profound realizations, having their egos smashed into oblivion, or visiting new worlds. And often, they report these experiences as being ‘more real than real’. In this case, blood is both symbolic and very real.
A meaningful katabasis, or Orphic descent, into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge is for the restoration of the whole person. There are many motivations for a katábasis and many kinds of descent. Emphasis is placed on the distinction between mundane-personal/profane egoic and transpersonal/mythic/sacred storytelling.
The body is grounded in the soul. For some time now, researchers have been aware of the Default Mode Network. Various regions in the brain work in synchrony producing the feeling of self-referential autobiography, having an ‘ego’ or a ‘sense of self’.
Switching it off tends to correlate with mystical experiences -- feelings of ego dissolution, or loss of one’s sense of self. We open to perceiving ‘other realities’. In this sense, psychedelic worlds feel real may be because they are an imaginal and experiential reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network
The only way out is through. The fact that they can be attained, whether on or off psychedelics, means that they can be as real as any state of mind. In the therapeutic sense, they are as real as their impact, ideally, for the better. Real world effects supersede unactionable ‘truth'.
Different kinds of stories from the Orphic katabáseis are tales about the power of poetry and the ultimate finality of death or provide a vision of the cosmic system that includes both the worlds of the living and the dead. The continuing bond with the deceased exists outside our subjectivity as an autonomous image (Becker). Not all descents to the Underworld are the same; they differ in genre, in tone, in outlook, depending on who is undertaking the journey and how the Underworld appears.
Nor does the journey to the other world always have the same meaning, but the messages about the relation of life and death, of the living to the dead, and of the world of the living to the world of the dead all vary with the particular telling of the tale. This liminal world is the deep realm of Kybele. Dionysus also went to the underworld and back, like Orpheus, in the shamanic traditions preceding the Greek Mystery Religions.
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)." (James Hillman)
"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 that tends to jump down, on any occasion we are not up to. They are the gravity force of the psyche." (Hillman)
“There is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them.” C.G. Jung
Victor Turner claims, “Sooner or later, no one is exempt from ritual duty, just as no one is exempt from economic, legal, or political duty. Communal participation, obligation, the passage of the whole society through crises, collective and individual, directly or by proxy, are the hallmarks of 'the work of the gods' and sacred human work.”
Primary Perception
How did such a primordial goddess myth emerge from “unconscious primal impulses”? Emotions are the felt immediacy of the gods in our bodily lives. Campbell (2004) summarized that “the only way to affirm life is to affirm it to the root, to the rotten, horrendous base. It is this kind of affirmation that one finds in the primitive rites.” (Pathways to Bliss: p. 4)
Our perspective is grounded in the historical past with erotico-mystical strands. Archetypes give us the impression of immediacy. The Whole and the Fragmented are implicated in the area of immediate concern.
We reimagine the mutually interpenetrating Kybele and Dionysus existing from the same time, belonging to the same period of time, and alive in the present as the same psychic dynamics. Recognized or not, they are alive or denied in therapies, ideas, and cultures of the present -- planting intentions in the soil and soul.
A transformational encounter with the 'feminine' psyche, shifts consciousness into an emotionally toned and embodied awareness of the many voices of psyche. “Mystical, erotic, [or] depressive” experience is no longer something that one “has,” but is rather integrated within a multivalent and “bisexual” psyche (Hillman, Myth of Analysis, 290).
Hillman revisions psychology with Dionysian tropes, emphasizing “prolonged moistening, a life in the child, hysterical attempts at incarnation through symptoms, and erotic compulsion toward soul-making (294). The
“therapeutic goal” is a “weakening of consciousness,” rather than heroic “increase”; a “loosening and a forgetting…” (295).
Hillman says, “Dionysus offers new insight into the rending pain of self-division, especially as a body experience.” This “rending…can be understood as [a] particular kind of renewal…. necessary for awakening the consciousness of the body.” Hillman evokes Dionysus as god of drama. Healing (catharsis) occurs through finding “freedom in playing parts, partial, dismembered…never being whole but participating in the whole that is a play” of one’s own life" (38).
Dionysus dis- and re-membered initiates psyche into the “archetypal consciousness of the body”, through a Dionysian hermeneutic of renewal. Psychological dismembering frees the multiple consciousnesses which reside in our belly, feet, sex organs, and elsewhere. They gain recognition, and are given voice again. In dramatic tension, “we are composed of agonies not polarities” (Healing Fiction, 40).
Kybele, as 'the feminine,' is characterized as “the earth, darkness, the abysmal side of bodily animal passions and instinctual nature, and ‘matter’ in general” (Jung 1954, 195; Hillman 1972, 215). Consciousness itself is multivalent, with many interpretations, meanings, or values. A variety of actors invoke numerous gods through multiple masks.
Psychopathology and mythology depend on one another. Dionysus is the shadow of madness witnessed by spirit, hysteria, and pathologies of repression of emotionality, eros, the body, and materiality in general. Dionysian bisexuality and “androgynous consciousness", even our fantasies of Kybele and Dionysus cults bring another perspective. They share movement, dance, and flow. They can be freed from psychiatric distortions.
This view is unconventional, embodied, multidimensional, and transformative, with a viscerality of the depths of the body. It is polyphonic, theatrical, and a “Dionysian” hermeneutic of enactment, personae, movement, and flow. The body and imaginal body conjoin with with deep, visceral feeling, linked to the action of the image. This is the domain of the sapiential "feminine", the natural fusion of the imaginative approach and imaginal body. The "feminine" in us feels the evocative and transformative power of the image itself.
There are identifiable patterns in myth. “Contextual meaning” is embedded within the narrative architecture of story images. They tell us where we come from and where we are going. We cannot force a materialization of actual history upon the (representational) symbolic or (virtual) archetypal substrate. However, to us, many of the initiatory features sound like psychically co-created trauma.
The archetypal approach is a way of living reflectively, imaginatively, questioning, noticing, soul versus the ravages of spirit. Primordial Kybele is solitary but her bloody interactions tell the tale. Instinct in its daemonic form, entirely non-human, lives through her.
James Hillman notes that the unconscious anima is a creature without relationships, an autoerotic being whose aim is to take total possession of the individual (1985: 116). "But one thing is essential to the notion of archetypes: their emotional possessive effect, their bedazzlement of consciousness so that it becomes blind to its own stance.”
Her earliest forms are rough and formless. She doesn't possess
the psychological characteristic of projection because she is embedded in an archaic identity as her first statue is in a stone. Her numinous significance is chthonic, tied to the reflective nature of water and the provocative nature of caverns -- the “night conditions” or “night states” of the soul: intoxication, dream, trance, unconsciousness, and death.
Kybele is also the vibrantly animated presence of the world at the center of our being, how the world gets into our heart, even through drying creek beds, dwindling creatures, particular flora and fauna, earth and rock formations.
We dimly sense the secrets of the dead, images that look like living acts, symbols that hide what they claim to show, wandering spirits and souls that strive vainly for birth. The wind comes alive with invisible presences. Such moments can live forever, continuing to inform us. The urgency of nature brims with vitality.
We carry our histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies. Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embedded, embodied.
Our bodies' sensory apparatus is the only way we experience the larger world. It is the medium through which we meet and respond to that world, feeling its reciprocal impact on us. Thus our symptoms can reflect our cultural as well as personal attitudes.
Kybele is visceral engagement, a twilight beauty throbbing with a sense of wider life. We sense our self-world connection in the environment, the ferment of existence, even in the psychopathy of the world. We become intimate with nature and our interdependent nature in a 'rebearth.' Kybele rocked the cradle of civilization in the heartland of ancient Anatolia and was the mother of all gnostic-fractal goddesses. She is a bridge to the other gods.
Animate presences tell us where we come from and where we are going, re-enchanting our relationship with self, world, and others. Everything converses. We are immersed in the discourse of place, element, landscape. We may have forgotten their presence consciously, but they have not forgotten us.
The origins of inhuman relations are lost in the mists of archaic times. The root syllable 'ki' meant earth in Sumerian. Ki gave birth to the Anunnaki as Kybele did to the Olympians. Ki's mother Nammu, like Kybele, was also called “the lady of the mountains.”
Several poems describe her creation of mankind by making a clay figurine which she brought to life. Ki became the ruler of earth. This “earth” or “ground” was known in antiquity as a goddess., Kibele or Kybele, who means emplaced, located, grounded: in other words, here, whether local, regional, or farther out; immanent rather than transcendent or otherworldly.
Her symbol is the tree, the pine, under which little spirits grow from the mycelial mulch. The tree means vegetative life, according to Jung:
"It is the tree that nourishes all the stars and planets; and it is the tree out of which come the first parents, the primordial parents of humanity, and in which the last couple, also representing the whole of humanity, are buried. ... consciousness comes from the tree and dissolves into the tree again -- the consciousness of human life... So the tree stands for a particular kind of life of the collective unconscious, namely, vegetative life." (Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1432-1434.)
Carl Ruck, Robert Attrell, and others argue that the ancient mystery cults practiced by the Greeks and their neighbors were derived from the prehistoric use of psychoactive mushrooms in caverns, which appeared to have permeable walls. A way of life is a religious devotion to an idea’s higher values and their unknown future. Evolution is a modern mythical narrative.
Ancient Anatolia has a 4,000 year old history. Gobekli Tepe is dated to 12,000 years ago, the transition of hunter-gatherers to settled farmers. Shepherds and farmers had Bronze Age rivalries. The agricultural transition was a period of momentous cultural and demographic change. The flow state is correlated with influences of plant and animal sentience. Harmonic resonance “interactivity” is multi-functional.
These were not people who routinely overlooked plants, especially those identified with mythological elements. Their paradigm was a dialogue with the vegetal world. "Or one can say that the plant is the kind of life which is nearest to the elements, a transition as it were, or the bridge, between the animal and inorganic nature." (CG Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1432-1434.)
The European Neolithic period was marked by the cultivation of crops and the raising of livestock. Increased numbers of settlements and the widespread use of pottery began around 7000 BC in Greece and the Balkans, probably influenced by earlier farming practices in Anatolia and the Near East. It spread from South Eastern Europe along the valleys of the Danube and the Rhine.
A sheer explosion of imagery—a “revolution of symbols”—took place predating the adoption of agriculture by millennia. This shift marked a changing worldview, tied to the beginning of cult or religion, then led to the domestication of plants and animals. It led to the mother of all cults, with the goddess as the balance of life/death/rebirth; good/evil; and, predator/prey.
Psychedelics break the frame of ordinary waking awareness. They provide direct experience of re-enchantment for living in an animate world. The altered reality is dreamlike, but amplified by the spontaneous generation of nature.
When dismembered or dissolved, consciousness self-organizes in a self-healing act of renewal. This fungal sacrament figured in the various Mystery cults of the Anatolian Goddess and her male attendant, a psychoactive substance animate with deity.
Such a sense of Mystery cannot be lost. The stype of the mushrooms was called the thyrsus with its psychoactive cap stuffed into its stalk. In Amanita mushrooms, the toxins are largely present in the cap. Prominent in the metaphoric accounts of the mountain revels is the encounter with the mooing and bellowing bovine.
Through this altered reality, they awoke to the 'true reality' of the Goddess, commemorating her primordial identity as resident in these wild plants. As neither an animal nor plant, mushrooms became mythic. Mushroom sacraments of the drink goddess propitiated the chthonic deities. In Thrace a mushroom cult existed daring back at least to the generation before the Trojan War.
The Kybele-Attis cult is explicitly associated by artifacts with Amanita muscaria, fly agaric or fly amanita, a muscimol mushroom. It is also symbolically linked by the Phrygian 'liberty cap' headgear of Attis, which bears no resemblance to the spotted red-capped mushrooms with deadly or mind altering wild and primordial toxins. Visionary materializations from other dimension.
It is an accurate image of Psilocybe semilanceata, found in cow dung. We can also presume the Cubensis species of magic mushrooms also sprang from abundant cow manure on the Phrygian plains. Nothing would prevent the ritual mixing of such types of psychoactives.
Attis/Dionysus/Sabeus was a fungal persona with an embodied, emotional, and erotic nature that knows itself through myth. Carl Ruck notes,
"naturally occurring megalithic structures that resemble mushrooms throughout the region identified as Thrace in antiquity were the foci of religious observances, sometime with the fungal likeness of the stone structures intensified by human intervention. Thrace was considered the probable origin of Dionysian rites. Wine was recognized in antiquity as the product of fungal growth and the drink was a cultivated version of wild intoxicants, among which was the mushroom."
"The rituals in celebration of the deity commemorated his primordial identity as resident in these wild plants and mediated his evolution into the intoxicant grown upon the cultivated grapevine, and the wine itself was fortified beyond its alcoholic content by the addition of these wild antecedents of viticulture. The legendary wine of Thrace was particularly potent through the addition of a psychoactive mushroom." (2016, The Wolves of War)
This cult-sensibility is a lost way of knowing, the most primordial liminal approach. Besides possessing psychedelics, we have entirely lost the meaning context that is the vitality of such worship. It may or may not have provided the first ideological identity. This is not a metaphor of feminine psychology in women, but of the pure generative force prior to polarization. Archetypes transcend biological differences.
We have to be honest, that we can only construct a historioplastic metafiction, exposing the infinite mutability of a paradoxically finite truth. Symbols and hunting signs join us to the nonhuman, to the the wildness of the universe. The intoxicant provided an immediate experiential bond with the past and present.
What we don't find in Kybele's artifacts is a pregnant vegetation goddess, mother and child iconography, nor maiden forms. What we find are rough hewn rock-cut images, a seated matron on a throne or in her chariot, or pillar goddess forms with legs covered in animal glyphs.
We can pretend to but always fail to understand the powers that live us. What gets planted in the merger with a plant-god? What outgrowths, what extensions, are there.? Wild memory is enfolded in the plants and they speak for themselves. This is re-discovery of nature's wisdom within a plant intelligence. http://www.sexusjournal.com/FileUpload/bs566760/File/ruck-thracian-mystery-religions-sexus-fall-2018-v3-no-10.pdf
LIFESTREAM
Life in the Bloodstream
The unconscious flows through life in the bloodstream like the 'underground stream' or divine spring potentiates the sacred symbolism of nature's sanctuaries of rock and water. Monumental statues adorned spring sanctuaries of spring-cults.
Notions of the unconscious augment our vision of nature. Instinctive knowing is perception by the unconscious. Intuition or 'animal knowing' flows from the unconscious into conscious awareness. Symbols open to the unknown in bodies that are part of nature.
Redemptive forces arise from the unconscious, an opening to unity, to access divinity and infinity. This mystical aesthetic, related to the spiritual, shamanic, and religious, rests on the manifestation of the archetypal in all forms of creativity.
We remain conscious to these visions as a wakeful witness with memory. Through the sacrament, nature gets into the bloodstream. We can slip through the liminal gap in a way that even dreams rarely offer. There is memory in nature. Immaterial memory travels through the substrate of time and space. Nothing but memory sustains us.
We foster Mystery to feel whole, even without words and language. Living systems are superpositional, transmutational, shamanic, homeopathic, and paraphysically entangled. Therefore, we can even respond to the state of another with a 'contact high.' It is clearly visible in the ecstatic 'gleam in the eye.'
Likewise, there are many unconscious influences on memory. The body can remember prior psychedelic impressions just by touching or holding the 'divine' substance. Timeless experiences are unbound to time or space, and so continue to 'inform' us.
Memory itself is most often unconsciously experienced. Later psychophysical and emotional affects arise in consciousness, or 'flashbacks' to the prior state occur, as effects of such timelessness are not time bound to a specific window.
"Behind consciousness there lies not the absolute void but the unconscious psyche, which affects consciousness from behind and from inside, just as much as the outer world affects it from in front and from outside.” ~Carl Jung, CW 15, P. 206
Intuition is a focus that spontaneously arises within flow. An aesthetic of the unknown offers a numinous experience, involving both the unconscious and conscious mind -- glimpses of forms of meaning not accessible to full rational exposition. Psyche, unconsciously understood meaning, is the missing link between nature's complexity and our own depths. We share 30% of our genes with fungi.
Layers and layers and layers of history are in these soils from which all European nations descend. Anatolian genetics are present within almost all populations from the European continent and many beyond.
A tree’s root system is twice the size of it’s crown. This mycorrhizal network connecting these roots is massive. One teaspoon of soil contains several miles of fungal filaments in this network. Root tips are brain-like structures with brain-like processes going on.
They communicate in electrical and chemical ways. Now scientists think trees can even communicate through sound -- 220 hertz -- the frequency of flowing water in the underground. Trees can hear this sound of beloved water.
The earth spoke in seismic quakes that trembled mountaintop sanctuaries and the pine trees spoke to another when no one was listening. Lightning scorched the landscape and storms inundated it. It all effected the fragile crops.
The inner world of the psyche and the outer, external cosmos remain deeply connected and related. The ancients recounted events involved in their very existence. It used to be between people, the landscape, and stone itself. Kybele is the mountain that bears a natural or artificial cave, wild unknown country. Her Phrygian ritual setting is a spring, flowing water and a forest.
The Great Goddess was called mater/matar in Old-Phrygian inscriptions. Kybele is the great chthonic earth mother, before whom all are equal. In Phrygia, she was never portrayed with a mural crown. She has a funereal context. Nature is an internally meaningful, habit-establishing process.
Matar was only represented in anthropomorphic form at a relatively late date, i.e., not until the Phrygian dynasty was so developed that it became necessary to employ the anthropomorphic images that the neighboring cultures — the Neo-Hittites and the Urartians — were used to.
This corresponds also with the fact that the gods of the Thracians, too, were not represented anthropomorphically until they met other cultures like the Greeks. The evidence for ritual castration in Anatolia is also vague. It defies the idea that this was a predominant feature of the Mother’s cult in Phrygia — most of the evidence comes from Rome.
Genetically, you are not one person but contain a multitude of ancestors you carry. Your genome allows you to find information from them all. The unconscious is the dark web of humanity. The mystery nature of Kybele worship, suggested by orgiastic features, associated her with Dionysus, as well as divine possession.
Our Neolithic ancestors not only domesticated plants and animals, they domesticated themselves, becoming part of the landscape and belonging to it. The land is alive with spiritual meaning. The whole person is involved; emotions that arise are reactions to the experienced image, the living soul, whether beastial or sublime, obscure or radiant.
Domestication was a ritual to bridge the wild into a safe and orderly world. It wasn't new information about the relation to the ancestors but to themselves. Eventually, the grand fantasy changed from being buried in the earth to up in the sky, the relationship between themselves and the sky or the cosmos itself.
When they appear in art and literature, the gods have already been seen in the revelation of the experience. We encounter and engage their imaginal presence, and independent existence in the non-human. As the language of the body and feeling, symbolism connects to other realities. This is an archaeology of consciousness and spiritual anatomy. Mystery is innate and irreducible.
"Stories never live alone: they are the branches of a family that we have to trace back, and forward. [...] Mythical figures live many lives, die many deaths, and in this they differ from the characters we find in novels, who can never go beyond the single gesture. But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear their echo. Only when we become aware of a sudden consistency between incompatibles can we say we have crossed the threshold of myth."
(Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony)
Imagination is everything that isn't conceptual: feelings, physical sensations, emotions, perceptions. Mind is abstract ideas. Modern research shows that imagining really does make it so at neurological levels. Whenever we hear or read a story, our level of engagement is such that we “mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative,” according to researcher, Nicole Speer.
It transforms the way we see the world. All we have is story. Our brains interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses.
Stratified meaning incarnates as embodiment and tangible actualization and carries us. It is not the dream figure that needs manifesting but consciousness or realization of the personification as symbolic material representation; emotional memory process, not product. The personified figure is an archetypal image, a divine influx of human feeling and inhuman vision; no fixed form but a flickering of light and shadow.
Personal experience brings highly spiritual material down-to-earth. Like ourselves, dream are partly empirical and partly transcendent. Objective psyche moves subjective feeling as the moving force in all life -- an embodied "poetic ecology," feeling the others manifest in their appearance and incarnate in the bodies of other organisms.
Nature, anima mundi, in this fashion exemplifies what we also are -- our soul is the whole world. "Animism" is derived from the latin "anima" meaning, "breath" or "soul", said Pythagoras, and Plato. An immaterial force animates the entire universe---the natural phenomenon that things animate and inanimate are held to possess an innate soul.
It is the living medium of our emotions and our mental concepts as we are the living manifestation of psyche. Hormones are chemical messengers secreted into the blood, a chorus of chemical hormones sent throughout the body in combination -- hormonal harmonies of sacred physiology.
Our multidisciplinary search includes language, ethnography, and cultural artifacts. Archetypal psychology helps us engage directly. We climb deep inside the phenomenon, beneath Plato's cave (where we are all the prisoners of our own misperceptions), back into the caverns of our dreams, the thin veneer of temporary, fluctuating material on top of vast caverns of non-being. Where does the non-human speak beyond psyche? Nature subsumes culture when unconsciousness lacks creative transformation.
Artistic, scientific, and religious propensities don't reduce one to the other. Different disciplines have different strategies. No unifying propensity or discipline can claim priority over another, dismembering being and knowing.
Euripides is the first to describe the worship of Kybele in an explicitly Dionysiac context. The god comes from Tmolos, from the mountains of Phrygia and Lydia, with the ecstatic melodies of Phrygian auloi and tympana, the inventions of Rhea, accompanied his thyasos of Bacchants (Euripides Bacchae 58-9, 127-8).
The mortal is happy when initiated, celebrates the mysteries (orgias) of the Great Mother Kybele, and, crowned with ivy leaves, serves Dionysos (Euripides Bacchae 78-82). Euripides' verses reflect a real scene of an orgiastic cult. (Gasparro 1978: 1148-87;1985:11-12).
Earlier Greek texts emphasized the ritual atmosphere of ecstasy and
mania, the state of being possessed by the deity, a condition reached with the accompanying sounds of the flutes, tympana and cymbals in the mountainous landscape. Oreia, sometimes used as her single appellation.
The mythological narrative concerning Kybele appeared only in the Hellenistic age. Nor is there a story related to the Thracian goddess. Referring to her a mother of legendary King Midas could possibly reflect the role of the Phrygian ruler in the cult of the Great Goddess.
Roller believes that Atti was a royal name, like Midas, and that the king had sacred obligations. Based on evidence from Hellenistic Phrygia, where Attis is actually the title of the High priest, and assuming that this function (i.e., high priest) would be the only remnant of an earlier sacred kingship (under the names of Midas and Attis) in a time when Phrygia had lost its independence.
She then proposes that Matar enjoyed common worship with the king, who isregarded as divine. Since Matar was indeed regarded as the protector of the state (Roller 1999:111), she could have joined in a hieros gamos with the king in Phrygia, to reinforce his authority. This would eventually lead the Greeks to confuse this divine priest-king/high priest with a god, thus creating Attis (Roller 1999:70, 112).
Diodorus CLAIMS Midas participated in all sacrifices and celebrations of Kybele 'out of his devotion to the beauty', according to the Greek version (Diodorus 3, 59, 8). Midas is 'a Mygdonian king', son of the Mother of the Gods, son of.Kybele, according to Hyginus. (Fabulae191; 254, 16).
Arnobius connects the story with Agdistis — a bisexual.creature, born of the Great Mother Mountain and Zeus. Agdestes, as Arnobius gives the name, after being reduced to a female by the gods, inflicted madness on Attis on the day of his wedding with Midas' daughter. Arnobius himself states in a previous passage that the founder of the celebrations of the Phrygian Mother was Midas or Dardanos (Adversus Nationes2, 73). The same is related by Clement of Alexandria.
Both the Greek literary tradition on Midas and the Phrygian rock-cut monuments associate the figure of the Phrygian ruler with the Mother Goddess in an open-air ritual on the rocky mountain top/hill, in front of a niche, often in a rock-cut complex.
Midas is the Goddess' son just in this moment of a ritual performance. Greek and Roman versions of the myth of Cybele and Attis reflected 'older Phrygian rites, particularly the rites of mourning for a dead priest-king.' (Roller 1999: 258) This may have been the performance of the sacred marriage.
The story by Plutarch reveals a mystery cult closely associated with Dionysiac religion (Plutarch Caesar 9). He tells us about a goddess called Bona Dea by the Romans, and Gynaeceia by the Greeks. Her celebration was attended only by women; the teletai were performed at night, with dances and music, closely resembling the celebration of Bendis at Piraeus as described by Plato (Plato Republic1, 327-8).
The Phrygians considered her to be the mother of their king Midas. According to the Greeks, however, she was the mother of Dionysos whose name was not to be spoken (i.e. not to be divulged: a,ppv) Toq; Liddell, Scott 1996: 247).
Plutarch's text differs both from the Pessinus tradition and from the mythographic story of Attis and Kybele, being centered on elaborate ritual. This goddess is practically anonymous as well, her adjectival appellation resembles that of the Phrygian Mother, and she acquired similar epithets (Brouwer 1989:245,n 64).
As in Euripides' verses, the Goddess is associated with Dionysos, and the mystery aspect of her worship parallels the Orphic rites (Brouwer 1989:369-70). It is worth noting that the cultic role of the Phrygian ruler is suggested in this context. It is just this element that points to a reflection of an indigenous tradition. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3643027?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A89e1f316c8819908b9c99b30204a6a9d&seq=11#page_scan_tab_contents
The Visible Darkness
We reconstruct these ancient cultures through our own ideological lens, yet another archetypal perspective, changing expressions of archetypes in the collective psyche. Archetypes are self-organizing and self-renewing despite periodically fluctuations in rhythm.
Rhythm is everywhere, pervading every corner of existence. Life doesn't exist without rhythm, a well-organized expanse in time or space, an order that flows.
Psyche has its own butterfly effect. The rhythms of 'the Mother of the Gods' plays throughout all archetypes as wave upon wave of crescendos pulse, and intervals. Rhythm resonates with and entrains many innate, pre-existing archetypal qualities.
Entrainment gives rhythm its healing value in the human body and psyche. It manifests with a variety of forms, modes, styles or images and has a numinous essence (mystical, spiritual essence). Rhythm was at the core of primordial cults. Musical instruments as old as 43,000 ya have been found, preceded by pulse, heartbeat, brainwaves, and breath.
Certain types of experience used to be considered religious but are no longer. But 'real religion' isn't limited to our contemporary views of identity, sexuality, family life, work, and inner experience. In Plato's Symposium, eros is the cohesive universal force unites everything in the primordial.
Yet, we also suffer the tortures of the depths. We may ride rough waves of sexual betrayal, seduction, cruelty, gender fluidity, bullying, violence, or loss -- both positive and negative aspects of humanness, self-transcendence and self-transformation.
It bears on deep human suffering of our own shadow, which Jung called "a positively demonic dynamism." The image shadowing our lives is our bearer of fate and fortune -- the shadow of our rational world. Disowned and demonized parts of the mother are conceptualized as sinister and forbidden.
Dimensions of self buffered profound vulnerability to virtually unbearable experiences of loss and vulnerability, the inevitable absence of a protective parent figure, leaving an unfulfilled need to be loved.
Enter the undying Great Mother, midwife of life and death. She is the rhythm of being, the hypnotic effect of the 'abandoned' body being in the world -- a promise of power and vision (hypnogogia). The mother of changes is the cauldron of rebirth. Her cult is a framework for engaging our deeper nature and the natural world rather than salvation or liberation from it.
Death, a psychic force, is as implicit in primal religion as explicit transcendence and the supernatural outlook, despite how desperately we struggle and try to deny death. We shouldn't undervalue or overlook the gods' religious significance, then or now.
The resurrection of Dionysus-Attis is co-equal with the resurrection the Mother, combining chthonic and solar aspects. If you stop projecting on such entities they become animated autonomously in the ritual ecstatic state, bringing forth creative expression from the imaginal realm or unconscious dimensions.
"I have wanted also, to keep in our minds the common language about the 'good' earth's shadows: soil and dirt, fears of being buried alive; quicksand, sinkholes and dust bowls; earthquakes and avalanches; dust to dust...the unfathomable autonomous depths. My main aim is to draw us away from imagining the earth as a good mother, passive, nurturing, and supportive, and to recognize the idea of earth to be a complex phenomenon requiring efforts of thought and imagination." (James Hillman)
Life in the Bloodstream
The unconscious flows through life in the bloodstream like the 'underground stream' or divine spring potentiates the sacred symbolism of nature's sanctuaries of rock and water. Monumental statues adorned spring sanctuaries of spring-cults.
Notions of the unconscious augment our vision of nature. Instinctive knowing is perception by the unconscious. Intuition or 'animal knowing' flows from the unconscious into conscious awareness. Symbols open to the unknown in bodies that are part of nature.
Redemptive forces arise from the unconscious, an opening to unity, to access divinity and infinity. This mystical aesthetic, related to the spiritual, shamanic, and religious, rests on the manifestation of the archetypal in all forms of creativity.
We remain conscious to these visions as a wakeful witness with memory. Through the sacrament, nature gets into the bloodstream. We can slip through the liminal gap in a way that even dreams rarely offer. There is memory in nature. Immaterial memory travels through the substrate of time and space. Nothing but memory sustains us.
We foster Mystery to feel whole, even without words and language. Living systems are superpositional, transmutational, shamanic, homeopathic, and paraphysically entangled. Therefore, we can even respond to the state of another with a 'contact high.' It is clearly visible in the ecstatic 'gleam in the eye.'
Likewise, there are many unconscious influences on memory. The body can remember prior psychedelic impressions just by touching or holding the 'divine' substance. Timeless experiences are unbound to time or space, and so continue to 'inform' us.
Memory itself is most often unconsciously experienced. Later psychophysical and emotional affects arise in consciousness, or 'flashbacks' to the prior state occur, as effects of such timelessness are not time bound to a specific window.
"Behind consciousness there lies not the absolute void but the unconscious psyche, which affects consciousness from behind and from inside, just as much as the outer world affects it from in front and from outside.” ~Carl Jung, CW 15, P. 206
Intuition is a focus that spontaneously arises within flow. An aesthetic of the unknown offers a numinous experience, involving both the unconscious and conscious mind -- glimpses of forms of meaning not accessible to full rational exposition. Psyche, unconsciously understood meaning, is the missing link between nature's complexity and our own depths. We share 30% of our genes with fungi.
Layers and layers and layers of history are in these soils from which all European nations descend. Anatolian genetics are present within almost all populations from the European continent and many beyond.
A tree’s root system is twice the size of it’s crown. This mycorrhizal network connecting these roots is massive. One teaspoon of soil contains several miles of fungal filaments in this network. Root tips are brain-like structures with brain-like processes going on.
They communicate in electrical and chemical ways. Now scientists think trees can even communicate through sound -- 220 hertz -- the frequency of flowing water in the underground. Trees can hear this sound of beloved water.
The earth spoke in seismic quakes that trembled mountaintop sanctuaries and the pine trees spoke to another when no one was listening. Lightning scorched the landscape and storms inundated it. It all effected the fragile crops.
The inner world of the psyche and the outer, external cosmos remain deeply connected and related. The ancients recounted events involved in their very existence. It used to be between people, the landscape, and stone itself. Kybele is the mountain that bears a natural or artificial cave, wild unknown country. Her Phrygian ritual setting is a spring, flowing water and a forest.
The Great Goddess was called mater/matar in Old-Phrygian inscriptions. Kybele is the great chthonic earth mother, before whom all are equal. In Phrygia, she was never portrayed with a mural crown. She has a funereal context. Nature is an internally meaningful, habit-establishing process.
