1. “Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” 

Haruki Murakami, “Kafka on the Shore”

Sandra Poirier, “Lion in Sandstorm“

2.

D. H. Lawrence

Snake

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice a dream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

Signature of Cranach the Elder: winged snake with ruby ring

1.“When you were a wandering desire in the mist, I too was there, a wandering desire. Then we sought one another, and out of our eagerness dreams were born. And dreams were time limitless, and dreams were space without measure.”
Khalil Gibran, “The Forerunner“

2.Etymology of Desire:

Early 13c., from Old French desirrer (12c) ‘wish, desire, long for,‘ from Latin desiderare ‘long for, wish for; demand, expect,‘ original sense perhaps ‘await what the stars will bring,‘ from the phrase de sidere ‘from the stars,‘ from sidus (genitive sideris) ‘heavenly body, star, constellation.‘

http://www.etymonline.com/

3.“Desire itself derives from a Latin nautical term which means ‘of the star.’ To have desire is to have a vector, an intentionality, a direction. To lose desire is to be as adrift as a mariner who has lost the guiding star across otherwise trackless seas.”

James Hollis, “Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life”

Emily Balivet, “The Star – Goddess of Hope”

“Lady, weeping at the crossroads

Would you meet your love

In the twilight with his greyhounds,

And the hawk on his glove?

 

Bribe the birds then on the branches,

Bribe them to be dumb,

Stare the hot sun out of heaven

That the night may come.

 

Starless are the nights of travel,

Bleak the winter wind;

Run with terror all before you

And regret behind.

 

Run until you hear the ocean’s

Everlasting cry;

Deep though it may be and bitter

You must drink it dry.

 

Wear out patience in the lowest

Dungeons of the sea,

Searching through the stranded shipwrecks

For the golden key.

 

Push on to the world’s end, pay the

Dread guard with a kiss;

Cross the rotten bridge that totters

Over the abyss.

 

There stands the deserted castle

Ready to explore;

Enter, climb the marble staircase

Open the locked door.

 

Cross the silent empty ballroom,

Doubt and danger past;

Blow the cobwebs from the mirror

See yourself at last.

 

Put your hand behind the wainscot,

You have done your part;

Find the penknife there and plunge it

Into your false heart.”

Kay Sage, “The Fourteen Daggers”

I am starting a new series on my blog which will consist of conversations regarding books, films and potentially other soulful topics of interest. I am calling the series “Passionate Longing for Dialogue,” which is a quote from Martin Buber’s I and Thou. The following is my exchange with Gray of graycrawford.net about the new novel by Haruki Murakami. I met Gray through blogging on wordpress and we understood immediately that we have a strong mercurial connection and that our thought processes resonate with each other very deeply.

Monika: Murakami has been one of my favorite novelists for a long time now, so I try not to miss any of his novels. The most recent one, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, really enchanted me. I finished it in just four days, I think. I love everything about his writing: the meditative sentences and the fathomless depths he goes into. In an interview for “The Guardian” that I have read recently, Murakami said:

“I’d like to be a perfect tinker. So I have to write good sentences – honest and beautiful and elegant and strong sentences.”

First of all, I am captivated by his style and imagery. I sometimes sit and meditate on individual sentences that he wrote because they convey so much depth and can be so tenderly beautiful at the same time. I think the English translator did a good job with the book, as far as I can tell without knowing any Japanese. Another aspect of Murakami’s writing I strongly relate to is its dreamlike quality. To write like this, one has to descend deep into the unconscious (as he says in the interview, “You have to be strong to descend into the darkness of your mind.”). You can really feel the depth of his thought and how he is able to bring back to the light the fruits of his encounters with the imaginary figures of his unconscious mind. What you get from him as a reader is an exhilarated feeling of the vastness of the Self, the deep conviction that the human psyche has no spatial or temporal limits; yet at the same time all his stories are firmly rooted in the here and now: he can be obsessive in describing daily chores, etc. One of the novels by him that I really loved was Kafka on the Shore, where one of the characters says:

“Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.”

If you agree with this, you will like Murakami, I think. It takes a special kind of imagination and sensitivity to get his writing and its introverted charm. Also, I think that each novel has a sound spiritual message.

About Colorless Tsukuru, compared to his other works, this one lacks Byzantine adornments and mad encounters with talking cats, but it is still profound and honest in exploring the inner workings of an individual soul. The colorless protagonist is a brilliant idea, I think. In the first part of the novel we read: “He set up a tiny place to dwell, all by himself, on the rim of a dark abyss.” That sentence I think is a very strong carrier of the theme of the book, which for me is an encounter with the void. And this place, the void, turned out to be “a place of strange abundance” for him. Even though the book is minimalist, there is abundance in it, I think.

Gray: Colorless Tsukuru is the first novel I have read by Haruki Murakami, yet in one book he has become one of my all-time favorite writers. For me this is a book that arrived at the perfect time in my life, a work whose themes penetrated into the subterranean realm of my mind. It has already become one of my favorite books ever, and I am not sure if I have ever had so much delight in reading a novel.  The joy Murakami brings to me is indeed in his immaculate sentences full of deep contemplation, written with awareness of the space between words and the space between characters.  I agree that he reveals the expanse of Self, and our soul unbound by temporal or spatial limitations.  As you said, the magic is that he does all this through attention to the details of everyday life.  A decision to order an espresso and sit on a bench leads to a journey into the deepest recesses of consciousness.

Tsukuru’s name in Japanese means “to make,” and though he is an engineer involved in the design of train stations, he spends much of his time making himself empty in the beginning of the book, clinging to his daily routines and tasks “like a person in a storm desperately grasping at a lamppost” (p. 4). Yet in this “dark, stagnant void” he sleepwalks through with a blank mind (p. 4), he finds the very source of his own regeneration, a place from which he falls like a star burning, burning with desire for the character of Sara Kimoto.

Death, thoughts of death and suicide, emerge in the very first sentence of this story and linger.  Murakami etched into my mind with every sentence the necessity of death and emptiness in the process of finding true love; in sharp relief he revealed that to open to the divine of the Other we desire with full presence and possession, we must have done the work of facing and staying present with our past wounds of relationship lurking in our unconscious until we have bled them to death. Murakami teaches that it takes courage, confidence, and boldness to do this work of psyche, turning the work of facing the deepest recesses of one’s soul into a hero’s journey.  Yet instead of action sequences and attacks from monsters to hold back, the characters mostly sit and talk, sit in silence, and listen to music. Still, there are nonetheless terrors to be found in the unconscious of these characters, like dragons awakening from slumber in the caves of their mind.

Tsukuru found himself on the edge of a “huge, dark abyss that ran straight through to the earth’s core” (p. 5), because he had been abandoned, cut off from a close-knit group of friends.  Five friends,  a fifth harmonic of human interaction that contained within the alchemical mix of personalities a Venusian sense of harmony.  These four friends each have a name that is a color in Japanese:   two males, Aka (red) and Ao (blue), and two females, Shiro (white) and Kuro (black). Tsukuru is the only one of the five friends whose name is “colorless,” and in line with this symbol he feels a lack of color, lack of distinction, lack of Self.  The Mystery of the story that initiates Tsukuru into a pilgrimage not unlike a path of individuation in a Jungian sense, is why his friends chose to cut him out of their life.

M: It is precisely because Tsukuru lacks the “outside color” that allows him to have a rich inner life of deep, passionate emotions. This character’s intensity is extraordinary. If you just focus on the appearances then yes – you might say his persona is not spectacular – but he is far from “middling, palling, lacking in color” if we look at his inner life. I appreciate his quiet perfectionism and his earnest approach to the quest that Sara sends him on. This hero does not say no to a call to adventure. I particularly love how Murakami described Sara’s effect on Tsukuru:

“He wasn’t normally conscious of it, but there was one part of his body that was extremely sensitive, somewhere along his back. This soft, subtle spot he couldn’t reach was usually covered by something, so that it was invisible to the naked eye. But when, for whatever reason, that spot became exposed and someone’s finger pressed down on it, something inside him would stir. A special substance would be secreted, swiftly carried by his bloodstream to every corner of his body. That special stimulus was both a physical sensation and a mental one, creating vivid images in his mind.

The first time he met Sara, he felt an anonymous finger reach out and push down forcefully on that trigger on his back.”

In the meantime, I am also reading a book about the history of the notion of Genius and I am starting to believe that Tsukuru is the Genius that our times need: an individual who bravely faces his own shadow and past woundings, works through his pain and emotional turmoil, being brutally honest with himself in the process in order to undergo a transformation. Vulnerability is another quality of his I find particularly touching. What did you think of his jealousy dream? Here I quote the relevant passage:

“That night he had a strange dream, one in which he was tormented by strong feelings of jealousy. …

… he had never once personally experienced these emotions. …

In this dream, though, he burned with desire for a woman. It wasn’t clear who she was. She was just there. And she had a special ability to separate her body and her heart. I will give you one of them, she told Tsukuru. My body or my heart. But you can’t have both. … I’ll give the other part to someone else, she said. But Tsukuru wanted all of her. He wasn’t about to hand over one half to another man. …

A horrendous pain lashed out at him, as if his entire body were being wrung out by enormous hands. His muscles snapped, his bones shrieked in agony, and he felt a horrendous thirst, as if every cell in his body were drying up, sapped of moisture. … His body shook with rage… Darkish, agitated blood pulsed to all his extremities.

…

…just as a powerful west wind blows away thick banks of clouds, the graphic, scorching emotion that passed through his soul in the form of a dream must have canceled and negated the longing for death, a longing that had reached out and grabbed him around the neck.”

I find it amazing that it was the dream that spurred his transformation, and not an outside event.

G: Yes, his dream of jealousy is crucial in the story, and a premonition of his desire for Sara Kimoto that would further pull him forward and put him in touch with the kundalini like energy you described. He had never felt real jealousy before the dream because he had never felt passionately in love with someone before.  Whether he had never allowed himself to feel passion previously, or had just not met the right person, like a lightning strike of Uranus and a Neptunian dissolution of his former self, it is Sara Kimoto that drives him to face his past and resurrect his sense of Self.  In astrology, you know that both Uranus and Neptune are associated with our dream reality, so it makes sense to me that this dream would arise at a point in his life when he was emerging from the void.

It makes me think of how typical therapeutic and new age philosophy can be all about negating romantic desire as a projection of an ideal on another person- we are told what we sense in this other is something that is really inside of us, and we are cautioned about the illusion of love.  We are told it is “bad” to feel jealousy.  Yet strong desire, desire that can come out as jealousy at times, is a soul force animating our existence. It brings us alive and we can feel every particle of our body burning with feeling.  The woman Tsukuru desires in the dream offers him a choice of her body or her heart, but Tsukuru is not satisfied- he wants all of her and does not want to share part of her with another.  While this can be judged as the perspective of a typical possessive, patriarchal modern man, in another sense this is desire for full union with the divinity of the Other, two beings merging in complete openness with one another, opening the awareness of each to a new dimension of Soul.  I do not mean that jealousy turning into destructive anger and violence is anything to commend or approve of, only that the type of jealousy Tsukuru feels welling up inside of him is the force that motivates him to finally face and release his past so that he can regenerate.

And regenerate he does- from his time on the edge of a “huge, dark abyss that ran straight through to the earth’s core” (p. 5), a place with no color, “with not a drop of water, nor a blade of grass” (p. 45), Tsukuru finds his physical form transformed and his perception of physical matter opened wide:  “The feeling of the wind, the sound of rushing water, the sense of sunlight breaking through the clouds, the colors of flowers as the seasons changed- everything around him felt changed, as if they had all been recast” (p. 49).

His consciousness shifting from a dark void to a state perceiving previously unseen aliveness in the universe, it is the dream of jealousy that actually makes Tsukuru want to live.  Further, it is his desire for Sara Kimoto that makes him finally face the wounds of abandonment inflicted upon him by his former circle of beloved friendship and fellowship.

When I was reading the scene of Tsukuru’s physical transformation, an image of Dionysus came to my mind for some reason.  And then later, I came across this quote from Joseph Campbell about Dionysus, illuminating my visualization:   “Dionysus represents sudden inspiration, the energy of life pouring through time and throwing off old forms to make new life . . . the thrust of time that destroys all things and brings forth all things . . . the generative power, thrust out of darkness” (Goddesses, p. 215-216).

Yet Tsukuru never becomes a Dionysian monster of violence and devouring through his jealousy.  Instead, he goes inward, and his feelings of jealousy dismember his own being internally as he feels ripped apart and emptied.  This seems to be an interesting process symbolized by his name of Tsukuru, meaning “to make,” as Murakami reveals a creative process of going deep within, risking tearing oneself apart from the inside, creating a space in the process to birth something new into the world.

M: I love your Dionysian reference and I also agree that Tsukuru shows tremendous nobility of character in his approach to inner work. He takes responsibility for his own shadow and works with it instead of projecting it on others and tormenting them with his issues.

Another thing I really wanted to discuss with you is his friendship and homoerotic fascination with Fumiaki Haida . It seems to me that after his transformative dream about jealousy Tsukuru’s soul was ready to give itself over to a new relationship or we could say that his dream revealed his longing for a deep and transformative encounter with the Other. Isn’t it fascinating (and obvious on the other hand) that Tsukuru’s dreams have an influence on his waking life? Right after he dreams of a sexual encounter with Haida, Haida abandons him exactly as Tsukuru’s five friends had done before. I believe that in every relationship there are two channels of exchange: the outer conscious one and the ocean of unconscious messages constantly transmitted back and fourth between two souls. The latter has much, much more substance and a tremendous power of manifestation. You mentioned Uranus before – I think it is a theme of Tsukuru’s life – sudden abandonments, which cause trauma but also spur him to look deeper into himself and undergo substantial inner work. I have always thought that Murakami’s writing is indeed like dreaming: in many of his novels the storylines have an inner logic and feel of a dream. I think it is irrelevant to debate whether Tsukuru is gay or not; I think that eros is a soul making force that does not know gender. Perhaps Tsukuru’s dream revealed to him how badly he had missed deep human connection, how starved he had been for passion. What words cannot express, music is able to communicate with ease. Haida is the one who brings music into Tsukuru’s life, particularly Liszt and his poignant piece “Le mal du pays,” (“a groundless sadness called forth in a person’s heart by a pastoral landscape,” “homesickness”). I am glad you noticed how silence is significant for Murakami and how this writer presents the interplay of distance and proximity, the ebb and flow of expression in relationships. Eating together seems like a holy ritual in his writing, doesn’t it?

Another interesting character Murakami introduces is Mirodikawa, who seems to possess a whole array of supernatural gifts. He says:

“Each individual has their own unique color, which shines faintly around the contours of their body.  Like a halo. Or a backlight. I’m able to see these colors clearly.”

Earlier you mentioned kundalini, here Murakami is clearly talking about being able to perceive an aura. The reason why Murakami’s writing appeals to us so much is perhaps because he seems to side with the “people like us,” those who are sensing the paradigm shift happening around. I do not know about you but it is increasingly difficult for me to read literature which refuses to acknowledge the existence of divine mystery permeating our universe.

Speaking of mystery, one feature of Murakami’s writing I absolutely adore is that not all mysteries are solved in his novels, not all thoughts finished, not all questions answered. If it is true what I said before, that his writing is like dreaming, than you cannot expect it to unfold as a doctoral dissertation. You need to learn to accept the limits of how much you can know as an individual consciousness. I also suspect that Murakami is sitting on such a creative geyser of ideas that he frequently has issues with following many of them to their resolution. Actually, critics have said that Tsukuru Tazaki has a surprisingly tight structure for that novelist. Still, not all the mysteries get solved… I do not mind that at all.

G: There is great Mystery in this story, so I agree it makes sense that Murakami does not find it necessary to leave the reader with an idea of “ending,” as he is too Mercurial for that, too aware of the constant shifting and motion of life.  I love how you brought up the idea of Eros knowing no gender, as it goes to the core of the primordial Eros of myth, and this makes a lot of sense in the relationship between Tsukuru and Haida.  Returning to Uranus, it is interesting that Haida brings so much Uranian energy into Tsukuru’s life, including how he comes from a different type of conditioning than Tsukuru.  In contrast to Tsukuru, who had a father talented at making money and acclimated to the world of business, Haida had a father with no talent or interest in making money, acclimated to the world of ideas and philosophy.  In addition to music, Haida also brings the concept of freedom of thought to Tsukuru and in their dialogue Murakami explores the fabric of our nature.

On pages 74-75, Haida elaborates on an idea from Voltaire that “Originality is nothing but judicious imitation” and where they take this concept fascinated me:

 Haida began, “Everything has boundaries. The same holds true with thought. You shouldn’t fear boundaries, but you also should not be afraid of destroying them. That’s what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries . . .”

This statement made Tsukuru question the ecstasy prophets are said to experience when receiving a message.  He ruminated, “And this takes place somewhere that transcends free will, right?  Always passively . . . And that message surpasses the boundaries of the individual prophet and functions in a broader, universal way . . . And in that message there is neither contradiction nor equivocation . . . I don’t get it, if that’s true, then what’s the value of human free will?”

You also went straight to the center of one of the essential ideas of the book when you wrote about how important that unconscious communication is between people in relationship, Monika.  This idea comes up over and over again in the story.  I agree that one of the most enchanting scenes in the story is Haida’s description of his father’s experience with Midorikawa, whose name fittingly means “Green River” as the Haida family name means “Gray Field.”  Murakami’s description of this storytelling is as mesmerizing as a lucid dream.  At the heart of this scene is our realization that Midorikawa has accepted death, and that by embracing this darkness his perception has been blown open:

“At the point when you agree to take on death, you gain an extraordinary capacity.  A special power, you could call it. Perceiving the colors that people emit is merely one function of that power, but at the root of it all is an ability to expand your consciousness. You’re able to push open what Aldous Huxley calls ‘the doors of perception.’ Your perception becomes pure and unadulterated. Everything around you becomes clear, like the fog lifting. You have an omniscient view of the world and see things you’ve never seen before.”

I love how this connects with our human nature, our life on this planet and the interplay between day and night, life and death. Our every breath is taken within the knowledge that one day the heart in our chest will stop beating.  It makes me think of when I was young boy sleeping in my bedroom at night.  On a side note, I think you will find it funny that my bedroom walls were painted sky blue by my parents at my request, with stencils of white clouds, and in one spot my father accidentally painted one of the cloud stencils upside down, a small outlier symbol.  Anyway, I do not remember how old I was exactly, but in one period of time I remember staying up at night thinking about my death. I thought about it over and over again, what would happen to my mind upon death.  Where would all of my thoughts go, how would my mind function in death, and after death if there was anything I could experience with any of my senses.  I would think about this at great length before falling asleep, night after night.  I am not sure exactly when I stopped doing this, only that at some point I became satisfied that there was nothing further I could understand at that point, I guess.  I am not sure how this period of intense speculation as young boy impacted my later perception, only that eventually I have become fascinated by these types of themes of darkness and the void as our found in this novel by Murakami.

M: That made me smile – a renegade cloud. In a sense Tsukuru was also an outsider in their five-member group. He considered his role in a conversation with Ao: “I’ve always seen myself as an empty person, lacking color and identity. Maybe that was my role in the group. To be empty. … An empty vessel. A colorless background, “ to which Ao replied, “It’s hard to explain, but having you there, we could be ourselves. You didn’t say much, but you had your feet solidly planted on the ground, and that gave the group a sense of security. Like an anchor.” To me Tsukuru seems to be  someone who is like the centre of gravity and an empty canvas in his environment.   His name means “to make,” as we have said before: he wants to create things of material substance (train stations) and he also facilitates the release and manifestation of the energy that exists as a potential in his friends’ subconscious minds. I do not wish to give away the reason of him being ostracized, but suffice it to say that there was a mystery involving a sex crime. I think Tsukuru’s sexual dreams about the victim of the crime that happened prior to the crime being committed show his extraordinary ability to absorb the unconscious energy of others’  and mirror it back. A thought occurred to me that Tsukuru “extracts” the color from others.

I feel we have not said quite enough about Murakami’s extraordinary use of color symbolism in his novel. I mean, he is painting with word, isn’t he? You once recommended Goethe’s Theory of Colours to me. The whole book is available online and I have looked through it today, coming across this striking quote: “For where dark passes over light … yellow appears; and on the other hand, where a light outline passes over the dark background, blue appears.” In other words, colors arise out of the dynamic interplay between light and darkness. Darkness is not a passive agent in that respect but a very active principle.  I think Murakami did a wonderful job demonstrating the pivotal role of darkness, void and emptiness in the process of creation and individuation. I am thinking of the findings of quantum physics that space is not a passive background, but instead a flexible medium that can bend, twist and flex. In a spiritual sense, Tsukuru was not passive: he was actively creating the world around him.

Being a writer Murakami’s obvious primary medium is words, which he infuses wonderfully with color, rhythm and sound. Don’t you love him for sentences like this: “Unspoken feelings were as heavy and lonely as the ancient glacier that had carved out the deep lake.”  He carves his sentences out from a deep, deep lake somewhere in the heart of the mountains, I feel. There is no unnecessary verbosity but every word is used with deep resolve and attention to meaning –  it is enough just to look at the names of the characters to realize this. We have mentioned a lot of them but I was especially enchanted that Sara means “sal tree” and Kimoto “under the tree.” The sal tree has enormous religious significance in the east as a tree under which Buddha was born. Its resin is used as powerful medicine, its wood burned as incense. Sara is the one who spurred on Tsukuru’s healing, she is the one with whom he shared his deepest wounds and she is the one he decides to give himself to so that she can help him melt the frozen core of his emotional suffering. As he realizes during a very pivotal scene: “One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds.”

G: Monika, I love your description of how Tsukuru gives himself to Sara so that she can melt the frozen core of his emotions. I did not know there was a connection between the name Sara and “sal tree,” as I had thought it was connected with “Princess.”  I was just fumbling around the Internet looking for the meaning, and found this additional meaning on Wikipedia:  “Sara is the usual transliteration of an old Sanskrit word (सार) approximately meaning “essence” or “core”, or “speckled.”  All of these symbols, combined with her last name meaning “under the tree,” are so fitting for her impact on Tsukuru, and of course “under the tree” makes us think of the Buddha gaining his enlightenment.  This connection between Sara being a profound teacher for Tsukuru, a guru-like focus of his desire who inspires his release of past suffering, is fascinating considering that Tsukuru is thirty-six years old in the story and so experiencing a Jupiter return.  As it takes Jupiter approximately twelve years to make it around the zodiac, we experience a Jupiter return at age 12, 24, and 36.  At these ages we often have a significant event occur, and this can include an inspirational new relationship such as Sara Kimoto. It does not mean that everything is going to go harmoniously, as when I think back to when I had my Jupiter return around the age of thirty-six I had a lot of difficult experiences.  I do feel, however, that the events around a Jupiter return are significant in terms of our destiny and where we are ultimately headed, and are a pivotal period holding signs of where our future cycle is heading.  All of this directly connects to the desire Tsukuru feels for Sara, a woman with an “indefinably vital and alive . . . face” with “dark eyes, never timid, brimming with curiosity.”  Sara is able to be a grounding force for Tsukuru and can calmly, and bluntly, speak truth to him with words that go directly into the soul of Tsukuru:

 “You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.” Sara looked directly into his eyes. “If nothing else, you need to remember that.  You can’t erase history, or change it.  It would be like destroying yourself.”