Matar was only represented in anthropomorphic form at a relatively late date, i.e., not until the Phrygian dynasty was so developed that it became necessary to employ the anthropomorphic images that the neighboring cultures — the Neo-Hittites and the Urartians — were used to.
This corresponds also with the fact that the gods of the Thracians, too, were not represented anthropomorphically until they met other cultures like the Greeks. The evidence for ritual castration in Anatolia is also vague. It defies the idea that this was a predominant feature of the Mother’s cult in Phrygia — most of the evidence comes from Rome.
Genetically, you are not one person but contain a multitude of ancestors you carry. Your genome allows you to find information from them all. The unconscious is the dark web of humanity. The mystery nature of Kybele worship, suggested by orgiastic features, associated her with Dionysus, as well as divine possession.
Our Neolithic ancestors not only domesticated plants and animals, they domesticated themselves, becoming part of the landscape and belonging to it. The land is alive with spiritual meaning. The whole person is involved; emotions that arise are reactions to the experienced image, the living soul, whether beastial or sublime, obscure or radiant.
Domestication was a ritual to bridge the wild into a safe and orderly world. It wasn't new information about the relation to the ancestors but to themselves. Eventually, the grand fantasy changed from being buried in the earth to up in the sky, the relationship between themselves and the sky or the cosmos itself.
When they appear in art and literature, the gods have already been seen in the revelation of the experience. We encounter and engage their imaginal presence, and independent existence in the non-human. As the language of the body and feeling, symbolism connects to other realities. This is an archaeology of consciousness and spiritual anatomy. Mystery is innate and irreducible.
"Stories never live alone: they are the branches of a family that we have to trace back, and forward. [...] Mythical figures live many lives, die many deaths, and in this they differ from the characters we find in novels, who can never go beyond the single gesture. But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear their echo. Only when we become aware of a sudden consistency between incompatibles can we say we have crossed the threshold of myth."
(Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony)
Imagination is everything that isn't conceptual: feelings, physical sensations, emotions, perceptions. Mind is abstract ideas. Modern research shows that imagining really does make it so at neurological levels. Whenever we hear or read a story, our level of engagement is such that we “mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative,” according to researcher, Nicole Speer.
It transforms the way we see the world. All we have is story. Our brains interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses.
Stratified meaning incarnates as embodiment and tangible actualization and carries us. It is not the dream figure that needs manifesting but consciousness or realization of the personification as symbolic material representation; emotional memory process, not product. The personified figure is an archetypal image, a divine influx of human feeling and inhuman vision; no fixed form but a flickering of light and shadow.
Personal experience brings highly spiritual material down-to-earth. Like ourselves, dream are partly empirical and partly transcendent. Objective psyche moves subjective feeling as the moving force in all life -- an embodied "poetic ecology," feeling the others manifest in their appearance and incarnate in the bodies of other organisms.
Nature, anima mundi, in this fashion exemplifies what we also are -- our soul is the whole world. "Animism" is derived from the latin "anima" meaning, "breath" or "soul", said Pythagoras, and Plato. An immaterial force animates the entire universe---the natural phenomenon that things animate and inanimate are held to possess an innate soul.
It is the living medium of our emotions and our mental concepts as we are the living manifestation of psyche. Hormones are chemical messengers secreted into the blood, a chorus of chemical hormones sent throughout the body in combination -- hormonal harmonies of sacred physiology.
Our multidisciplinary search includes language, ethnography, and cultural artifacts. Archetypal psychology helps us engage directly. We climb deep inside the phenomenon, beneath Plato's cave (where we are all the prisoners of our own misperceptions), back into the caverns of our dreams, the thin veneer of temporary, fluctuating material on top of vast caverns of non-being. Where does the non-human speak beyond psyche? Nature subsumes culture when unconsciousness lacks creative transformation.
Artistic, scientific, and religious propensities don't reduce one to the other. Different disciplines have different strategies. No unifying propensity or discipline can claim priority over another, dismembering being and knowing.
Euripides is the first to describe the worship of Kybele in an explicitly Dionysiac context. The god comes from Tmolos, from the mountains of Phrygia and Lydia, with the ecstatic melodies of Phrygian auloi and tympana, the inventions of Rhea, accompanied his thyasos of Bacchants (Euripides Bacchae 58-9, 127-8).
The mortal is happy when initiated, celebrates the mysteries (orgias) of the Great Mother Kybele, and, crowned with ivy leaves, serves Dionysos (Euripides Bacchae 78-82). Euripides' verses reflect a real scene of an orgiastic cult. (Gasparro 1978: 1148-87;1985:11-12).
Earlier Greek texts emphasized the ritual atmosphere of ecstasy and
mania, the state of being possessed by the deity, a condition reached with the accompanying sounds of the flutes, tympana and cymbals in the mountainous landscape. Oreia, sometimes used as her single appellation.
The mythological narrative concerning Kybele appeared only in the Hellenistic age. Nor is there a story related to the Thracian goddess. Referring to her a mother of legendary King Midas could possibly reflect the role of the Phrygian ruler in the cult of the Great Goddess.
Roller believes that Atti was a royal name, like Midas, and that the king had sacred obligations. Based on evidence from Hellenistic Phrygia, where Attis is actually the title of the High priest, and assuming that this function (i.e., high priest) would be the only remnant of an earlier sacred kingship (under the names of Midas and Attis) in a time when Phrygia had lost its independence.
She then proposes that Matar enjoyed common worship with the king, who isregarded as divine. Since Matar was indeed regarded as the protector of the state (Roller 1999:111), she could have joined in a hieros gamos with the king in Phrygia, to reinforce his authority. This would eventually lead the Greeks to confuse this divine priest-king/high priest with a god, thus creating Attis (Roller 1999:70, 112).
Diodorus CLAIMS Midas participated in all sacrifices and celebrations of Kybele 'out of his devotion to the beauty', according to the Greek version (Diodorus 3, 59, 8). Midas is 'a Mygdonian king', son of the Mother of the Gods, son of.Kybele, according to Hyginus. (Fabulae191; 254, 16).
Arnobius connects the story with Agdistis — a bisexual.creature, born of the Great Mother Mountain and Zeus. Agdestes, as Arnobius gives the name, after being reduced to a female by the gods, inflicted madness on Attis on the day of his wedding with Midas' daughter. Arnobius himself states in a previous passage that the founder of the celebrations of the Phrygian Mother was Midas or Dardanos (Adversus Nationes2, 73). The same is related by Clement of Alexandria.
Both the Greek literary tradition on Midas and the Phrygian rock-cut monuments associate the figure of the Phrygian ruler with the Mother Goddess in an open-air ritual on the rocky mountain top/hill, in front of a niche, often in a rock-cut complex.
Midas is the Goddess' son just in this moment of a ritual performance. Greek and Roman versions of the myth of Cybele and Attis reflected 'older Phrygian rites, particularly the rites of mourning for a dead priest-king.' (Roller 1999: 258) This may have been the performance of the sacred marriage.
The story by Plutarch reveals a mystery cult closely associated with Dionysiac religion (Plutarch Caesar 9). He tells us about a goddess called Bona Dea by the Romans, and Gynaeceia by the Greeks. Her celebration was attended only by women; the teletai were performed at night, with dances and music, closely resembling the celebration of Bendis at Piraeus as described by Plato (Plato Republic1, 327-8).
The Phrygians considered her to be the mother of their king Midas. According to the Greeks, however, she was the mother of Dionysos whose name was not to be spoken (i.e. not to be divulged: a,ppv) Toq; Liddell, Scott 1996: 247).
Plutarch's text differs both from the Pessinus tradition and from the mythographic story of Attis and Kybele, being centered on elaborate ritual. This goddess is practically anonymous as well, her adjectival appellation resembles that of the Phrygian Mother, and she acquired similar epithets (Brouwer 1989:245,n 64).
As in Euripides' verses, the Goddess is associated with Dionysos, and the mystery aspect of her worship parallels the Orphic rites (Brouwer 1989:369-70). It is worth noting that the cultic role of the Phrygian ruler is suggested in this context. It is just this element that points to a reflection of an indigenous tradition. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3643027?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A89e1f316c8819908b9c99b30204a6a9d&seq=11#page_scan_tab_contents
The Visible Darkness
We reconstruct these ancient cultures through our own ideological lens, yet another archetypal perspective, changing expressions of archetypes in the collective psyche. Archetypes are self-organizing and self-renewing despite periodically fluctuations in rhythm.
Rhythm is everywhere, pervading every corner of existence. Life doesn't exist without rhythm, a well-organized expanse in time or space, an order that flows.
Psyche has its own butterfly effect. The rhythms of 'the Mother of the Gods' plays throughout all archetypes as wave upon wave of crescendos pulse, and intervals. Rhythm resonates with and entrains many innate, pre-existing archetypal qualities.
Entrainment gives rhythm its healing value in the human body and psyche. It manifests with a variety of forms, modes, styles or images and has a numinous essence (mystical, spiritual essence). Rhythm was at the core of primordial cults. Musical instruments as old as 43,000 ya have been found, preceded by pulse, heartbeat, brainwaves, and breath.
Certain types of experience used to be considered religious but are no longer. But 'real religion' isn't limited to our contemporary views of identity, sexuality, family life, work, and inner experience. In Plato's Symposium, eros is the cohesive universal force unites everything in the primordial.
Yet, we also suffer the tortures of the depths. We may ride rough waves of sexual betrayal, seduction, cruelty, gender fluidity, bullying, violence, or loss -- both positive and negative aspects of humanness, self-transcendence and self-transformation.
It bears on deep human suffering of our own shadow, which Jung called "a positively demonic dynamism." The image shadowing our lives is our bearer of fate and fortune -- the shadow of our rational world. Disowned and demonized parts of the mother are conceptualized as sinister and forbidden.
Dimensions of self buffered profound vulnerability to virtually unbearable experiences of loss and vulnerability, the inevitable absence of a protective parent figure, leaving an unfulfilled need to be loved.
Enter the undying Great Mother, midwife of life and death. She is the rhythm of being, the hypnotic effect of the 'abandoned' body being in the world -- a promise of power and vision (hypnogogia). The mother of changes is the cauldron of rebirth. Her cult is a framework for engaging our deeper nature and the natural world rather than salvation or liberation from it.
Death, a psychic force, is as implicit in primal religion as explicit transcendence and the supernatural outlook, despite how desperately we struggle and try to deny death. We shouldn't undervalue or overlook the gods' religious significance, then or now.
The resurrection of Dionysus-Attis is co-equal with the resurrection the Mother, combining chthonic and solar aspects. If you stop projecting on such entities they become animated autonomously in the ritual ecstatic state, bringing forth creative expression from the imaginal realm or unconscious dimensions.
"I have wanted also, to keep in our minds the common language about the 'good' earth's shadows: soil and dirt, fears of being buried alive; quicksand, sinkholes and dust bowls; earthquakes and avalanches; dust to dust...the unfathomable autonomous depths. My main aim is to draw us away from imagining the earth as a good mother, passive, nurturing, and supportive, and to recognize the idea of earth to be a complex phenomenon requiring efforts of thought and imagination." (James Hillman)
Stunned Bewilderment
The great sage Pythagoras called the soul of the world Rhea-Kybele cosmic fluidy, or astral light. Esoterically, the word 'kybele' means: "the rolling light---the divine spouse of universal fire, or of the creative spirit." The past of the worlds trembles in vague images, and the future is there, also, with the living souls inevitably destined to descend into flesh.
This is the meaning of the "Veil of Isis" and the "mantle of Cybele" into which all beings are woven. Further, this universal medium, this astral light, the garment of light is a phenomenon of vision and ecstasy. It is the vehicle which transmits the movements of thought, and the living mirror in which the soul contemplates the images of that material and the spiritual world.
Rhea Kybele reigns everywhere--it is the mighty soul of the world, the vibrating and morphing substance which the breath of the creative spirit uses at will. It is the very ether that serves to cement together all the worlds, the mediator between the invisible and the visible, between spirit and matter, between the within and the without of the universe. We can only glimpse pure astral light in a condition of lofty ecstasy.
A characteristic of psychedelic experience is that people ardently think and feel that they are true and meaningful, even moreso than ordinary life. Consciousness is distributed in matter, linking consciousness to unconscious significance. The body is laid to rest. Without external input the body is confronted with the cave, total darkness with all internal aspects. Consciousness is forced to go within.
They journey to other realms but are still with their souls which makes it feel all right. It is a process of re-membrance of the power and healing power of the irrational, in the Dionysian sense. His is a particular spirit and pathos. The god of spontaneity, intoxication, drama, and even comedy enters the scene. Here we remember the animal-instinctual divine. He is "the way to a renewed, re-membered consciousness." (Hillman, 2007)
We are being asked to love our soul, to be comfortable with ambiguity, to revive ideas that feed the soul, blind with divine temptation and affection. The archetypal meaning of events is its meaning for soul. If images are the food of soul, the best images are mythological, an emergent archetypal perspective.
Autonomous psyche, which has a compelling life of its own. Just because archetypes [gods and goddesses] cannot be seen since they are unmanifest doesn't meant they don't exist. They exist as pure potential. They are inherently invisible, virtual, yet seen in their realtime effects, psychic instincts or images.
It is analogous to the way photons emerge from the chaotic, unobservable virtual sacred vacuum of zero point into detectable manifestation, since psyche and matter are the same. Thus, dissolution is a return to the source, primordial chaos, or prima materia for rebirth. This is the guiding myth.
A move towards seeing through this methodology invokes an immediate encounter with the dismembering influence of Dionysus, a god closely associated with revitalization through disorder.
The Dionysian presence facilitates the radical re-visioning and tearing apart of stale, violently fixated, and dogmatic theory and practice. Through the work of archetypal psychology, Dionysus has presented as a dialectic partner to the abhorrent one-sidedness of Apollonian natural science psychology.
Divine figures are the ultimate categories for understanding human existence. The mirror of the soul leads us to understand more about ourselves and our world, an interior community of archetypes and ancestors. Dionysus reanimates the marginalized, repressed, and forgotten Feminine.
The great sage Pythagoras called the soul of the world Rhea-Kybele cosmic fluidy, or astral light. Esoterically, the word 'kybele' means: "the rolling light---the divine spouse of universal fire, or of the creative spirit." The past of the worlds trembles in vague images, and the future is there, also, with the living souls inevitably destined to descend into flesh.
This is the meaning of the "Veil of Isis" and the "mantle of Cybele" into which all beings are woven. Further, this universal medium, this astral light, the garment of light is a phenomenon of vision and ecstasy. It is the vehicle which transmits the movements of thought, and the living mirror in which the soul contemplates the images of that material and the spiritual world.
Rhea Kybele reigns everywhere--it is the mighty soul of the world, the vibrating and morphing substance which the breath of the creative spirit uses at will. It is the very ether that serves to cement together all the worlds, the mediator between the invisible and the visible, between spirit and matter, between the within and the without of the universe. We can only glimpse pure astral light in a condition of lofty ecstasy.
A characteristic of psychedelic experience is that people ardently think and feel that they are true and meaningful, even moreso than ordinary life. Consciousness is distributed in matter, linking consciousness to unconscious significance. The body is laid to rest. Without external input the body is confronted with the cave, total darkness with all internal aspects. Consciousness is forced to go within.
They journey to other realms but are still with their souls which makes it feel all right. It is a process of re-membrance of the power and healing power of the irrational, in the Dionysian sense. His is a particular spirit and pathos. The god of spontaneity, intoxication, drama, and even comedy enters the scene. Here we remember the animal-instinctual divine. He is "the way to a renewed, re-membered consciousness." (Hillman, 2007)
We are being asked to love our soul, to be comfortable with ambiguity, to revive ideas that feed the soul, blind with divine temptation and affection. The archetypal meaning of events is its meaning for soul. If images are the food of soul, the best images are mythological, an emergent archetypal perspective.
Autonomous psyche, which has a compelling life of its own. Just because archetypes [gods and goddesses] cannot be seen since they are unmanifest doesn't meant they don't exist. They exist as pure potential. They are inherently invisible, virtual, yet seen in their realtime effects, psychic instincts or images.
It is analogous to the way photons emerge from the chaotic, unobservable virtual sacred vacuum of zero point into detectable manifestation, since psyche and matter are the same. Thus, dissolution is a return to the source, primordial chaos, or prima materia for rebirth. This is the guiding myth.
A move towards seeing through this methodology invokes an immediate encounter with the dismembering influence of Dionysus, a god closely associated with revitalization through disorder.
The Dionysian presence facilitates the radical re-visioning and tearing apart of stale, violently fixated, and dogmatic theory and practice. Through the work of archetypal psychology, Dionysus has presented as a dialectic partner to the abhorrent one-sidedness of Apollonian natural science psychology.
Divine figures are the ultimate categories for understanding human existence. The mirror of the soul leads us to understand more about ourselves and our world, an interior community of archetypes and ancestors. Dionysus reanimates the marginalized, repressed, and forgotten Feminine.
Entangled Lives
The Anatolian plant-gods Attis-Kybele are a manifold of such images and non-rational features of human experience. They embody interrelated forces, entangled divine lives. They merge as the psychedelic brew. These androgynous gods represent more than gender reconciliation. She transcends the species boundary as a non-human entity.
By invoking the archetypal perspective, the individual places a vivid personal experience within a universal cosmology, finding their place in relation to the Gods. James Hillman once said: psyche is not unconscious – we are. Archetypal images have a generative power that is psychically compelling.
Without Dionysus, undifferentiated animal-human-divine, we are cut off from instinctual life. Dionysus, endless instinctual life, cannot be endured as a constant way of being due to the chaos, savagery, and animalism.
Such embodiment of the duality of nature and its union with life and death is a way of carrying the intrinsic shadow, all surplus feral emotion. Striking emotional affects, like fear, or pity or wonder, are found in the phenomena of the world around us. The lacunae are discovered.
A rectification then takes place. The supernatural or divine mushrooms remain a 'psychic intervention,' the madness of daemonic agency. Our memories define the limits of our remembering; deep memory takes us back to the original creative impulse. Human beings have known this throughout history and it is just as true today as in any era.
As we sacrifice our certainties, we remember them with symbols, transforming life. We are essentially “redeemed” through this recognition, by “reverting” them to their true cause in the divine ideas. Hillman claims reversion includes the meaning that “archetypal persons transcend historical limitations even as they manifest themselves in historical time.”
"The mythical is the speculum of the psychological, its reflection beyond the personal. Myth provides the objective aspect for the subjective meanings in psychic events. Without myths it would all be me, personally, narrowed to the history of a case. Myth stands back of psyche, acting as a foil for objective reflection." (James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis)
"The mythical is the speculum of the psychological, its reflection beyond the personal. Myth provides the objective aspect for the subjective meanings in psychic events. Without myths it would all be me, personally, narrowed to the history of a case. Myth stands back of psyche, acting as a foil for objective reflection." (James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis)
In the Paleo-Phrygian period (9th–7th centuries bc) there was still no influence from the Greeks. Paleo-Balkan language is of four kinds, Greek-Macedonian-Phrygian, Thracian, Armenian, and Albanian. The main Phrygian-Mysian migration from Balkans to Anatolia took place between early 14th to late 12th c. BCE. Samothracian gods may include pre-Greek elements, or other non-Greek elements, such as Thracian, Tyrrhenian, Pelasgian, Phrygian or Hittite.
Mythopoetic imagery is inseparable from thought, representing a conscious form of experience. Myth is taken seriously as it reveals a significant, if unverifiable truth – a metaphysical truth, which may include intimacy with [sometimes nonhuman] Other as selfhood. In this sense, "in the beginning", Infant and Mother are the paradigm of existence.
KYBELE (Cybele) was the ancient Phrygian Mother of the Gods, a primal nature goddess worshiped with mushroom wine, abandonment, and orgiastic rites in the mountains of central and western Anatolia. She possesses formidable, awesome, magical powers. People came to her to seek vengeance or justice, and she can possess individuals with madness or illness, or cure them from disease (Borgeaud 1996:27ff.;Roller 1999:156).
She is the mother, but not opposed to the masculine, being prior to gender division. This mother is m/Other potentiated by savage animalistic sexuality. She embodies our psychic dependence on the unconscious. The mother is an imaginal universal, whether biological, functional, or symbolic mothering.
The Great Goddess appears in mythologies from all over the world. But, rather than in isolation, the gods often appear co-mingled together. These poetic imaginal characters are clothed in the greatest passions and therefore full of sublimity and arousing wonder.
“In the primal world view,” Tarnas summarizes (2006, 18), “intelligence and soul … pervade all of nature and the cosmos, and a permeable human self directly participates in that larger matrix of meaning … within which he is fully embedded."
Mythology accretes around her figure, suggesting an 'orphic' influence, like Dionysus. Phrygia is an area that is often called "Thrace," a region of SE Europe including NE Greece, S Bulgaria, and European Turkey. It is bordered by the Black Sea in the northeast, and the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean Sea in the south, then extending to central Turkey.
The first advanced civilization arose on the island of Crete -- the Minoans. Naturally, they traded in Anatolia. As Matar, she became partially assimilated to aspects of the Earth-goddess Gaia, her Minoan equivalent Rhea, and the harvest–mother goddess Demeter and Demeter Chthonia (Sparta, 6th c. BCE). The daughter of Rhea, Demeter is sometimes mentioned with all the attributes of Rhea.
We don't know what aspects of the Greek deities Phrygian devotees
recognized or accepted as belonging to their Mother Goddess. In ancient Phrygian mythology, Dindymene is one of the names of Kybele, mother of the gods. Her temples are found in parts of ancient Ionia, such as Magnesia on the Maeander. The name may derive from Mount Dindymus in Phrygia, where a temple to Kybele Dindymene was built at Pessinus. Legend claims that temple was built by the Argonauts.
Kybele was also conflated with Hekate, Artemis, Aphrodite, Isis (in Demotic texts), Dionysus, and Orphism in specific regards. Pan and the Nymphs followed her retinue. Neith was an earlier androgynous serpent-like form of Isis. That does not mean in all cases that they shared a common cult and initiations. They remain distinct but juxtaposed figures. In practice, rites of different cults may be part of the same ritual.
Paleo-Balkan language is of four kinds: Greek-Macedonian-Phrygian. and Thracian, Armenian, and Albanian. The main Phrygian-Mysian migration from Balkans to Anatolia took place between early 14th to late 12th c. BCE. There is no evidence of any newcomers after the destruction of Hittite sites.
Tradition said the Phrygians already lived in Anatolia many generations before the Trojan War. There are conflicting theories. The ethnonym Phrygian was used only by Greek and later Latin authors. So, how were they called by all others?
The only candidate is the ethnonym Mushku or Mushki, first mentioned during the reign of Ninurta−apil−Ekur, in the first quarter of the 12th c. BC. The Assyrian term Mushki was used to define also the Phrygians. In Babylonian texts of the Achaemenid period, the term lu muškaja is used several times. We can safely assume that the term refers also to the Anatolian Phrygians, who echoed the tale of Tammuz, the shepherd god and great goddess Ishtar/Inanna.
"The available Greek texts do not offer a clear picture about the origin of the Phrygians. According to them, several migrations took place over the Hellespont in both directions. From the 5th c. BC onwards, various peoples either claimed to be related with the Phrygians, or others thought that about them: the Paiones, Bryges, Mygdones, Troes, Teukroi, Mysoi, and Armenians. It appears that, in the Greek texts, the term Phrygian does not necessarily describe one ethnos, but is used either as a geographic term or describes a group of people who spoke a more or less similar language. Interestingly, as we are informed by Hesychius, the name Phrygian, in the language of their kindred Lydians, meant “ freemen”, i.e. it alludes to a social status not an ethnic or tribal association."
https://www.academia.edu/4580510/The_Mushki_Phrygian_problem_from_the_Near_Eastern_point_of_view
https://www.academia.edu/28736205/Formation_of_the_Greeks_their_language_and_writing_4600-2200_BCE?email_work_card=minimal-title
Kybele and Dionysus are distinct but conjoined by origin, myth, traits, rites, and tradition. Dionysus came from the east in the train of the Great Mother, Kybele, who taught him most of his rites of ecstatic abandon. He was later conflated with the local form Attis. Magna Mater of Rome was sometimes portrayed sailing on the sea, while Attis was accompanied by the stars placed around his Phrygian hat.
Copresence
Dionysus still strides forward as a bearded, dark bridegroom to meet his divine bride. Such a marriage suggests the copresence of deities and comingling of cults. In most intertwining tales, however, Dionysos appears as a tender boy, the son of his mother, called Attis.
In many ways, Kybele and Dionysus are two sides of the same androgynous coin -- the indestructible life principle. But she also had a destructive aspect in which she signified the unknown, the unconscious and mysterious, the magical and intuitive qualities women in particular are considered to have. She is then Astarte, Luna, Hecate, Kali. This is the bleeding-edge.
They share overlapping dyadic qualities, such as sexual ambiguity, ecstatic worship, and renewal. Each inflects the other with their presence, expressing a particular function, attribute, gender, mood, or feeling. Erich Neumann says, "The unconscious life of nature, which is also the life of the Uroboros, combines the most meaningless destruction with the supreme meaningfulness of instinctive creation..." (The Origins and History of Consciousness)
Mother Nature is chthonic, representing the cycles of nature. Neumann claims, "Mythologically, the phallic-chthonic deities are companions of the Great Mother, not representatives of the specifically masculine. Psychologically...phallic masculinity is still conditioned by the body and this is under the rule of the Great Mother, whose instrument it remains."
The chthonic gods represent the primal instincts that come to us directly through nature. Dionysus is a phallic-chthonic deitiy. Dark eros is threatening, representative of the creative and destructive aspects of nature. He can inspire ecstatic, delirious sexual activity, a religious rapture of connection with nature and cosmos perceived outside the cult as madness, and the most degrading, violent, murderous activity.
We seek the meaning in every event that soul holds in terms of our immanent death, as well as its meaning to soul. Through the power of Dionysus we can connect with the meaning of our suffering and tragedies, and even come to see the comic irony in our most unpleasant circumstances.
Personal mythology comes through a life story gained from the chaotic and unnerving interplay of archetypes. Both the ancient tales and today's psychologized archetypes describe contemporary individual and collective experience of gods and goddesses. Each perspective informs and perpetuates the other.
For example, through Dionysus, we experience soul in matter; the imaginal aspect of reality, and the reality aspect of imaginal life. There is no mind-body split, here. There is no clear distinction between sanity and insanity. Dionysus' madness is characterized as ritualistic enthusiasm. He is insane with enthusiasm, and communicates this to his devotees in his epiphany.
This energized enthusiasm is abandonment of ego's perspective. 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 which recognizes and embraces many self-arising archetypal perspectives.
The theme of the "dying and resurrecting god" is common to Osiris, Dionysus and Christ -- for all suffered, were torn apart, and resurrected like the plant-god mushroom. Hillman tells us that "Dismemberment refers to a psychological process that requires a body metaphor"..."the rending pain of self-division, especially as a body-experience."
Intoxication, eroticism, universal fertility and also unforgettable experiences are inspired by the periodic arrival of mania, the presence of death, immersion in animal unconsciousness, or by the ecstasy of enthousiasmos. All these terrors and revelations spring from a single source: the presence of the god. His mode of being expresses the paradoxical unity of life and death.
Kybele is a goddess of uplifted arms, outstretched legs and lion totems. The oldest gods, fashioned out of the forces and forms in nature, reflect the most fundamental human experiences. Arguably, she survives as the Blessed Virgin Mary, but in a much sanitized form. Filling local needs under many names, her perpetuated rite persisted for thousands of years, transmitted in different sanctuaries and temples of the prehistoric, ancient, medieval and modern world.
Kybele and Dionysus are among the oldest mythological appearances known to humanity. Herodotus claimed they were both Phyrgian, worshiped as early as 1500 BCE. However, mushroom amulets appear as cult objects in Vinca culture, c. 5200–4900 BCE.
In this context Dionis was a mystic deity in the temples of goddesses Axiokersa, Demetra, and Kibela. He was also the god of resurrection. Heraclitus considered Hades and Dionysus one and the same. This meant that Dionysus is also the Lord of the Dead, the Lord of the Underworld, echoing or paralleling the funereal and ancestral rites and functions of Kybele.
“The Hades within Dionysus says that there is an invisible meaning in sexual acts, a significance for the soul in the phallic parade, that all of our life force, including the polymorphic and pornographic desires of the psyche, refer to the underworld of images.” (James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, p. 45)
Dionis wandered the world accompanied by his teacher, Silen (lat. Silenus), bands of satyrs, and his women followers, the Maenads. On his way back to Macedonia, Dionis also visited the great Phrygia. He met his grandmother, the great mother goddess Kibela or Rhea, who purified him and taught him the mysteries of life and resurrection. According to Apollodorus (III. 5.§ 1.) these events took place before he went to India.
Stamen and Scepter
The pinecone that tipped his Thyrsus staff linked him to Kibela; both Brygo/Phrygian primordial deities shared the pine as central image. This phallic scepter tipped with a pinecone (symbolizing pineal gland/third eye) was also his emblem, and the potent panther, bull, and serpents were his totem-animals. Her cult also emphasized felines and predatory birds. The orgia involved snake handling.
Orgia were more cultic than the formal mysteries, as suggested by the violently ecstatic rites described in myth as celebrated by Attis in honor of Kybele. This reflected in the willing self-castration of her priests the Galli in the historical period. The orgia of both Dionysian worship and the cult of Kybele aim at breaking down barriers between the celebrants and divinity through a state of mystic exaltation (Brill, 1985)
An Orphic story also named the toys of the new ruler of the world. These toys became symbols of rites of initiation, first undergone by the divine boy, the first Dionysus. Dice, ball, top, golden apples, bull-roarer and wool played a part in the ceremony of initiation or in the tale itself. We will come back to this initiatory 'wool' when describing the sacramental draught. It is a clue to the agency that such bodily mysticism and psychosomatic liberation had only temporary effects each time — the period of the ekstasis.
The Anatolian plant-gods Attis-Kybele are a manifold of such images and non-rational features of human experience. They embody interrelated forces, entangled divine lives. They merge as the psychedelic brew. These androgynous gods represent more than gender reconciliation. She transcends the species boundary as a non-human entity.
By invoking the archetypal perspective, the individual places a vivid personal experience within a universal cosmology, finding their place in relation to the Gods. James Hillman once said: psyche is not unconscious – we are. Archetypal images have a generative power that is psychically compelling.
Without Dionysus, undifferentiated animal-human-divine, we are cut off from instinctual life. Dionysus, endless instinctual life, cannot be endured as a constant way of being due to the chaos, savagery, and animalism.
Such embodiment of the duality of nature and its union with life and death is a way of carrying the intrinsic shadow, all surplus feral emotion. Striking emotional affects, like fear, or pity or wonder, are found in the phenomena of the world around us. The lacunae are discovered.
A rectification then takes place. The supernatural or divine mushrooms remain a 'psychic intervention,' the madness of daemonic agency. Our memories define the limits of our remembering; deep memory takes us back to the original creative impulse. Human beings have known this throughout history and it is just as true today as in any era.
As we sacrifice our certainties, we remember them with symbols, transforming life. We are essentially “redeemed” through this recognition, by “reverting” them to their true cause in the divine ideas. Hillman claims reversion includes the meaning that “archetypal persons transcend historical limitations even as they manifest themselves in historical time.”