“Why are we talking about this?” Tsukuru said, half to himself, trying to sound upbeat. “I’ve never talked to anybody about this before, and never planned to.”

Sara smiled faintly. “Maybe you needed to talk with somebody. More than you ever imagined.” (p.44)

I enjoyed reading your thoughts on how Tsukuru, like his name, was able “to make” unconscious dynamics come out and played the role of a stabilizing force in the group.  In fact, at one point Murakami described Tsukuru as feeling “like a young tree absorbing nutrition from the soil” (p. 18) when he was in the group of five friends, the only one whose name did not signify a color.  Even though Tsukuru puts himself down over and over again as having no unique qualities or special talents like his colorless name, he is the only member of the group who had the courage to individuate at a young age and leave the safe confines of their community in order to follow his calling in the monstrous urban environment of Tokyo.  However, we do end up discovering that another one of the five friends also ultimately individuated, and again Murakami’s choice of name for this character is compelling:  Kuru, whose name means “black.”

The contrast between the two women in the five friends, Shiro and Kuru, White and Black respectively, is striking.  They had been best friends since being young girls in school together, described by Murakami as “a unique and captivating combination of a beautiful, shy artist and a clever, sarcastic comedian” (p. 14).  While Murakami described Shiro as a sort of white light being with a beautiful face, “with a model’s body and the graceful features of a traditional Japanese doll,” there is something of the ideal in Shiro that does not appear to be fully grounded and integrated with her shadow, or dark side.  She is described as having extraordinary talent in music, capable of mesmerizing her friends with her beautiful piano playing.  Yet she is also described as being embarrassed of her own physical beauty, a shy and sheltered personality who seems to come the most alive when nurturing the musical talents of young, innocent children.  There is a side to Shiro that comes off as secretive, removed, or distant.

In contrast, Kuru’s name meaning black is fitting as she is more integrated with her shadow.  Kuru is described as being an avid reader who is very curious about the world around her, and we can imagine that instead of hiding from the darker sides of things that Kuro was willing to investigate everything, including the dark. She is also described as being hilariously sarcastic, and as we know usually it is the ones who are the most sarcastic who are also the ones willing to look the most deeply into things, leading to their comedic gift.  It is further fascinating that we eventually learn that Kuru was aware of having strong romantic desire for someone in their circle of friends, and was somehow able to manage consciously integrating this desire while at the same time holding herself back from pursuing the desire for the sake of the group’s platonic ideal. As an individuated adult, Kuru puts her creativity into the medium of pottery and manipulation of earthy matter, another symbol of her being grounded in her physical environment.

M: Thank you for elaborating on Shiro – she seemed like a fascinating and mysterious character to me, fragile, angelic even, but, as you said, not cut out to live in the world of dense matter. She seems so inaccessible: like an expensive porcelain doll in a high-end shop. And yet she was the one in the group who had an artist’s soul and genuine musical talent. I have a feeling we could go on and on discussing the book but instead of that I will let Murakami have the last word. Here Tsukuru remembers how Shiro used to play the piano:

“The Yamaha grand piano in the living room of her house. Reflecting Shiro’s conscientiousness, it was always perfectly tuned. The lustrous exterior without a single smudge or fingerprint to mar its luster. The afternoon light filtering in through the window. Shadows cast in the garden by the cypress trees. The lace curtain wavering in the breeze. Teacups on the table. Her black hair, neatly tied back, her expression intent as she gazed at the score. Her ten long, lovely fingers on the keyboard. Her legs, as they precisely depressed the pedals, possessed a hidden strength that seemed unimaginable in other situations. Her calves were like glazed porcelain, white and smooth. Whenever she was asked to play something, this piece was the one she most often chose. ‘Le mal du pays.’ The groundless sadness called forth in a person heart’s by a pastoral landscape. Homesickness. Melancholy.”

All the photographs used in this post depict Maureen Fleeming, a magnificent dancer. Most come from her website http://www.maureenfleming.com/index.html

I. EVENING

Slowly now the evening changes his garments
held for him by a rim of ancient trees;
you gaze: and the landscape divides and leaves you,
one sinking and one rising toward the sky.

And you are left, to none belonging wholly,
not so dark as a silent house, nor quite
so surely pledged unto eternity
as that which grows to star and climbs the night.

To you is left (unspeakably confused)
your life, gigantic, ripening, full of fears,
so that it, now hemmed in, now grasping all,
is changed in you by turns to stone and stars.

translated by Edward Snow

II. EVENING

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes
a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.

translated by Stephen Mitchell

“Evening” is one of the most famous poems by Rilke. It is also a poem that I have always regarded as unbelievably, sublimely beautiful, expressing how we humans are torn between the simultaneous boundedness and unboundedness of existence. Our substance consists both of the immense stars and of the perfect and silent stones. Our life, “gigantic, ripening, full of fears” is dramatically poised between the two. I am reminded of Jung’s Red Book and his beautiful vision in the desert:

 “How beautiful it is here! The reddish color of the stones is wonderful; they reflect the glow of a hundred thousand past suns these small grains of sand have rolled in fabulous primordial oceans, over them swam primordial monsters with forms never beheld before. Where were you, man, in those days? On this warm sand lay your childish primordial animal ancestors, like children snuggling up to their mother. /o mother stone, I love you, I lie snuggled up against your warm body, /your late child. Blessed be you, ancient mother.”

Circle of Stones, Tenere Desert

I have been wondering about how a translation can make or break a poem. Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the poem by Rilke I am featuring today is the most celebrated but, frankly, I do not understand why. The translation I favor is by Edward Snow, who called Rilke “…the poet of thresholds and silences, of landscapes charged with remoteness and expectancy.” After a careful study of the poem in the original German I can say just this: while I was able to understand both Rilke’s original verse and Snow’s translation, if I had just been presented with Mitchell’s rendition, I would have been rather lost and confused. The emotional reaction I experience is also much more palpable when I read the Snow’s translation.

Yaroslav Gerzhedovich, “The Midnight Stars“

1.“…he [William Blake] did everything he could to make his figures lose substance, to become transparent and indeterminate one from the other, to defy gravity, to be present but intangible, to glow without a definable surface, not to be reducible to objects.”

John Berger, “Ways of Seeing”

2.“’Mental things,’ Blake declared, ‘are alone Real. What is Called Corporeal Nobody Knows of its dwelling Place; it is in Fallacy & its Existence is Imposture.’”

“’I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I Would Question a Window concerning a Sight.’”

Leopold Damrosch, “Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth”

William Blake, “An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man”

Karena A Karras, “The Bath”

I.”The Zodiac & the Dying/Rising God
While the daily rising and setting of the sun told the tale of Atum -Re’s deadly boat journey, the moon’s monthly crescendo and diminuendo portrayed the myth of Inanna’s death and rebirth.  But, after she rose from the Underworld, the goddess Inanna was warned that, if she hoped ‘to escape the pit alive, she must leave another who shall wait in her place.’

Henceforth, it was Damuzi, her shepherd-king and consort that descended into the dark Underworld.  Though he passed through the same Mythologem of Death and Rebirth as Inanna, Damuzi descended, died and rose again yearly, with the seasonal cycle of rain and drought. Like Osiris in Egypt, Attis in Syria, and Baal in Canaan, the ‘Son of the Abyss’ became a new Iconologue of Time’s Measure, marking the span of the sacred year.
The dying/rising god marked the passage of a year by mythologizing the signs that recurred in the earth’s fertile cycle.  Like the fertile seed at the time of the harvest, Damuzi was seized, thrashed and cut to pieces … And, like the seed buried under the earth so as to gestate and sprout again, he was dragged into the Underworld, where he remained – until the re-emergence of the crops themselves embodied his resurrection …

Each time the fields manifest new growth, the god of vegetation also became manifest.  Through the image of the dying/rising god, the intervals of the fertile year were measured and, through his earthly epiphany, that span was rendered sacred.  …
Meanwhile,  a fascinating series of images have come down to us from Sumerian culture …  This array of images, when taken together, also symbolizes the yearly cycle. From the vantage point of the spiraling ziggurats, the Sumerian priesthood were able to discern a multitude of ancient images in the night-sky.

Eventually, they learned to read the heavens like a book – which is what they called astrology, Shitir Shame, ‘The Book of Heaven.’ By following the path of Sin, the moon, over the course of the year, they recognized twelve celestial figures: Luhunga ‘the Hired Man’ (Aries), Guanna ‘the Bull of Heaven’ (Taurus), Mastabbagalgal ‘the Great Twins’ (Gemini), Allul ‘the Crab’ (Cancer), Urgula ‘the Lion’ (Leo), Absin ‘the Furrow’ (Virgo), Zibanitum ‘the Scales’ (Libra), Girtab ‘the Scorpion’ (Scorpio), Pabilsag ‘the Centaur’ (Sagittarius), Sahurmasku ‘the Fish-tailed Mountain Goat’ (Capricorn), Gula ‘the Great’ (Aquarius) and Kummes ‘the Tails’ (Pisces). Together, these twelve images formed, what the Greeks called, ‘the wheel of the Zodiac’ (from zôé, life, zôidion, small figure, and kyklos, circle or wheel, giving us zodiakos ‘the wheel of life’.)

Thus, in Mesopotamia, there were two iconologues to measure the passage of a year, one celestial  and one terrestrial.”

Caruana, Enter through the Image: The Ancient Image Language of Myth, Art and Dreams, pp. 75-76

“Almost two thousands years before the circular zodiac of Bet-Alpha, Near Eastern rulers, especially in Babylon, invoked their Gods on treaty documents; boundary stones (Kudurru) were emblazoned with the celestial symbols of these Gods – planets and zodiacs – within the heavenly circle, embraced by an undulating serpent that represented the Milky Way” (via http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sitchin/whentimebegan/whentimebegan07.htm)

II.“The Moon … represents all raw materials, all elemental or psychic energies not yet organic or individuated. But it is not only the inorganic as such. It is the inorganic striving to become organized. It is the ‘woman’ yearning to be fecundated and to become a mother, longing for her ‘home’. It is not chaos; but rather, the response of chaos to light; an unsteady, changeful, moody response, now waxing, then waning — yet it is light nevertheless; as much of light as the resurgent past may mirror and reflect. And the Earth and all living things thereon are the temples where the song of light and the song of life resound. Light gives to men the will to be whole and integrated. Life gathers their chaotic soul-energies, churns them up, dissolves and boils them in the alchemical vessel in which may be generated the gold of consciousness and of individual selfhood.”

Dane Rudhyar, New Mansions for New Men: A Spiritual Interpretation of Astrology in the Light of Universal Symbolism http://khaldea.com/rudhyar/nmnm/nmnm_moon.php

III.“The Goddess is the Encircler, the Ground of Being; the God is That-Which-Is-Brought-Forth, her mirror image, her other pole. She is the earth; He is the grain. She is the all encompassing sky; He is the sun, her fireball. She is the Wheel; He is the traveler. He is the sacrifice of life to death that life may go on. She is the Mother and Destroyer; He is all that is born and is destroyed.”

Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess: 20^th Anniversary Edition, p. 72

Goddess Kali as Great Mother

Illustration of a black angel found in Aurora consurgens

Black: The History of a Color, by Michel Pastoureau is one of the most fascinating books I have read in recent months. There are moments in life when the need of comforting, enveloping blackness predominates all other needs; this is where I am right now. I was intrigued to learn from Pastoureau’s book that it was the imperial Rome that started to define that colour black in negative terms. Previously, it was a color much revered:

“As the color of night and darkness, as the color of the bowels of the earth and the underground world, black is also the color of death. From the Neolithic, black stones were associated with funeral rites, sometimes accompanied with statuettes and objects very dark in color. The same is true in the historical periods throughout the Near East and in pharaonic Egypt. Yet this chthonic black is neither diabolical nor harmful. On the contrary, it is linked to the fertile aspect of the earth; for the dead, whose passage to the beyond it ensures, it is a beneficial black, the sign or promise of rebirth. That is why among the Egyptians the divinities related to death were nearly always painted black, like Anubis, the jackal-god who accompanies the dead to the tomb; Anubis is the embalmer-god and his flesh is black.

Anubis, the Tomb of Tutenkhamun reconstructed at a Berlin exhibition

 Similarly, the deified kings and queens, ancestors of the pharaoh, were generally represented with black skin, a color that was not the least bit depreciatory. In Egypt the negative, suspect color was red rather than black: not the admirable red of the solar disc as it rose or set, but the red of the forces of evil and the god Seth, murderer of … Osiris and a great destructive force.”

I happened to watch A Space Odyssey 2001 yesterday. I was quite captivated with Kubrick’s ingenious use of the colour black symbolism. First the movie starts with a long shot of a completely dark screen (there are also similar intermissions throughout the movie), then there are amazing long shots of the dark mantle of night enveloping our little fragile Earth like a powerfully protective Black Coat – an emblem of Mahakala, the powerful protector of Dharma in Buddhism; and finally, most importantly, a mysterious black monolith mystifies both our humanoid ancestors and our technologically evolved human successors.

The black monolith turns out to be a force equally primal, overpowering and mystifying regardless of the level of technological development of those confronted with it. The people of the future in Kubrick’s vision are startlingly dry and emotionless, though. I was perplexed, and quite outraged, to be honest, that a great space expedition of what for Kubrick was a distant future did not include any women. There were five men on the ship and a computer called Hal, who was the most emotional member of the crew. I see the black monolith as a representation of the shunned feminine, which of course does not exhaust its rich symbolism. As a meaningful synchronicity, a strikingly similar black monolith jumped to me yesterday from the pages of Jung’s Red Book:

In the part of the Red Book entitled “Descent into Hell in the Future“ we find the following fascinatingly dark passage:

 “I see a gray rock face along which I sink into great depths. I stand in black dirt up to my ankles in a dark cave. Shadows sweep over me. I am seized by fear, but I know I must go in. I crawl through a narrow crack in the rock and reach an inner cave whose bottom is covered with black water. But beyond this I catch a glimpse of a luminous red stone which I must reach. I wade through the muddy water. The cave is full of the frightful noise of shrieking voices. I take the stone, it covers a dark opening in the rock. I hold the stone in my hand, peering around inquiringly. I do not want to listen to the voices, they keep me away. But I want to know. Here something wants to be uttered. I place my ear to the opening. I hear the flow of underground waters. I see the bloody head of a man on the dark stream. Someone wounded, someone slain floats there. I take in this image for a long time, shuddering. I see a large black scarab floating past on the dark stream. In the deepest reach of the stream shines a red sun, radiating through the dark water. There I see-and a terror seizes me-small serpents on the dark rock walls, striving toward the depths, where the sun shines. A thousand serpents crowd around, veiling the sun. Deep night falls. A red stream of blood, thick red blood springs up, surging for a long time, then ebbing. I am seized by fear. What did I see?”

He saw the Stone amidst blackness.

The nigredo or blackness, the initial stage of the alchemical process, is the original dark chaos (massa confusa) with all the elements swirling around together or it may also indicate a state of separation, in which the elements are in separated condition. If the latter is the case, a union of opposites is called for: male and female lay together to produce a third. This third product of their union (lesser coniunctio) must die, leading to a period of mourning: the nigredo. The next stage is the washing which “leads direct to the whitening (albedo), or else the soul (anima) released at the ‘death‘ is reunited with the dead body and brings about its resurrection, or again the ‘many colours‘ (omnes colores) or ‘peacock’s tail‘ (cauda pavonis), lead to the one white colour that contains all colours. At this point the first main goal of the process is reached, namely the albedo … highly prized by many alchemists as if it were the ultimate goal. It is the silver or moon condition, which still has to be raised to the sun condition. The albedo is, so to speak, the daybreak, but not till the rubedo is it sunrise. The transition to the rubedo is formed by the citrinitas, though this… was omitted later. The rubedo then follows direct from the albedo as the result of raising the heat of the fire to its highest intensity. The red and the white are King and Queen, who may also celebrate their “chymical wedding“ at this stage.“ (C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW vol. 12, pp. 231-232).

Depiction of the Ouroboros found in Aurora consurgens 

The arrangement of the stages does not mean that the goal of every alchemist was the white and red tincture or the hermaphrodite that contains both. Some of them defined their goal as lapis philosophorum (philosopher’s stone), which was very ambiguously defined: it was identified with prima materia as the means of producing the gold, but the gold was also identified with the philosopher’s stone. This ambiguity is an extraordinary value of alchemy to me, which I see in the wisdom and illumination achievable in every stage of the process. I choose to rest in Black for now:

 “It is then the black earth in which the gold of the lapis is sown like the grain of wheat … It is the black, magically fecund earth that Adam took with him from Paradise, also called antimony and described as a ‘black blacker than black.‘“

C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW vol. 12, p. 327

I. The Way of the West

“… each organism only lives through contact with other matter, assimilation, and contact with other life, which means assimilation of new vibrations, non-material. Each individual organism is vivified by intimate contact with fellow organisms: up to a certain point.

So man. He breathes the air into him, he swallows food and water. But more than this. He takes into him the life of his fellow men, with whom he comes into contact, and he gives back life to them. This contact draws nearer and nearer, as the intimacy increases. When it is a whole contact, we call it love. Men live by food, but die if they eat too much. Men live by love, but die, or cause death, if they love too much.

There are two loves: sacred and profane, spiritual and sensual.

In sensual love, it is the two blood-systems, the man’s and the woman’s, which sweep up into pure contact, and almost fuse. Almost mingle. Never quite. There is always the finest imaginable wall between the two blood-waves, through which pass unknown vibrations, forces, but through which the blood itself must never break, or it means bleeding.

In spiritual love, the contact is purely nervous. The nerves in the lovers are set vibrating in unison like two instruments. The pitch can rise higher and higher. But carry this too far, and the nerves begin to break, to bleed, as it were, and a form of death sets in.

…

But as a matter of fact this glowing unison is only a temporary thing, because the first law of life is that each organism is isolate in itself, it must return to its own isolation.

Yet man has tried the glow of unison, called love, and he likes it. It gives him his highest gratification. He wants it. He wants it all the time. He wants it and he will have it. He doesn’t want to return to his own isolation. Or if he must, it is only as a prowling beast returns to its lair to rest and set out again.”

D.H. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe”

Edward Munch, “Vampire”

II. The Way of the East

“Black Coat holds the skull-cup

containing the life-blood of the ego and

the chopping-knife which destroys all

hindrances. The cut-off heads worn as a

garland around his neck signify the conquest

of all enlightened mental functions.

When he appears in union sitting with

his consort Radiant Goddess , it denotes the

highest level of insight. They then ride an

indestructible mule through oceans of

blood. In her four hands, Radiant Goddess

holds a mirror showing the world, a

diamond dagger … cutting

the disturbing feelings, a trident showing

her awakened inner energies and a snake-

lasso with which she catches all disturbing

infuences.”

Invocation of the Protector Black Coat: Diamond Way Buddhism

III. The Way of Poetry

SACRIFICE, by Reiner Maria Rilke

Translated by Edward Snow

“How my body blooms from every vein

more fragrantly, since I first saw you;

look, I walk slimmer now and so much straighter,

and you only wait -: who are you then?

See: I feel how I’m moving away,

how I’m shedding my old life, leaf by leaf.

Only your smile stands like pure stars

over you and, soon now, over me.

Everything that from my childhood years

still floats namelessly and gleams like water:

I will christen it yours on the altar,

which your hair has set on fire

and your breasts have gently wreathed.”

Raffaele Monti, “Vestal Virgin”

2 November, All Soul’s Day is a universal day of judgement:

“I believe this is the source of the Judgement of the Dead linked with the month of November, when the Pleiades are high in the night sky.  In the Halls of Amenti, Maat and Thoth weighed the souls of the dead against the feather of truth as did Archangel Michael on the day of judgement, All Soul’s Day, 2nd November.“

Olga Morales http://www.cosmicintelligenceagency.com/eclipse-gate-2012/

November is often called the month of the Pleiades because in this month the stars of the Celestial Serpent shine brightly from dusk till dawn. In esoteric lore and in myth, the Seven Sisters are referred to as the Seven Mothers of the World. Both Madame Blavatsky and Barbara Hand Clow, author of The Pleiadian Agenda, have associated the stars of the Pleiades with the Harmony of the Spheres and the creation of the universe by means of sound and vibration. According to Madame Blavatsky, quoted here after Munya Andrews, author of The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades, “it is the stars of Ursa Major acting in concert with the Pleiades that govern the various cycles of time, including the cyclical destruction and reconstruction of the cosmos.”

Elihu Vedder, “The Pleiades”

The Pleiades are also called the Seven Doves. I have recently realized that the Semitic word for ‘dove’ – ione, is related to ‘yoni’ and also to the Roman name of the goddess Hera – Juno. While “Juno” means a female genius, the Dove is a well-known symbol of Sophia (by some equated with the Holy Spirit) –an emanation of divine wisdom. Quite amazingly, the brightest star in the Pleiades cluster is Alcyone:

 “Many ancient traditions state that Alcyone was the central spiritual Sun that emits creative light, that which sends great teachers of light into the world.  It was believed to be the centre of the Universe around which our own solar system revolves but this idea is not supported by our current astronomers although in the 1850’s it was well accepted.  …  It is now ascertained that the Sun is also in motion, around some other and vastly mightier centre.  Astronomers are not fully agreed as to what or where that centre is.  Some, however, believe that they have found the direction of it to be the Pleiades, and particularly Alcyone. To the distinguished astronomer Prof. J.H. Maedler belongs the honour of having made this discovery.  Alcyone, then, as far as science can perceive, would seem to be the ‘midnight throne’ in which the whole system of gravitation has a central seat …

Alcyone was called Al Wasat, the Central One by the Arabs, and Temennu, the Foundation Stone by the Babylonians.

… The ancient name Alcyone, now so celebrated in the annals of science, is evidently of Oriental origin, having the Arabic and old Hebrew article Al, prefixed to its root Cyon, centre.  Its meaning, centre, foundation, anticipates one of the greatest achievements of modern astronomy, the discovery that to this point, this centre, gravitates the whole magnificent arrangement of the stars called the Galaxy, to which our sun belongs.’“

Olga Morales http://www.cosmicintelligenceagency.com/eclipse-gate-2012/

To that etymology, I think we can also add my yoni/Juno association.