"The mythical is the speculum of the psychological, its reflection beyond the personal. Myth provides the objective aspect for the subjective meanings in psychic events. Without myths it would all be me, personally, narrowed to the history of a case. Myth stands back of psyche, acting as a foil for objective reflection." (James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis)
"The mythical is the speculum of the psychological, its reflection beyond the personal. Myth provides the objective aspect for the subjective meanings in psychic events. Without myths it would all be me, personally, narrowed to the history of a case. Myth stands back of psyche, acting as a foil for objective reflection." (James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis)
In the Paleo-Phrygian period (9th–7th centuries bc) there was still no influence from the Greeks. Paleo-Balkan language is of four kinds, Greek-Macedonian-Phrygian, Thracian, Armenian, and Albanian. The main Phrygian-Mysian migration from Balkans to Anatolia took place between early 14th to late 12th c. BCE. Samothracian gods may include pre-Greek elements, or other non-Greek elements, such as Thracian, Tyrrhenian, Pelasgian, Phrygian or Hittite.
Mythopoetic imagery is inseparable from thought, representing a conscious form of experience. Myth is taken seriously as it reveals a significant, if unverifiable truth – a metaphysical truth, which may include intimacy with [sometimes nonhuman] Other as selfhood. In this sense, "in the beginning", Infant and Mother are the paradigm of existence.
KYBELE (Cybele) was the ancient Phrygian Mother of the Gods, a primal nature goddess worshiped with mushroom wine, abandonment, and orgiastic rites in the mountains of central and western Anatolia. She possesses formidable, awesome, magical powers. People came to her to seek vengeance or justice, and she can possess individuals with madness or illness, or cure them from disease (Borgeaud 1996:27ff.;Roller 1999:156).
She is the mother, but not opposed to the masculine, being prior to gender division. This mother is m/Other potentiated by savage animalistic sexuality. She embodies our psychic dependence on the unconscious. The mother is an imaginal universal, whether biological, functional, or symbolic mothering.
The Great Goddess appears in mythologies from all over the world. But, rather than in isolation, the gods often appear co-mingled together. These poetic imaginal characters are clothed in the greatest passions and therefore full of sublimity and arousing wonder.
“In the primal world view,” Tarnas summarizes (2006, 18), “intelligence and soul … pervade all of nature and the cosmos, and a permeable human self directly participates in that larger matrix of meaning … within which he is fully embedded."
Mythology accretes around her figure, suggesting an 'orphic' influence, like Dionysus. Phrygia is an area that is often called "Thrace," a region of SE Europe including NE Greece, S Bulgaria, and European Turkey. It is bordered by the Black Sea in the northeast, and the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean Sea in the south, then extending to central Turkey.
The first advanced civilization arose on the island of Crete -- the Minoans. Naturally, they traded in Anatolia. As Matar, she became partially assimilated to aspects of the Earth-goddess Gaia, her Minoan equivalent Rhea, and the harvest–mother goddess Demeter and Demeter Chthonia (Sparta, 6th c. BCE). The daughter of Rhea, Demeter is sometimes mentioned with all the attributes of Rhea.
We don't know what aspects of the Greek deities Phrygian devotees
recognized or accepted as belonging to their Mother Goddess. In ancient Phrygian mythology, Dindymene is one of the names of Kybele, mother of the gods. Her temples are found in parts of ancient Ionia, such as Magnesia on the Maeander. The name may derive from Mount Dindymus in Phrygia, where a temple to Kybele Dindymene was built at Pessinus. Legend claims that temple was built by the Argonauts.
Kybele was also conflated with Hekate, Artemis, Aphrodite, Isis (in Demotic texts), Dionysus, and Orphism in specific regards. Pan and the Nymphs followed her retinue. Neith was an earlier androgynous serpent-like form of Isis. That does not mean in all cases that they shared a common cult and initiations. They remain distinct but juxtaposed figures. In practice, rites of different cults may be part of the same ritual.
Paleo-Balkan language is of four kinds: Greek-Macedonian-Phrygian. and Thracian, Armenian, and Albanian. The main Phrygian-Mysian migration from Balkans to Anatolia took place between early 14th to late 12th c. BCE. There is no evidence of any newcomers after the destruction of Hittite sites.
Tradition said the Phrygians already lived in Anatolia many generations before the Trojan War. There are conflicting theories. The ethnonym Phrygian was used only by Greek and later Latin authors. So, how were they called by all others?
The only candidate is the ethnonym Mushku or Mushki, first mentioned during the reign of Ninurta−apil−Ekur, in the first quarter of the 12th c. BC. The Assyrian term Mushki was used to define also the Phrygians. In Babylonian texts of the Achaemenid period, the term lu muškaja is used several times. We can safely assume that the term refers also to the Anatolian Phrygians, who echoed the tale of Tammuz, the shepherd god and great goddess Ishtar/Inanna.
"The available Greek texts do not offer a clear picture about the origin of the Phrygians. According to them, several migrations took place over the Hellespont in both directions. From the 5th c. BC onwards, various peoples either claimed to be related with the Phrygians, or others thought that about them: the Paiones, Bryges, Mygdones, Troes, Teukroi, Mysoi, and Armenians. It appears that, in the Greek texts, the term Phrygian does not necessarily describe one ethnos, but is used either as a geographic term or describes a group of people who spoke a more or less similar language. Interestingly, as we are informed by Hesychius, the name Phrygian, in the language of their kindred Lydians, meant “ freemen”, i.e. it alludes to a social status not an ethnic or tribal association."
https://www.academia.edu/4580510/The_Mushki_Phrygian_problem_from_the_Near_Eastern_point_of_view
https://www.academia.edu/28736205/Formation_of_the_Greeks_their_language_and_writing_4600-2200_BCE?email_work_card=minimal-title
Kybele and Dionysus are distinct but conjoined by origin, myth, traits, rites, and tradition. Dionysus came from the east in the train of the Great Mother, Kybele, who taught him most of his rites of ecstatic abandon. He was later conflated with the local form Attis. Magna Mater of Rome was sometimes portrayed sailing on the sea, while Attis was accompanied by the stars placed around his Phrygian hat.
Copresence
Dionysus still strides forward as a bearded, dark bridegroom to meet his divine bride. Such a marriage suggests the copresence of deities and comingling of cults. In most intertwining tales, however, Dionysos appears as a tender boy, the son of his mother, called Attis.
In many ways, Kybele and Dionysus are two sides of the same androgynous coin -- the indestructible life principle. But she also had a destructive aspect in which she signified the unknown, the unconscious and mysterious, the magical and intuitive qualities women in particular are considered to have. She is then Astarte, Luna, Hecate, Kali. This is the bleeding-edge.
They share overlapping dyadic qualities, such as sexual ambiguity, ecstatic worship, and renewal. Each inflects the other with their presence, expressing a particular function, attribute, gender, mood, or feeling. Erich Neumann says, "The unconscious life of nature, which is also the life of the Uroboros, combines the most meaningless destruction with the supreme meaningfulness of instinctive creation..." (The Origins and History of Consciousness)
Mother Nature is chthonic, representing the cycles of nature. Neumann claims, "Mythologically, the phallic-chthonic deities are companions of the Great Mother, not representatives of the specifically masculine. Psychologically...phallic masculinity is still conditioned by the body and this is under the rule of the Great Mother, whose instrument it remains."
The chthonic gods represent the primal instincts that come to us directly through nature. Dionysus is a phallic-chthonic deitiy. Dark eros is threatening, representative of the creative and destructive aspects of nature. He can inspire ecstatic, delirious sexual activity, a religious rapture of connection with nature and cosmos perceived outside the cult as madness, and the most degrading, violent, murderous activity.
We seek the meaning in every event that soul holds in terms of our immanent death, as well as its meaning to soul. Through the power of Dionysus we can connect with the meaning of our suffering and tragedies, and even come to see the comic irony in our most unpleasant circumstances.
Personal mythology comes through a life story gained from the chaotic and unnerving interplay of archetypes. Both the ancient tales and today's psychologized archetypes describe contemporary individual and collective experience of gods and goddesses. Each perspective informs and perpetuates the other.
For example, through Dionysus, we experience soul in matter; the imaginal aspect of reality, and the reality aspect of imaginal life. There is no mind-body split, here. There is no clear distinction between sanity and insanity. Dionysus' madness is characterized as ritualistic enthusiasm. He is insane with enthusiasm, and communicates this to his devotees in his epiphany.
This energized enthusiasm is abandonment of ego's perspective. 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 which recognizes and embraces many self-arising archetypal perspectives.
The theme of the "dying and resurrecting god" is common to Osiris, Dionysus and Christ -- for all suffered, were torn apart, and resurrected like the plant-god mushroom. Hillman tells us that "Dismemberment refers to a psychological process that requires a body metaphor"..."the rending pain of self-division, especially as a body-experience."
Intoxication, eroticism, universal fertility and also unforgettable experiences are inspired by the periodic arrival of mania, the presence of death, immersion in animal unconsciousness, or by the ecstasy of enthousiasmos. All these terrors and revelations spring from a single source: the presence of the god. His mode of being expresses the paradoxical unity of life and death.
Kybele is a goddess of uplifted arms, outstretched legs and lion totems. The oldest gods, fashioned out of the forces and forms in nature, reflect the most fundamental human experiences. Arguably, she survives as the Blessed Virgin Mary, but in a much sanitized form. Filling local needs under many names, her perpetuated rite persisted for thousands of years, transmitted in different sanctuaries and temples of the prehistoric, ancient, medieval and modern world.
Kybele and Dionysus are among the oldest mythological appearances known to humanity. Herodotus claimed they were both Phyrgian, worshiped as early as 1500 BCE. However, mushroom amulets appear as cult objects in Vinca culture, c. 5200–4900 BCE.
In this context Dionis was a mystic deity in the temples of goddesses Axiokersa, Demetra, and Kibela. He was also the god of resurrection. Heraclitus considered Hades and Dionysus one and the same. This meant that Dionysus is also the Lord of the Dead, the Lord of the Underworld, echoing or paralleling the funereal and ancestral rites and functions of Kybele.
“The Hades within Dionysus says that there is an invisible meaning in sexual acts, a significance for the soul in the phallic parade, that all of our life force, including the polymorphic and pornographic desires of the psyche, refer to the underworld of images.” (James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, p. 45)
Dionis wandered the world accompanied by his teacher, Silen (lat. Silenus), bands of satyrs, and his women followers, the Maenads. On his way back to Macedonia, Dionis also visited the great Phrygia. He met his grandmother, the great mother goddess Kibela or Rhea, who purified him and taught him the mysteries of life and resurrection. According to Apollodorus (III. 5.§ 1.) these events took place before he went to India.
Stamen and Scepter
The pinecone that tipped his Thyrsus staff linked him to Kibela; both Brygo/Phrygian primordial deities shared the pine as central image. This phallic scepter tipped with a pinecone (symbolizing pineal gland/third eye) was also his emblem, and the potent panther, bull, and serpents were his totem-animals. Her cult also emphasized felines and predatory birds. The orgia involved snake handling.
Orgia were more cultic than the formal mysteries, as suggested by the violently ecstatic rites described in myth as celebrated by Attis in honor of Kybele. This reflected in the willing self-castration of her priests the Galli in the historical period. The orgia of both Dionysian worship and the cult of Kybele aim at breaking down barriers between the celebrants and divinity through a state of mystic exaltation (Brill, 1985)
An Orphic story also named the toys of the new ruler of the world. These toys became symbols of rites of initiation, first undergone by the divine boy, the first Dionysus. Dice, ball, top, golden apples, bull-roarer and wool played a part in the ceremony of initiation or in the tale itself. We will come back to this initiatory 'wool' when describing the sacramental draught. It is a clue to the agency that such bodily mysticism and psychosomatic liberation had only temporary effects each time — the period of the ekstasis.
bDionysus 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, Page 90.
Dionis was usually represented with the bull horns on his forehead. Dionis' priestesses, the Maenads, or Bacchantes, celebrated his orgies with drunkenness, nakedness, and sacramental feasting. In Phrygia and Paionia he was also known as Sabazios or Savadios, or the sky-father god of the Phrygians. In Indo-European languages, such as Phrygian, the -dio(s) element in his name derives from -dyeus or -deu, the common precursor of Latin "deus‟ ('god').
Contrary to popular opinion Dionysus is not merely the god of revelry, indulgence, erotic compulsion and intoxication, but of ecstatic rapture. His double-nature is also reflected in his sexual ambiguity. Psychedelic experience often contains imagery of dismemberment in the early stages of ego-death, and often a passage through the underworld. The afterglow of the experiential journey is perceived as a renewal or rebirth.
The physical basis of the soma intoxicating recipe has been debated. Proposed answers range from cannabis, to magic mushrooms to long-extinct herbs. Vats have been discovered with a mixture of cannabis, ephedra, and opium. Nevertheless, this inspiration is described as the antithesis of rational thought, embodied in dark obscure movements, thoughts and impulses of darkness. It manifests as an intoxicant, producing an enthusiasm which may even lead to madness.
Soma was considered a universal life power. Certain plants were held to be particularly efficient in collecting and storing soma, this mysterious psychic energy. Those consumed with the power to change consciousness were held sacred as embodiments of deities.
Psychologically, the ritual for absorbing soma was to the feminine principle, the Goddess. Experience of the eternal, immovable aspect of psyche, transcends the duality of gender descriptions. When drinking in soma (entheogen), the initiate becomes filled with the god.
Dionysus, rooted in the earth and ecstasy, is the prototype of shamanic descent and the dying and resurrecting godmen. This 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.
Attis, Adonis, Bachus, Bromius, Tammuz, Pan, Sabazius, Serapis, Zalmoxius, Zeus, and Orpheus himself - are replicas of their grand primordial archetype the gnostic Dionis and the variations which appear among them resulted from the transplantation of the god from one region to another.
The Alexandrian philosophers understood Serapis as the "Anima Mundi," that spirit of whom universal nature was the body, holding the doctrine of the "One harmonious whole whose body is Nature, and soul the God."
The migrating Phrygians brought the Dionis/Sabazius cult with them when they settled in Anatolia in the early first millennium BCE, thus, the god's origins can be traced in Macedonia, specifically in Pelagonia and Paionia in Upper Macedonia (today R. of Macedonia), the Phrygian's ancestral homeland.
https://www.academia.edu/18798233/Dionis_Dionysus_Sabazius_Bachus_-_Macedonic_Deity_from_Prehistoric_Times?email_work_card=title
The Cretan Dionis was linked not only with Osiris, but also with Tammuz of Babylon, Ashur of Assyria, Attis of Phrygia, Agni of India and his twin-brother Indra. Each of these deities was apparently a developed form of a primitive culture-god.
Such primordial myths have deep roots stretching back to prehistoric times. It begs the question how and why they formed. Such personifications must have arisen at the dawn of symbolic imagination. They are engraved deeply into subconscious collective memory and traditions. Kybele is a goddess of uplifted arms and outstretched legs. The herbalists of hunter-gatherer societies with their hidden lore preceded all civilizations.
Imagine one of our ancient ancestors, suddenly stricken by illness or a near-fatal accident. Hovering near the brink of death, an ordinary person suddenly finds him or herself locked in an immersive visionary experience of shadowy figures, muted voices and blinding luminescence.The cosmos opens its enfolding arms and infinity spreads out in a timeless panoply that dissolves all fear, all separation from the Divine. Fear of death vanishes in a comforting flood of bliss, peace and dazzling light, the ultimate ‘holy’ connection. Overwhelming conviction arises that this is the more fundamental Reality. The welcoming gates of a personal heaven open.
Suddenly back in the body, returned to ordinary reality, one is left to interpret that transcendent experience to oneself and others. This near-death experience may not have resulted in physical demise, but it has led to the death of the old self, the personal self -- and the rebirth, rapture, or resurrection of the soul or spirit. It brings a surge of emotions, conviction and even transformation in its wake. The soul has taken a journey from which we cannot return the same.
A descent into psychobiological hell can lead to a transcendent journey toward the Sly or perhaps the yawning abyss of the Void. Shamans, priests, prophets, mystics, and gurus arose to show the Way of navigating these nether regions, of finding healing, the eternal moment, a peaceful heart, and epiphany.
Our progenitors had to directly confront existential issues of survival, adaptation, stress, mating, birth, loss, and death. They gradually developed stories about the basics of life, social, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual existence. They created myths, beliefs about creation and our creation to give meaning to life. They developed rituals, ceremonies, and practices to heal body and mind, mark life passages, and placate forces beyond their control. These accounted for their origins as well as voices, visions and experiences that seemed to come from the great Beyond.
The god-experience is a process, a subjective perception, rather than an objectively provable reality. Distractions cease, replaced by the direct impact of oceanic expansion, sudden insight, childlike wonder, ecstatic exaltation above bodily and personal existence, dissolution in a timeless moment, fusion, gnosis. It is direct perception coupled with high emotion and deep realization of what appears to be ultimate truth.
It rips away the veil of illusion, revealing the pure ground state of our existence without any emotional, mental, or belief filters. Left with only pure awareness, the natural mind is finally free of earthly trappings. Bathed in emotions of joy, assurance and salvation, Cosmos becomes a living presence. Immortality is sensed, so fear of death vanishes. The numinous mystery is divine. In some sense, religion is a reaction to what actually is.
Death/rebirth motifs arose from their the mysterious effects of their cache of ecstatic techniques. We are children of the dark mother, woven in her many pulsating wombs. As creatures of shadow and folly, we are undone. Still, the clamorous and soft symphonies of beauty and wonder innervate this apparently gloomy human experience.
Calling Down the Mother
The Phrygians of Thrace originated from Anatolia, and the Mystery traditions involve the Great Mountain Goddess, who is identifiable with the Phrygian mother goddess. Phrygia was locally called Muska, pronounced Mushka, like mushroom.
They obviously didn't practice a fully restored Neolithic rite, but certain qualities like visions, dreams, trance, hallucinations, madness, and psychological abandon of the funereal cult remained intact.
Kybele is 'phallic' yet manifests in a 'female' human form. 'Phallic' does not necessarily mean 'male', nor refer to 'penises' exclusively. It is not confined to maleness or femaleness or human anatomy.
Like now, those were times of painful losses, of starving bellies and emaciated hopes. The lingering spectacle of destruction shadowed the lands and gnawed at the bones of the world. She is not there behind the tombs, nor risen either. She has fallen to the bacchanal depths which clever words and maps cannot unravel, where the fruit of her sacred pine roots decorate our wounds.
We move through the permeable membrane of our animal essence into those moments when words are no longer useful. Walls move, minds move, too. We gesture toward hopes and worlds beyond human, beyond the intelligible, beyond our usual ways of making sense to a with-ness with the world.
In her Wild Hunt, the children brave the adult world and the feminine dance of life into it. We shed our embroidered robes and run mad and naked into the wilderness. Our footsteps glow seductively in the rough terrain where we declare our freedom by re-enchanting the ordinary. The crossroads is an immanent manifold of emergent imagery.
Without a container, initiation is experienced as personal crisis. A deep state of unbearable unrest leads to a recognition of the point where the psyche knows it is at the boundary of comfortable existence. There it must burn the ego structure to ashes by coming into the sanctuary.
Gods and goddesses exist as the source of infinite possibilities, both seen and unseen, that function as love. A body exists both as a part of a community and as a singular entity. The archetype of initiation makes itself conscious by way of trauma in order to connect with inner wisdom and the ecology of the intergenerational network.
Kybele offered an underground spiritual ethic and entanglement, a hieroglyphics of the flesh, and moments of magic and conjuration that connect truth with multifaceted tricksterism.
A “learned unknowing” is not a reduction in knowledge but a gateway to new knowledge. Failure to live up to societal standards can open up eccentric, more creative ways of thinking and being in the world, while forcing us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido. Kybele suggests that the relationship between spiritual divinity and tricksterism must be rethought in relation to bodily autonomy, sex, gender, and sexuality.
Invisibility is a prerequisite of tricksterism. The dynamism of matter underlies materialization. Phenomena or objects do not precede their interaction, rather, 'objects' emerge through particular intra-actions, in this case of god-plant and initiate. Rather than dancing in Kybele's mountains, we dance with her mountains.
Physical and emotional initiatory wounding was frequently enacted during ceremonies to show the initiate's ability to accept, yet withstand death. Initiatory wounding manifests itself as physical or emotional trauma triggered by an instinctual need to express the metaphorical language. The negation of speech can portray characteristics of the Divine.
Numerous bizarre and grotesque aspects of her myths and worship, describing intense physical, emotional, or psychic pain, suggest 'trauma as initiation.' Facing wilder and compelling events honors the soul's need for a metaphorical descent, death, and rebirth. The unimaginable new and transformative experiences allow us to dwell in the debris field of our demise, making sanctuary from a queer assemblage of unholy insights.
Trauma survivors have to connect with forces beyond themselves to survive situations that are outside the norm. Without a metaphorical language to express the reality of a liminal state, psyche grasps for any incident that will propel the self forward into the dark depths of the loss of ego identity. Sometimes, the only way to dissolve that false self-image structure is through trauma.
Kybele still offers comfort, tends wounds, and validates the emotions of the experience by sharing the stories of such life changing events --the numinous experiences that allow metaphorical threshold crossing and transformation.
Liminal Transition
Perhaps, rather than the first goddess, mother of all gods, Kybele was the last incarnation of the Great Liberating Mother, great due to temporal power. Kybele was the daughter of the Phrygian sky-god and earth-mother, “the great protectress,” reconciler of all goddesses.
"She of the Long Hair"
"She of the long hair" may be connected with Amanita muscaria's ability to resurrect. Mycelial spun threads also grow on barley and have the same effects as the original dried Amanita muscaria mushroom. Tests were run on samples of dried Amanita muscaria gathered from around the world. All subspecies of Amanita muscaria produce exactly the same out-spun threads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTXNO7CAsc4&feature=emb_title
Gordon Wasson first proposed that the common forest mushroom Amanita muscaria was the actual Vedic Soma, a sacred "immortal" "plant" bearing no leaves, blossoms, roots, fruit or seeds. It was turned into a sacred drink bearing the same name in the Soma ceremony.
He claimed the mushrooms had to be dried before using and then re-hydrated before the pressing; a process which is mentioned in the Rig Veda. Drying the Amanita muscaria mushrooms and then making a water extract did yield a far superior drink compared to the juice of fresh mushrooms.
Nature's gift of the Amanita muscaria mushroom is multiplied, strengthened, and self purified. The Soma drink self purified with its own eternal fleece produces a smooth experience with almost no negative physical symptoms and a higher quality spiritual experience. It is the magical transformative process of the Soma ceremony that creates something unattainable directly from Nature -- something Immortal. (Teeter)
We know Kybele's cult dried their mushrooms on the lofty sacred pines then used them for chthonic descent. We must pay attention not only to the plant but how it is processed to produce different chemical compounds.
Many shamanic plants are not active or even usable in their natural state and may require extensive processing before being used. Rehydration "calls forth the out spun thread" and grows mycelium that looks like Sheep Wool. This Soma created "wool" is the "eternal fleece" used to filter the Soma juice. https://ambrosiasociety.org/the-society/amanita-muscaria-fly-agaric-resurrection-video-2007
Kybele was born as an hermaphrodite named Agdistis who was castrated by the gods to become the goddess Kybele. The Phrygian sky-god is identified with the Greek Zeus in Pausanias' account of the myth. The Greeks identified her with their own mother of the gods, the Titaness Rhea. She is also linked to Isis, and even the Virgin Mary.
This page describes the early myths and lore of Kybele set in her homeland of Phrygia. The distinctly non-Greek myth is of her hermaphroditic birth and her love for the liberty-capped youth Attis. Her son/lover consort was the vegetation god Attis, a god of resurrection.
"Cybele probably means ‘of the mountain,’ or ‘of the cave’. She was equated with the Minoan Cretan Rhea of the Idaean Cave. Her ecstatic rites were considered the origin of the bacchanalia, and she was said to have cured Dionysus of the madness inflicted upon him by the jealousy of Hera." (Ruck)
http://www.sexusjournal.com/FileUpload/bs566760/File/ruck-thracian-mystery-religions-sexus-fall-2018-v3-no-10.pdf
"The role of Dionysus and intoxication in the castration of Agdistis is an etiological myth identifying the severed phallus-mushroom as an analogue of the deity." ..."the severed member is a phallus with its resemblance to its botanical analogue." (Ruck)
Some myths call Dionysus her son. He is an example of a Thracian-Greek variant of the ancient Soma God, plant of Immortality. An extremely old God, his name was found on a fired clay tablet written in Linear B script, an archaic form of Greek that is pre-alphabet and dates to about 1450 BC.
Cybele was worshiped in wild, emotional, bloody, orgiastic, cathartic ceremonies. Her radiant halo is neither solar nor lunar, but a mushroom homologue for the radiant underside of the cap. Her annual spring festival celebrated the death and resurrection of Her beloved Attis, personification of the Amanita muscaria mushroom. The rock-cut goddess is a metaphor of the 'place where time stands still'.
Borrowed from Ancient Greek, the etymology of οὐσία (ousía) is from the feminine present participle of εἰμί (eimí, “I am”). Depending on the context, ousia may be translated as "nature," "being," "essence," "reality," or "substance." The Greek word ousia was put to philosophical use by Plato in his early dialogue Euthyphro. The divine luminosity looks back at itself in naked awareness.
The Thracians conceived the chief divinity of the Samothracian and Lemnian mysteries as Rhea-Hecate. Those who settled in Asia Minor became acquainted with even stranger beings, like the one who was worshiped with wild and enthusiastic solemnities. The Greeks who afterwards settled in Asia also identified the Asiatic goddess with Rhea, with whose worship they had long been familiar (Strab. x. p. 471; Hom. Hymn. 13, 31).
In Phrygia, Rhea became Cybele who is said to have purified Dionysus, and taught him the mysteries (Apollod. iii. 5. § 1). Thus a Dionysiac element amalgamated with the worship of Rhea. Demeter, as daughter of Rhea, is sometimes mentioned with all the attributes belonging to Rhea. (Eurip. Helen. 1304.)
The confusion then became so great that the worship of the Cretan Rhea was confounded with that of the Phrygian mother of the gods. The orgies of Dionysus became interwoven with those of Cybele. Strangers from Asia, who must be looked upon as jugglers, introduced a variety of novel rites, which were fondly received, especially by the populace (Strab. 1. c.; Athen. xii. p. 553 ; Demosth. de Coron. p. 313). Both the name and the connection of Rhea with Demeter suggest that she was in early times revered as goddess of the earth.
https://www.kanaanministries.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/A-Study-on-the-Cult-of-Cybele.pdf
...
https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/3/Special-Issue/article-p43.xml
http://www.sexusjournal.com/FileUpload/bs566760/File/ruck-thracian-mystery-religions-sexus-fall-2018-v3-no-10.pdf
Carl Ruck on Chauvet cave: "The recently discovered Chauvet Cave in southern France was sealed by a rock fall and has remained undisturbed for 35,000 years. In addition to its remarkably preserved frescos, the stipes of mushrooms was found on the cave floor, obviously, the remains of mushrooms brought into the cave for ingestion. Werner Herzog filmed his documentary of the cave in 3D to “capture the intentions of the painters” as the hallucinogenic qualities of the art melded into the cave wall experience. Although Herzog discussed this in a German-language interview, the mushrooms have been ignored in the public information about the Chauvet Cave. Some of the stenciled hand prints on the cave’s walls are those of women, some those of children. The un-eaten stipes are the remnants. The caps were eaten. In the species Amanita muscaria, the psychoactive agents are present only in the red rind of the caps..." (Carl Ruck)
are merged in the animal divinity of the primordial psyche—a blissful and terrible experience.
~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 90.
Dionis was usually represented with the bull horns on his forehead. Dionis' priestesses, the Maenads, or Bacchantes, celebrated his orgies with drunkenness, nakedness, and sacramental feasting. In Phrygia and Paionia he was also known as Sabazios or Savadios, or the sky-father god of the Phrygians. In Indo-European languages, such as Phrygian, the -dio(s) element in his name derives from -dyeus or -deu, the common precursor of Latin "deus‟ ('god').
Contrary to popular opinion Dionysus is not merely the god of revelry, indulgence, erotic compulsion and intoxication, but of ecstatic rapture. His double-nature is also reflected in his sexual ambiguity. Psychedelic experience often contains imagery of dismemberment in the early stages of ego-death, and often a passage through the underworld. The afterglow of the experiential journey is perceived as a renewal or rebirth.
The physical basis of the soma intoxicating recipe has been debated. Proposed answers range from cannabis, to magic mushrooms to long-extinct herbs. Vats have been discovered with a mixture of cannabis, ephedra, and opium. Nevertheless, this inspiration is described as the antithesis of rational thought, embodied in dark obscure movements, thoughts and impulses of darkness. It manifests as an intoxicant, producing an enthusiasm which may even lead to madness.
Soma was considered a universal life power. Certain plants were held to be particularly efficient in collecting and storing soma, this mysterious psychic energy. Those consumed with the power to change consciousness were held sacred as embodiments of deities.
Psychologically, the ritual for absorbing soma was to the feminine principle, the Goddess. Experience of the eternal, immovable aspect of psyche, transcends the duality of gender descriptions. When drinking in soma (entheogen), the initiate becomes filled with the god.
Dionysus, rooted in the earth and ecstasy, is the prototype of shamanic descent and the dying and resurrecting godmen. This 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.
Attis, Adonis, Bachus, Bromius, Tammuz, Pan, Sabazius, Serapis, Zalmoxius, Zeus, and Orpheus himself - are replicas of their grand primordial archetype the gnostic Dionis and the variations which appear among them resulted from the transplantation of the god from one region to another.
The Alexandrian philosophers understood Serapis as the "Anima Mundi," that spirit of whom universal nature was the body, holding the doctrine of the "One harmonious whole whose body is Nature, and soul the God."
The migrating Phrygians brought the Dionis/Sabazius cult with them when they settled in Anatolia in the early first millennium BCE, thus, the god's origins can be traced in Macedonia, specifically in Pelagonia and Paionia in Upper Macedonia (today R. of Macedonia), the Phrygian's ancestral homeland.
https://www.academia.edu/18798233/Dionis_Dionysus_Sabazius_Bachus_-_Macedonic_Deity_from_Prehistoric_Times?email_work_card=title
The Cretan Dionis was linked not only with Osiris, but also with Tammuz of Babylon, Ashur of Assyria, Attis of Phrygia, Agni of India and his twin-brother Indra. Each of these deities was apparently a developed form of a primitive culture-god.
Such primordial myths have deep roots stretching back to prehistoric times. It begs the question how and why they formed. Such personifications must have arisen at the dawn of symbolic imagination. They are engraved deeply into subconscious collective memory and traditions. Kybele is a goddess of uplifted arms and outstretched legs. The herbalists of hunter-gatherer societies with their hidden lore preceded all civilizations.
Imagine one of our ancient ancestors, suddenly stricken by illness or a near-fatal accident. Hovering near the brink of death, an ordinary person suddenly finds him or herself locked in an immersive visionary experience of shadowy figures, muted voices and blinding luminescence.The cosmos opens its enfolding arms and infinity spreads out in a timeless panoply that dissolves all fear, all separation from the Divine. Fear of death vanishes in a comforting flood of bliss, peace and dazzling light, the ultimate ‘holy’ connection. Overwhelming conviction arises that this is the more fundamental Reality. The welcoming gates of a personal heaven open.