Emily Balivet, “The Pleiades – Seven Sisters”

But how exactly did the Pleiades bring the visible universe about? One utterly fantastic esoteric theory states that a race of “Interstellar Serpents“ came to Atlantis from the Pleiades:

 “According to Dhyani Ywahoo and the records of Cherokees, these androgynous Serpents are known as the ‘sacred seven,’ and are said to have travelled from the universal seat of Divine Mind, the Pleiades, in order to instil within developing humankind the spark of the individuated mind. Once on the Earth the Pleiadian missionaries mated with the human population and their progeny spread throughout Atlantis.’”

Olga Morales http://www.cosmicintelligenceagency.com/eclipse-gate-2012/

Are the serpents twining around the Caduceus a representation of the Seed Serpents of the Pleiades? The earliest known representation of the Caduceus is Ningishzida – the Sumerian underworld deity, known as the Lord of the Good Tree. Interestingly, in Sumerian myth the winged and horned snake/dragon Ningishzida was both a guardian of the portal to the Underworld and the guardian of the Highest Heaven of Anu. The universal (not only Biblical) symbol of the Tree of Life which as axis mundi connects the heavens, earth and the underworld, has always been associated with the snake of wisdom entwined in its roots:

“The Underworld aspect of Nin-ĝišzida was serpentine, the roots of the good tree that he represented, the sign for tree root, ‘arina’, which consists of two crossed signs for serpent (MUŠ), this must be understood as a vast underground network and source of power.“

Via http://traveltoeat.com/ishtar-and-tammuz-ram-in-a-thicket/

The Pleiadian Celestial Serpent symbolically echoes the coiling serpentine roots of the Tree of Life. Modernity/patriarchy has severed the connection between heaven, earth and the underworld, uprooting us spiritually by severing the connection with our serpentine, moist roots. An ancient Sumerian hymn to Ningishzida reads:

“Lord, your mouth is that of {a pure magician} … a snake with a great tongue,

…

Your holy word is known to them that know it, but is unknown to them that do not know it.

…

You fall upon the river as a flood-wave, you rise in the fields as a devastating flood.“

Via http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.4.19.2#

We desperately need to hear the healing rain song of the Pleiades (water nymphs). Their singing is about the new waters of life flooding our dried out spiritual landscape.

William Blake, “Eve Tempted by the Serpent”

“Night” by Michelangelo was sculpted in white marble and put to rest on the tomb of Giuliano de Medici in San Lorenzo Church, Florence. Her attributes are an owl and a mask. I remember seeing the sculpture for the first time many years ago and having a powerful, visceral reaction to it. It was haunting, disturbing, arresting, extremely powerful. I still cannot look at her without feeling shaken to the core of my being. Her angelic face with the moon and star on the forehead is serene and lovely, yet her body is quite muscular, manly, contorted and nothing but inert. I learnt later that Michelangelo used to work with male models for female nudes. That may have been so, but that fact does not make the figure of the Night any less feminine for me. Looking at her today, I am thinking of Jung’s concept of Animus – the unconscious aspect of the feminine psyche – who at the highest stage of individuation is her psychopomp (i.e. guide of her soul). Alternatively, I think we can appreciate how Michelangelo captured the wholeness of the archetype of Night by showing that she who in myth arose from Chaos holds the totality of the opposites in herself.

There has been some controversy regarding her breasts which were called “ugly” by some and even “cancerous” by an oncologist. This author makes an excellent counter-suggestion:

“But why did Michelangelo make Night’s breasts like that?  He represented them as life-giving fruit, great stores of nourishment and fertility.  He turned down the “spigot”, as mothers do, to make it more accessible and alluring. The unusual relief is his characteristic way of giving it life and movement.”

via https://100swallows.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/night-by-michelangelo/

Nyx, the Greek goddess of the night, was a figure of exceptional power, feared by both gods and humans. In the Orphic Hymn to the Night she appears as the principle of all creation,

“Night [Nyx], parent goddess, source of sweet repose, from whom at first both Gods and men arose,
Hear, blessed Venus [Kypris], deck’d with starry light, in sleep’s deep silence dwelling Ebon night!
Dreams and soft case attend thy dusky train, pleas’d with the length’ned gloom and feaftful strain.
Dissolving anxious care, the friend of Mirth, with darkling coursers riding round the earth.
Goddess of phantoms and of shadowy play, whose drowsy pow’r divides the nat’ral day:
By Fate’s decree you constant send the light to deepest hell, remote from mortal sight
For dire Necessity which nought withstands, invests the world with adamantine bands.
Be present, Goddess, to thy suppliant’s pray’r, desir’d by all, whom all alike revere,
Blessed, benevolent, with friendly aid dispell the fears of Twilight’s dreadful shade.”

http://www.theoi.com/Text/OrphicHymns1.html#2

In her Mysteries of the Dark Moon, Demetra George refers to her as “Mother Night, in the form of a great black-winged spirit hovering over a vast sea of darkness.” Revered for her oracular powers, she ruled the Universe before Uranus took over and the era of patriarchal gods ensued. The magnificent sculpture by Michelangelo reminds us that, as Demetra George writes: “The wisdom of Black Mother Night, spanning Greek, Eastern, and Egyptian traditions, is that the preexisting nature of all life is a universally connected matrix of living energy whose first expression is as love.”

“Light breaks where no sun shines;

Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart

Push in their tides;

And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,

The things of light

File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs

Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;

Where no seed stirs,

The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,

Bright as a fig;

Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;

From poles of skull and toe the windy blood

Slides like a sea;

Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky

Spout to the rod

Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,

Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;

Day lights the bone;

Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin

The winter’s robes;

The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,

On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;

When logics dies,

The secret of the soil grows through the eye,

And blood jumps in the sun;

Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.”

Robert Ellaby, “Sun“

Frida Kahlo, “Memory of the Heart”

As much as early Christians wanted to break ties with antiquity, aiming at redefining the concept of divine possession, their cult of angels and saints bore a striking resemblance to the worship of gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome. The demon of Socrates was never really put to rest. What happened, instead was a mere replacement of the old terminology with the new one, while the underlying meaning remained strikingly similar. Saints and patrons replaced geniuses only in the name:

 “…gradually, in late antiquity, men and women transferred much of the language and longing previously reserved for the genius, daimon, and other invisible companions to the saint. The saint was the genius’s heir, watching over people and places alike and protecting their human charges from birth until death. Saints bore messages and prayers, interceding for the people before God.” (Darrin M. McMahon, “Divine Fury: A History of Genius,” p.41)

Ostensibly monotheistic, early Christianity with its rampant cult of saints could be likened to a polytheistic religion with its multitude of divine beings. Alongside saints, dangerous demons were firmly believed to lurk in every corner of the world, “laying traps of temptation, snares of iniquity and sin.”

Early Christians delighted in etymology. After Plato, they derived the word “demon” (daimon) from the Greek daêmôn, “knowing,” associated with demonic foreknowledge and omniscience. Demons had their luminous counterparts in Angels. Both had wings, both could appear “everywhere in a single moment.” McMahon writes that “saints were canonized as saints precisely because they resisted the demons and it was largely for this reason that the cult of angels generated such consternation in the early church.” Very early on, at Christian councils, invoking angels was deemed inappropriate and highly dangerous because it entailed a grave risk of facing a demon instead. Boasters such as the French priest Adalbert who announced that he had received “holy relics, a letter from Jesus, and revelations from the angels, with whom he claimed to be in regular contact” were vehemently condemned.

Evelyn de Morgan, “Angel with Serpent”

Mikhail Vrubel, “Demon Seated”

It is quite striking to me that already in early Christianity direct contact with divinity was frowned upon or even condemned by church authorities. What seems to have been encouraged was blind acceptance and faith in the official dogma. The arduous cult of saints and their relics, however, apparently fulfilled the need of a more direct religious experience. As is true of everything, relic worship was already known in antiquity in relation to the cult of a hero, who was considered to be “olbios,” i.e. blessed:

 “…the cult hero is olbios, ‘blessed’, after he or she dies, and the worshipper of a cult hero can become olbios, ‘blessed’, by making mental contact with the earth that contains the corpse of the hero or even with a relic or simulacrum of the hero.”

Gregory Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, Kindle Edition

In Christianity, however, the cult of the relics was “tied to concepts of wholeness, corporeal integrity, and the resurrection of the body,” as Holger A. Klein notices in his article “Sacred Things and Holy Bodies: Collecting Relics from Late Antiquity to the Early Renaissance.” The enormous popularity of relics continued well until the 16^th century:

 “For more than a thousand years in Europe, all the important deeds of life were carried out under saints’ blessings, assured by the proximity of their relics. One did not plant crops, launch a ship, start a building, convene a gathering, give birth to a baby, or bury a relative without seeking to have the remains of saints physically nearby. As the special dead, saints were believed to be spiritual and invisible, but their power to heal, to bless, and to defend worked—or worked best—if they were materially and bodily present as relics.“

Andrew Butterfield, “What Remains”

What makes relics so fascinating is that they sanctify matter as “a medium of the divine,” or as a magic talisman of remembrance, Butterfield remarks. He goes on to explain:

 “Relics are an example of what James Frazer called ‘contagious magic.‘ Any thing that Jesus, Mary, or the saints touched was thought to retain the glow of sanctity, so items of their clothing, and objects from the life of Christ, particularly pieces of the True Cross, were also venerated as holy.“

The Stealing of St. Mark’s Body, Chapel of San Clemente, Basilica of San Marco, 12th century (image via http://venice11.umwblogs.org/the-myth-of-st-mark/)

Physical objects are concrete, touchable, and as such they evoke a presence that is longed for. The relics were believed to ooze blood, milk, oil and water, to radiate light and give off perfume. It is worth remembering that in ancient Egypt, mummies were embalmed with resins and other sweet-smelling spices so that they would be acceptable to the deities. Anubis, a jackal-headed god associated with mummification, checked each newcoming mummy with his keen nose for the required “Odor of Sanctity.“

Anubis

The vile containing the small amount of blood was drawn from the late Pope John Paul II after the attempt on his life on May 13, 1981. It was displayed for veneration for the first time on May 1, 2011, during his beatification.

“Thomas Becket’s body was still on the cathedral floor when people from Canterbury came in and tore off pieces of his clothes and then dipped these pieces in his blood. They believed that they would bring them luck and keep evil away.“ Via http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/thomas_becket.htm

In the 16^th century reformation started and Calvin declared with his typical sternness: “All flesh is dust … [and relics are] heaps of foolish trifles.” But in other parts of the world relics continued to be venerated as magical embodiment of a once-revered presence. Behold the Age of Reason. In the 19th century most rational scientists fell prey to what seems to be a common human predilection: endowing matter with spirit. The cult of genius focused on the brain. Mcmahon remarks:

 “And yet, what Hegel rightly perceived with his dialectical gaze was that even the phrenologists’ most reductive attempts to reduce mind to matter had the paradoxical effect of endowing matter with a strangely spiritual significance. By isolating genius above the shoulders, they made a totem of the skull. And by concentrating genius’s power in the brain, they made of its flesh a fetish that radiated with powerful allure. Behold the mystery of genius made manifest. Behold the secret of genius revealed.” (p. 139)

Even our times are not free of relic worship. Once again Butterfield remarks with perspicacity:

“And yet relics are, in one form or another, everywhere. We all have material objects that help freshen memory and recall emotion: locks of hair, baby shoes, heirlooms, and so on. There is no substitute for things of this kind. Nothing else provides the same experience or the same essential service. The intense interest in memorabilia is a version of this obsession. The property of stars and celebrities can generate intense longing, and also wild prices: two million dollars for Jimi Hendrix’s guitar..“

(also her chest x-ray fetched $45,000 at an auction…)

The last witticism belongs to McMahon: “Einstein’s brain has since been digitized and is now available as an iPad app in 350 microscopic slides. For a mere $9.99, genius may be downloaded to your touchscreen and venerated in your home.”