Suddenly back in the body, returned to ordinary reality, one is left to interpret that transcendent experience to oneself and others. This near-death experience may not have resulted in physical demise, but it has led to the death of the old self, the personal self -- and the rebirth, rapture, or resurrection of the soul or spirit. It brings a surge of emotions, conviction and even transformation in its wake. The soul has taken a journey from which we cannot return the same.
A descent into psychobiological hell can lead to a transcendent journey toward the Sly or perhaps the yawning abyss of the Void. Shamans, priests, prophets, mystics, and gurus arose to show the Way of navigating these nether regions, of finding healing, the eternal moment, a peaceful heart, and epiphany.
Our progenitors had to directly confront existential issues of survival, adaptation, stress, mating, birth, loss, and death. They gradually developed stories about the basics of life, social, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual existence. They created myths, beliefs about creation and our creation to give meaning to life. They developed rituals, ceremonies, and practices to heal body and mind, mark life passages, and placate forces beyond their control. These accounted for their origins as well as voices, visions and experiences that seemed to come from the great Beyond.
The god-experience is a process, a subjective perception, rather than an objectively provable reality. Distractions cease, replaced by the direct impact of oceanic expansion, sudden insight, childlike wonder, ecstatic exaltation above bodily and personal existence, dissolution in a timeless moment, fusion, gnosis. It is direct perception coupled with high emotion and deep realization of what appears to be ultimate truth.
It rips away the veil of illusion, revealing the pure ground state of our existence without any emotional, mental, or belief filters. Left with only pure awareness, the natural mind is finally free of earthly trappings. Bathed in emotions of joy, assurance and salvation, Cosmos becomes a living presence. Immortality is sensed, so fear of death vanishes. The numinous mystery is divine. In some sense, religion is a reaction to what actually is.
Death/rebirth motifs arose from their the mysterious effects of their cache of ecstatic techniques. We are children of the dark mother, woven in her many pulsating wombs. As creatures of shadow and folly, we are undone. Still, the clamorous and soft symphonies of beauty and wonder innervate this apparently gloomy human experience.
Calling Down the Mother
The Phrygians of Thrace originated from Anatolia, and the Mystery traditions involve the Great Mountain Goddess, who is identifiable with the Phrygian mother goddess. Phrygia was locally called Muska, pronounced Mushka, like mushroom.
They obviously didn't practice a fully restored Neolithic rite, but certain qualities like visions, dreams, trance, hallucinations, madness, and psychological abandon of the funereal cult remained intact.
Kybele is 'phallic' yet manifests in a 'female' human form. 'Phallic' does not necessarily mean 'male', nor refer to 'penises' exclusively. It is not confined to maleness or femaleness or human anatomy.
Like now, those were times of painful losses, of starving bellies and emaciated hopes. The lingering spectacle of destruction shadowed the lands and gnawed at the bones of the world. She is not there behind the tombs, nor risen either. She has fallen to the bacchanal depths which clever words and maps cannot unravel, where the fruit of her sacred pine roots decorate our wounds.
We move through the permeable membrane of our animal essence into those moments when words are no longer useful. Walls move, minds move, too. We gesture toward hopes and worlds beyond human, beyond the intelligible, beyond our usual ways of making sense to a with-ness with the world.
In her Wild Hunt, the children brave the adult world and the feminine dance of life into it. We shed our embroidered robes and run mad and naked into the wilderness. Our footsteps glow seductively in the rough terrain where we declare our freedom by re-enchanting the ordinary. The crossroads is an immanent manifold of emergent imagery.
Without a container, initiation is experienced as personal crisis. A deep state of unbearable unrest leads to a recognition of the point where the psyche knows it is at the boundary of comfortable existence. There it must burn the ego structure to ashes by coming into the sanctuary.
Gods and goddesses exist as the source of infinite possibilities, both seen and unseen, that function as love. A body exists both as a part of a community and as a singular entity. The archetype of initiation makes itself conscious by way of trauma in order to connect with inner wisdom and the ecology of the intergenerational network.
Kybele offered an underground spiritual ethic and entanglement, a hieroglyphics of the flesh, and moments of magic and conjuration that connect truth with multifaceted tricksterism.
A “learned unknowing” is not a reduction in knowledge but a gateway to new knowledge. Failure to live up to societal standards can open up eccentric, more creative ways of thinking and being in the world, while forcing us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido. Kybele suggests that the relationship between spiritual divinity and tricksterism must be rethought in relation to bodily autonomy, sex, gender, and sexuality.
Invisibility is a prerequisite of tricksterism. The dynamism of matter underlies materialization. Phenomena or objects do not precede their interaction, rather, 'objects' emerge through particular intra-actions, in this case of god-plant and initiate. Rather than dancing in Kybele's mountains, we dance with her mountains.
Physical and emotional initiatory wounding was frequently enacted during ceremonies to show the initiate's ability to accept, yet withstand death. Initiatory wounding manifests itself as physical or emotional trauma triggered by an instinctual need to express the metaphorical language. The negation of speech can portray characteristics of the Divine.
Numerous bizarre and grotesque aspects of her myths and worship, describing intense physical, emotional, or psychic pain, suggest 'trauma as initiation.' Facing wilder and compelling events honors the soul's need for a metaphorical descent, death, and rebirth. The unimaginable new and transformative experiences allow us to dwell in the debris field of our demise, making sanctuary from a queer assemblage of unholy insights.
Trauma survivors have to connect with forces beyond themselves to survive situations that are outside the norm. Without a metaphorical language to express the reality of a liminal state, psyche grasps for any incident that will propel the self forward into the dark depths of the loss of ego identity. Sometimes, the only way to dissolve that false self-image structure is through trauma.
Kybele still offers comfort, tends wounds, and validates the emotions of the experience by sharing the stories of such life changing events --the numinous experiences that allow metaphorical threshold crossing and transformation.
Liminal Transition
Perhaps, rather than the first goddess, mother of all gods, Kybele was the last incarnation of the Great Liberating Mother, great due to temporal power. Kybele was the daughter of the Phrygian sky-god and earth-mother, “the great protectress,” reconciler of all goddesses.
"She of the Long Hair"
"She of the long hair" may be connected with Amanita muscaria's ability to resurrect. Mycelial spun threads also grow on barley and have the same effects as the original dried Amanita muscaria mushroom. Tests were run on samples of dried Amanita muscaria gathered from around the world. All subspecies of Amanita muscaria produce exactly the same out-spun threads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTXNO7CAsc4&feature=emb_title
Gordon Wasson first proposed that the common forest mushroom Amanita muscaria was the actual Vedic Soma, a sacred "immortal" "plant" bearing no leaves, blossoms, roots, fruit or seeds. It was turned into a sacred drink bearing the same name in the Soma ceremony.
He claimed the mushrooms had to be dried before using and then re-hydrated before the pressing; a process which is mentioned in the Rig Veda. Drying the Amanita muscaria mushrooms and then making a water extract did yield a far superior drink compared to the juice of fresh mushrooms.
Nature's gift of the Amanita muscaria mushroom is multiplied, strengthened, and self purified. The Soma drink self purified with its own eternal fleece produces a smooth experience with almost no negative physical symptoms and a higher quality spiritual experience. It is the magical transformative process of the Soma ceremony that creates something unattainable directly from Nature -- something Immortal. (Teeter)
We know Kybele's cult dried their mushrooms on the lofty sacred pines then used them for chthonic descent. We must pay attention not only to the plant but how it is processed to produce different chemical compounds.
Many shamanic plants are not active or even usable in their natural state and may require extensive processing before being used. Rehydration "calls forth the out spun thread" and grows mycelium that looks like Sheep Wool. This Soma created "wool" is the "eternal fleece" used to filter the Soma juice. https://ambrosiasociety.org/the-society/amanita-muscaria-fly-agaric-resurrection-video-2007
Kybele was born as an hermaphrodite named Agdistis who was castrated by the gods to become the goddess Kybele. The Phrygian sky-god is identified with the Greek Zeus in Pausanias' account of the myth. The Greeks identified her with their own mother of the gods, the Titaness Rhea. She is also linked to Isis, and even the Virgin Mary.
This page describes the early myths and lore of Kybele set in her homeland of Phrygia. The distinctly non-Greek myth is of her hermaphroditic birth and her love for the liberty-capped youth Attis. Her son/lover consort was the vegetation god Attis, a god of resurrection.
"Cybele probably means ‘of the mountain,’ or ‘of the cave’. She was equated with the Minoan Cretan Rhea of the Idaean Cave. Her ecstatic rites were considered the origin of the bacchanalia, and she was said to have cured Dionysus of the madness inflicted upon him by the jealousy of Hera." (Ruck)
http://www.sexusjournal.com/FileUpload/bs566760/File/ruck-thracian-mystery-religions-sexus-fall-2018-v3-no-10.pdf
"The role of Dionysus and intoxication in the castration of Agdistis is an etiological myth identifying the severed phallus-mushroom as an analogue of the deity." ..."the severed member is a phallus with its resemblance to its botanical analogue." (Ruck)
Some myths call Dionysus her son. He is an example of a Thracian-Greek variant of the ancient Soma God, plant of Immortality. An extremely old God, his name was found on a fired clay tablet written in Linear B script, an archaic form of Greek that is pre-alphabet and dates to about 1450 BC.
Cybele was worshiped in wild, emotional, bloody, orgiastic, cathartic ceremonies. Her radiant halo is neither solar nor lunar, but a mushroom homologue for the radiant underside of the cap. Her annual spring festival celebrated the death and resurrection of Her beloved Attis, personification of the Amanita muscaria mushroom. The rock-cut goddess is a metaphor of the 'place where time stands still'.
Borrowed from Ancient Greek, the etymology of οὐσία (ousía) is from the feminine present participle of εἰμί (eimí, “I am”). Depending on the context, ousia may be translated as "nature," "being," "essence," "reality," or "substance." The Greek word ousia was put to philosophical use by Plato in his early dialogue Euthyphro. The divine luminosity looks back at itself in naked awareness.
The Thracians conceived the chief divinity of the Samothracian and Lemnian mysteries as Rhea-Hecate. Those who settled in Asia Minor became acquainted with even stranger beings, like the one who was worshiped with wild and enthusiastic solemnities. The Greeks who afterwards settled in Asia also identified the Asiatic goddess with Rhea, with whose worship they had long been familiar (Strab. x. p. 471; Hom. Hymn. 13, 31).
In Phrygia, Rhea became Cybele who is said to have purified Dionysus, and taught him the mysteries (Apollod. iii. 5. § 1). Thus a Dionysiac element amalgamated with the worship of Rhea. Demeter, as daughter of Rhea, is sometimes mentioned with all the attributes belonging to Rhea. (Eurip. Helen. 1304.)
The confusion then became so great that the worship of the Cretan Rhea was confounded with that of the Phrygian mother of the gods. The orgies of Dionysus became interwoven with those of Cybele. Strangers from Asia, who must be looked upon as jugglers, introduced a variety of novel rites, which were fondly received, especially by the populace (Strab. 1. c.; Athen. xii. p. 553 ; Demosth. de Coron. p. 313). Both the name and the connection of Rhea with Demeter suggest that she was in early times revered as goddess of the earth.
https://www.kanaanministries.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/A-Study-on-the-Cult-of-Cybele.pdf
...
https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/3/Special-Issue/article-p43.xml
http://www.sexusjournal.com/FileUpload/bs566760/File/ruck-thracian-mystery-religions-sexus-fall-2018-v3-no-10.pdf
Carl Ruck on Chauvet cave: "The recently discovered Chauvet Cave in southern France was sealed by a rock fall and has remained undisturbed for 35,000 years. In addition to its remarkably preserved frescos, the stipes of mushrooms was found on the cave floor, obviously, the remains of mushrooms brought into the cave for ingestion. Werner Herzog filmed his documentary of the cave in 3D to “capture the intentions of the painters” as the hallucinogenic qualities of the art melded into the cave wall experience. Although Herzog discussed this in a German-language interview, the mushrooms have been ignored in the public information about the Chauvet Cave. Some of the stenciled hand prints on the cave’s walls are those of women, some those of children. The un-eaten stipes are the remnants. The caps were eaten. In the species Amanita muscaria, the psychoactive agents are present only in the red rind of the caps..." (Carl Ruck)
Neolithic women from Pontokomi Eordaias, Greece, in the Archaeological Museum of Aiani. No date given, estimate 5000-4000 bce. Some with a date of 5800-5400 bce.
'History must be rewritten to every generation to be made understandable to the people of that generation' (Nilsson, in Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, Adelphi, Milan 1979, p. 279).
ORACULAR MAGIC
Kybele's name means Oracle or Prophetess or 'she of the hair'. Sje is also a mourning goddess, linked to the underworld. The legends say worship of the Great Mother Kybele arose in Asia Minor, but its root was Pelasgian culture. Early seats of Phrygian worship included Mt. Ida, Mt. Sipylus, Cyzicus, Sardis, Gordion, and Pessimus. Animal or plant worshiping preceding that of anthropomorphic gods is corroborated by artifacts in Thrace.
Cybele and Atys were later known to the Greeks and Romans as essentially Phrygian. Their worship spread first to Ionian, Greek, then Roman territory. Thrace was connected to her worship. She was mentioned by Pindar in the 4th c. BCE. The Greeks conflated her with Rhea, from Crete and even Hekate and Aphrodite. Her rites linked with the son/lover dying and resurrection gods Attis and Dionysus. The goddess mingled Greek and primal Asian cult practice with a likely root in the Neolithic and ancestral worship.
The cult of Kybele, the `Great Mother`, was popular throughout Anatolia and in Kyzikos, one of the great cities of the ancient world, founded by Pelasgians from Thessaly; see L.E.Roller, "In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele. Attis wears the Phrygian "Liberty Cap" symbolizing the Soma mushroom. The cult spread via trade routes.
From a Vedic perspective, Cybele's mountain would be Mount Meru, the ladder to heaven. Associated with Greek Rhea, Cybele corresponds to the Vedic sky mother Aditi, the "devamatr" or the mother of the all gods, who is described as the feminine form of Brahma (like Saraswati and Vena). Aditi is said to provide nourishment as the cosmic cow, her milk being identified with the entheogenic Soma drink, which must thus be the psychedelic libation of Cybele.
ORACULAR MAGIC
Kybele's name means Oracle or Prophetess or 'she of the hair'. Sje is also a mourning goddess, linked to the underworld. The legends say worship of the Great Mother Kybele arose in Asia Minor, but its root was Pelasgian culture. Early seats of Phrygian worship included Mt. Ida, Mt. Sipylus, Cyzicus, Sardis, Gordion, and Pessimus. Animal or plant worshiping preceding that of anthropomorphic gods is corroborated by artifacts in Thrace.
Cybele and Atys were later known to the Greeks and Romans as essentially Phrygian. Their worship spread first to Ionian, Greek, then Roman territory. Thrace was connected to her worship. She was mentioned by Pindar in the 4th c. BCE. The Greeks conflated her with Rhea, from Crete and even Hekate and Aphrodite. Her rites linked with the son/lover dying and resurrection gods Attis and Dionysus. The goddess mingled Greek and primal Asian cult practice with a likely root in the Neolithic and ancestral worship.
The cult of Kybele, the `Great Mother`, was popular throughout Anatolia and in Kyzikos, one of the great cities of the ancient world, founded by Pelasgians from Thessaly; see L.E.Roller, "In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele. Attis wears the Phrygian "Liberty Cap" symbolizing the Soma mushroom. The cult spread via trade routes.
From a Vedic perspective, Cybele's mountain would be Mount Meru, the ladder to heaven. Associated with Greek Rhea, Cybele corresponds to the Vedic sky mother Aditi, the "devamatr" or the mother of the all gods, who is described as the feminine form of Brahma (like Saraswati and Vena). Aditi is said to provide nourishment as the cosmic cow, her milk being identified with the entheogenic Soma drink, which must thus be the psychedelic libation of Cybele.
Diodorus said the oracle ordered the Phyrgians to bury the body of Attis and to worship the Great Mother, Kybele, in order to be protected from epidemics and droughts. Her cult was imported from Pelasgian lands, including the region of the Lower Danube. The culture was connected by ethnic, economic, and religious ties.
Modern scholarship has produced a large volume of literature on the Phrygian goddess Kybele, the image of the Great Mother-Goddess, both on European and on Anatolian soil. Besides classic works (Graillot 1912; Vermaseren 1977), studies include (Naumann 1983; Borgeaud 1996; Işık 1999; Roller 1999). Representations of Kybele are gathered in the eight volume Corpus by M J Vermaseren (volumes 1 and 2: Vermaseren 1982; 1987). All contributions must consider the exhaustive study on the Mother cult in Phrygia, Greece, and Rome by L E Roller (1999). |
Ancient Greek philosophy had roots in the shamanic practices common to many cultures (e.g., Dodds, 1951, ch. 5; Butterworth, 1966, ch. 4,1970; Kingsley, 1994, 1995, ch. 15). The Greeks learned these techniques from the “Scythians” when they colonized the north shore of the Black Sea in the seventh century BCE and from the Thracians and Persian Magi, who also knew north-Asiatic shamanism (Hornblower & Spawforth, 1996, p. 1375; Kingsley, 1995, pp. 226–7). Poseidon, the sea god, was the ancestor of the royal families of Phoenicia, Phrygia, Sidon, Thebes.
The circle-dot motif similar to Harappan and central Asian; Anatolian figures dated close to the time of the first signs of the Hittite language are attested from the Kul Tepe site in Anatolia.
MYCOLOGY & MYTHOLOGY
Asiatic Cult of Kybele
Asiatic Cult of Kybele
"The so-called Death Cap,‘ Amanita phalloides, is filled with the lethal toxin amanitin; many other mushrooms visually similar Amanita species contain liver damaging amatoxins and phallotoxins.
Shortly after, these side-effects are followed by waves of enthusiastic euphoria, sensory distortions of time and space, and visual and auditory hallucination. These waves of weariness and exhilaration may come and go several times before the hallucinogenic chemicals wear off entirely. The duration of clinical testing does not usually exceed several hours. The following day the consumer may have attacks of sickness and vomiting.
One inevitable side-effect of the mushroom is caused by muscazone, a lactame isomer of muscimol, which aversely impacts the central nervous system with fatigue and confusion for some time after the main effects have subsided. This may account for Firmicus Maternus‘ attacks on the eunuchs of the Syrian Mother who could―barely hold their heads up on their limp necks and who, ―swept up by playing flutes, call their Goddess to fill them with an unholy spirit so as to seemingly predict the future to idle men. At least a day of rest is needed after an evening of mushroom use, both to process the neural side-effects and to come to grips with what transpired on the sleepless night which passed.
These side-effects make this particular mushroom rather unsuitable for profane use unless one is an accustomed user. Such fearful side-effects likely posed some difficulties to people‘s earliest use of
Amanita muscaria leading to the invention of a number of ritualized processing methods. Ultimately, the most widespread mode of consumption today is simply the ingestion of dried caps. The consumption of dried capsis most popular partly because drying is the easiest and best method of preservation, and partly because the fresh undried fungus contains the potent neurotoxin, Ibotenic acid.
Once having found the red caps, the one who combed the forests seeking the fresh mushrooms would hang them upon the outstretched branches of the tree to dry in the sun‘s rays, allowing their main poisonous constituent (as produced by Ibotenic acid) to be largely converted through decarboxylation into muscimol, thus enhancing their hallucinogenic potential and making them safer for ingestion. Once dried upon the tree, the now more powerful caps were taken down to be torn apart and consumed." (Attrell)
Attrell contends that "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."
Shortly after, these side-effects are followed by waves of enthusiastic euphoria, sensory distortions of time and space, and visual and auditory hallucination. These waves of weariness and exhilaration may come and go several times before the hallucinogenic chemicals wear off entirely. The duration of clinical testing does not usually exceed several hours. The following day the consumer may have attacks of sickness and vomiting.
One inevitable side-effect of the mushroom is caused by muscazone, a lactame isomer of muscimol, which aversely impacts the central nervous system with fatigue and confusion for some time after the main effects have subsided. This may account for Firmicus Maternus‘ attacks on the eunuchs of the Syrian Mother who could―barely hold their heads up on their limp necks and who, ―swept up by playing flutes, call their Goddess to fill them with an unholy spirit so as to seemingly predict the future to idle men. At least a day of rest is needed after an evening of mushroom use, both to process the neural side-effects and to come to grips with what transpired on the sleepless night which passed.
These side-effects make this particular mushroom rather unsuitable for profane use unless one is an accustomed user. Such fearful side-effects likely posed some difficulties to people‘s earliest use of
Amanita muscaria leading to the invention of a number of ritualized processing methods. Ultimately, the most widespread mode of consumption today is simply the ingestion of dried caps. The consumption of dried capsis most popular partly because drying is the easiest and best method of preservation, and partly because the fresh undried fungus contains the potent neurotoxin, Ibotenic acid.
Once having found the red caps, the one who combed the forests seeking the fresh mushrooms would hang them upon the outstretched branches of the tree to dry in the sun‘s rays, allowing their main poisonous constituent (as produced by Ibotenic acid) to be largely converted through decarboxylation into muscimol, thus enhancing their hallucinogenic potential and making them safer for ingestion. Once dried upon the tree, the now more powerful caps were taken down to be torn apart and consumed." (Attrell)
Attrell contends that "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."
"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. The actors in this drama, chiefly women or eunuchs playing the role of sacred prostitutes, ‘ritualistically hung their god upon a tree before his fated dismemberment. This prehistoric ritual was once practiced on the forest floors of the Near East and ultimately disseminated across Eurasia sometime between 7,800 and 5,800 BC on the backs of Europe‘s earliest agriculturalists. Like the mushroom-eating Eurasian shaman of today, those once inhabiting the lush mountainsides of the Near East, must have possessed awareness of Amanita muscaria’s entheogenic potential, its mycorrhizal relationship with sacred trees, and its pattern of cyclical rebirth." (Attrell)
The Mother Goddess concept, which emphasizes the fertility and productivity of women, was born first in Anatolia. This concept later spread to Greece and across Europe. The first Mother Goddess of Anatolia is Kybele, or Matar. This great goddess has different names in different regions and cultures.
In Phrygia, she is called Kyble, Semele, and Kubele, and in Lykia, she is named Kibele, Kubele, Dinda, and Leto. In Hittite sources, we see the names Arinna, Hepat, and Kubaba and in Ephesus, she is called Artemis. The Mother Goddess also has different names within Anatolia. She was Ishtar and İausga in Babel; Marianna, and Inanna in Sumeria; Nut, Hathor, and Isis in Egypt; Lat, Atargatis, Palestene, Astarte, and Diktinna in Syria; Rhea, Artemis, Ops, Ge, Mata, Urania, Urunome, Ida, and Maia in Crete; Venus, Vesta, and Anna in Italy; and Hubbel in Arabia.
From the seventh century on, Artemis was identified with Hecate, a lunar goddess, with the Thracian goddess Bendis, and with Cybele. Cybele, the Phrygian Mater Deum, arrived in Rome in 204 bce, a long time before Atargatis, the Syrian goddess.
Other names: Agdistis Cybele Magna Mater, Berecyntia, Brimo, Dindymene, Magna Mater, Mother of the Gods, Kubaba, Matar Kubelē, Kubileya or Kubeleya “Kubeleyan Mother” (Phrygian, translation: “Mountain Mother”), Lydian Kuvava (Turkish Kibele), Κυβέλη, Kybêlê, Kybele, Κυβήβη Kybebe, Κύβελις Kybelis (Greek), Meter Theon, Great Mother.
Other Names and Epithets: Antaea, Mātēr, Mētēr, Mistress Cybele the Mother, Mistress of Animals, Idaea, Isis, Rhea, Demeter, Ops, Potnia Theron (Mistress of the Animals), Mater Deum Magna Idaea, Meter Theon Idaia (“Mother of the Gods, from Mount Ida”), Meter Oreie (Mountain Mother), “The Mother of the Gods, the Savior who Hears our Prayers”, “The Mother of the Gods, the Accessible One.” Megalenses ludi, Pessinuntica (Phrygian – “Mother of the Gods.”)
In Phrygia, she is called Kyble, Semele, and Kubele, and in Lykia, she is named Kibele, Kubele, Dinda, and Leto. In Hittite sources, we see the names Arinna, Hepat, and Kubaba and in Ephesus, she is called Artemis. The Mother Goddess also has different names within Anatolia. She was Ishtar and İausga in Babel; Marianna, and Inanna in Sumeria; Nut, Hathor, and Isis in Egypt; Lat, Atargatis, Palestene, Astarte, and Diktinna in Syria; Rhea, Artemis, Ops, Ge, Mata, Urania, Urunome, Ida, and Maia in Crete; Venus, Vesta, and Anna in Italy; and Hubbel in Arabia.
From the seventh century on, Artemis was identified with Hecate, a lunar goddess, with the Thracian goddess Bendis, and with Cybele. Cybele, the Phrygian Mater Deum, arrived in Rome in 204 bce, a long time before Atargatis, the Syrian goddess.
Other names: Agdistis Cybele Magna Mater, Berecyntia, Brimo, Dindymene, Magna Mater, Mother of the Gods, Kubaba, Matar Kubelē, Kubileya or Kubeleya “Kubeleyan Mother” (Phrygian, translation: “Mountain Mother”), Lydian Kuvava (Turkish Kibele), Κυβέλη, Kybêlê, Kybele, Κυβήβη Kybebe, Κύβελις Kybelis (Greek), Meter Theon, Great Mother.
Other Names and Epithets: Antaea, Mātēr, Mētēr, Mistress Cybele the Mother, Mistress of Animals, Idaea, Isis, Rhea, Demeter, Ops, Potnia Theron (Mistress of the Animals), Mater Deum Magna Idaea, Meter Theon Idaia (“Mother of the Gods, from Mount Ida”), Meter Oreie (Mountain Mother), “The Mother of the Gods, the Savior who Hears our Prayers”, “The Mother of the Gods, the Accessible One.” Megalenses ludi, Pessinuntica (Phrygian – “Mother of the Gods.”)
Anatolian and Armenian hypothesis: Migratory patterns and genetics suggest a primeval Armenian migration through Anatolia to Thrace, and toward the Lower Danube in ancient times. Then, a return migration from Thrace to Phrygia where the Matar/Kybele cult took root and flourished. By the late third millennium BCE, offshoots of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had reached Anatolia (Hittites), the Aegean (Mycenaean Greece), Western Europe, and southern Siberia. Adherents of the Thracian cult of Dionysos, apparently consumed a wine that contained mushrooms (Allegro 1971).
Wohlberg (1990) views the Thracian Dionysos Sabazios as the analog of the Indian soma and the Persian haoma (cf. Peganum harmala) and has propounded the theory that the Thracian god is identical to the fly agaric mushroom.352 Carl Ruck has suggested that the secret offering of the Hyperboreans to the Delian Apollo was a fly agaric mushroom and was thus the last reminder of the Indo-Germanic soma (Ruck 1983**). He views the leopard, the sacred animal of Dionysos, as a symbol for the fly agaric, which was consumed ritually and used for entheogenic purposes, because the marks on the leopard’s coat resemble those on a dried fly agaric cap (Ruck 1995, 133**). In general, Ruck regards the fly agaric as the original entheogen of the Greek culture(s), which over the course of time was replaced by a variety of (placebo) agents (Ruck, 1995).
It is presently unknown whether the Phrygians were actively involved in the collapse of the Hittite capital Hattusa or whether they simply moved into the vacuum left by the collapse of Hittite hegemony after the Late Bronze Age collapse. According to Herodotus, the Phrygians were initially dwelling in the southern Balkans under the name of Bryges (Briges), changing it to Phruges after their final migration to Anatolia, via the Hellespont.
From tribal and village beginnings, the state of Phrygia arose in the eighth century BCE with its capital at Gordium. During this period, the Phrygians extended eastward and encroached upon the kingdom of Urartu, the descendants of the Hurrians, a former rival of the Hittites. Meanwhile, the Phrygian Kingdom was overwhelmed by Cimmerian invaders around 690 BCE, then briefly conquered by its neighbour Lydia, before it passed successively into the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great and the empire of Alexander and his successors, was taken by the Attalids of Pergamon, and eventually became part of the Roman Empire (Wiki).
Fly agaric is wide spread in a number of countries, but in Armenia it is found in Ijevan floristic region – in Dilijan town, surrounding lake Parz (Parz lich); Aparan floristic region – in the towns Tsaxkadzor, Hanqavan; in Lori floristic region; in mixed forests at altitudes of 1500–1700 m above sea level, from August to October. A Mycorrhizal fungi, with birch and pine trees. Fungi played a role in humankind's earliest history. See Soma. https://archive.org/stream/SomaAmongTheArmenians_661/soma_djvu.txt
Wohlberg (1990) views the Thracian Dionysos Sabazios as the analog of the Indian soma and the Persian haoma (cf. Peganum harmala) and has propounded the theory that the Thracian god is identical to the fly agaric mushroom.352 Carl Ruck has suggested that the secret offering of the Hyperboreans to the Delian Apollo was a fly agaric mushroom and was thus the last reminder of the Indo-Germanic soma (Ruck 1983**). He views the leopard, the sacred animal of Dionysos, as a symbol for the fly agaric, which was consumed ritually and used for entheogenic purposes, because the marks on the leopard’s coat resemble those on a dried fly agaric cap (Ruck 1995, 133**). In general, Ruck regards the fly agaric as the original entheogen of the Greek culture(s), which over the course of time was replaced by a variety of (placebo) agents (Ruck, 1995).
It is presently unknown whether the Phrygians were actively involved in the collapse of the Hittite capital Hattusa or whether they simply moved into the vacuum left by the collapse of Hittite hegemony after the Late Bronze Age collapse. According to Herodotus, the Phrygians were initially dwelling in the southern Balkans under the name of Bryges (Briges), changing it to Phruges after their final migration to Anatolia, via the Hellespont.
From tribal and village beginnings, the state of Phrygia arose in the eighth century BCE with its capital at Gordium. During this period, the Phrygians extended eastward and encroached upon the kingdom of Urartu, the descendants of the Hurrians, a former rival of the Hittites. Meanwhile, the Phrygian Kingdom was overwhelmed by Cimmerian invaders around 690 BCE, then briefly conquered by its neighbour Lydia, before it passed successively into the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great and the empire of Alexander and his successors, was taken by the Attalids of Pergamon, and eventually became part of the Roman Empire (Wiki).
Fly agaric is wide spread in a number of countries, but in Armenia it is found in Ijevan floristic region – in Dilijan town, surrounding lake Parz (Parz lich); Aparan floristic region – in the towns Tsaxkadzor, Hanqavan; in Lori floristic region; in mixed forests at altitudes of 1500–1700 m above sea level, from August to October. A Mycorrhizal fungi, with birch and pine trees. Fungi played a role in humankind's earliest history. See Soma. https://archive.org/stream/SomaAmongTheArmenians_661/soma_djvu.txt
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)
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)
"In telling such a myth, the ancients did not intend to provide entertainment. Neither did they seek, in a detached way and without ulterior motives, for intelligible explanations of the natural phenomena. They were recounting events in which they were involved to the extent of their very existence. "The images had already become traditional at the time when we meet them in art and literature, but originally they must have been seen in the revelation which the experience entailed. ... The imagery is inseparable from the thought. It represents the form in which the experience has become conscious. "Myth, then, is to be taken seriously, because it reveals a significant, if unverifiable truth – we might say a metaphysical truth."
—Henri Frankfort & Henriette Groenewegen-Frankfort (1949). ‘Myth and Reality.’ In Frankfort, H., Frankfort, H. A., Jacobsen, T., & Wilson, J. A., Before Philosophy (pp. 11-36). Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, pp. 15-6. First published as The Intellectual Adventure of Early Man, U of Chicago Press, 1946)
—Henri Frankfort & Henriette Groenewegen-Frankfort (1949). ‘Myth and Reality.’ In Frankfort, H., Frankfort, H. A., Jacobsen, T., & Wilson, J. A., Before Philosophy (pp. 11-36). Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, pp. 15-6. First published as The Intellectual Adventure of Early Man, U of Chicago Press, 1946)
The Primeval World
Kybele is 'Mother of the Gods,' 'Mother of the Mountains,' and 'Mistress of Beasts.' The Anatolian Earth Mother embodied the original fluid relationship between the constellation of all beings that gave rise to her voice even before time began.
Primal Tradition
Goddess, Great Goddess, Kybele, Lady Goddess of the Mountains
Visit your small madness upon me, I pray, that the great madness shall pass me by.
The Asiatic goddess and her cult-partner arose long before the classical era of belief. She is the Phrygian goddess of magic, wild things, and faith -- the dark mysteries of earth and nature. Phrygians originally worshiped their goddess in an aniconic fashion, like the Thracians who before being influenced by the Greeks never depicted their goddess anthropomorphically. (Bogh, 2007)
Generally, she is characterized by a dual nature of unpredictable power and beneficent qualities. Numinous archetypes fluctuate between transpersonal glory and pre-rational chaos. We are not proposing a historically-discounted universal goddess theory or matriarchy (Gimbutas 2001). But, according to the Oriental Institute, the Gimbutas theory of Kurgan migration has gained ground on ancient DNA evidence, linguistic correlations, and artifact evidence (Renfrew).
It is essential that her foundational motif is foremost. Kybele, Attis, and Dionysus have all been specifically associated with fly agaric or Amanita muscaria, and to deny that Thracian and Anatolian antic cult-worship can only lead us astray. Central Balkan Neolithic culture. (Gimbutas, Maria: The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe 6500-3500 BC Myth and Cult Images, Univ. of California Press, 1982) These findings confirm the thesis that the indigenous Thracian population existed since the early Stone Age between 65,000 and 55,000 BC.
Instead we have to look for evidence derived from an experience of the sacred and artifacts. Arguably, the primal Kybele cult is a mystery religion, which requires undergoing ordeals, a death-like experience, and suffering transformation. Wisdom came from the dead, who could only be contacted safely in the proper ritual context.
She is usually represented seated on a throne with a phiale (libation bowl) and a tympanon (frame drum). She has formidable, awesome, magical powers. People came to her to seek vengeance or justice. She can possess individuals with madness or illness, or cure them from disease (Borgeaud 1996:27ff.; Roller 1999:156).
Roller demonstrates historically that there is no divine Attis until Hellenistic and Roman times. But this doesn't preclude more archaic antecedents when the goddess was worshiped alone. He emerged organically from the local environment, legends, and archaic practice. He arises from a sacrament to a distinct god with his own cyclic behavioral traits as a lover of the imagination.
She is the wildness within us that never dies despite being civilized. The cult is one of the wild (undifferentiated) affective faculty. Momentary reactions produce feeling-tones. It embraces affective reactions: desires, drives, impulses, intuition, instincts, moods, as well as sensations, passions, feelings, and emotions. It all spills forth from the libation cup.
We can look at modern life with such ego-alien struggles and affects with a mythological eye. The chthonic regions of the psyche are the most archaic.
Fantastic symbolic role-playing is either necessary to someone's pattern of life, or else it do not affect them, does not move them.
This is a transformative survival value. Symbolic patterns of the Mother and Son-Lover persist today, unconsciously enacted in the mother-complex and more in a mystifying, confused, even archaic way.
When coherent but non-systematic feeling and emotion lose touch with consciousness they fall into deep unconscious caverns. Emotion raises. It is an essentially creative state, a total event activating the symbolic transformation of body and psyche. Images speak to us and resonate in the body.
Feeling functions as a relation, the function of relationship, and adaptation to the internal and external environment. Feeling is a function with consistency, continuity, and identity that shapes events and colors our evaluation of our experiences.
James Hillman attributes the puer archetype to the son-lover motif, saying, "The puer God dies when the primal trust is broken, and the man is born. And the man is born only when the feminine in him is born. This is a radical change in the masculine cosmos." ("Betrayal", Loose Ends.)
Other symbols were later transferred to Kybele. The Roman version of the cult retained its ecstatic and foreign elements, but differed greatly from the cult in the ancient Phrygian homeland of Kybele.
In the Paleo-Phrygian period (9th–7th centuries BC) there was still no influence from the Greeks. Herodotos (VII, 73) said the Phrygians were immigrants from Thrace settling in Anatolia. According to modern theories, this would be in the late Bronze age -- 12th and the 10th centuries BC.
Indigenous Armenians claim they descend directly from Noah. Migration lines have been drawn from antic Armenia through Anatolia, into Thrace. and up to the Danube, known for its ancient Vinca culture. There was also a reverse migration through Thrace into Phrygia.
Pagan Armenia assimilated aspects of the Phrygian Kybele. According to some authors, Nane was adopted from the Akkadian goddess Nanaya, from the Phrygian goddess Cybele, or was from Elamite origin.
Sibel, Cymbal & Symbols
The chthonic great goddess had many names (Matar, Kubileya, Kubaba) localized at different Mystery sanctuaries. Genetic studies show that today's Anatolians are largely from the indigenous population of the region. They use a Turkish language name for Kybele, which is Sibel.
The realities and specifics of prehistoric culture are closed to us. Like it or not, we have to rely on ancient evidence to even imagine what she and her controversial cult were actually like. The mythical body is the body in the myth.
In Phrygia, no written records remain concerning her cult and worship, though there are numerous statues of seated women that some archaeologists believe represent Kybele. Her evidence is carved in stone. Often she is also portrayed giving birth, indicative of her Mother Goddess status. The cult was never monolithic, but a power laced with ambiguity.
We know the rites were very bizarre, including visionary communion, mystical sympathy with the world, the non-rational dimensions of human experience. This was an oracular cult with no body of doctrine, and no sacred books. It did have mystical psychoactive communion. Numinous archetypes fluctuate between transcendent glory and pre-rational chaos.
"Orgia may have been earlier manifestations of cult than the formal mysteries, as suggested by the violently ecstatic rites described in myth as celebrated by Attis in honor of Cybele and reflected in the willing self-castration of her priests the Galli in the historical period. The orgia of both Dionysian worship and the cult of Cybele aim at breaking down barriers between the celebrants and the divinity through a state of mystic exaltation." Giulia Sfameni Gasparro, Soteriology and Mystic Aspects in the Cult of Cybele and Attis (Brill, 1985), p. 53 and 11–19.
There is little doubt that the prepared sacred drink was intoxicating and intended to access altered consciousness or mystical communion in a ritual context. It flourished because it provided everyone with the same basic connection to underlying reality. We still feel the impact of the world around us in a series of personal relationships with such genuine radical metaphors.
Kybele was worshiped in orgiastic rites, dissonant music, and wild dancing. This kind of bodily mysticism and psychosomatic liberation had only temporary effects each time — the period of the ekstasis (Turcan).
But we don't hear how and why of the archaic practices. Our approach tries to penetrate the phenomenon itself, surrounding it from all sides, circumambulating and expanding it by increasing the volume -- amplification. The phenomenon is mythopoetical, not intellectual. But belief in a deity was subsumed in direct experience.
Pre-rational experience is somatic -- our physical, animal, biological nature, felt sense experience, and emotions. Beneath the numbness or dissociation of disembodiment, the felt sense has been available as a constant stream of invaluable information. It manifests itself in direct contact which is more than a metaphor -- a vibrant experience.
The idea of life, projected onto the trans-rational cosmos, sexualizes it. We know the rite produces sympathy with the Mystery-Deity and the madness of her grief, jealousy, and ecstasy and therefore our own. The fused state and merging are pre-rational; oneness with everything is trans-personal.
Such experiences were insured with shamanic entheogenic initiation. At the dawn of religion, instead of mere confusion, the Great Mother instilled reverence for pre-rationality codified into a system for living. She is about perennial problems of human existence, the problem of humankind in nature, fate, and death.
Rebirth is the theme of the self-regenerating goddess. The material world is revealed in its animated glory. It can also be a terrifying encounter that assumes a new 'identity' from moment to moment.
It fosters healthy, secure attachment with a somatic approach to establishing what was missed in early life. Trauma healing cannot happen without somatic resources, it is also true that healing cannot happen without including the dimension of meaning-making through which humans make sense of our worlds.
The effects of collective trauma, violence and oppression are passed on from one generation to the next; our early relationships can be disrupted. This produces a population of people who struggle to form healthy, sustainable bonds. Relationships can feel unsafe, intimacy can produce anxiety, and people can oscillate between codependency and isolation.
Symbolic meaning is inherent in self-referential encoding of the material and symbolic aspects of events. Fabulism is a way of exploring myth, allegory, and fable as a means of comprehending the complexities of human nature. Our notions about the nature of the world is our worldview.
It collects information about its own functioning that lead to ambiguities, strange loops, and paradox -- a blurring of matter-symbol distinctions into myth. The initial condition implies a self-referent impotency principle (Attis) that unchanging events cannot completely describe changing events. We know the cult changed radically as it dispersed through Greece, Rome, and other cultures.
Self-reference and self-modification symbols can be both too vague and too narrow in comparison to processes of interest. Such self-organization of initial conditions is a subsymbolic paradigm. The initial conditions refer to a chaotic aspect -- the raw awareness of consciousness under the effects of an entheogen as an origin for an autonomous or dynamic symbol grounding of internal meanings -- emergence.
The mystical “motif” is marked by high emotional intensity, even trauma at times with a brief period of physical stress followed by a cathartic event, demarcated by a high level of emotional arousal followed by an active intensification of belief and practice.
Over time, the cult dropped and added new cultural components and characteristics. It made constellations with other gods and goddesses. But even today, archaic psyche continues to present as autonomous mind, with unconscious patterns and cycles, moreso in non-ordinary states of consciousness.
There is nothing “subjective” or “objective” about consciousness. This primary process is beyond dualism. Such primitive intuitions don't die. Patterns or psychological paradigms span thousands of years. Caves remain the womb of the mother, the tomb, and the place of initiation, part of her system of religious symbolism.
People can still grasp the timeless energetic nature of reality -- the great connected web of life that is in constant motion -- the electricity of the moment. Let every cell of every human pulse with perfection. Closing fearful eyes will not stop but only amplify the process. With entheogens what one believed about a deity became irrelevant.
"Wine was fortified in the mixing ceremony with a variety of toxins derived from plant and animal sources, sometimes even lethal substances in sub-lethal amounts, such as serpent venoms, salamander secretions, henbane, opium, Datura (jimsonweed), and deadly hemlock (Conium maculatum). This tradition survives in the modern Greek folk wine of retsina (fortified with psychoactive terpenes from pine resin)." (Ruck)
"A strong Thracian wine known as ‘Biblian’ ( Bíblinos/Búblinos) was an export of Samothrace; in the ritual initiation into the Mystery of the Great Gods as celebrated on the island and elsewhere in cave sanctuaries throughout ancient Thrace, accessed the ecstatic visionary revel that summoned an apparition of the netherworld goddess." (Ruck)
https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/mushroom-monuments-thrace-and-ancient-sacred-rites-005267
Forbidden Fruit
The forbidden fruit of the mythic tree is Amanita muscaria (Ruck). There is reason not to expect that encounters with A. muscaria stretch back as long as hominins occupied the temperate forest regions of the Northern Hemisphere. These mushrooms grow in symbiosis with Betula spp. (birch) and Pinus spp. (pine trees). When forests are slashed and burnt not only the woods, but the unseen life-support systems under the surface are wrecked too.
Different toxins and alkaloids prevail depending on the concoction. We can't be sure if the divine entheogen was abandoned or replaced by surrogates, but it induced a visionary reality and cohesive worship. It was euphemistically and symbolically known as the "bull" for its power.
We don't know if the divine elixir was a single substance or a mixture. Psilocybin and Cubensis mushrooms were also found on the plains. Drug-induced initiations were practiced throughout the known ancient world with mushrooms, opium, ephedra, cannabis, ergot, acacia, henbane, Syrian rue (mountain rue; Peganum harmala), datura, and more.
In Sacred Mushrooms of the Goddess, Ruck (p. 73-84) describes the Lesser Mysteries of Artemis as based on the wild mushroom. They pushed human experiential boundaries to their limits and beyond the agonies of ecstasy. Modern reports of ingestion in wine describe energetic states, a strong desire to dance followed by sedative effects around 3 hours, and intense dreamlike trips for hours.
"The effects of Amanita muscaria are diverse and vary according to dosage, method of preparation and the cultural and psychological expectations of the consumer. A small dose (or the initial effect of a larger one) causes bodily stimulation and a desire for movement and physical exercise.
Responses to the fly-agaric varied widely. Sometimes an intoxicated individual had to be restrained from over-exerting himself, whilst on other occasions it would induce a tranquil state of bliss in which beautiful visions appeared before the eyes. The effects can be divided into three basic stages, which sometimes overlap. About fifteen minutes after taking the mushrooms the stimulating effects begin and there is much loud singing and laughing. This stage is followed by auditory and visual hallucinations in conjunction with the sensation that things increase in size."
The goddess's dark places are crowned with woodlands and high groves, speckled with seasonal mushrooms. The Phrygians had a consuming passion for their god plants. They loved undiluted fermented grain beer. Fermentation was another fungal mystery of transformation of mead and bread.
Rejuvenation comes from connecting with pristine consciousness, the eternal aspects or forces of nature--the infinite, transcendent Source. We cannot gloss over her mycological roots. Some of what we know today can be reflected back to the ancient cult. The cave is a crucible of transcendence and shamanic transport. Kybele and Attis are essentially womb and phallus.
Kybele generates and what she generates is the god within. In this mythic dimension within, her gleaming shape-shifting vision, god-perception, and cosmic consciousness were revealed in symbolic pyrotechnics. Ecstasy meant to 'stand outside oneself,' to enter another dimension, a world apart. It demonstrates the divine resides within.
Those who know her have done so through an imparting of secret knowledge. The secrets of Kybele were originally those of the divine pharmacopeia. Her secrets remain virginal and her mysteries are inviolable. Our experiences belong only to ourselves. Each has their own. Kybele had one that was foundational first, and became symbolic of magical potency.
Knowledge of the sacramental substance has been obscured. It is little known outside of ethnomycology. Yet, archaeology confirms it. There are numerous icons of Attis shaped like mushrooms. His legend also suggests the same. Pliny attributed a sexual character to Amanita muscaria. The splotchy red mushrooms mirrored 'the spilled blood of Attis.' Is an Amanita-wine the lost elixir?
Mushrooms are a perennial metaphor for the penis. They still have erotic connotations. The cult consumed fly agaric (spiritual flight). Attis was the Paleo-European key to the rites of the Great Mother. Yet it has been largely under-reported, except as a communal regression into oceanic states, a mystical return to the mother.
Elements of ritual gender-blending, transvestitism or literal and symbolic androgyny are nearly universal among shamans. Transgender shamans are metaphorically described as changing into a woman or androgynous being. But, the terms "eunuch" and "transgender" are not synonymous. Yet, this ritual androgyny is considered a sign of spirituality.
We experience that larger world and self--the rhythmic pulse of all life in the womb of the cosmic mother. This mystical fusion is somewhat akin to an expanded experience of the world. It includes oceanic feelings, the experience of being expanded, quasi-larger or more spacious than one's own body.
Oceanic feeling is a sense of fuller vision extending to apparently limitless horizons. Consciousness is encountered as more like a field than a localized point, a field that transcends the body and yet somehow interacts with it.
Kybele Speaks
We have to let Kybele speak and amplify herself and listen. We seek the emotional and feeling factor associated with the archetypal image. To study plants, we study the soil from which they grow.
All archetypes are contaminated with one another in the unconscious. The motifs of myths grow from a human basis. We have to circumambulate the story to grasp its essence as personal and cosmic religion -- through mystic identification.
If we start with the Paleo-European Great Mother, we can pile up comparative material forever until all symbols are included, for she is 'the mother of all'. We can't erase inconvenient parts of history; that is denial. But it is not mere speculation either. 'Going down into the depths' of thought-patterns and emotional experience and re-emerging remains the great Mystery.
You danced with the Mother, shrieked with the Mother, bled with the Mother, and the Mother helped you heal.
How can we make her Presence, participation mystique, and animism felt in our lives today, in contemporary society? The sacred meal is her oldest ritual, despite all later modifications.
James Hillman said, "When the gods arrive on stage, everything becomes silent and the eyelids close. Plunged into oblivion by this experience, we re-emerge and without knowing exactly what is happened, we know only that we have been transformed."
We need to set the scene. The Midas legend and Gordion are a major part of Kybele's legends. The gods arrived with an ancient disaster of immense proportions. Naturally, we cannot collapse the timeline down over centuries, but we are looking for pulse-points [wars, famine, cliate change, disasters] that might have increased the fervor for devotees of Kybele, especially in earth disasters.
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/phry/hd_phry.htm
The date of the ancient Mediterranean Eruption is hidden in dead trees specifically, 1560 BCE, in the wood of a royal Phrygian tomb. A more remote eruption later may also have affected weather. The anomaly of 1159 b.c. coincides with the global effects of the eruption of Hekla III in Iceland.
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1996/07/cornell-researchers-precisely-date-wood-ancient-tomb-turkey
Nature reports that "logs used to build the inner chamber of the Midas Mound Tumulus, a massive tomb named for King Midas of the Phrygians and located at the Gordion archaeological site, were cut in 718 B.C. "That is not plus-or-minus anything; it is a date 'to the year,'" said Cornell doctoral student Maryanne Newton, one of the Nature article's coauthors."
The Bronze Age Minoan eruption was one of the most massive eruptions on earth in the past 10,000 years. Anatolia shared the catastrophe of the Thera eruption, which turned the sky black with ash. Cooler and wetter weather threatened their crops. Surely, amid the death and destruction they called on their great goddess.
Artifacts from her cult center verify this: "When the volcano erupted, the island of Thera—and environs thousands of miles in every direction—was wracked with pyroclastic flows and tsunamis, as clouds of ash blotted out the sky and blanketed much of the Mediterranean region with the stuff. That included the local Minoan town of Akrotiri and, farther away, woods that would be used to construct the royal “Midas Mound” tumulus, or tomb, near the ancient Phrygian site of Gordion, in Turkey." Isaac Schultz April, 2020
She signifies a profound transformation and an enriched understanding of darkness, staying within the darkness, within its dark illumination. Our ancestors sit with us in the dark. The Divine Earth Road follows an underground stream into the Underworld, a geocentric mythical topology. It coalesced with the source of all that comes into being.
Jung mused, “If you comprehend the darkness, it seizes you. It comes over you like the night with black shadows and countless shimmering stars. Silence and peace come over you if you begin to comprehend the darkness. Only he who does not comprehend the darkness fears the night."
Clement of Alexandria quoted the initiatory formula as a password: "From the tambourine I have eaten; from the cymbal I have drunk; I have become the kernos (sacred dish; terra-cotta vessel for offerings); the room (cave bridal chamber; shrine; initiation chamber) I have entered." (Protrept Exortation to the Greeks 2.15: trans. Vermaseren, in Eliade)
Shadow is the substance of the soul, that inner darkness that draws us down, away from life in inexorable relationship with the Underworld. Then, as now, a veritable patchwork of ideas, philosophies, and superstitions syncretized into many unique permutations within the minds of each individual.
Our personal mythology arises when we are engulfed by an unconscious content. Such numinous experience is the kernel of our story. Our own psychological events keep the motifs alive which reveal basic archetypal structure and the somatic framework.
Rilke spoke of our wild calling in Requiem for a Friend: "And only then, when I have learned enough, I will go to watch the animals, and let something of their composure slowly glide into my limbs; will see my own existence deep in their eyes, which hold me for awhile and let me go, serenely, without judgment."
Sexual Paradox
Gender inequality has deep collective unconscious roots. Today we have terms such as emasculation, transgender, non-binary, and transvestite. Ancient devotees might have been connoisseurs of ancient poisons, hypnotists, psychics, telepaths and clairvoyants. They comprehended the communication of animals and plants.
Even rapture and ecstasy are essentially passive. Trauma triggers are locked in time loops. So are ritual or psychedelic experiences. Ordeals that drove the trance included corporeal mortification, sensory deprivation, and sensory overload.
"The small madness can be understood as certain types of katharsis, frenzy, or voluntary surrender. It can be accessed through a variety of conduits, including entheogens, dance, sex, pain, and channeling. When directed devotionally through these conduits, the small madness acts as a pressure valve, inoculating
practitioners against the great madness." (Knight)
https://www.academia.edu/36762984/The_Passion_of_Agdistis_Gender_Transgression_Sexual_Trauma_Time_Travel_and_Ritualized_Madness_in_Greco-Anatolian_Revival_Cultus
Jung said 'the gods have become diseases.' When Zeus raped Kybele, she fractured into Agdistis, a rageful post-trumatic complex. We can find Kybele hidden in collective insanity, dissociation, rape, incestuous symbiosis, mother fixation, extreme dependency, sexual non-conformity, as well as the compulsive bloodletting of cutting, sexually-transmitted madness and disease, and sexual trauma. These were among the ritualized acts of her cult that can be enacted unconsciously, compulsively.
How can we find her within our psyche and wildly alive in the world around us, with its shrinking ecology? As nature becomes less wild, do humans become more so, in collective regression? What positive and life-affirming moves can we make in that direction? Each of us must answer for ourselves. We must find our magical elixir, the Fruit of Life, which reveals the Great Actual.
When you taste him, you taste me, as well. My madness is in his.
When you drink of him, you drink of me.
The holes and the paradoxes in our mythos are dreamlike and paradoxical, so the living goddess can enter, whether the theme is 'beauty and the beast,' or 'the helpful animal,' or 'the sacred meal,' etc. These are elementary poetical and fantasy images, elementary emotion, and elementary impulses toward typical actions. What do we do with such feelings, emotions, and fantasies?
Novelist Ken Kesey said, “The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer. They think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”
Telluric Presence
The goddess's dark places are crowned with woodlands and high groves. Phrygia lies in the central highlands of Anatolia whose fierce terrain of precipitous mountains and untamed forest gave birth to an eruption of the sacred, an equally fierce goddess cult of religious enthusiasm and ecstasy. It was flamboyant and gory. She exploded suddenly and violently, and broke out dramatically, in a kaleidoscope of radical mood swings.
Kybele is an autochthonous Anatolian cult. Anatolia is home to a 12,000 year old civilization, rediscovered at Gobekli Tepe. We argue strongly in favor of remote origins. Anatolia was also strongly connected via trade to Mesopotamia.
Symbolism is a system of highly complex relations, of polarities, linking the physical and metaphysical worlds. She carried a key which opened the gates of the invisible world. While Kybele was made of stone, Attis was said to not be visible.
What paleolithic humans evolved out of this process is impossible to know except through indirect deductions. It was a way to share an original vision or experience, manifest in the crenelated crown with its veil, a mushroom homologue. Riding a lion could also be a metaphor.
Kybele had a dangerous reputation and notorious festivals. To enter a cave is to enter Kybele. Her most sacred manifestation was as a black meteorite, a sacred stone supposedly endowed with life. In Cypress, Aphrodite was also worshipped as a conical black stone.
The incense that billowed over her processions likely contained cannabis. Keys; cymbals; frame drum; Kybele is credited with inventing drums, flutes and percussion instruments. Creatures: Bees, bulls, big cats especially leopards and lions; her chariot is pulled by lions.
Our knowledge about the latter part of the Neolithic Age is considerably wider. There were mushroom cults and rituals of consubstantiality with deities in both pre-Indo-European tribes and in the Middle and Near East. Nearly 4,000 years ago, the Kybele cult was primitive nature worship that transformed into a system of spiritualized mysteries.
Her cult connected transcendent soul with a god of intoxication. Her pomegranate emblem was a euphemism for the poppy by shape and the Amanita mushroom by red color. We don't need to know the raw truth as much as to experience it, "to find our way to the inner, and perhaps wordless, irrational experience," as Jung said.
Any episode in her mythic history is quite recent in comparison to the deep, underground time of the Great Mother for whom time is the progress of chthonic and hypochthonic forces, the liberation of ancient powers. The flow of fully-immersive participation mystique with nature is the intimate connection between our animal and human nature.
The concept of the Great Goddess is Semitic, or a Semitic influence, even if the Phrygians were Indo-European. Though Phrygians were Aryan, their cult was not purely Aryan. They migrated from Armenia across Anatolia to Thrace and Macedonia.
Most of the Eastern Mediterranean believed that the Phrygians were progenitors of the world‘s oldest goddess. Kybele, a phase of the great goddess of the East, dates back to the distant pre-Indo-European past or to non-Indo-European of the most remote antiquity. Her sacred green stones can be seen in the temple of the once-lost Hittite capital. She was mother-goddess of ancient Troy (Ilium).
Initiation and mushrooms were "facets of a prehistoric and pan-human magico-religious archetype." The priestesses would drum and dance ecstatically, rub their hair in the dirt, whip themselves into a frenzy. Since the cup or bowl is shown on Kybele's votive figures, niche monuments, communal shrines, and statues, we can presume the mushrooms were made into a drink and libation.
This is the sacramental libation of the original Holy Grail. This vessel, the bowl, was carried in her procession. Kybele as mushroom was a very literal bridge to the unconscious.
Large door rocks replicate complete building facades that can only open for the psyche. These doors are abbreviated versions of the house of the goddess who stands beckoning open-armed in the doorway. With the goddess infusion one could walk through walls to other realms.
Collective unconscious psychic processes are simple, bare, and concise. All archetypes are essentially unknown psychic factors. Archetypal images unfold basic processes and patterns of the psyche with an overlay of cultural material, such as ritual drinking from a tympanon-drum in the later mysteries of Kybele.
Kybele's ancient praises are literally carved in stone. But more, these are touchstone experiences in which archetypes and myths shape and inform our very being and psychic experience, like DNA informs our physical being. It is the sacred drama wherein the transcendent devours, fertilizes, begets, slays, and brings itself to life again.
Kybele is 'Mother of the Gods,' 'Mother of the Mountains,' and 'Mistress of Beasts.' The Anatolian Earth Mother embodied the original fluid relationship between the constellation of all beings that gave rise to her voice even before time began.
Primal Tradition
Goddess, Great Goddess, Kybele, Lady Goddess of the Mountains
Visit your small madness upon me, I pray, that the great madness shall pass me by.
The Asiatic goddess and her cult-partner arose long before the classical era of belief. She is the Phrygian goddess of magic, wild things, and faith -- the dark mysteries of earth and nature. Phrygians originally worshiped their goddess in an aniconic fashion, like the Thracians who before being influenced by the Greeks never depicted their goddess anthropomorphically. (Bogh, 2007)
Generally, she is characterized by a dual nature of unpredictable power and beneficent qualities. Numinous archetypes fluctuate between transpersonal glory and pre-rational chaos. We are not proposing a historically-discounted universal goddess theory or matriarchy (Gimbutas 2001). But, according to the Oriental Institute, the Gimbutas theory of Kurgan migration has gained ground on ancient DNA evidence, linguistic correlations, and artifact evidence (Renfrew).
It is essential that her foundational motif is foremost. Kybele, Attis, and Dionysus have all been specifically associated with fly agaric or Amanita muscaria, and to deny that Thracian and Anatolian antic cult-worship can only lead us astray. Central Balkan Neolithic culture. (Gimbutas, Maria: The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe 6500-3500 BC Myth and Cult Images, Univ. of California Press, 1982) These findings confirm the thesis that the indigenous Thracian population existed since the early Stone Age between 65,000 and 55,000 BC.
Instead we have to look for evidence derived from an experience of the sacred and artifacts. Arguably, the primal Kybele cult is a mystery religion, which requires undergoing ordeals, a death-like experience, and suffering transformation. Wisdom came from the dead, who could only be contacted safely in the proper ritual context.
She is usually represented seated on a throne with a phiale (libation bowl) and a tympanon (frame drum). She has formidable, awesome, magical powers. People came to her to seek vengeance or justice. She can possess individuals with madness or illness, or cure them from disease (Borgeaud 1996:27ff.; Roller 1999:156).
Roller demonstrates historically that there is no divine Attis until Hellenistic and Roman times. But this doesn't preclude more archaic antecedents when the goddess was worshiped alone. He emerged organically from the local environment, legends, and archaic practice. He arises from a sacrament to a distinct god with his own cyclic behavioral traits as a lover of the imagination.
She is the wildness within us that never dies despite being civilized. The cult is one of the wild (undifferentiated) affective faculty. Momentary reactions produce feeling-tones. It embraces affective reactions: desires, drives, impulses, intuition, instincts, moods, as well as sensations, passions, feelings, and emotions. It all spills forth from the libation cup.
We can look at modern life with such ego-alien struggles and affects with a mythological eye. The chthonic regions of the psyche are the most archaic.
Fantastic symbolic role-playing is either necessary to someone's pattern of life, or else it do not affect them, does not move them.
This is a transformative survival value. Symbolic patterns of the Mother and Son-Lover persist today, unconsciously enacted in the mother-complex and more in a mystifying, confused, even archaic way.
When coherent but non-systematic feeling and emotion lose touch with consciousness they fall into deep unconscious caverns. Emotion raises. It is an essentially creative state, a total event activating the symbolic transformation of body and psyche. Images speak to us and resonate in the body.
Feeling functions as a relation, the function of relationship, and adaptation to the internal and external environment. Feeling is a function with consistency, continuity, and identity that shapes events and colors our evaluation of our experiences.
James Hillman attributes the puer archetype to the son-lover motif, saying, "The puer God dies when the primal trust is broken, and the man is born. And the man is born only when the feminine in him is born. This is a radical change in the masculine cosmos." ("Betrayal", Loose Ends.)
Other symbols were later transferred to Kybele. The Roman version of the cult retained its ecstatic and foreign elements, but differed greatly from the cult in the ancient Phrygian homeland of Kybele.
In the Paleo-Phrygian period (9th–7th centuries BC) there was still no influence from the Greeks. Herodotos (VII, 73) said the Phrygians were immigrants from Thrace settling in Anatolia. According to modern theories, this would be in the late Bronze age -- 12th and the 10th centuries BC.
Indigenous Armenians claim they descend directly from Noah. Migration lines have been drawn from antic Armenia through Anatolia, into Thrace. and up to the Danube, known for its ancient Vinca culture. There was also a reverse migration through Thrace into Phrygia.
Pagan Armenia assimilated aspects of the Phrygian Kybele. According to some authors, Nane was adopted from the Akkadian goddess Nanaya, from the Phrygian goddess Cybele, or was from Elamite origin.
Sibel, Cymbal & Symbols
The chthonic great goddess had many names (Matar, Kubileya, Kubaba) localized at different Mystery sanctuaries. Genetic studies show that today's Anatolians are largely from the indigenous population of the region. They use a Turkish language name for Kybele, which is Sibel.
The realities and specifics of prehistoric culture are closed to us. Like it or not, we have to rely on ancient evidence to even imagine what she and her controversial cult were actually like. The mythical body is the body in the myth.
In Phrygia, no written records remain concerning her cult and worship, though there are numerous statues of seated women that some archaeologists believe represent Kybele. Her evidence is carved in stone. Often she is also portrayed giving birth, indicative of her Mother Goddess status. The cult was never monolithic, but a power laced with ambiguity.