Related posts:

http://symbolreader.net/2014/09/23/on-genius-1/

http://symbolreader.net/2014/10/03/on-genius-2-genius-in-antiquity/

Bassin de Neptune, Versailles

“The longing for redemption is an ancient, strange and many-headed daimon, which dwells within even the most earthbound and prosaic of souls. Sometimes eloquent and sometimes mute, this daimon aspires toward some dimly sensed union with an all-seeing, all-loving, ineffable Other, in whose encircling embrace may be found ultimate solace for the harsh limits of mortality and the frightening isolation of individuality which lie embedded somewhere, albeit unconscious, in every life. Even if we do not call the Other by any divine name, but instead direct our devotion and our yearning toward unrecognized surrogates such as humanity en masse, family, nature, art, love, or admiration for a particular person or thing. The hallmarks of the longing for redemption are, first, that it is a longing; that it is compulsive and absolute, and often collides violently with individual values; and third, that its goal is not relationship, but rather, dissolution.

…

Jung speculated on the possibility that the longing for redemption is innate – an archetypal predisposition as primordial and irresistible as the urge to procreate. The main revelation of “Symbols of Transformation,” … is that it is … the unconscious psyche itself, which seeks to transform its own compulsive and doomed instinctuality through the mediating influence of the symbols which it creates. Not society or superego, but soul, in Jung’s view, is ultimately responsible for the transformation of raw libido into the work of devotional art, the noble humanitarian ideal, the awesome dignity of the sacred rite, the profound and cruelly beautiful initiatory work of turning human lead into human gold. In other words, what we call God is really Nature, the chthonic nature described by Freud’s id, seeking freedom from its own death-shadowed inertia through a gradual evolution not only of form, as Darwin would have it, but of expression and of consciousness. And the instrument of this transformation is that eternally elusive faculty which we call the imagination.

…

What then is this poignant yearning which justifies any sacrifice, this eternal cry from the wasteland of incarnation? Is it truly the clear voice of the soul making itself heard through the prison walls of earthy substance? Or is it the desperate defence-mechanism of the fragile personality, bruised and rendered stubbornly infantile by incompetent parenting and its own regressiveness, and unwilling or unable to make the difficult foray into the jungle of everyday life and death?

…

Neptune

Astrology has a planetary symbol to describe all human urges, and the longing for redemption is as human as the rest. In astrological language, it is called Neptune, named after the Roman god of the watery depths. … The longing for redemption is the longing for dissolution in the waters of pre-birth – maternal, cosmic, or both. … Neptune should have been named after a sea goddess, not a sea god. The source of life with which we seek to merge brandishes a masculine name, but wears a feminine face.”

Liz Greene, The Astrological Neptune and the Quest for Redemption, pp. xi-xiv

Emily Balivet, “Nereid”

“Clear-cut distinctions and strict formulations are quite impossible in this field, seeing that a kind of fluid interpenetration belongs to the nature of all archetypes. They can only be roughly circum­scribed at best. Their living meaning comes out more from their presentation as a whole than from single formulation. Every attempt to focus them more sharply is immediately punished by the intangible core of meaning losing its luminosity. No archetype can be reduced to a simple formula. It is a vessel which we can never empty, and never fill. It has a potential existence only, and when it takes shape in matter it is no longer what it was. It persists throughout the ages and requires inter­preting ever anew. The archetypes are the im­perishable elements of the unconscious, but they change their shape continually.

It is a well-nigh hopeless undertaking to tear a single archetype out of the living tissue of the psyche; but despite their interwovenness they do form units of meaning that can be apprehended intuitively.”

Carl Gustav Jung, Collected Works 9i, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, pars 301-302)

John O’Grady, “The Edge of the Deep Green Sea”
http://www.johnogradypaintings.com/the-edge-of-the-deep-green-sea-160/

Emily Balivet, “Mother Isis”

1.“When I comprehended my darkness, a truly magnificent night came over me and my dream plunged me into the depths of the millennia, and from it my phoenix ascended.”

C.G. Jung, “The Red Book”

2.”At the beginning there was only Khaos (Air), Nyx (Night), dark Erebos (Darkness), and deep Tartaros (Hell’s Pit). Ge (Earth), Aer (Air) and Ouranos (Heaven) had no existence. Firstly, black-winged Nyx (Night) laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Erebos (Darkness), and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Eros with his glittering golden wings.”

Aristophanes, “Frogs”

Nyx, Hesperus & Selene, gods of night, star & moon

3. “Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,

And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;

Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,

And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood…“

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 19 (bolding mine)

4. “The phoenix symbolizes the birth of life at a new level through the burning of all limitations into the fire. This fire is the real symbol of the energy which burns in the man who has reached the eighth phase of his journey along the Zodiac. It is the fire which destroys lesser forms and summons greater ones to be developed during the Sagittarius period of the cycle. This fire is the transcendent and occult aspect of sex…”

Dane Rudhyar,  http://www.khaldea.com/rudhyar/pofl/pofl_p2s8p3.shtml

Chinese dragon and phoenix hand embroidery painting, via http://www.redbubble.com/people/xpcraft/works/1909101-chinese-dragon-and-phoenix-hand-embroidery-painting

The myth of the phoenix most probably has its roots in ancient Egypt, where the bird benu was worshiped, which had the power to regenerate itself and was associated with the sun. Benu was connected with the primeval act of creation:

 “In the beginning,  when Atum created the world and the primeval hill was the first thing to rise out of the waters of chaos,  the benu perched on the hill,  and its first flight across the sky marked the beginning of time.  Because of its role in this creation myth, the benu, signifying the return to a new beginning, the start of a New Era, was a natural symbol for the Sothic period [a single year between heliacal risings of Sothis – i.e. Sirius, the dog star].“

Carol F. Heffeman, The Phoenix at the Fountain: Images of Woman and Eternity in Lactantius’s Carmen De Ave Phoenice and the Old English Phoenix

Benu bird from an Egyptian papyrus

The benu, venerated at Heliopolis, the city of the sun, was believed to have been appearing in Egypt at intervals of 1,461 years heralding the beginning of a new cycle. The heliacal rising of Sothis (Sirius) coincided with the rising of the Nile and the renewal of life. The benu was also significant in Egyptian funerary rites, as Heffeman writes: “the Book of the Dead contains a spell for transforming a dead person into a benu, enabling him or her to fly to the eternal land beyond.“

Papyrus from the Book of the Dead of Nakht (detail), showing two Benu

Already in Neolithic times, as is evident from extensive research conducted by a Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, birds were believed to partake of the feminine nature. Gimbutas excavated numerous Bird Goddess figurines that contained the cosmic egg from which gods were believed to have arisen. A similar myth was told over and over again in ancient Egypt, Babylonia and Greece.

Ishtar vase, goddess with bird feet

Heffeman puts forward an interesting suggestion regarding those ancient figurines. She quotes Mircea Eliade’s profound thought regarding creation of life. The celebrated Romanian historian of religion and philosopher said that life always springs from over-fullness, from a wholeness. Thus: “Bird Goddesses have both female egg-shaped buttocks and long phallic necks, suggesting a fusion of the sexes.“

It is in the phoenix that the fusion of the sexes -the myth of the Androgyne – is realized most beautifully. What a pity that most of us know only a tiny fragment of the beautiful story – its climax: the rising of the new phoenix from the ashes. Carol F. Heffeman in her extraordinary book brings us the full myth by analyzing a poem “Carmen de Ave Phoenice“ by Lanctantius, an early Christian author. Born in Northern Africa, he was an ideal candidate to marry the pagan myth with Christianity. The wonderful poem can be read here,   and the following is the summary offered by Heffeman:

“Lanctantius’ Carmen de Ave Phoenice begins with a description of the phoenix’s grove on a high plateau in the East. Remote from man and blessed with temperate weather,  the grove has at its center a fountain that overflows twelve months of the year. Here the phoenix follows a daily ritual of immersing itself in the fountain at dawn, flying up to a perch on a tall tree, and singing as the sun rises. This pattern of life continues for a thousand years until the old phoenix needs to renew itself. Then the phoenix takes flight to Syria where it seeks out a palm tree in which to die and recreate itself. After the old phoenix dies in flames ignited by the sun, the young phoenix evolves from the amassed ashes of its predecessor. [She elaborates later: “The new phoenix first appears as a worm that creeps out of the ashes, grows in due course to a bird,  and flies away.“] When it becomes an adult, it shapes whatever remains of the dead phoenix into a ball and takes it to an altar in Heliopolis. A joyous host of birds gather around the fabulous bird and sculpt it in marble amidst singing and gift-giving.“

Phoenix silk painting, image via https://www.flickr.com/photos/natsart/5359512905/

Heffeman believes strongly that the poem’s imagery draws on female initiation rites and says there is “a menstrual connection” to the fountain which overflows twelve times a year. She adds that the plumage of phoenix was believed to be partly golden, but mostly crimson red, as the natives of Phoenicia, the land which gave its origin to the name phoenix, were cloth dyers by trade.

A phoenix depicted in a book of mythological creatures by FJ Bertuch (wikipedia)

It is a sublime image of the phoenix waiting eternally in sublime seclusion for the aurora, the new dawn. But it does not wait passively; instead it purifies itself regularly and ritualistically “in the very font of the origin of life.” When the cycle is ripe, and the sun rises, the conception sequence may start and the phoenix begins his wondrous and ecstatic song of conception.

Phoenix detail from Aberdeen bestiary

The Roman poet Ovid wrote that both heat and moisture are required to create life: “For when moisture and heat become mingled they conceive and all things arise from these two.“  In the phoenix birth ritual, the heat of the sun produces fragrant steam, as Heffeman continues: “The imagery of steam, redolent with scent [amidst the herbs the phoenix has collected and placed around itself as a nest] suggests steamy fumigation, an external expedient that has been used to facilitate delivery by many peoples in many times.“

It is believed in Christian lore that the phoenix was last sighted after the Holy Spirit overshadowed Virgin Mary, and she gave birth to Jesus in a secluded cave. The symbol seems to have experienced a vast collective renewal at our moment in history. Does that mean that the phoenix has relived the whole cosmology and is ready to begin a new song of conception? I think the time is right to bring the full meaning of the symbol to our collective awareness. To me, the poem by Lactantius and its eye – opening interpretation by Heffeman reestablish the importance of the feminine principle in one of the most potent and most universal myths of humanity. In The Secret Teachings of All Ages, Manly P. Hall wrote: “The phœnix is the most celebrated of all the symbolic creatures fabricated by the ancient Mysteries for the purpose of concealing the great truths of esoteric philosophy. … Mediæval Hermetists regarded the phœnix as a symbol of the accomplishment of alchemical transmutation, a process equivalent to human regeneration.” The phoenix symbolizes being reborn into a new spiritual consciousness – the culmination of the Great Work.