We know the rites were very bizarre, including visionary communion, mystical sympathy with the world, the non-rational dimensions of human experience. This was an oracular cult with no body of doctrine, and no sacred books. It did have mystical psychoactive communion. Numinous archetypes fluctuate between transcendent glory and pre-rational chaos.
"Orgia may have been earlier manifestations of cult than the formal mysteries, as suggested by the violently ecstatic rites described in myth as celebrated by Attis in honor of Cybele and reflected in the willing self-castration of her priests the Galli in the historical period. The orgia of both Dionysian worship and the cult of Cybele aim at breaking down barriers between the celebrants and the divinity through a state of mystic exaltation." Giulia Sfameni Gasparro, Soteriology and Mystic Aspects in the Cult of Cybele and Attis (Brill, 1985), p. 53 and 11–19.
There is little doubt that the prepared sacred drink was intoxicating and intended to access altered consciousness or mystical communion in a ritual context. It flourished because it provided everyone with the same basic connection to underlying reality. We still feel the impact of the world around us in a series of personal relationships with such genuine radical metaphors.
Kybele was worshiped in orgiastic rites, dissonant music, and wild dancing. This kind of bodily mysticism and psychosomatic liberation had only temporary effects each time — the period of the ekstasis (Turcan).
But we don't hear how and why of the archaic practices. Our approach tries to penetrate the phenomenon itself, surrounding it from all sides, circumambulating and expanding it by increasing the volume -- amplification. The phenomenon is mythopoetical, not intellectual. But belief in a deity was subsumed in direct experience.
Pre-rational experience is somatic -- our physical, animal, biological nature, felt sense experience, and emotions. Beneath the numbness or dissociation of disembodiment, the felt sense has been available as a constant stream of invaluable information. It manifests itself in direct contact which is more than a metaphor -- a vibrant experience.
The idea of life, projected onto the trans-rational cosmos, sexualizes it. We know the rite produces sympathy with the Mystery-Deity and the madness of her grief, jealousy, and ecstasy and therefore our own. The fused state and merging are pre-rational; oneness with everything is trans-personal.
Such experiences were insured with shamanic entheogenic initiation. At the dawn of religion, instead of mere confusion, the Great Mother instilled reverence for pre-rationality codified into a system for living. She is about perennial problems of human existence, the problem of humankind in nature, fate, and death.
Rebirth is the theme of the self-regenerating goddess. The material world is revealed in its animated glory. It can also be a terrifying encounter that assumes a new 'identity' from moment to moment.
It fosters healthy, secure attachment with a somatic approach to establishing what was missed in early life. Trauma healing cannot happen without somatic resources, it is also true that healing cannot happen without including the dimension of meaning-making through which humans make sense of our worlds.
The effects of collective trauma, violence and oppression are passed on from one generation to the next; our early relationships can be disrupted. This produces a population of people who struggle to form healthy, sustainable bonds. Relationships can feel unsafe, intimacy can produce anxiety, and people can oscillate between codependency and isolation.
Symbolic meaning is inherent in self-referential encoding of the material and symbolic aspects of events. Fabulism is a way of exploring myth, allegory, and fable as a means of comprehending the complexities of human nature. Our notions about the nature of the world is our worldview.
It collects information about its own functioning that lead to ambiguities, strange loops, and paradox -- a blurring of matter-symbol distinctions into myth. The initial condition implies a self-referent impotency principle (Attis) that unchanging events cannot completely describe changing events. We know the cult changed radically as it dispersed through Greece, Rome, and other cultures.
Self-reference and self-modification symbols can be both too vague and too narrow in comparison to processes of interest. Such self-organization of initial conditions is a subsymbolic paradigm. The initial conditions refer to a chaotic aspect -- the raw awareness of consciousness under the effects of an entheogen as an origin for an autonomous or dynamic symbol grounding of internal meanings -- emergence.
The mystical “motif” is marked by high emotional intensity, even trauma at times with a brief period of physical stress followed by a cathartic event, demarcated by a high level of emotional arousal followed by an active intensification of belief and practice.
Over time, the cult dropped and added new cultural components and characteristics. It made constellations with other gods and goddesses. But even today, archaic psyche continues to present as autonomous mind, with unconscious patterns and cycles, moreso in non-ordinary states of consciousness.
There is nothing “subjective” or “objective” about consciousness. This primary process is beyond dualism. Such primitive intuitions don't die. Patterns or psychological paradigms span thousands of years. Caves remain the womb of the mother, the tomb, and the place of initiation, part of her system of religious symbolism.
People can still grasp the timeless energetic nature of reality -- the great connected web of life that is in constant motion -- the electricity of the moment. Let every cell of every human pulse with perfection. Closing fearful eyes will not stop but only amplify the process. With entheogens what one believed about a deity became irrelevant.
"Wine was fortified in the mixing ceremony with a variety of toxins derived from plant and animal sources, sometimes even lethal substances in sub-lethal amounts, such as serpent venoms, salamander secretions, henbane, opium, Datura (jimsonweed), and deadly hemlock (Conium maculatum). This tradition survives in the modern Greek folk wine of retsina (fortified with psychoactive terpenes from pine resin)." (Ruck)
"A strong Thracian wine known as ‘Biblian’ ( Bíblinos/Búblinos) was an export of Samothrace; in the ritual initiation into the Mystery of the Great Gods as celebrated on the island and elsewhere in cave sanctuaries throughout ancient Thrace, accessed the ecstatic visionary revel that summoned an apparition of the netherworld goddess." (Ruck)
https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/mushroom-monuments-thrace-and-ancient-sacred-rites-005267
Forbidden Fruit
The forbidden fruit of the mythic tree is Amanita muscaria (Ruck). There is reason not to expect that encounters with A. muscaria stretch back as long as hominins occupied the temperate forest regions of the Northern Hemisphere. These mushrooms grow in symbiosis with Betula spp. (birch) and Pinus spp. (pine trees). When forests are slashed and burnt not only the woods, but the unseen life-support systems under the surface are wrecked too.
Different toxins and alkaloids prevail depending on the concoction. We can't be sure if the divine entheogen was abandoned or replaced by surrogates, but it induced a visionary reality and cohesive worship. It was euphemistically and symbolically known as the "bull" for its power.
We don't know if the divine elixir was a single substance or a mixture. Psilocybin and Cubensis mushrooms were also found on the plains. Drug-induced initiations were practiced throughout the known ancient world with mushrooms, opium, ephedra, cannabis, ergot, acacia, henbane, Syrian rue (mountain rue; Peganum harmala), datura, and more.
In Sacred Mushrooms of the Goddess, Ruck (p. 73-84) describes the Lesser Mysteries of Artemis as based on the wild mushroom. They pushed human experiential boundaries to their limits and beyond the agonies of ecstasy. Modern reports of ingestion in wine describe energetic states, a strong desire to dance followed by sedative effects around 3 hours, and intense dreamlike trips for hours.
"The effects of Amanita muscaria are diverse and vary according to dosage, method of preparation and the cultural and psychological expectations of the consumer. A small dose (or the initial effect of a larger one) causes bodily stimulation and a desire for movement and physical exercise.
Responses to the fly-agaric varied widely. Sometimes an intoxicated individual had to be restrained from over-exerting himself, whilst on other occasions it would induce a tranquil state of bliss in which beautiful visions appeared before the eyes. The effects can be divided into three basic stages, which sometimes overlap. About fifteen minutes after taking the mushrooms the stimulating effects begin and there is much loud singing and laughing. This stage is followed by auditory and visual hallucinations in conjunction with the sensation that things increase in size."
The goddess's dark places are crowned with woodlands and high groves, speckled with seasonal mushrooms. The Phrygians had a consuming passion for their god plants. They loved undiluted fermented grain beer. Fermentation was another fungal mystery of transformation of mead and bread.
Rejuvenation comes from connecting with pristine consciousness, the eternal aspects or forces of nature--the infinite, transcendent Source. We cannot gloss over her mycological roots. Some of what we know today can be reflected back to the ancient cult. The cave is a crucible of transcendence and shamanic transport. Kybele and Attis are essentially womb and phallus.
Kybele generates and what she generates is the god within. In this mythic dimension within, her gleaming shape-shifting vision, god-perception, and cosmic consciousness were revealed in symbolic pyrotechnics. Ecstasy meant to 'stand outside oneself,' to enter another dimension, a world apart. It demonstrates the divine resides within.
Those who know her have done so through an imparting of secret knowledge. The secrets of Kybele were originally those of the divine pharmacopeia. Her secrets remain virginal and her mysteries are inviolable. Our experiences belong only to ourselves. Each has their own. Kybele had one that was foundational first, and became symbolic of magical potency.
Knowledge of the sacramental substance has been obscured. It is little known outside of ethnomycology. Yet, archaeology confirms it. There are numerous icons of Attis shaped like mushrooms. His legend also suggests the same. Pliny attributed a sexual character to Amanita muscaria. The splotchy red mushrooms mirrored 'the spilled blood of Attis.' Is an Amanita-wine the lost elixir?
Mushrooms are a perennial metaphor for the penis. They still have erotic connotations. The cult consumed fly agaric (spiritual flight). Attis was the Paleo-European key to the rites of the Great Mother. Yet it has been largely under-reported, except as a communal regression into oceanic states, a mystical return to the mother.
Elements of ritual gender-blending, transvestitism or literal and symbolic androgyny are nearly universal among shamans. Transgender shamans are metaphorically described as changing into a woman or androgynous being. But, the terms "eunuch" and "transgender" are not synonymous. Yet, this ritual androgyny is considered a sign of spirituality.
We experience that larger world and self--the rhythmic pulse of all life in the womb of the cosmic mother. This mystical fusion is somewhat akin to an expanded experience of the world. It includes oceanic feelings, the experience of being expanded, quasi-larger or more spacious than one's own body.
Oceanic feeling is a sense of fuller vision extending to apparently limitless horizons. Consciousness is encountered as more like a field than a localized point, a field that transcends the body and yet somehow interacts with it.
Kybele Speaks
We have to let Kybele speak and amplify herself and listen. We seek the emotional and feeling factor associated with the archetypal image. To study plants, we study the soil from which they grow.
All archetypes are contaminated with one another in the unconscious. The motifs of myths grow from a human basis. We have to circumambulate the story to grasp its essence as personal and cosmic religion -- through mystic identification.
If we start with the Paleo-European Great Mother, we can pile up comparative material forever until all symbols are included, for she is 'the mother of all'. We can't erase inconvenient parts of history; that is denial. But it is not mere speculation either. 'Going down into the depths' of thought-patterns and emotional experience and re-emerging remains the great Mystery.
You danced with the Mother, shrieked with the Mother, bled with the Mother, and the Mother helped you heal.
How can we make her Presence, participation mystique, and animism felt in our lives today, in contemporary society? The sacred meal is her oldest ritual, despite all later modifications.
James Hillman said, "When the gods arrive on stage, everything becomes silent and the eyelids close. Plunged into oblivion by this experience, we re-emerge and without knowing exactly what is happened, we know only that we have been transformed."
We need to set the scene. The Midas legend and Gordion are a major part of Kybele's legends. The gods arrived with an ancient disaster of immense proportions. Naturally, we cannot collapse the timeline down over centuries, but we are looking for pulse-points [wars, famine, cliate change, disasters] that might have increased the fervor for devotees of Kybele, especially in earth disasters.
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/phry/hd_phry.htm
The date of the ancient Mediterranean Eruption is hidden in dead trees specifically, 1560 BCE, in the wood of a royal Phrygian tomb. A more remote eruption later may also have affected weather. The anomaly of 1159 b.c. coincides with the global effects of the eruption of Hekla III in Iceland.
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1996/07/cornell-researchers-precisely-date-wood-ancient-tomb-turkey
Nature reports that "logs used to build the inner chamber of the Midas Mound Tumulus, a massive tomb named for King Midas of the Phrygians and located at the Gordion archaeological site, were cut in 718 B.C. "That is not plus-or-minus anything; it is a date 'to the year,'" said Cornell doctoral student Maryanne Newton, one of the Nature article's coauthors."
The Bronze Age Minoan eruption was one of the most massive eruptions on earth in the past 10,000 years. Anatolia shared the catastrophe of the Thera eruption, which turned the sky black with ash. Cooler and wetter weather threatened their crops. Surely, amid the death and destruction they called on their great goddess.
Artifacts from her cult center verify this: "When the volcano erupted, the island of Thera—and environs thousands of miles in every direction—was wracked with pyroclastic flows and tsunamis, as clouds of ash blotted out the sky and blanketed much of the Mediterranean region with the stuff. That included the local Minoan town of Akrotiri and, farther away, woods that would be used to construct the royal “Midas Mound” tumulus, or tomb, near the ancient Phrygian site of Gordion, in Turkey." Isaac Schultz April, 2020
She signifies a profound transformation and an enriched understanding of darkness, staying within the darkness, within its dark illumination. Our ancestors sit with us in the dark. The Divine Earth Road follows an underground stream into the Underworld, a geocentric mythical topology. It coalesced with the source of all that comes into being.
Jung mused, “If you comprehend the darkness, it seizes you. It comes over you like the night with black shadows and countless shimmering stars. Silence and peace come over you if you begin to comprehend the darkness. Only he who does not comprehend the darkness fears the night."
Clement of Alexandria quoted the initiatory formula as a password: "From the tambourine I have eaten; from the cymbal I have drunk; I have become the kernos (sacred dish; terra-cotta vessel for offerings); the room (cave bridal chamber; shrine; initiation chamber) I have entered." (Protrept Exortation to the Greeks 2.15: trans. Vermaseren, in Eliade)
Shadow is the substance of the soul, that inner darkness that draws us down, away from life in inexorable relationship with the Underworld. Then, as now, a veritable patchwork of ideas, philosophies, and superstitions syncretized into many unique permutations within the minds of each individual.
Our personal mythology arises when we are engulfed by an unconscious content. Such numinous experience is the kernel of our story. Our own psychological events keep the motifs alive which reveal basic archetypal structure and the somatic framework.
Rilke spoke of our wild calling in Requiem for a Friend: "And only then, when I have learned enough, I will go to watch the animals, and let something of their composure slowly glide into my limbs; will see my own existence deep in their eyes, which hold me for awhile and let me go, serenely, without judgment."
Sexual Paradox
Gender inequality has deep collective unconscious roots. Today we have terms such as emasculation, transgender, non-binary, and transvestite. Ancient devotees might have been connoisseurs of ancient poisons, hypnotists, psychics, telepaths and clairvoyants. They comprehended the communication of animals and plants.
Even rapture and ecstasy are essentially passive. Trauma triggers are locked in time loops. So are ritual or psychedelic experiences. Ordeals that drove the trance included corporeal mortification, sensory deprivation, and sensory overload.
"The small madness can be understood as certain types of katharsis, frenzy, or voluntary surrender. It can be accessed through a variety of conduits, including entheogens, dance, sex, pain, and channeling. When directed devotionally through these conduits, the small madness acts as a pressure valve, inoculating
practitioners against the great madness." (Knight)
https://www.academia.edu/36762984/The_Passion_of_Agdistis_Gender_Transgression_Sexual_Trauma_Time_Travel_and_Ritualized_Madness_in_Greco-Anatolian_Revival_Cultus
Jung said 'the gods have become diseases.' When Zeus raped Kybele, she fractured into Agdistis, a rageful post-trumatic complex. We can find Kybele hidden in collective insanity, dissociation, rape, incestuous symbiosis, mother fixation, extreme dependency, sexual non-conformity, as well as the compulsive bloodletting of cutting, sexually-transmitted madness and disease, and sexual trauma. These were among the ritualized acts of her cult that can be enacted unconsciously, compulsively.
How can we find her within our psyche and wildly alive in the world around us, with its shrinking ecology? As nature becomes less wild, do humans become more so, in collective regression? What positive and life-affirming moves can we make in that direction? Each of us must answer for ourselves. We must find our magical elixir, the Fruit of Life, which reveals the Great Actual.
When you taste him, you taste me, as well. My madness is in his.
When you drink of him, you drink of me.
The holes and the paradoxes in our mythos are dreamlike and paradoxical, so the living goddess can enter, whether the theme is 'beauty and the beast,' or 'the helpful animal,' or 'the sacred meal,' etc. These are elementary poetical and fantasy images, elementary emotion, and elementary impulses toward typical actions. What do we do with such feelings, emotions, and fantasies?
Novelist Ken Kesey said, “The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer. They think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”
Telluric Presence
The goddess's dark places are crowned with woodlands and high groves. Phrygia lies in the central highlands of Anatolia whose fierce terrain of precipitous mountains and untamed forest gave birth to an eruption of the sacred, an equally fierce goddess cult of religious enthusiasm and ecstasy. It was flamboyant and gory. She exploded suddenly and violently, and broke out dramatically, in a kaleidoscope of radical mood swings.
Kybele is an autochthonous Anatolian cult. Anatolia is home to a 12,000 year old civilization, rediscovered at Gobekli Tepe. We argue strongly in favor of remote origins. Anatolia was also strongly connected via trade to Mesopotamia.
Symbolism is a system of highly complex relations, of polarities, linking the physical and metaphysical worlds. She carried a key which opened the gates of the invisible world. While Kybele was made of stone, Attis was said to not be visible.
What paleolithic humans evolved out of this process is impossible to know except through indirect deductions. It was a way to share an original vision or experience, manifest in the crenelated crown with its veil, a mushroom homologue. Riding a lion could also be a metaphor.
Kybele had a dangerous reputation and notorious festivals. To enter a cave is to enter Kybele. Her most sacred manifestation was as a black meteorite, a sacred stone supposedly endowed with life. In Cypress, Aphrodite was also worshipped as a conical black stone.
The incense that billowed over her processions likely contained cannabis. Keys; cymbals; frame drum; Kybele is credited with inventing drums, flutes and percussion instruments. Creatures: Bees, bulls, big cats especially leopards and lions; her chariot is pulled by lions.
Our knowledge about the latter part of the Neolithic Age is considerably wider. There were mushroom cults and rituals of consubstantiality with deities in both pre-Indo-European tribes and in the Middle and Near East. Nearly 4,000 years ago, the Kybele cult was primitive nature worship that transformed into a system of spiritualized mysteries.
Her cult connected transcendent soul with a god of intoxication. Her pomegranate emblem was a euphemism for the poppy by shape and the Amanita mushroom by red color. We don't need to know the raw truth as much as to experience it, "to find our way to the inner, and perhaps wordless, irrational experience," as Jung said.
Any episode in her mythic history is quite recent in comparison to the deep, underground time of the Great Mother for whom time is the progress of chthonic and hypochthonic forces, the liberation of ancient powers. The flow of fully-immersive participation mystique with nature is the intimate connection between our animal and human nature.
The concept of the Great Goddess is Semitic, or a Semitic influence, even if the Phrygians were Indo-European. Though Phrygians were Aryan, their cult was not purely Aryan. They migrated from Armenia across Anatolia to Thrace and Macedonia.
Most of the Eastern Mediterranean believed that the Phrygians were progenitors of the world‘s oldest goddess. Kybele, a phase of the great goddess of the East, dates back to the distant pre-Indo-European past or to non-Indo-European of the most remote antiquity. Her sacred green stones can be seen in the temple of the once-lost Hittite capital. She was mother-goddess of ancient Troy (Ilium).
Initiation and mushrooms were "facets of a prehistoric and pan-human magico-religious archetype." The priestesses would drum and dance ecstatically, rub their hair in the dirt, whip themselves into a frenzy. Since the cup or bowl is shown on Kybele's votive figures, niche monuments, communal shrines, and statues, we can presume the mushrooms were made into a drink and libation.
This is the sacramental libation of the original Holy Grail. This vessel, the bowl, was carried in her procession. Kybele as mushroom was a very literal bridge to the unconscious.
Large door rocks replicate complete building facades that can only open for the psyche. These doors are abbreviated versions of the house of the goddess who stands beckoning open-armed in the doorway. With the goddess infusion one could walk through walls to other realms.
Collective unconscious psychic processes are simple, bare, and concise. All archetypes are essentially unknown psychic factors. Archetypal images unfold basic processes and patterns of the psyche with an overlay of cultural material, such as ritual drinking from a tympanon-drum in the later mysteries of Kybele.
Kybele's ancient praises are literally carved in stone. But more, these are touchstone experiences in which archetypes and myths shape and inform our very being and psychic experience, like DNA informs our physical being. It is the sacred drama wherein the transcendent devours, fertilizes, begets, slays, and brings itself to life again.
"In Thrace of the Early Iron Age (1050-7th century BCE) and in the following years, the sacred places are revealed on engraved stone mushrooms and even the presence of anthropomorphic niches depict the deity of the Earth, the Mother Goddess, Demeter or Cybele. The main and basic element of these sacred places is either the totemic symbol, which determines the totemic center or anthropomorphic stone carvings and menhirs." (Attrell)
Throughout northeastern Greece, western Turkey, and Bulgaria, in the region known in antiquity as Macedonia, Anatolia, and Thrace, there are numerous megalithic natural rock formations that resemble mushrooms. The most ancient sacred monuments take the form of a microcosm, where we can trace stones, forests, water (springs, streams, rivers), paintings of animals or plants. All the above-mentioned are totemic centres of the ancient sacred places. The popular belief according to which the animal or plant worshipping preceded that of anthropomorphic gods is corroborated in Thrace. This corroboration relies on the fact that totemism as an original form of religion leads us to the system of belief in which animals and plants functioned as forerunners of the ancient Greek gods, that is animals-gods and plants-gods (Burkert 1993, 151). The role of mushrooms in the ancient evolution of human religions is attested to fungiform petroglyphs, rock artifacts, and mythologies from all major regions of the world. This prehistoric mycolatry persisted into the historic era in the major religious traditions of the world, which often left evidence of these practices in sculpture, art, and scriptures.
Throughout northeastern Greece, western Turkey, and Bulgaria, in the region known in antiquity as Macedonia, Anatolia, and Thrace, there are numerous megalithic natural rock formations that resemble mushrooms. The most ancient sacred monuments take the form of a microcosm, where we can trace stones, forests, water (springs, streams, rivers), paintings of animals or plants. All the above-mentioned are totemic centres of the ancient sacred places. The popular belief according to which the animal or plant worshipping preceded that of anthropomorphic gods is corroborated in Thrace. This corroboration relies on the fact that totemism as an original form of religion leads us to the system of belief in which animals and plants functioned as forerunners of the ancient Greek gods, that is animals-gods and plants-gods (Burkert 1993, 151). The role of mushrooms in the ancient evolution of human religions is attested to fungiform petroglyphs, rock artifacts, and mythologies from all major regions of the world. This prehistoric mycolatry persisted into the historic era in the major religious traditions of the world, which often left evidence of these practices in sculpture, art, and scriptures.
Communal Shamanism
Robert Graves first suggested her myths were hazy Greek recollections. Distant shamanic-totemic tribes lived in mountain woods and made brews from raw Amanita muscaria in order to induce prophetic vision, heightened sexual energy, senselessness, and incredible physical strength. With trance and possession, drama is another shamanic experience -- the evocation of deceased ancestors.
"In the eastern Mediterranean, these ecstatic cults were most often held in honor 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." (Attrell)
Entheogens are
"The Hittites worshiped Teshub, the great god of mountain summits and of the thunder — whose symbolic emblems were the hatchet and the bull — and the great goddess, prototype of the Greek Kybele. After settling in Asia Minor and occupying Cappadocia, Phrygia, Lydia, Pontus and parts of Armenia and Cilicia, the Hittites began, in the twentieth century B.C., to make forays also into northern Syria and Mesopotamia."
Great depth is hidden in her roots. Anatolia was steeped deeply in mythology. Storytelling was likely an important part of her culture and tradition with songs, tales and myths being passed down regularly from one generation to another, ensuring their stories remain told and their value enriched.
The range of meaning contained in every symbol can be regarded as an illustration not only of metaphysical principles but also of higher levels of reality. As an Oriental or Semitic earth goddess, she was celebrated with fiery nocturnal passions, furious and orgiastic rituals -- beating of drums, crashing of loud cymbals, blowing of horns, and clashing of armor.
Her mycological history is likely her longest cultural thread, convoluted as the mycelium that gives it root as a widely-practiced phenomenon (also in Dionysus and Mithras cults). We presume an antic origin for continuity of the symbol and icon which must be taken at face value. Such change is not psychological, but mythological. More than human forces can assume new forms.
If they depicted the goddess as a mushroom, she is still a mushroom. The body is in transformation or metamorphosis. The bodies of gods and goddesses change to assume new forms. They morph, changing from divine or human form into animal, vegetable, or mineral.
In Thrace of the Early Iron Age (1050-7thcentury BCE) and in the following years, the sacred places are revealed on engraved stone mushrooms and even the presence of anthropomorphic niches depict the deity of the Earth, the Mother Goddess, Demeter or Cybele.
The stone mushrooms in the Aegean Thrace, that were located in Southern Evros (Kirki), central Evros (Petrotopos Kotronia, Lagyna, Dadia, Kornofolia) constitute a common phenomenon of Thracian megalithic sanctuaries that have the mushroom as a totemic symbol. With this form Thracians used to portray the omnipotent deity they worshiped.
Usually a sculptured anthropomorphic niche next to it represents an earthy female deity that is co–worshiped. These forms take advantage of pre-existing natural geological features and you can find them in various geological environments. Their material is of the local bed rock. In some of them the human intervention to the natural rock is clear. Kiotsekoglou & Pagkalis, https://www.academia.edu/27258760/Mushrooms_Sanctuary
In addition to wine, Dionysus is associated with opium and mushrooms. Many Greek and Anatolian phallic tombstones from all periods survive in the shape recognized as a mushroom. Kurtz et al., 1971). In fact, ‘mushroom’ appears to have been a metaphor for both the erect penis and burial coffin or tomb.
The Thracian or Phrygian cap provides the botanical name for the mushroom’s cap as the pileus, implying an anthropomorphized creature beneath it wearing it as its hat. It had a long continuance through medieval and Renaissance tradition until modern times as a marker for initiates into the secrets of the ancient Mysteries (Ruck et al., 2011) Attis is often depicted in this distinctive cap.
"In Thrace, archaeological evidence indicates that a mushroom cult existed dateable back at least to the generation before the Trojan War and the mythical tradition of Orpheus and the sailing of Jason with the troupe of Argonauts (Markov, 2008, 2014; Kiotsekoglou, 2014; Samorini, 2012). In addition to the numerous megalithic natural rock formations that resemble mushrooms, a cave at Thracian Ismara/Maroneia that served as a sanctuary presents a fungal likeness in the configuration of its entrance, two adjacent openings like eyes with an overhanging rock configuration giving the impression of a stipe as nose supporting a mushroom cap as forehead, imparting a fungal face of the goddess to the mountain (Kiotsekoglou, 2014)."
A votive plaque in an Eleusinian sanctuary, "depicts the goddess rising above against a hemispherical red cap as a sunrise. The same configuration of visionary eyes and fungal nose bridge occurs on silver and gold tablets found in the seventh-century Thracian sanctuary of Demeter at Mesimvria Zone. Persephone as a head rising from the ground was the essential vision at the Eleusinian Mystery sanctuary." (Ruck, Mushroom Sacraments in the Cults of Early Europe)
"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." (Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 90).
Dionysus is not merely the god of revelry, indulgence, erotic compulsion and intoxication, but of ecstatic rapture. Dionysus, rooted in the earth and ecstasy, is the prototype of shamanic descent and the dying and resurrecting godmen. This 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.
Dionysus was worshiped in Hellenistic times (after 332 BC) from Italy to Greece and into Egypt and the Middle East. The Greek Dionysus is mentioned in Linear B tablets from roughly 1,200 BC. Herodotus describes initiation into the mysteries of Dionysus in the fifth century BC. [Herodotus Histories book 4, 78 80], Euripides' play about him, 'The Bacchae', was first performed about 400 BC.
Kybele's records were carved on living stone monuments which time has not effaced. Symbolism and historicity are only superficially irreconcilable. Almost all transcendental events appear to be both historical and symbolic at once—seen simply as symbolic matter transformed into legend then into history.
Probably the earliest Anatolian female figure connected with felines, dating to the pre-pottery, pre-agricultural Neolithic, no later than 8000 BCE, has been found in level II of the southeast Anatolian site of Göbekli Tepe, north of the Harran plain, in southeastern Turkey. The figure is carved in an area between pillars containing depictions of felines (Schmidt 2006:238, figure 104).
She had a role in Phyrigian burials. The rosette, a radiant fungal solar cap, one of her attributes, has been found in ancient royal burial sites. Ionian motifs of rosettes and lion heads imply the relation to the Phrygian goddess.
"Symbolism adds a new value to an objector an act, without thereby violating its immediate or “historical” validity. Once it is brought to bear, it turns the object or action into an “open” event: symbolic thought opens the door on to immediate reality for us, but without weakening or invalidating it; seen in this light the universe is no longer sealed off, nothing is isolated inside its own existence: everything is linked by a system of correspondences and assimilations." (Eliade, Cirlot)
Robert Graves first suggested her myths were hazy Greek recollections. Distant shamanic-totemic tribes lived in mountain woods and made brews from raw Amanita muscaria in order to induce prophetic vision, heightened sexual energy, senselessness, and incredible physical strength. With trance and possession, drama is another shamanic experience -- the evocation of deceased ancestors.
"In the eastern Mediterranean, these ecstatic cults were most often held in honor 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." (Attrell)
Entheogens are
- –entheogenic, inducing an internal sense of spiritual presence;
- –provide access to a spiritual world, the supernatural, bringing the world of mythic beliefs into experience;
- –produce an experience of one’s soul or spirit and its separation from the body and travel to the supernatural world;
- –cause experiences of the activation of powers within and outside of the person;
- –induce experiences of relationships with animals and at times the sense of transformation into an animal;
- –provoke experiences of ego death followed by transformation or rebirth;
- –provide information through visions;
- –engage healing, especially through the dramatic ritual evocation of emotional experiences; and
- –provide processes for group integration and enhanced social cohesion.
- Kybele is distinct from, but connected to Rhea by idea, assimilation, and history. The effects of the cult of Kybele were closely connected with the Chaldean Oracles. They were savants, diviners, astrologers, and magicians of Babylonia. The Greeks incorporated Oriental legends into their own mythologies.
"The Hittites worshiped Teshub, the great god of mountain summits and of the thunder — whose symbolic emblems were the hatchet and the bull — and the great goddess, prototype of the Greek Kybele. After settling in Asia Minor and occupying Cappadocia, Phrygia, Lydia, Pontus and parts of Armenia and Cilicia, the Hittites began, in the twentieth century B.C., to make forays also into northern Syria and Mesopotamia."
Great depth is hidden in her roots. Anatolia was steeped deeply in mythology. Storytelling was likely an important part of her culture and tradition with songs, tales and myths being passed down regularly from one generation to another, ensuring their stories remain told and their value enriched.
The range of meaning contained in every symbol can be regarded as an illustration not only of metaphysical principles but also of higher levels of reality. As an Oriental or Semitic earth goddess, she was celebrated with fiery nocturnal passions, furious and orgiastic rituals -- beating of drums, crashing of loud cymbals, blowing of horns, and clashing of armor.
Her mycological history is likely her longest cultural thread, convoluted as the mycelium that gives it root as a widely-practiced phenomenon (also in Dionysus and Mithras cults). We presume an antic origin for continuity of the symbol and icon which must be taken at face value. Such change is not psychological, but mythological. More than human forces can assume new forms.
If they depicted the goddess as a mushroom, she is still a mushroom. The body is in transformation or metamorphosis. The bodies of gods and goddesses change to assume new forms. They morph, changing from divine or human form into animal, vegetable, or mineral.
In Thrace of the Early Iron Age (1050-7thcentury BCE) and in the following years, the sacred places are revealed on engraved stone mushrooms and even the presence of anthropomorphic niches depict the deity of the Earth, the Mother Goddess, Demeter or Cybele.
The stone mushrooms in the Aegean Thrace, that were located in Southern Evros (Kirki), central Evros (Petrotopos Kotronia, Lagyna, Dadia, Kornofolia) constitute a common phenomenon of Thracian megalithic sanctuaries that have the mushroom as a totemic symbol. With this form Thracians used to portray the omnipotent deity they worshiped.
Usually a sculptured anthropomorphic niche next to it represents an earthy female deity that is co–worshiped. These forms take advantage of pre-existing natural geological features and you can find them in various geological environments. Their material is of the local bed rock. In some of them the human intervention to the natural rock is clear. Kiotsekoglou & Pagkalis, https://www.academia.edu/27258760/Mushrooms_Sanctuary
In addition to wine, Dionysus is associated with opium and mushrooms. Many Greek and Anatolian phallic tombstones from all periods survive in the shape recognized as a mushroom. Kurtz et al., 1971). In fact, ‘mushroom’ appears to have been a metaphor for both the erect penis and burial coffin or tomb.
The Thracian or Phrygian cap provides the botanical name for the mushroom’s cap as the pileus, implying an anthropomorphized creature beneath it wearing it as its hat. It had a long continuance through medieval and Renaissance tradition until modern times as a marker for initiates into the secrets of the ancient Mysteries (Ruck et al., 2011) Attis is often depicted in this distinctive cap.
"In Thrace, archaeological evidence indicates that a mushroom cult existed dateable back at least to the generation before the Trojan War and the mythical tradition of Orpheus and the sailing of Jason with the troupe of Argonauts (Markov, 2008, 2014; Kiotsekoglou, 2014; Samorini, 2012). In addition to the numerous megalithic natural rock formations that resemble mushrooms, a cave at Thracian Ismara/Maroneia that served as a sanctuary presents a fungal likeness in the configuration of its entrance, two adjacent openings like eyes with an overhanging rock configuration giving the impression of a stipe as nose supporting a mushroom cap as forehead, imparting a fungal face of the goddess to the mountain (Kiotsekoglou, 2014)."
A votive plaque in an Eleusinian sanctuary, "depicts the goddess rising above against a hemispherical red cap as a sunrise. The same configuration of visionary eyes and fungal nose bridge occurs on silver and gold tablets found in the seventh-century Thracian sanctuary of Demeter at Mesimvria Zone. Persephone as a head rising from the ground was the essential vision at the Eleusinian Mystery sanctuary." (Ruck, Mushroom Sacraments in the Cults of Early Europe)
"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." (Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 90).
Dionysus is not merely the god of revelry, indulgence, erotic compulsion and intoxication, but of ecstatic rapture. Dionysus, rooted in the earth and ecstasy, is the prototype of shamanic descent and the dying and resurrecting godmen. This 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.
Dionysus was worshiped in Hellenistic times (after 332 BC) from Italy to Greece and into Egypt and the Middle East. The Greek Dionysus is mentioned in Linear B tablets from roughly 1,200 BC. Herodotus describes initiation into the mysteries of Dionysus in the fifth century BC. [Herodotus Histories book 4, 78 80], Euripides' play about him, 'The Bacchae', was first performed about 400 BC.
Kybele's records were carved on living stone monuments which time has not effaced. Symbolism and historicity are only superficially irreconcilable. Almost all transcendental events appear to be both historical and symbolic at once—seen simply as symbolic matter transformed into legend then into history.
Probably the earliest Anatolian female figure connected with felines, dating to the pre-pottery, pre-agricultural Neolithic, no later than 8000 BCE, has been found in level II of the southeast Anatolian site of Göbekli Tepe, north of the Harran plain, in southeastern Turkey. The figure is carved in an area between pillars containing depictions of felines (Schmidt 2006:238, figure 104).
She had a role in Phyrigian burials. The rosette, a radiant fungal solar cap, one of her attributes, has been found in ancient royal burial sites. Ionian motifs of rosettes and lion heads imply the relation to the Phrygian goddess.
"Symbolism adds a new value to an objector an act, without thereby violating its immediate or “historical” validity. Once it is brought to bear, it turns the object or action into an “open” event: symbolic thought opens the door on to immediate reality for us, but without weakening or invalidating it; seen in this light the universe is no longer sealed off, nothing is isolated inside its own existence: everything is linked by a system of correspondences and assimilations." (Eliade, Cirlot)
Ritualized Ecstasy
Kybele's image is of unutterable sanctity, both in horror and in reverence. Ritualized processing of intoxicants, ecstasy, and local populations thrived. Sacrifice occurred in the groves, and orgies in the caverns that echoed and roared with frenzy. They enticed their dead god back up the axis mundi like a serpent from the underworld, the heart of the Goddess‘ rites.
In these groves, trees were hewn into images of the Divine Bridegroom, a nameless god, whose phallus was called out from the earth for ritual consumption. On the forest floor, Amanita muscaria itself appears as a blazing red fire glowing beneath the pine.
Historically, the cult first emerged from the sacred caverns and groves at Gordium, the legendary city of King Midas (738-696 BCE). More likely, her hidden cult was introduced there. There must have been a strong unconscious emotional interest and appeal for other centers of worship popped up like mushrooms -- 23 highland monuments.
Her first lavish temple was built in the early Phrygian period, around the eighth century BCE. The meteoric idol of the Mother really came from there. Her secret identity is a continuation of primitive, animistic thought.
They must have been thunderstruck by such firefall. They knew what it was and where it came from -- not in scientific terms, but in terms of their collective mythic lives.
More recently Antonin Artaud used the motif metaphorically. "And there is a luminous point where all reality is rediscovered, only changed, transformed, by -- what? -- a nucleus of the magic use of things. And I believe in mental meteorites, in personal cosmogonies."
Kybele was linked to Dionysus. Attis, Adonis, Bachus, Bromius, Tammuz, Pan, Sabazius, Serapis, Zalmoxius, Zeus, and Orpheus himself - are replicas of their grand primordial archetype Dionis. The variations which appear among them resulted from the transplantation of the god from one region to another. The migrating Phrygians brought the Dionis/Sabazius cult with them when they settled in Anatolia in the early first millennium BCE.
The pinecone that tipped his Thyrsus linked him to Kybela (lat. Cybele), another Brygo/Phrygian primordial deity. This phallic scepter tipped with a pinecone (symbolizing pineal gland/third eye) was also his emblem; the potent panther was his totem-animal, The god's origins trace to Macedonia, (Pelagonia and Paionia in Upper Macedonia, the Phrygian's ancestral homeland).
The story of Attis also originated here. A eunuch priest, Atys traveled from Pessinus to Sardis, the Lydian capital at the foot of mount Tmolos, where 'the ancient goddess, Kubaba, from Mesopotamia and the Phrygian goddess first appear to have merged.' (Gough, 2014)
Kybele is virtual, chaotic, and autochthonous. The Roman orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BCE), said the Anatolian goddess was revered, ‘by all the kings who have ever held rule in Europe and in Asia.’ She eventually refracted into competing narratives, many of which contain residue of past paradigms lost in the mists of deep time.
The essence of all phenomena is a vibrant rhythm, the intimate nature of phenomena is directly perceptible by polyrhythmic human consciousness. For this reason, imitating is knowing. The echo is the paradigm of imitation and initiation. Her ordeal was a psychedelic metaphysical journey.
Rituals of music, dance, and drugs were a way of seeking direct contact with the deity. Drugs were synonymous with the divine influence of a deity. Whether or not some of these magical traditions and divination rites preserve relics, or hallucinations, of Paleo- and Neolithic heritage is not entirely a matter of conjecture.
The oldest female goddesses were associated with the serpentine powers of the dynamic life force, the natural cycle of life. Her names, shape and powers changed from the Anatolian Earth Mother over time and cross cultural interactions.
"Ritual dismemberment and consumption of a sacrificial victim recently hung upon a sacred tree is, a central process of actions in the rites of the Phrygian mother at large and has much relevance to the study of other mystery initiations." (Attrell)
"Internally, this manifested itself as an ordeal and a spiritual ascent for the sacrificial 'king'; essentially, his duty was to sacrifice himself to the goddess,
mimicking the mushroom itself. He was dressed as the god and suspended himself in the sun‘s rays in order to dry ‘before he was taken down and ritually murdered and eaten by the maenads, as had been done with the mushroom.
The poet Robert Graves was the first to suggest that the maenad‘s savage custom of tearing off their victims‘heads was an allegorical reference to tearing off Amanita muscaria‘s cap (since the stalk was not eaten)." ..."the 'revel‘ which ensued during these rites was no beatific feast; rather, it is a scene of desperation attended by cries of lamentation and wailing."
"The divinely inspired lamentation of women is an all-pervasive phenomenon in the religions of the dying and rising gods. In cults of the Divine Bridegroom, lamentation existed hand in hand with the ecstatic behavior arising at the sacred marriage." (Attrell)
The unconscious psyche, intuition, and associative thinking is the instinctual human essence. Psyche periodically goes into periods of descent or depression and even mania, often in a very dramatic way. She symbolically links a supernatural world of the dead to the world of the living in a realistically human shape with multiple states of being. Both the Greek and Roman cults were hybrid practices, a blend of Hellenic and Oriental cult practices.
Her tympanon (frame drum, tambourine) is the celestial sphere. She was sometimes worshiped as the pole star representing the gate of heaven or axis of the Earth, an umbilical connecting the galactic center to the world-navel, tethers the center of the Earth to the center of the Sky, a bridge linking both forms of reality in a cosmic synthesis. (Guénon 2001, Behun)
When these elements are drawn together, they reciprocally inform one another, deepening our understanding of the performative and spatial dimensions of our experience of the divine and opening the possibility of a direct relationship unbound by dogma. Direct experience is symbolically intimate.
Gaston Bachelard posed the question: ‘How could a legend be kept alive and perpetuated if each generation had not “intimate reasons” for believing in it?’ The symbolist meaning of a phenomenon helps to explain these ‘intimate reasons.’ It links the instrumental with the spiritual, the human with the cosmic, the acasual with the causal, disorder with order, and the transcendent.
The androgynous goddess, the masculine/feminine energy of the world body, means the soul or psyche has no gender. It involves masculine and feminine aesthetics.
"In liminal situations around the world, neophytes are often
treated or symbolically represented as being neither male nor female. Alternatively, they may be allotted the characteristics of both genders, irrespective of their biological sex. In the given initiation rite, they are symbolically sexless or androgynous, as what Victor Turner calls ―a kind of human prima material–as undifferentiated raw material." (Attrell)
Modern ideas of motherhood and sentimental mores can only lead us astray. Kybele is a Dark Mother from the depths of pre-history. She appears in our dreams as a wild animal. as uncontrolled, unacknowledged aspects of ourselves.
The Phrygian deity was the prototype mother goddess of the Mediterranean -- the archetypal imaginal landscape, wild unknown country. Her ritual settings were caves, rock-cut monuments or sanctuaries, springs, flowing water, and virgin forests. She remained a living ode to instinct, beauty, and dignity.
Kybele priests used to demonstrate their psychic abilities using magical stones. The most well-known magic stone was the Kybele Blackstone of Pessinus. Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, a historian, wrote that such conic black stones were found in various regions of Anatolia. A black meteorite was worshiped as her sky body.
Her themes and rites included bees and bulls, sacred marriage, a mother-goddess wedded to her son, and the dying god. Her indigenous Anatolian form was shaped by currents from ancient Mesopotamia and the seductive jangling of cymbals.
Ishtar and Astarte (Sumerian, Hittite, Neo-Hittite) in the east converged with European influences (Balkans, Thrace, Macedonia, Crete) from the west. Frenzies of devotion echoed Tammuz and Adonis. Kybele became linked to the cults of Rhea and Dionysos. Their ecstatic rituals intermingled. The Anatolian mysteries suffered under Persian rule.
The later Greek (Cybele) and Roman (Magna Mater) versions differed in characteristics, myths, and images as other cults co-mingled. The bow and arrow of Artemis and Diana are not her early attributes. Her wide diffusion, an act of inclusion, was also an act of engulfment.
She was considered an essentially foreign, exotic mystery-goddess who arrives in a lion-drawn chariot to the accompaniment of wild music, wine, and a disorderly, ecstatic following. Her priest-son shifted from Midas and Dionysos to Attis. In her fluid iconography, when the son-lover was a flute, the wife and mother Kybele was represented by the tympanon. Her mythic stories largely took form in the Hellenistic era.
The mythic goddess is ambivalent, formidable, and relentless. She exuded power and demanded respect. Her surreal violence, and the unbridled bisexual hyper-erotic libido of the severed hermaphrodite cannot be denied but it was ritualized, eventually into a Roman prophetess, the Sibyl.
We search for behavioral processes that are proto-religious but have the potential to relate to supernatural forces or a point of contact with human psychic abilities. Her followers crossed sexual boundaries during ecstatic rites.
Shared imagination is its core, leading to communal trance celebration and orgiastic sharing of imaginal bodies. The ritual atmosphere is ecstasy, deity possession, and mania. Borderline experiences suggest a possible expanded future through body-centered imagination. Mushroom mycelia are digestive organs that secrete digestive enzymes.
Hidden in the walls of our own labyrinthine digestive tracts, gut-brain bidirectional signalling exists between the gastrointestinal tract and the brain. The microbial gut actually talks to the brain, releasing hormones into the bloodstream and signaling the vagus nerve. They perfectly fit the definition of reward neurons that drive motivation and increase pleasure.
Belly brain generates spontaneous visceral inner images, which in a state of altered consciousness support the healing process. We reunite with the potential world, the eternal primeval world. What is spaceless and timeless corresponds to the eternal essence of the unified world and the world soul. Complex thought emerged around the middle Paleolithic.
Kybele's image is of unutterable sanctity, both in horror and in reverence. Ritualized processing of intoxicants, ecstasy, and local populations thrived. Sacrifice occurred in the groves, and orgies in the caverns that echoed and roared with frenzy. They enticed their dead god back up the axis mundi like a serpent from the underworld, the heart of the Goddess‘ rites.
In these groves, trees were hewn into images of the Divine Bridegroom, a nameless god, whose phallus was called out from the earth for ritual consumption. On the forest floor, Amanita muscaria itself appears as a blazing red fire glowing beneath the pine.
Historically, the cult first emerged from the sacred caverns and groves at Gordium, the legendary city of King Midas (738-696 BCE). More likely, her hidden cult was introduced there. There must have been a strong unconscious emotional interest and appeal for other centers of worship popped up like mushrooms -- 23 highland monuments.
Her first lavish temple was built in the early Phrygian period, around the eighth century BCE. The meteoric idol of the Mother really came from there. Her secret identity is a continuation of primitive, animistic thought.
They must have been thunderstruck by such firefall. They knew what it was and where it came from -- not in scientific terms, but in terms of their collective mythic lives.
More recently Antonin Artaud used the motif metaphorically. "And there is a luminous point where all reality is rediscovered, only changed, transformed, by -- what? -- a nucleus of the magic use of things. And I believe in mental meteorites, in personal cosmogonies."
Kybele was linked to Dionysus. Attis, Adonis, Bachus, Bromius, Tammuz, Pan, Sabazius, Serapis, Zalmoxius, Zeus, and Orpheus himself - are replicas of their grand primordial archetype Dionis. The variations which appear among them resulted from the transplantation of the god from one region to another. The migrating Phrygians brought the Dionis/Sabazius cult with them when they settled in Anatolia in the early first millennium BCE.
The pinecone that tipped his Thyrsus linked him to Kybela (lat. Cybele), another Brygo/Phrygian primordial deity. This phallic scepter tipped with a pinecone (symbolizing pineal gland/third eye) was also his emblem; the potent panther was his totem-animal, The god's origins trace to Macedonia, (Pelagonia and Paionia in Upper Macedonia, the Phrygian's ancestral homeland).
The story of Attis also originated here. A eunuch priest, Atys traveled from Pessinus to Sardis, the Lydian capital at the foot of mount Tmolos, where 'the ancient goddess, Kubaba, from Mesopotamia and the Phrygian goddess first appear to have merged.' (Gough, 2014)
Kybele is virtual, chaotic, and autochthonous. The Roman orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BCE), said the Anatolian goddess was revered, ‘by all the kings who have ever held rule in Europe and in Asia.’ She eventually refracted into competing narratives, many of which contain residue of past paradigms lost in the mists of deep time.
The essence of all phenomena is a vibrant rhythm, the intimate nature of phenomena is directly perceptible by polyrhythmic human consciousness. For this reason, imitating is knowing. The echo is the paradigm of imitation and initiation. Her ordeal was a psychedelic metaphysical journey.
Rituals of music, dance, and drugs were a way of seeking direct contact with the deity. Drugs were synonymous with the divine influence of a deity. Whether or not some of these magical traditions and divination rites preserve relics, or hallucinations, of Paleo- and Neolithic heritage is not entirely a matter of conjecture.
The oldest female goddesses were associated with the serpentine powers of the dynamic life force, the natural cycle of life. Her names, shape and powers changed from the Anatolian Earth Mother over time and cross cultural interactions.
"Ritual dismemberment and consumption of a sacrificial victim recently hung upon a sacred tree is, a central process of actions in the rites of the Phrygian mother at large and has much relevance to the study of other mystery initiations." (Attrell)
"Internally, this manifested itself as an ordeal and a spiritual ascent for the sacrificial 'king'; essentially, his duty was to sacrifice himself to the goddess,
mimicking the mushroom itself. He was dressed as the god and suspended himself in the sun‘s rays in order to dry ‘before he was taken down and ritually murdered and eaten by the maenads, as had been done with the mushroom.
The poet Robert Graves was the first to suggest that the maenad‘s savage custom of tearing off their victims‘heads was an allegorical reference to tearing off Amanita muscaria‘s cap (since the stalk was not eaten)." ..."the 'revel‘ which ensued during these rites was no beatific feast; rather, it is a scene of desperation attended by cries of lamentation and wailing."
"The divinely inspired lamentation of women is an all-pervasive phenomenon in the religions of the dying and rising gods. In cults of the Divine Bridegroom, lamentation existed hand in hand with the ecstatic behavior arising at the sacred marriage." (Attrell)
The unconscious psyche, intuition, and associative thinking is the instinctual human essence. Psyche periodically goes into periods of descent or depression and even mania, often in a very dramatic way. She symbolically links a supernatural world of the dead to the world of the living in a realistically human shape with multiple states of being. Both the Greek and Roman cults were hybrid practices, a blend of Hellenic and Oriental cult practices.
Her tympanon (frame drum, tambourine) is the celestial sphere. She was sometimes worshiped as the pole star representing the gate of heaven or axis of the Earth, an umbilical connecting the galactic center to the world-navel, tethers the center of the Earth to the center of the Sky, a bridge linking both forms of reality in a cosmic synthesis. (Guénon 2001, Behun)
When these elements are drawn together, they reciprocally inform one another, deepening our understanding of the performative and spatial dimensions of our experience of the divine and opening the possibility of a direct relationship unbound by dogma. Direct experience is symbolically intimate.
Gaston Bachelard posed the question: ‘How could a legend be kept alive and perpetuated if each generation had not “intimate reasons” for believing in it?’ The symbolist meaning of a phenomenon helps to explain these ‘intimate reasons.’ It links the instrumental with the spiritual, the human with the cosmic, the acasual with the causal, disorder with order, and the transcendent.
The androgynous goddess, the masculine/feminine energy of the world body, means the soul or psyche has no gender. It involves masculine and feminine aesthetics.
"In liminal situations around the world, neophytes are often
treated or symbolically represented as being neither male nor female. Alternatively, they may be allotted the characteristics of both genders, irrespective of their biological sex. In the given initiation rite, they are symbolically sexless or androgynous, as what Victor Turner calls ―a kind of human prima material–as undifferentiated raw material." (Attrell)
Modern ideas of motherhood and sentimental mores can only lead us astray. Kybele is a Dark Mother from the depths of pre-history. She appears in our dreams as a wild animal. as uncontrolled, unacknowledged aspects of ourselves.
The Phrygian deity was the prototype mother goddess of the Mediterranean -- the archetypal imaginal landscape, wild unknown country. Her ritual settings were caves, rock-cut monuments or sanctuaries, springs, flowing water, and virgin forests. She remained a living ode to instinct, beauty, and dignity.
Kybele priests used to demonstrate their psychic abilities using magical stones. The most well-known magic stone was the Kybele Blackstone of Pessinus. Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, a historian, wrote that such conic black stones were found in various regions of Anatolia. A black meteorite was worshiped as her sky body.
Her themes and rites included bees and bulls, sacred marriage, a mother-goddess wedded to her son, and the dying god. Her indigenous Anatolian form was shaped by currents from ancient Mesopotamia and the seductive jangling of cymbals.
Ishtar and Astarte (Sumerian, Hittite, Neo-Hittite) in the east converged with European influences (Balkans, Thrace, Macedonia, Crete) from the west. Frenzies of devotion echoed Tammuz and Adonis. Kybele became linked to the cults of Rhea and Dionysos. Their ecstatic rituals intermingled. The Anatolian mysteries suffered under Persian rule.
The later Greek (Cybele) and Roman (Magna Mater) versions differed in characteristics, myths, and images as other cults co-mingled. The bow and arrow of Artemis and Diana are not her early attributes. Her wide diffusion, an act of inclusion, was also an act of engulfment.
She was considered an essentially foreign, exotic mystery-goddess who arrives in a lion-drawn chariot to the accompaniment of wild music, wine, and a disorderly, ecstatic following. Her priest-son shifted from Midas and Dionysos to Attis. In her fluid iconography, when the son-lover was a flute, the wife and mother Kybele was represented by the tympanon. Her mythic stories largely took form in the Hellenistic era.
The mythic goddess is ambivalent, formidable, and relentless. She exuded power and demanded respect. Her surreal violence, and the unbridled bisexual hyper-erotic libido of the severed hermaphrodite cannot be denied but it was ritualized, eventually into a Roman prophetess, the Sibyl.
We search for behavioral processes that are proto-religious but have the potential to relate to supernatural forces or a point of contact with human psychic abilities. Her followers crossed sexual boundaries during ecstatic rites.
Shared imagination is its core, leading to communal trance celebration and orgiastic sharing of imaginal bodies. The ritual atmosphere is ecstasy, deity possession, and mania. Borderline experiences suggest a possible expanded future through body-centered imagination. Mushroom mycelia are digestive organs that secrete digestive enzymes.
Hidden in the walls of our own labyrinthine digestive tracts, gut-brain bidirectional signalling exists between the gastrointestinal tract and the brain. The microbial gut actually talks to the brain, releasing hormones into the bloodstream and signaling the vagus nerve. They perfectly fit the definition of reward neurons that drive motivation and increase pleasure.
Belly brain generates spontaneous visceral inner images, which in a state of altered consciousness support the healing process. We reunite with the potential world, the eternal primeval world. What is spaceless and timeless corresponds to the eternal essence of the unified world and the world soul. Complex thought emerged around the middle Paleolithic.
Veiled Goddess Plant
In the raw wilderness, the wildest of all the plants was the seedless mushroom, which defied cultivation. More than a sacred plant it was the living goddess. While the earliest Phrygian reference to Kybele dates from the 7th century BCE, evidence shows previous cultures likely worshiped a maternal goddess figure.
"Up until c. 1200 BCE, Troy was considered the stronghold of the Bosporus, but when Troy fell so did the Hittite Empire. The Thracian conquerors from the Balkans were ancestors of the Phrygians. (CAA: 19.) The ancient Phrygians settled in central and western Anatolia and Midas was one of their illustrious sovereigns. King Midas advanced a major civilization, which was strongly influenced by Neo-Hittites and Urartians (Vannics/Chaldeans). (ACRT: 14.) The Capital was Gordion and the National Goddess was Phrygian Matar Cybele plus her son – lover Attis." (CAA: 18-20; MG: 398-400.)
https://www.academia.edu/36598140/171._750-650_Cybele_and_King_Midas_Anatolia.pdf?email_work_card=view-paper
Hallucinogenic mushrooms have been found in the remains of the southeast European Vinca culture from the Danube, dated to 5000 BCE. Did the practice move through Thrace to Phyrgia or was it indigenous?
Carl Ruck (2018) makes such a connection in "Thracian Mystery Religions." "Ancient Thrace, the region of the northern Greek lands south of the Rhodope Mountains that border modern Bulgaria, is associated with several religious cults that surface in Classical Greek culture.":
http://www.sexusjournal.com/FileUpload/bs566760/File/ruck-thracian-mystery-religions-sexus-fall-2018-v3-no-10.pdf
"The ancient Mystery mythological tradition links northern mainland Greece and the islands of Samothrace and Lemnos with Troy, Persia, Boeotian Thebes, Egypt, Crete, Etruscan Italy, the Peloponnesus, Athens, and the sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone at the Attic village of Eleusis. Common to this wide geographical matrix is the role of a psychoactive mushroom as a shamanic sacrament affording access to mystical
experience. The Greek Homeric tradition knew of the plant as the Homeric moly, [h]omomi, and the
haoma sacrament of the Zoroastrian Magi priests and the warrior brotherhood of Mithraism. This was expressed as a zoomorphic anthropomorphism in the figure of the Gorgon Queen Medusa, and the bovine and taurine metaphors for the Amanita muscaria mushroom. ... signifying female empowerment though expertise in medicinal and sacred drugs ...This fungal sacrament figured in the various Mystery cults of the Anatolian
Goddess and her male attendant, and in the antithetical relationship of the gods Apollo and Dionysus."
Early Anatolian inscriptions have been found and deciphered from facades, niches, arches, or other rock monuments. Some reliefs display Kybele standing in a mythical doorway, the magical gateway between the divine and regular worlds.
Phrygian Kybele is powerful and demanding. Her mysterious cult following is centered around her lover Attis who castrated himself. How and why did the Phrygians develop this cult and elevate the fascinating deity, Kybele?
This is a fierce androgynous goddess with a transgendered son-lover, whose original shamanic cult can be associated through her own artifacts with the use of psychoactive mushrooms, likely used since Paleolithic times. A riveting stare is consistent with a visionary state.
Mushrooms have a significant cultural history of religious use for inducing visionary, mystical or shamanic trance states. Naturally, much of what we can say about cult history is speculative, but we can speak about the effects of certain practices linked to the Anatolian mushroom-goddess with some confidence. (Attrell, 2013)
The challenge of this effort is not only mythical, but also cosmological. The blurring, or even complete disintegration, of the distinction between our subjective sense of self and the external environment under the influence of psychedelics has long been a source of fascination.
Environmental stress causes metamorphoses to accelerate. We are built on modified versions of a template furnished by ancient ancestors. Incomprehensible elements of a cult indicate proto-historical traces of archaic evolutionary stages.
The continuity of shamanic themes is lost in the mists of pre-history. Shamanism melded into the Mediterranean Mystery religions, which followed Mesopotamian and Egyptian use of mushrooms by the elite. There are suggestive artifacts such as a bas relief from Athens of Cybele presenting Attis with a 'mushroom-flower," dated to 300 B.C.E. (Umit Sayin, 2014)
Shamanic power is sexually ambiguous. The body is used as an active component of participation in rituals to engender altered states of consciousness. Psychedelics chemically modulate our sense of self, according to Natasha Mason (2020), of Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
https://newatlas.com/science/breakthrough-psilocybin-study-neurochemical-glutamate-human-ego/?fbclid=IwAR18y_BCZbkbJk7ml06P5MmUHimxyCqcV7ABOPujYn6Ut2Bcgbxc5LmMVBA
Psilocybin also influences a mysterious brain region called the claustrum. Francis Crick (2014) suggested the claustrum may be key to our experience of consciousness, unifying and co-ordinating disparate brain areas to help generate our singular experience. "It receives input from almost all regions of cortex and projects back to almost all regions of cortex.”
https://newatlas.com/science/psychedelic-claustrum-consciousness-brain-psilocybin-ego/?utm_source=New+Atlas+Subscribers&utm_campaign=4fb4df55bd-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_06_15_01_48&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-4fb4df55bd-90498185&fbclid=IwAR2CetBEHS9pKtbSJVIzdd_6ohj6lFVofJrGUvdezCe0bn4AK5MWE8niIvU
Claustrum activity seems to orchestrate a kind of synchronized slowing down of brain activity across a number of different cortical regions. When claustrum activity is suppressed, it affects the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs. Brain networks that don’t normally communicate will suddenly spark up connections under the influence of psilocybin. It seemed to significantly alter how the claustrum communicated with a number of brain regions fundamentally involved in attentional tasks and sensory processing, and and its beneficial therapeutic outcomes. (Hardy, 2020)
Psychoactive mushrooms increase glutamate concentration levels in the medial prefrontal cortex and decrease glutamate concentration levels in the hippocampus. These modulations predict experiences of positive or negative ego dissolution based on such glutamate concentrations.
'Negatively experienced' ego dissolution is the loss of autonomy and self-control of thought processes, intentionality, decision making, and spontaneous movements. 'Positively experienced' ego dissolution is the depersonalization associated with positive emotional states, like heightened mood, sense of oneness, ecstasy, and euphoria. It marks surrender to Kybele's boundless and infinite love.
In the raw wilderness, the wildest of all the plants was the seedless mushroom, which defied cultivation. More than a sacred plant it was the living goddess. While the earliest Phrygian reference to Kybele dates from the 7th century BCE, evidence shows previous cultures likely worshiped a maternal goddess figure.
"Up until c. 1200 BCE, Troy was considered the stronghold of the Bosporus, but when Troy fell so did the Hittite Empire. The Thracian conquerors from the Balkans were ancestors of the Phrygians. (CAA: 19.) The ancient Phrygians settled in central and western Anatolia and Midas was one of their illustrious sovereigns. King Midas advanced a major civilization, which was strongly influenced by Neo-Hittites and Urartians (Vannics/Chaldeans). (ACRT: 14.) The Capital was Gordion and the National Goddess was Phrygian Matar Cybele plus her son – lover Attis." (CAA: 18-20; MG: 398-400.)
https://www.academia.edu/36598140/171._750-650_Cybele_and_King_Midas_Anatolia.pdf?email_work_card=view-paper
Hallucinogenic mushrooms have been found in the remains of the southeast European Vinca culture from the Danube, dated to 5000 BCE. Did the practice move through Thrace to Phyrgia or was it indigenous?
Carl Ruck (2018) makes such a connection in "Thracian Mystery Religions." "Ancient Thrace, the region of the northern Greek lands south of the Rhodope Mountains that border modern Bulgaria, is associated with several religious cults that surface in Classical Greek culture.":
http://www.sexusjournal.com/FileUpload/bs566760/File/ruck-thracian-mystery-religions-sexus-fall-2018-v3-no-10.pdf
"The ancient Mystery mythological tradition links northern mainland Greece and the islands of Samothrace and Lemnos with Troy, Persia, Boeotian Thebes, Egypt, Crete, Etruscan Italy, the Peloponnesus, Athens, and the sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone at the Attic village of Eleusis. Common to this wide geographical matrix is the role of a psychoactive mushroom as a shamanic sacrament affording access to mystical
experience. The Greek Homeric tradition knew of the plant as the Homeric moly, [h]omomi, and the
haoma sacrament of the Zoroastrian Magi priests and the warrior brotherhood of Mithraism. This was expressed as a zoomorphic anthropomorphism in the figure of the Gorgon Queen Medusa, and the bovine and taurine metaphors for the Amanita muscaria mushroom. ... signifying female empowerment though expertise in medicinal and sacred drugs ...This fungal sacrament figured in the various Mystery cults of the Anatolian
Goddess and her male attendant, and in the antithetical relationship of the gods Apollo and Dionysus."