Phoenix Fountain – Mugunghwa Valley, Korea, via https://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronbrownphotos/4972461256/

1. “At the dawn of history, the whole world – animate and inanimate, natural and supernatural – was interpreted symbolically. Life, death and rebirth were in constant close proximity, and these unceasing transformations were explained through stories and symbols: the passage between this world and the next, the rebirth of each new day and each spring. Such stories were symbolically relieved through ritual, art, dance, sacrifice, masks, hieroglyphs, talismans, fetishes, architecture and music. They served to keep a community in close connection with its defining narratives, above all its creation myths and stories of origin.”
Sacred Symbols: Peoples, Religions, Mysteries, edited by Robert Adkinson

image: John White – Indian ritual dance from the village of Secoton, via http://www.kunstkopie.de/a/white-john/indianritualdancefromthev.html

2. “Rites and symbols, both of which are essential elements of every initiation, and, more generally are associated with everything traditional, are in fact closely linked by their very nature. All the constituent elements of a rite necessarily have a symbolic sense, whereas, inversely, a symbol produces — and this indeed is its essential purpose — in one who meditates upon it with the requisite aptitudes and disposition, effects rigorously comparable to those of rites properly speaking, with the reservation of course that when this meditation is undertaken there be, as a preliminary condition, that regular initiatic transmission failing which the rites would be in any case nothing more than a vain counterfeit, as with their pseudo-initiatic parodies. We must also add that the origin of authentic rites and symbols (anything less does not deserve the name, since it amounts in the end to entirely profane and fraudulent imitations) is likewise ‘non-human’. Thus the impossibility of assigning to them any definite author or maker is not due to a lack of information, as profane historians suppose (that is, if for want of a better solution they have not been driven to look on them as the product of a sort of “collective consciousness”, which, even if it existed, would in any case be quite incapable of producing things of a transcendent order, such as these), but is a necessary consequence of that very origin, something that can only be contested by those who completely misunderstand the true nature of tradition and of all its integral parts, as is evidently the case with rites and symbols.

…

… (E)very word is nothing more than a symbol of the idea it is intended to express. Thus all language, whether spoken or written, is truly a body of symbols, and it is precisely for this reason that language, despite all the “naturalistic” theories contrived in modern times to explain it, cannot be a more or less artificial human creation nor a simple product of man’s individual faculties.

…

… (E)very rite is literally made up of a group of symbols which include not only the objects used or the figures represented, as we might be tempted to think if we

stopped at the most superficial meaning, but also the gestures effected and the words pronounced (the latter, as we have said, really constituting moreover only a particular case of the former); in a word, all the elements of the rite without exception; and these elements then have a symbolic value by their very nature and not by virtue of any superadded meaning that might attach to them from outward circumstances without really being inherent to them. Again, it might be said that rites are symbols ‘put into action’, or that every ritual gesture is a symbol ‘enacted,’ but this is only another way of saying the same thing. Highlighting more particularly the rite’s characteristic that, like every action, it is something necessarily accomplished in time, whereas the symbol as such can be envisioned from a timeless point of view. In this sense one could speak of a certain pre-eminence of symbols over rites; but rites and symbols are fundamentally only two aspects of a single reality, which is, after all, none other than the “correspondence” that binds together all the degrees of universal Existence in such a way that by means of it our human state can enter into communication with the higher states of being.”

Rene Guenon,The Essential Rene Guenon: Metaphysics Tradition and the Crisis of Modernity, edited by John Herlihy, 2009 World Wisdom. Pp. 226-230

“The soul is the greatest of all miracles in nature. All other things beneath God are always one single being, but the soul is all things together…Therefore it may rightly be called the centre of nature, the middle term of all things, the series of the world, the face of all, the bond and juncture of the universe.“

Marsilio Ficino

Portrait of Marsilio Ficino at the Duomo, Florence

This “diligent capturer of planetary light” (Latin “sedulus erraticarum luminis captator“) was a most crucial figure in the Florentine Renaissance. As Liz Greene boldly asserts in Astrology of Fate, “(Ficino), it would be no exaggeration to state, started the Florentine Renaissance virtually single-handed.” Not many of us know that he was the one who translated Plato’s writings into Latin as well as the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, known as The Corpus Hermeticum. He influenced the most eminent Renaissance thinkers and artists throughout all of Europe, including masters like Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci. What he did was spread and expand awareness of the greatest mind of the Renaissance through his unique blending of philosophy, music, medicine, therapy, astrology, and magic. In the book Friend to Mankind: Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), Adrian Bertoluzzi wrote:

“In the bright firmament of the Italian Renaissance no luminary has suffered in recent times a more unmerited eclipse than Marsilio Ficino. Today in Florence anyone can freely admire the majestic grace of Brunelleschi’s cupola. Ficino left no such tangible testimony of his life’s work. The influence he bequeathed to posterity was celebrated under the sacrosanct names of Plato, Plotinus, Hermes Trismegistus and Dionysius the Areopagite. But during his lifetime which spanned sixty-six years Ficino was hailed as something of a legend in his own right; recognised as a philosopher, musician and doctor, a healer of souls.

Plato’s Works translated by Ficino

…

Shakespeare’s debt to Ficino has been obscured for us by his sheer genius – transmuting philosophic gold into poetic gold with a lightning-swift intuitive understanding of the most profound thought which makes the term ‘influence’ almost irrelevant: the origin, the aim, the effect is one.“

Ficino’s translation of Plotinus

As Ficino fecundated the entire progeny of brilliant minds of his time what we owe him is acknowledgement of his crucial role as a genius of humankind. In his understanding, the true genius lay in the soul “caught up in the rapture of divine embrace.” In Divine Fury, The History of Genius, Darrin McMahon elaborates Ficino’s notion of furor, i.e. “vast zeal, burning piety, and sedulous worship of divinity,” without which no great work can be accomplished. There is poetic furor under the Muses, religious furor under Dionysius, prophetic furor under Apollo but the greatest furor of all is the furor of love under Venus:

  “For Ficino, the divine madness of love permeated all the furors — it lay behind true oracular, prophetic, and mystical power just as it animated the ecstatic visions of the genuine poet, who was blessed by God with the ability to see and re-create the beauty of the world. All those special abilities were divine gifts, which raised us to something higher than ourselves. That was the transformative power of the furor divinus, without which, Ficino judged, ‘no man has ever been great.’”

Ficino saw the soul as a messenger, mediator, “the middle term of all things in the universe.”  It connects the body with the mind, acting as the greatest binding factor of all:

 “The way, Ficino makes as clear as can be, is to cultivate the soul as an intermediate factor. The life of the soul will be connected fully to sensuous living and to rational thinking. But the soul will have its own way of connecting to each. Thinking might be sensuous, poetic, grounded, full of imagery. Physical life will be soulful–brimming with value, beauty, pleasure, art.“

Thomas Moore, “Marsilio Ficino: Magus and Cultural Visionary“ in: Friend to Mankind: Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), edited by Michael Shepherd

I am particularly drawn to this notion of the soul as mediator – argent vive (quicksilver), Mercurius, which, according to alchemists, was “the second part of the philosophical stone.”.As Marsilio Ficino wrote himself in his treatise on alchemical art, linking Mercurius to Virgin Mary:

“We say the mercury vive is the second part of the stone. Which since it is living and crude, is said to dissolve the bodies themselves, because it naturally adheres to them in their profundity. This is the stone without which Nature operates nothing. Whence the philosophers advise us not to work but in Sol and mercury; which being joined make up the stone of the philosophers. Who therefore can deservedly praise the merits of mercury, since it is he alone who maketh gold thin and who has so great a power, that he can reduce Sol itself into the first nature? Which power nothing else in the world is discerned to have. It is thus said of the mercury which the wise men seek for, is in mercury. Mercury destroys all foliated Sol: it dissolves and softens it, and takes the soul out of the body. If it be sublimated, then there is made aqua vitae. If anyone therefore ask you: What are the stones? You shall answer, that Sol and mercury are the physical stones. But these stones are dead on Earth and operate nothing, but what is by the industry of men supplied to them.

image from the manuscript De Sphaera illustrated by Cristoforo de Predis

I will propose you a similitude of gold. The ethereal heaven was shut from all men, so that all men should descend to the infernal seats, and be there perpetually detained. But Jesus Christ opened the gate of the ethereal Olympus, and has now unlocked the kingdoms of Pluto, that the souls may be taken out; when by the co-operation of the holy spirit in the virginal womb, the virgin Mary did by an ineffable mystery and most profound sacraments conceive what was the most excellent in the heavens and on the earth; and at length brought forth for us the saviour of the whole world, who out of his super abundant bounty shall save all who are able to sin, if the sinner turn himself to him. But she remained an untouched and undefiled virgin: whence mercury is not undeservedly compared to the most glorious saint the virgin Mary. For mercury is a virgin because it never propagated in the womb of the Earth and metallic body, and yet it generates the stone for us; by dissolving heaven, that is, gold, it opens it, and brings out the soul; which understand you to be the divinity, and carries it some little while in its womb, and at length in its own time transmits it into a cleansed body. From whence a child, that is, the stone, is born to us, by whose blood the inferior bodies being tinged are brought safe into the golden heaven, and mercury remains a virgin without a stain, such as is was ever before.”

“Marsilio Ficino on the alchemical art”

Item 7 from Ms. Sloane 3638. Transcribed by Justin von Budjoss.

This text is a translation of a Latin text, Marsilius Ficinus, ‘Liber de Arte Chemica’, which was printed in the Theatrum Chemicum, Vol 2, Geneva, 1702, p172-183. It is not entirely certain if this text was actually written by Ficino, or was later ascribed to him.

image from Atalanta Fugiens by Michael Maier

“Of course the Man was wild too. He was dreadfully wild. He didn’t even begin to be tame till he met the Woman, and she told him that she did not like living in his wild ways. She picked out a nice dry Cave, instead of a heap of wet leaves, to lie down in; and she strewed clean sand on the floor; and she lit a nice fire of wood at the back of the Cave; and she hung a dried wild-horse skin, tail-down, across the opening of the Cave; and she said, ‘Wipe you feet, dear, when you come in, and now we’ll keep house.'”

Rudhyar Kipling, “The Cat That Walked by Himself“

Marija Gimbutas captures my heart for at least three reasons: she was born in a Slavic country like me (Lithuania in her case, Poland in mine), spent her life in emigration, and stirred the patriarchal archaeological scientific community with her unique theory of old European Neolithic culture. As it is stated in my post’s featured biographical documentary, “her theories painted a new picture of the oldest layer of western cultures.” What is fascinating is that those first communities showed no evidence of warfare: they were based on the principle of sharing and co-operation.

The phrase “Old Europe” refers to Neolithic Europe, or the portions of the European continent inhabited by people who made pottery and lived in small villages, ate domesticated and wild plant foods, between about 7000 BC and around 1500 BC; via http://thesga.org/2009/12/what-is-old-europe/

She never stated clearly whether those early communities were patriarchal or matriarchal. However, the centre of their religious practices was very clearly a worship of the “self-generating Goddess, Giver of Life, Wielder of Death and Regeneratrix,” whose power was “in water and stone, in tomb and cave, in animals and birds, snakes and fish, hill, trees, and flowers.” She embodied the living earth and the wisdom of her cycles of death and rebirth.

In an interview featured in the documentary, Marija Gimbutas said: “The Paleolithic Goddess was the Creatrix. Her body parts like breasts, belly, buttocks, vulva, are the procreative parts of the body ….” The incredibly numerous figurines and images that Gimbutas excavated in the area of Old Europe can be described as amalgams of birds and animals with female form.