Early Anatolian inscriptions have been found and deciphered from facades, niches, arches, or other rock monuments. Some reliefs display Kybele standing in a mythical doorway, the magical gateway between the divine and regular worlds.
Phrygian Kybele is powerful and demanding. Her mysterious cult following is centered around her lover Attis who castrated himself. How and why did the Phrygians develop this cult and elevate the fascinating deity, Kybele?
This is a fierce androgynous goddess with a transgendered son-lover, whose original shamanic cult can be associated through her own artifacts with the use of psychoactive mushrooms, likely used since Paleolithic times. A riveting stare is consistent with a visionary state.
Mushrooms have a significant cultural history of religious use for inducing visionary, mystical or shamanic trance states. Naturally, much of what we can say about cult history is speculative, but we can speak about the effects of certain practices linked to the Anatolian mushroom-goddess with some confidence. (Attrell, 2013)
The challenge of this effort is not only mythical, but also cosmological. The blurring, or even complete disintegration, of the distinction between our subjective sense of self and the external environment under the influence of psychedelics has long been a source of fascination.
Environmental stress causes metamorphoses to accelerate. We are built on modified versions of a template furnished by ancient ancestors. Incomprehensible elements of a cult indicate proto-historical traces of archaic evolutionary stages.
The continuity of shamanic themes is lost in the mists of pre-history. Shamanism melded into the Mediterranean Mystery religions, which followed Mesopotamian and Egyptian use of mushrooms by the elite. There are suggestive artifacts such as a bas relief from Athens of Cybele presenting Attis with a 'mushroom-flower," dated to 300 B.C.E. (Umit Sayin, 2014)
Shamanic power is sexually ambiguous. The body is used as an active component of participation in rituals to engender altered states of consciousness. Psychedelics chemically modulate our sense of self, according to Natasha Mason (2020), of Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
https://newatlas.com/science/breakthrough-psilocybin-study-neurochemical-glutamate-human-ego/?fbclid=IwAR18y_BCZbkbJk7ml06P5MmUHimxyCqcV7ABOPujYn6Ut2Bcgbxc5LmMVBA
Psilocybin also influences a mysterious brain region called the claustrum. Francis Crick (2014) suggested the claustrum may be key to our experience of consciousness, unifying and co-ordinating disparate brain areas to help generate our singular experience. "It receives input from almost all regions of cortex and projects back to almost all regions of cortex.”
https://newatlas.com/science/psychedelic-claustrum-consciousness-brain-psilocybin-ego/?utm_source=New+Atlas+Subscribers&utm_campaign=4fb4df55bd-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_06_15_01_48&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-4fb4df55bd-90498185&fbclid=IwAR2CetBEHS9pKtbSJVIzdd_6ohj6lFVofJrGUvdezCe0bn4AK5MWE8niIvU
Claustrum activity seems to orchestrate a kind of synchronized slowing down of brain activity across a number of different cortical regions. When claustrum activity is suppressed, it affects the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs. Brain networks that don’t normally communicate will suddenly spark up connections under the influence of psilocybin. It seemed to significantly alter how the claustrum communicated with a number of brain regions fundamentally involved in attentional tasks and sensory processing, and and its beneficial therapeutic outcomes. (Hardy, 2020)
Psychoactive mushrooms increase glutamate concentration levels in the medial prefrontal cortex and decrease glutamate concentration levels in the hippocampus. These modulations predict experiences of positive or negative ego dissolution based on such glutamate concentrations.
'Negatively experienced' ego dissolution is the loss of autonomy and self-control of thought processes, intentionality, decision making, and spontaneous movements. 'Positively experienced' ego dissolution is the depersonalization associated with positive emotional states, like heightened mood, sense of oneness, ecstasy, and euphoria. It marks surrender to Kybele's boundless and infinite love.
Embodied Insights
Combined with rhythmic sounds the body is driven to ecstatic experience. Combined with swaying movements, the body becomes a conduit for experiencing the divine. Trance is amplified by such reverberating resonance and vision, images of the unseen world. Hypnosis, used consciously or unconsciously is always a process of induction, deepening, and emerging.
We can also imagine what that means to our contemporary lives. In affirming ourselves, we affirm all existence. Awe as a “self-transcendent emotion,”
the upper reaches of pleasure on the boundary of fear. We tremble, but nevertheless come closer to the extraordinary event, engaging the fascinating force of the sacred event on our human psyche that unravels the very fabric of reality.
Was there a founding awefull event that gave rise to her cult? Mimetic culture and ritualized behavior (singing, dancing, and chanting) precedes mythic culture. Perhaps they watched sacred animals consume sacred plants, feeling awe at their unexpected discovery. Ritual cannibalism became symbolic.
Kybele is a Mysterium Fascinans, terrifying and fascinating, urgent, awesome, as well as dreadful, fearful, and overwhelming. We are disturbed or fascinated by our future, by our fate. These forgotten energies are passed down in an unconscious generational, or epigenetic way -- a spiral or vortex in culture.
Like the amanita mushrooms, Kybele has a radically creative and destructive aspect. She is a spore-goddess whose nature accreted layers of meaning over time. If she is the collective unconscious ("mother of the gods") itself, she begins where our consciousness stops. When we consciously embody this intimate wisdom, our bodies become temples of her living spirit.
There is always the potential in psychoactive plants for possession and inundation by potentially overwhelming affects like dissolution and disintegration, depressive or manic moods, unconscious or taboo fantasies, compulsions, and archetypal figures. Yet in this way things are kept open and alive. Kybele is a goddess of transgressions, the crossing of taboos.
Joseph Campbell reminds us, "And where we had thought to find an abomination we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outwards we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone we shall be with all the world."
Therefore, Kybele appears as intensely autonomous, full of rage to the point of madness, and profoundly inhuman. In some myths her primordial androgynous nature revolted and inflamed the gods who took action against her.
Her cult-worship was an unbridled primitive spectacle. Many aspects of it were later rejected, abandoned or tabooed by Hellenic and Roman culture. Yet she retained her inner throne. Now we have the earth-based Neo-Techno-Tribal shamanism movement -- communal ecstatic dance and transformation festivals.
We cannot suppress Kybele, but must 'see through' her dangerous images, through our enlivened senses. We must immerse in her destructive element so we can incorporate our darker side even though it is wildly dangerous. She promises liberation or metamorphosis from rationalistic one-sidedness.
In the Middle East and Anatolia, many hermetic and pagan religions, Greek and Hellenic cultures used psychoactive plants as a serious, part of religious rituals. They bridged the gap between merely intoxicated revel and numinous revelations. The impact of the psychedelic experience and imagination was enormous to the configuration of many religious and mythological characters, and archetypes.
Kybele's mythic forest remains untrammeled. Jung said, "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 sexuality. 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."
Her animals are both earthly and celestial (zodiac). Cult-animals, such as the lion, panther, bears, bulls, and predatory birds, are a way of taking on their powers. Totems are generally animals, rarely plants, never natural phenomena. The clan ancestor decends from the totem. Numerous features of Greek religion link animals and gods. Their importance echoes through history from indigenous tribes to philosophers:
“As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.” (Pythagoras) "Until mankind himself extends his circle of compassion to all living things, he will not know peace." (Dr. Albert Schweitzer)
There are traces, too, of a closer identification, in which gods (and/or their worshipers) appear in animal or part-animal form. 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. Birds wove, probed and pounded.
Animals are also symbols or psychic images, often seen in the most ancient cave art. We still typically put animals on nursery walls, rather than other cultural icons. The Greek word for zodiac, zoidion, has two distinct meanings: 1) a living being or an "animal", and 2) an image, figure, or picture of something; where something is located, "the place of a living being," or "the place of an image." The 12 houses were called "places," "domiciles," or "regions."
We still contain this archaic mode deep within ourselves, within our psyche, much as we retain entoptic visionary sensation. As embodied mythopoesis (myth-making), Kybele mediates between the boundaries of the known and unknown, the civilized and the wild, the worlds of the living and the dead, and the continuity of lives both living and dead (often in dreams or visions).
There is an Ecology of Souls. The life-world is always there as the background of all human experiences. She is the primal consciousness that instructs all life how to live in the world and not just on it.
The primordial female figure is connected with the underworld, ancestors, and the power of the deceased. The archaic cult of Kybele, with its mania, frenzy, chaos, thrashing, shrieks, droning horns, screaming flutes, and cacophony drives altered states.
The sacred mushroom is identified by its common Greek metaphor as an erect penis. The severed phallus-mushroom is an analogue of the deity. The severed member is a phallus with its resemblance to its botanical analogue.
Her revels might be likened to the first primal scream therapy. We have maligned the forests, the species, and the life force of the planet. We need a perceptual rebirth. One that comes from the heart. Paleolithic Kybele is a forest of symbolism -- the invisible made visible in psychic events, soul process, and revelatory meaning.
Her rustic aesthetic is a field of immediacy, of encounter, organized within a distribution of the sensible, a more primitive form of rhythmic language than words. Even largely unconscious flowing information elicits physical responses. We can speak imagistically like dreams themselves.
We have a visceral connection to the vocal terrain through its utterance and through the wordless knowing of intuitive listening in space. Rolling on the ground screaming might be the beginning of the way.
We can explore evidence for cult use of psychoactive substances. Though a lifeform radically alien to ours, fungal nature is sublime, a hidden world, a miraculous web of connections, interactions and communication. We are stopped dead in our tracks and have no choice but to stare in awe at our relationship with the living world.
Fungi raised bread and fermented drinks. Typically a variety of fungi are used as food for the soul in folk medicine. Rain induces the mushrooms to fruit. The sacred violet also blooms in spring around the Festival of Attis. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet, and the ways we think, feel and behave.
Mycelium is a web of wonder that underlies every step we take. The natural world is more fantastic than any fantasy, if you have the means to perceive it. Psychoactive fungi, 'true food,' embody that means of revealing essential being as the fundamental phenomena of psychic reality.
Belief in something is closely related to the way of life of the believers and their entangled lives. Religion clearly relates to lived reality, cultural processing of primary processes and powers in human life. Psyche itself in its own imaginative visibility is irreducible.
The cult of Kybele-Attis concerns fundamental love of imagination, and communion with the goddess by amplifying that primordial imaginal capacity and inherent urge. Because such love is obsessively self-referential, it is symbolically incestuous, an introversion to an imaginal character in an imaginal realm. The 'fantasy principle' is more fundamental than even the 'pleasure' or 'reality' principles.
Old academic cult models of automatic ascending development are obsolete and presumptuous. Over time, her Phrygian cults and iconography were transformed from her archaic meteoric and monumental rock-cut images in the Phrygian highlands.
Her mysteries were private rites with a chthonic aspect. They were eventually subsumed by the influences and interpretations of her Greek, Roman and other foreign devotees.
This ancient and mysterious figure has been altered so many times, we don't know her true origin or meaning. More than a fertility icon, the mountain-cave goddess is the doorway to the mystical encounter that leads to rebirth. Her perfect image is breath -- wind, soul, breath of creation, breath of life.
Rather than a vegetation-god, Attis the personification of an intoxicating sacred plant, linked to the pine tree that hosts the visionary mushroom, its miraculous mystery fruit. It mimics the androgynous male/female metamorphosis central to the myth. (Ruck)
Sacrificing virility to the gods can be a metaphor for the surrender of ordinary consciousness to ecstatic transformation. The living mythology of Kybele-Attis has a shamanic core from the Archaic period, which can be seen in her ancient artifacts, connection to the dead, and ritualized communicative behavior. The sacramental meal was also a love-feast.
The nocturnal ritual likely preceded the myths and legends, which are a multi-cultural confabulation. Hellenistic, Dionysian, and Roman literature later imported notions that re-directed and sanitized the original Anatolian tales but never influenced the native Phrygian practice in return. Outmoded archaeological interpretations of such a hodge-podge of eras and imported concepts and characterizations are a further impediment.
The totem animal or vegetable was sacred, so eaten as an act of communion. The ritual of Attis, a vegetation god, specifically included, "feeding on milk as if we were being born again." They danced erotically in the service of the goddess and god, generating power through the compelling force of rhythm of movement. They were carried beyond themselves.
In the evocative dance, life is ordered and reverts to potent primeval feeling and motion. Feelings are more than personal, reflecting universal phenomena working in our unconscious -- structures of behavior and feeling called by the names of vivifying divinities. Feeling accurately identifies the nature of the ancient mythology.
Every archetypal image has its own insights, excess and intensity. With the feeling function we reduce intellectual speculation to matters close at hand, personal issues of food and nature.
During the creative process, our own attributes, states, feelings and emotions are transferred onto the materials by a transformative function. They transform into an affect of nourishment that provides a regenerative sensibility which is healing.
The primitive feeling function is mainly a reaction of yes and no, like and dislike, acceptance and rejection. Rage... jealously... lying... resentment... blaming... greed... These forbidden feelings and behaviors arise from the dark, denied part of ourselves - the shrieking and raving personal shadow.
Ecstatic dancing creates powerfulness while dancing away superfluous power in loss of self, ritual madness, and the conversion of vital energy. Attis as primordial Old One was a primeval creating force, who unsexed himself under the pine-tree, the tree-mother of the Phrygians. Attis appears in the Greek world around the middle of the fourth century BC. His worshipers went into the mountains calling for him.
Attis was explicitly identified with potentially fatal Amanita muscaria mushrooms. The danger of the descent is in identifying with the instinctive world. Depth includes depth-perception, perceiving through the depths of soul, that take us to the Divine Soul. She is the means by which our inner depths can be felt in their Presence, here and now.
The Phrygian cap worn by her son-lover Attis indicates ecstatic experience. The ancient image is that of a god torn to pieces and eaten by adorers. The Phrygian god was born of a virgin, died and rose at Easter time, and left a sacramental meal eaten from consecrated musical instruments of the cult: frame drum or tambourine, cymbal, and castanets.
Worshipers cried, "I have eaten from the drum, I have drunk from the cymbal, I have carried the earthen dish" (on their heads). The god is killed and worshiped in effigy, then eaten by the initiates of Attis, swallowing all the magic power. The fundamental idea was that eating the god was a means of identifying with the god of the Mystery. Bad spirits might also enter.
The violent death, 'passion,' and resurrection of the god were enacted in sacred rites. Emasculated Mesopotamian priests were the models for Kybele's transgendered eunuch priests. Eating pork was taboo for Attis worshipers. They deposited their members in sacred subterranean places.
Ritual theophagy is the sacrifice and distribution of a god's 'flesh' to be consumed by worshipers to open a vast mystery. Eating new mycelial fruit was a sacrament, eucharist, or communion with the deity. The mycelium becomes entwined in whatever substrate it's in, making an inseparable mass of substrate and mycelium. If environmental conditions are right, the mycelium will produce a mushroom, the fruiting body. The mushroom is actually the reproductive structure of this organism.
The divine being was eaten or absorbed by the votaries. Weird or uncanny qualities arose they did not understand. They absorbed the awesome and dreadful aspects of the sacred thing. Union was predicated on food and sex, consuming or sexual merging with the god, including sensed Presence.
This article is a mytho-poetic exploration of the Paleo- and Neolithic psycho-historical context of the Kybele-Attis cult. This primal and visceral renewal by the goddess was the extreme state sought by devotees of Kybele as their epiphany. The votary was united to the divinity by imbibing some holy food or drink. Suedfeld, P., & Geiger, J. (2008) say the sensed presence is a coping resource in extreme environments. The sensed presence effect is enhanced by exhaustion, drugs, "twilight sleep," or sleep deprivation.
The "sensed presence", including the God-image, arises when the right hemispheric sense of self falls out of phase with the left hemispheric self. The right ‘self' is experienced as an external presence. Commonly, a person feels that the sensed presence is not themselves at all. Sensed presence experiences occur in a wide variety of situations, to a wide variety of people; and the presences themselves vary in appearance, identity, and behavior. There are many kinds of sensed presence phenomena. They include psychotic, feverish, and drug-induced hallucinations; angelic and other religious visitations, ghosts, "corner of the eye" glimpses of someone almost seen or almost heard, quite common among recently bereaved persons; vivid dreams and daydreams. Sometimes a presence is recognized as a religious figure, friend, acquaintance, or relative. They often appear when the person is weakened by exhaustion or illness; on the verge of death from cold, thirst, or starvation; lost and alone; or in an unusually stimulus-poor environment. Most surprisingly, they do not just serve as companions: they actually help the person in trouble, sometimes by offering useful information or advice and at other times by seeming to take a hand in whatever needs to be done to improve the chances of survival. The sensed presence may be the left-hemisphere interpreter’s explanation for right-hemisphere anomalies.
The danger of the descent is that the individual could identify with or be possessed by the instinctive world. Depth includes depth-perception, perceiving through the depths of soul, that take us to the Divine Soul. She is the means by which our inner depths can be felt in their Presence, here and now. The Phrygian cap worn by her son-lover Attis indicates ecstatic experience.
Combined with rhythmic sounds the body is driven to ecstatic experience. Combined with swaying movements, the body becomes a conduit for experiencing the divine. Trance is amplified by such reverberating resonance and vision, images of the unseen world. Hypnosis, used consciously or unconsciously is always a process of induction, deepening, and emerging.
We can also imagine what that means to our contemporary lives. In affirming ourselves, we affirm all existence. Awe as a “self-transcendent emotion,”
the upper reaches of pleasure on the boundary of fear. We tremble, but nevertheless come closer to the extraordinary event, engaging the fascinating force of the sacred event on our human psyche that unravels the very fabric of reality.
Was there a founding awefull event that gave rise to her cult? Mimetic culture and ritualized behavior (singing, dancing, and chanting) precedes mythic culture. Perhaps they watched sacred animals consume sacred plants, feeling awe at their unexpected discovery. Ritual cannibalism became symbolic.
Kybele is a Mysterium Fascinans, terrifying and fascinating, urgent, awesome, as well as dreadful, fearful, and overwhelming. We are disturbed or fascinated by our future, by our fate. These forgotten energies are passed down in an unconscious generational, or epigenetic way -- a spiral or vortex in culture.
Like the amanita mushrooms, Kybele has a radically creative and destructive aspect. She is a spore-goddess whose nature accreted layers of meaning over time. If she is the collective unconscious ("mother of the gods") itself, she begins where our consciousness stops. When we consciously embody this intimate wisdom, our bodies become temples of her living spirit.
There is always the potential in psychoactive plants for possession and inundation by potentially overwhelming affects like dissolution and disintegration, depressive or manic moods, unconscious or taboo fantasies, compulsions, and archetypal figures. Yet in this way things are kept open and alive. Kybele is a goddess of transgressions, the crossing of taboos.
Joseph Campbell reminds us, "And where we had thought to find an abomination we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outwards we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone we shall be with all the world."
Therefore, Kybele appears as intensely autonomous, full of rage to the point of madness, and profoundly inhuman. In some myths her primordial androgynous nature revolted and inflamed the gods who took action against her.
Her cult-worship was an unbridled primitive spectacle. Many aspects of it were later rejected, abandoned or tabooed by Hellenic and Roman culture. Yet she retained her inner throne. Now we have the earth-based Neo-Techno-Tribal shamanism movement -- communal ecstatic dance and transformation festivals.
We cannot suppress Kybele, but must 'see through' her dangerous images, through our enlivened senses. We must immerse in her destructive element so we can incorporate our darker side even though it is wildly dangerous. She promises liberation or metamorphosis from rationalistic one-sidedness.
In the Middle East and Anatolia, many hermetic and pagan religions, Greek and Hellenic cultures used psychoactive plants as a serious, part of religious rituals. They bridged the gap between merely intoxicated revel and numinous revelations. The impact of the psychedelic experience and imagination was enormous to the configuration of many religious and mythological characters, and archetypes.
Kybele's mythic forest remains untrammeled. Jung said, "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 sexuality. 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."
Her animals are both earthly and celestial (zodiac). Cult-animals, such as the lion, panther, bears, bulls, and predatory birds, are a way of taking on their powers. Totems are generally animals, rarely plants, never natural phenomena. The clan ancestor decends from the totem. Numerous features of Greek religion link animals and gods. Their importance echoes through history from indigenous tribes to philosophers:
“As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.” (Pythagoras) "Until mankind himself extends his circle of compassion to all living things, he will not know peace." (Dr. Albert Schweitzer)
There are traces, too, of a closer identification, in which gods (and/or their worshipers) appear in animal or part-animal form. 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. Birds wove, probed and pounded.
Animals are also symbols or psychic images, often seen in the most ancient cave art. We still typically put animals on nursery walls, rather than other cultural icons. The Greek word for zodiac, zoidion, has two distinct meanings: 1) a living being or an "animal", and 2) an image, figure, or picture of something; where something is located, "the place of a living being," or "the place of an image." The 12 houses were called "places," "domiciles," or "regions."
We still contain this archaic mode deep within ourselves, within our psyche, much as we retain entoptic visionary sensation. As embodied mythopoesis (myth-making), Kybele mediates between the boundaries of the known and unknown, the civilized and the wild, the worlds of the living and the dead, and the continuity of lives both living and dead (often in dreams or visions).
There is an Ecology of Souls. The life-world is always there as the background of all human experiences. She is the primal consciousness that instructs all life how to live in the world and not just on it.
The primordial female figure is connected with the underworld, ancestors, and the power of the deceased. The archaic cult of Kybele, with its mania, frenzy, chaos, thrashing, shrieks, droning horns, screaming flutes, and cacophony drives altered states.
The sacred mushroom is identified by its common Greek metaphor as an erect penis. The severed phallus-mushroom is an analogue of the deity. The severed member is a phallus with its resemblance to its botanical analogue.
Her revels might be likened to the first primal scream therapy. We have maligned the forests, the species, and the life force of the planet. We need a perceptual rebirth. One that comes from the heart. Paleolithic Kybele is a forest of symbolism -- the invisible made visible in psychic events, soul process, and revelatory meaning.
Her rustic aesthetic is a field of immediacy, of encounter, organized within a distribution of the sensible, a more primitive form of rhythmic language than words. Even largely unconscious flowing information elicits physical responses. We can speak imagistically like dreams themselves.
We have a visceral connection to the vocal terrain through its utterance and through the wordless knowing of intuitive listening in space. Rolling on the ground screaming might be the beginning of the way.
We can explore evidence for cult use of psychoactive substances. Though a lifeform radically alien to ours, fungal nature is sublime, a hidden world, a miraculous web of connections, interactions and communication. We are stopped dead in our tracks and have no choice but to stare in awe at our relationship with the living world.
Fungi raised bread and fermented drinks. Typically a variety of fungi are used as food for the soul in folk medicine. Rain induces the mushrooms to fruit. The sacred violet also blooms in spring around the Festival of Attis. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet, and the ways we think, feel and behave.
Mycelium is a web of wonder that underlies every step we take. The natural world is more fantastic than any fantasy, if you have the means to perceive it. Psychoactive fungi, 'true food,' embody that means of revealing essential being as the fundamental phenomena of psychic reality.
Belief in something is closely related to the way of life of the believers and their entangled lives. Religion clearly relates to lived reality, cultural processing of primary processes and powers in human life. Psyche itself in its own imaginative visibility is irreducible.
The cult of Kybele-Attis concerns fundamental love of imagination, and communion with the goddess by amplifying that primordial imaginal capacity and inherent urge. Because such love is obsessively self-referential, it is symbolically incestuous, an introversion to an imaginal character in an imaginal realm. The 'fantasy principle' is more fundamental than even the 'pleasure' or 'reality' principles.
Old academic cult models of automatic ascending development are obsolete and presumptuous. Over time, her Phrygian cults and iconography were transformed from her archaic meteoric and monumental rock-cut images in the Phrygian highlands.
Her mysteries were private rites with a chthonic aspect. They were eventually subsumed by the influences and interpretations of her Greek, Roman and other foreign devotees.
This ancient and mysterious figure has been altered so many times, we don't know her true origin or meaning. More than a fertility icon, the mountain-cave goddess is the doorway to the mystical encounter that leads to rebirth. Her perfect image is breath -- wind, soul, breath of creation, breath of life.
Rather than a vegetation-god, Attis the personification of an intoxicating sacred plant, linked to the pine tree that hosts the visionary mushroom, its miraculous mystery fruit. It mimics the androgynous male/female metamorphosis central to the myth. (Ruck)
Sacrificing virility to the gods can be a metaphor for the surrender of ordinary consciousness to ecstatic transformation. The living mythology of Kybele-Attis has a shamanic core from the Archaic period, which can be seen in her ancient artifacts, connection to the dead, and ritualized communicative behavior. The sacramental meal was also a love-feast.
The nocturnal ritual likely preceded the myths and legends, which are a multi-cultural confabulation. Hellenistic, Dionysian, and Roman literature later imported notions that re-directed and sanitized the original Anatolian tales but never influenced the native Phrygian practice in return. Outmoded archaeological interpretations of such a hodge-podge of eras and imported concepts and characterizations are a further impediment.
The totem animal or vegetable was sacred, so eaten as an act of communion. The ritual of Attis, a vegetation god, specifically included, "feeding on milk as if we were being born again." They danced erotically in the service of the goddess and god, generating power through the compelling force of rhythm of movement. They were carried beyond themselves.
In the evocative dance, life is ordered and reverts to potent primeval feeling and motion. Feelings are more than personal, reflecting universal phenomena working in our unconscious -- structures of behavior and feeling called by the names of vivifying divinities. Feeling accurately identifies the nature of the ancient mythology.
Every archetypal image has its own insights, excess and intensity. With the feeling function we reduce intellectual speculation to matters close at hand, personal issues of food and nature.
During the creative process, our own attributes, states, feelings and emotions are transferred onto the materials by a transformative function. They transform into an affect of nourishment that provides a regenerative sensibility which is healing.
The primitive feeling function is mainly a reaction of yes and no, like and dislike, acceptance and rejection. Rage... jealously... lying... resentment... blaming... greed... These forbidden feelings and behaviors arise from the dark, denied part of ourselves - the shrieking and raving personal shadow.
Ecstatic dancing creates powerfulness while dancing away superfluous power in loss of self, ritual madness, and the conversion of vital energy. Attis as primordial Old One was a primeval creating force, who unsexed himself under the pine-tree, the tree-mother of the Phrygians. Attis appears in the Greek world around the middle of the fourth century BC. His worshipers went into the mountains calling for him.
Attis was explicitly identified with potentially fatal Amanita muscaria mushrooms. The danger of the descent is in identifying with the instinctive world. Depth includes depth-perception, perceiving through the depths of soul, that take us to the Divine Soul. She is the means by which our inner depths can be felt in their Presence, here and now.
The Phrygian cap worn by her son-lover Attis indicates ecstatic experience. The ancient image is that of a god torn to pieces and eaten by adorers. The Phrygian god was born of a virgin, died and rose at Easter time, and left a sacramental meal eaten from consecrated musical instruments of the cult: frame drum or tambourine, cymbal, and castanets.
Worshipers cried, "I have eaten from the drum, I have drunk from the cymbal, I have carried the earthen dish" (on their heads). The god is killed and worshiped in effigy, then eaten by the initiates of Attis, swallowing all the magic power. The fundamental idea was that eating the god was a means of identifying with the god of the Mystery. Bad spirits might also enter.
The violent death, 'passion,' and resurrection of the god were enacted in sacred rites. Emasculated Mesopotamian priests were the models for Kybele's transgendered eunuch priests. Eating pork was taboo for Attis worshipers. They deposited their members in sacred subterranean places.
Ritual theophagy is the sacrifice and distribution of a god's 'flesh' to be consumed by worshipers to open a vast mystery. Eating new mycelial fruit was a sacrament, eucharist, or communion with the deity. The mycelium becomes entwined in whatever substrate it's in, making an inseparable mass of substrate and mycelium. If environmental conditions are right, the mycelium will produce a mushroom, the fruiting body. The mushroom is actually the reproductive structure of this organism.
The divine being was eaten or absorbed by the votaries. Weird or uncanny qualities arose they did not understand. They absorbed the awesome and dreadful aspects of the sacred thing. Union was predicated on food and sex, consuming or sexual merging with the god, including sensed Presence.
This article is a mytho-poetic exploration of the Paleo- and Neolithic psycho-historical context of the Kybele-Attis cult. This primal and visceral renewal by the goddess was the extreme state sought by devotees of Kybele as their epiphany. The votary was united to the divinity by imbibing some holy food or drink. Suedfeld, P., & Geiger, J. (2008) say the sensed presence is a coping resource in extreme environments. The sensed presence effect is enhanced by exhaustion, drugs, "twilight sleep," or sleep deprivation.
The "sensed presence", including the God-image, arises when the right hemispheric sense of self falls out of phase with the left hemispheric self. The right ‘self' is experienced as an external presence. Commonly, a person feels that the sensed presence is not themselves at all. Sensed presence experiences occur in a wide variety of situations, to a wide variety of people; and the presences themselves vary in appearance, identity, and behavior. There are many kinds of sensed presence phenomena. They include psychotic, feverish, and drug-induced hallucinations; angelic and other religious visitations, ghosts, "corner of the eye" glimpses of someone almost seen or almost heard, quite common among recently bereaved persons; vivid dreams and daydreams. Sometimes a presence is recognized as a religious figure, friend, acquaintance, or relative. They often appear when the person is weakened by exhaustion or illness; on the verge of death from cold, thirst, or starvation; lost and alone; or in an unusually stimulus-poor environment. Most surprisingly, they do not just serve as companions: they actually help the person in trouble, sometimes by offering useful information or advice and at other times by seeming to take a hand in whatever needs to be done to improve the chances of survival. The sensed presence may be the left-hemisphere interpreter’s explanation for right-hemisphere anomalies.
The danger of the descent is that the individual could identify with or be possessed by the instinctive world. Depth includes depth-perception, perceiving through the depths of soul, that take us to the Divine Soul. She is the means by which our inner depths can be felt in their Presence, here and now. The Phrygian cap worn by her son-lover Attis indicates ecstatic experience.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Cybelle_Attis_and_related_cults/T1nmUY70OzEC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=,cybele+and+attis,+Vermaseren&printsec=frontcover
The Natural Genesis - Gerald MasseyThe genetrix as Ta-urt (Typhon) is designated the 'Mother of the Beginnings,' 'Mother of the Revolutions' (time-cycles), 'Mother of the Fields of Heaven,' and the 'Mother of Gods and Men.' The priority of the genetrix as typical producer was plainly enough portrayed by Tesas-Neith, the Great Mother, at Sais. 'I am all that was, and is, and is to be; no mortal hath lifted my peplum, and the fruit I bore is Helios.'[2] The title of the goddess as 'Tesas-Neith' signifies the self-existing; she who came from herself. The genetrix is celebrated as the 'Only One' in the Ritual. 'Glory to thee! Thou art mightier than the Gods! The forms of the living souls which are in their places give glory to the terrors of thee, their Mother; thou art their origin.'[3]