“Bird Lady,” a Neolithic ceramic

Viktor Vasnetsov, “Sirin and Alkonost: the Birds of Joy and Sorrow”

Susan Seddon Boulet, “Eagle Woman”

What was unique for Gimbutas‘ scientific approach was that she was not happy with the strict, statistical, dry methodology of science, but she preferred a more non-orthodox approach focusing on myth and imagery. She was later shunned by scientific community for indulging her intuition and imagination in what they believed to be excessive and arbitrary manner. However, to me her findings and conclusions are deeply stirring and appealing. What she tried to to do was translate the language of images that comes from over 10,000 years ago. To achieve that, she had to go beyond the narrow confines of her discipline – to synthesize in a visionary way.

Richard Buchan, Librarian from Pacifica Graduate Institute says in the documentary: “She’s pointing out a whole time here, and it’s a time where everyone’s roughly equal in rank, it’s a female-centered culture, not male dominated, it’s relatively peaceful. People can live like that, and still maintain a large village, and an elaborate culture. Some of the late Cucuteni things had, those villages had 15,000 people living in them. Cucuteni, Vinça, Sesklo – our history books never told us these names. Perhaps because without kings, warfare, and conquest, they don’t fit the classic definition of civilization.” In the Neolithic Era humans moved on from a Nomadic lifestyle towards a settled culture. This is the actual cradle of civilization that was thriving much earlier than the cultures of Sumer and Egypt.

Gimbutas decided to step off the beaten econometric track of scientific archaelogy by engaging imagery, intuition, mythology, folklore and poetry. She took a leap of faith, deciding to follow her own truth and a difficult path of a misfit. Because synthesis and a global approach are anathemas in modern science, she consequently lost all her privileges and grants, which did not stop her from pursuing her findings. In her time, hardly any archaeologists were interested in such intangible, unquantifiable matters. Gimbutas, however, even before her emigration to the US, used to collect beautiful folk songs, called Dainos in Lithuanian. She poetically described them as “the rhythms of a bird, a wedding dance, a lament,a liturgy of nature and the milestones of everyday life.” She had started very early to stray from the consensus scientific path.

In an interview, she remembers her early days at Harvard university in the 50s: “There was no real chance to stay as a woman at Harvard, I knew that I could stay as a research fellow and lecturer, but I probably would never be a professor there. In the nineteen-fifties, as a staff member I couldn’t join the faculty club if I went alone, not escorted by men. Also, two libraries were closed to women. So that I couldn’t, I couldn’t really stand. I hated the situation.” She was much more appreciated at UCLA in California, where she spent a few successful years, yet after a while it turned out that even this progressive establishment was not ready for her revolutionary ideas.

The documentary tribute to Gimbutas ends with a recitation dedicated to the Goddess, which I cannot resist quoting in full:

“Her breasts are like her eyes, which also stream life-giving moisture. The coiled spirals are writhing snakes that shed their skin and come out new again, symbols of regeneration. In the duck faced waterbird these symbols combine. The bird lays the eggs that are seeds of rebirth. The fat, fertile Goddess, Mountain mother, mother earth is sow, temple, body, portal, mother and child, animal mother, the original madonna. She is linked to the uterine-shaped bull’s head. His upraised horns are symbols of the birth-giving goddess whose children are also males – music-makers, bards, shamans. From her vulva come rebirth and regeneration. She is the owl, the funerary urn, the bird of prey, the meandering soul’s journey… The goddess was fish, she had many animal forms: egglike, fertile, water; she was the womblike hedgehog, the double axe butterfly of transformation, and Marija saw these symbols repeat again and again, in infinite combinations that spelled out a mythology.”

“Symbols throw us across a spiritual abyss. When contemplating a sacred work of art, it may feel as if a great divide separated us from the Holy hidden in images. Then, our vision expands, and the image becomes transparent to its transcendent source. We are thrown together with the Sacred in a fleeting moment of epiphany…

The expressions just used were not ill-chosen. If we take the time to trace the etymology of the word ‘symbol’ through its Attic Greek antecedent, symbolé, we discover that it means literally to throw (balló) two things together (sym).

What symbols throw together, essentially, are sacred and mundane experiences, making them one.

…

The process of symbolization occurs by overwhelming necessity: the mind, over-awed and frightened by a profound and soul-shattering experience of the Sacred, desperately seeks those objects which can, by virtue of their structure, contain such a momentous outpouring of the Divine – which is threatening otherwise to blast apart the very vessel into which it is being poured. At such a moment, an object is sought for its power to appropriately contain the awesome appearance of the Numinosum, and so, a symbol is created.

In the earliest ages of mankind, the Sacred was experienced in this way – as a thunderous epiphany that led per force to the creation of a symbol. Then, a series of symbols were strung together by ancient myth, with certain Threshold Images at their nadir, to become our hieratic works of art. And, as we survey the many masterpieces of ars sacrum created over the course of history, we find that most offer us symbolic doorways, constructed by the visionary artists of old, as images to enter through, and then left behind for succeeding generations to attempt in crossing.

The symbols of the past are not totally outdated, antiquated and useless; they resonate still with unseen powers. Yet, it is only by bringing our own lives, preoccupied with its present conflicts and needs, to these eternal symbols, that the forms forgotten by time may thus be enlivened, and our own lives may be transformed thereby – informed once more by their ancient inhering power.”

L. Caruana, Enter Through the Image: The Ancient Image Language of Myth, Art and Dreams, Recluse Publishing 2009, pp. 111 and 128

Vasily Kafanov, “Dreamer”, via http://kafanov.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/m6.jpg

Image via http://chronoperates.deviantart.com/art/Art-Nouveau-Peacock-272202614

I.“A Sufi legend, likely of Persian origin, suggests that god created spirit in the form of a peacock. Shown its own divine image in a mirror, the peacock was seized with awe and drops of sweat fell from which all other beings were created.“

Hope B. Wernes, The Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in World Art, entry: Peacock

Catalina Estrada, “Pavos“

II.“The serene and starry sky and the shining sun are peacocks. The deep-blue firmament shining with a thousand brilliant eyes, and the sun rich with the colors of the rainbow, present the appearance of a peacock in all the splendour of its eye-bespangled feathers. When the sky of the thousand-rayed sun … is hidden by clouds … it again resembles the peacock, which, in the dark part of the year … sheds its beautiful plumage, and becomes drab and unadorned; the crow which had put on the peacock’s feathers then caws with the other crows in funereal concert. In winter the peacock-crow has nothing left to it except its shrill disagreeable cry, which is not dissimilar to that of the crow. It is commonly said of the peacock that it has an angel‘s feathers, a devil’s voice, and a thief’s walk.“

Angelo de Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, quoted by C.G. Jung in Mysterium Coniunctionis

Claude Monet, “Impression, Sunrise”

Herbert James Draper, “The Gates of Dawn“

At winter solstice, peaceful, regenerative darkness slowly gives way to the life-giving radiance of the sun. With the break of dawn, the alchemical period of nigredo (blackness) gradually and in stages gives way to a splendid display of the peacock’s tail. The peacock is predominantly (but not exclusively) a solar symbol – its cry greets the rising sun, its splendid tail, as Hope B. Wernes wrote in The Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in World Art,“ fanned out in all its glory, shines like the sun.“ The symmetrical forms of light and colour on the peacock’s tail are symbolic of the expansion of consciousness occurring as a result of an encounter with the immaterial universal archetypal patterns (the peacock’s invisible aspect) and the material multiplicity of forms (the peacock’s visible aspect) present in the entire universe. In Mysterium Coniunctionis, C.G. Jung stated that the peacock stands for the unity of “all colors (i.e., the integration of all qualities).“ The peacock also symbolizes the “inner beauty and perfection of the soul.“ Jung extensively quotes from Khunrath’s alchemical work entitled Amphitheatrum sapientiae, where the peacock, as a symbol integrating all polarities, was called the “soul of the world, nature, the quintessence, which causes all things to bring forth.“

The Splendor Solis by Salomon Trismosin, Plate 16 Venus: Peacock’s Tail

Susan Seddon Boulet, “Hera the Queen of the Gods“

Alphonse Mucha, “Peacock Princess”

The predominant colour of the peacock’s tail is green, which connects it with Venus as a ruler of the sign Taurus, and thus with “life, procreation and resurrection“ as a bird associated with Hera (Juno), Mother Queen of the gods. Says Jung: “Just as the Queen Mother or the mother of the gods grants renewal, so the peacock annually renews his plumage, and therefore has a relation to all the changes in nature.“

Jessie Arms Botke, “Black Peacocks with Japanese Persimmons“

In Christianity, the peacock was likewise considered a bird of resurrection, a conviction which stemmed from the Aristotelian notion that the flesh of the peacock never putrifies.

Gerhard Dorn, another alchemist quoted by Jung, explicated the succession of alchemical stages of the opus in relation to colours and associated animal symbolism: “the ‘dead spiritual body‘ is ‘the bird without wings.‘ It ‘changes into the raven’s head and finally into the peacock’s tail, after which it attains the whitest plumage of the swan and, last of all, to the highest redness, the sign of its fiery nature.‘ This plainly alludes to the phoenix, which, like the peacock, plays a considerable role in alchemy as a symbol of renewal and resurrection, and more especially as a synonym for the lapis.“ The emergence of the peacock’s tail in the alchemical opus heralded the imminent successful end of the work and the attainment of its goal. It was believed by alchemists and in medieval lore that peacocks destroyed serpents and dragons, transforming their poison into the healing medicine.

Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of earthy Delights” (detail)

Although I chose the quote by Gubernatis as the second motto for my article, I am not in agrrement with him about the cry of the peacock. I do understand, though, how the peacock as the symbol of wholeness (and as the bird of Venus) also embraces the shadow associated with the seductiveness of beauty, vanity and pride. A few years ago, I had something short of a mystical experience while walking through the Bruno Weber park and hearing peacocks‘cries.

Artist Bruno Weber in his sculpture park, https://www.zuerich.com/en/visit/culture/sculpture-park

There is a magnificent poem by Wallace Stevens called “Domination of Black,“ which features the symbolism of the cry of the peacock:

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry — the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

On a website Poet Tree (http://billsigler.blogspot.ch/2011/07/stevens-textplication-6-domination-of.html), I have come across a good interpretation of this poem. The author says:

“Dramatically, the poem moves through an extended comparison of a flickering fireplace fire with first the autumn leaves literally reflected from the outside into the room, then to the colors of peacocks tails (and the encroaching night to the dark green of hemlock trees). Then the noise the fire makes is compared to the noises of both peacocks and hemlocks (with some questioning of who is talking and listening to whom), and finally the planets in the sky seem like the same turning of the leaves, the changing of the seasons, a holistic sense of relatedness that soon resolves both in the fireplace and outside to darkness. This encroachment of night scares the speaker, but he remembers the cry of the peacock and feels better.

… hemlocks are evergreen trees that never change with the seasons, while peacocks replace their feathers annually. Thus, it’s quite easy to see a contrast between the elegant and artistic peacock and her strange cry signaling a continuation of life and the hemlock (also the name of the elixir which suicided the great philosopher Socrates) signaling the “domination of black” – the constant presence of death in our lives due to its unresolvable mystery.“

Interestingly, as can be read on an excellent website dedicated to constellations (http://www.constellationsofwords.com/Constellations/Pavo.html), the words “peacock” and “paean,” i.e. ‘a hymn, a song joy and triumph’ are related. Other cognates of the peacock (pavo in Latin) are ‘pavor’ (dread which strikes the heart) and ‘pave,’ as in “pave the way.”  The cry of the peacock in the poem becomes a true “mystical call,“ a voice from beyond addressing directly our incorruptible essence – the Soul – and beckoning us to cross the threshold of awakening.