“By classical Jungian definition, animus is the soul-force in women, and is considered masculine. However, many women psychoanalysts, including myself, have, through personal observation, come to refute the classical view and to assert instead that the revivifying source in women is not masculine and alien to her, but feminine and familiar.

Nevertheless, I believe the masculine concept of animus has great relevance. There is tremendous correlation between women who are afraid to create—afraid to manifest their ideas in the world, or else are doing so in some manner that is disrespectful or haphazard—and their dreams may present many images of injured or injuring men. Conversely, the dreams of women strong in outer manifesting ability often feature a strong male figure who consistently appears in various guises.

Animus can best be understood as a force that assists women in acting in their own behalf in the outer world. Animus helps a woman put forth her specific and feminine inner thoughts and feelings in concrete ways—emotionally, sexually, financially, creatively, and otherwise—rather than in a construct that patterns itself after a culturally imposed standard of masculine development in any given culture.

The male figures in women’s dreams seem to indicate that animus is not the soul of a woman, but ‘of, from, and for’ the soul of a woman. In its balanced and non-perverted form, animus is an essential ‘bridging man.’ This figure often has wondrous capabilities that cause him to rise to the work as bringer and bridger. He is like a merchant of soul. He imports and exports knowledge and products. He chooses the best of what is offered, arranges the best price, supervises the integrity of the exchanges, follows up, follows through.

Another way to understand this is to think of Wild Woman, the soul-Self, as the artist and the animus as the arm of the artist. Wild Woman is the driver, the animus hustles up the vehicle. She makes the song, he scores it. She imagines, he offers advice. Without him the play is created in one’s imagination, but never written down and never performed. Without him the stage may be filled to bursting, but the curtains never part and the marquee remains dark.

If we were to translate the healthy animus into Spanish metaphor, he would be el agrimensor, the surveyor, who knows the lay of the land and with his compass and his thread measures the distance between two points. He defines the edges and establishes boundaries. Also call him el jugador, the gamesman, the one who studies and knows how to and where to place the marker to gain or to win. These are some of the most important aspects of a robust animus.

So the animus travels the road between two territories and sometimes three: underworld, inner world, and outer world. All a woman’s feelings and ideas are bundled up and carted across those spans – in every direction – by the animus, who has a feeling for all worlds. He brings ideas from “out there” back into her, and he carries ideas from her soul-Self across the bridge to fruition and ‘to market.’ Without the builder and maintainer of this land bridge, a woman’s inner life cannot be manifested with intent in the outer world.

You needn’t call him animus, call him by what words or images you like. But also understand that there is currently within women’s culture a suspicion of the masculine, for some a fear of ‘needing the masculine,’ for others, a painful recovery from being crushed by it in some way. Generally this wariness comes from the barely- beginning-to-be-healed traumas from family and culture during times previous, times when women were treated as serfs, not selves. It is still fresh in Wild Woman’s memory that there was a time when gifted women were tossed away as refuse, when a woman could not have an idea unless she secretly embedded and fertilized it in a man who then carried it out into the world under his own name.

…

So, rather than being the soul-nature of women, animus, or the contra-sexual nature of women, is a profound psychic intelligence with ability to act. It travels back and forth between worlds, between the various nodes of the psyche. This force has the ability to extrovert and to act out the desires of the ego, to carry out the impulses and ideas of the soul, to elicit a woman’s creativity, in manifest and concrete ways.

The key aspect to a positive animus development is actual manifestation of cohesive inner thoughts, impulses, and ideas. Though we speak here of positive animus development, there is also a caveat: An integral animus is developed in full consciousness and with much work of self-examination. If one does not carefully peer into one’s motives and appetites each step of the way, a poorly developed animus results. This deleterious animus can and will senselessly carry out unexamined ego impulses, pumping out various blind ambitions and fulfilling myriad unexamined appetites. Further, animus is an element of women’s psyches that must be exercised, given regular workouts, in order for her and it to be able to act in whole ways. If the useful animus is neglected in a woman’s psychic life, it atrophies, exactly like a muscle that has lain inert too long.

While some women theorize that a warrior-woman nature, the Amazonian nature, the huntress nature, can supplant this ‘masculine-within-the-feminine element,’ there are to my sights many shades and layers of masculine nature, such as a certain kind of intellectual rule making, law giving, boundary setting, that are extremely valuable to women who live in the modem world. These masculine attributes do not arise from women’s instinctual psychic temperament in the same form or tone as those from her feminine nature.

So, living as we do in a world that requires both meditative and outward action, I find it very useful to utilize the concept of a masculine nature or animus in woman. In proper balance animus acts as helper, helpmate, lover, brother, father, king. This does not mean animus is king of the woman’s psyche, as an injured patriarchal point of view might have it. It means there is a kingly aspect existent in the woman’s psyche, a kingly element that when developed attitudinally, acts and mediates in loving service to the wild nature. Archetypally, the king symbolizes a force that is meant to work in a woman’s behalf and for her well-being, governing what she and soul assign to him, ruling over whatever psychic lands are granted to him.”

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves

Jacopo Sansovino, “Mars and Neptune” in Doge’s Palace, Venice, via http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jacopo_Sansovino_Marte_e_Nettuno_45.43434_E_12.34037.JPG

I.”Who fills the earth with golden motes of sunlight, who comes alive in the liminal east and sets in the liminal west.”

II.”I give thee everything that the sky provides, that the earth creates, and the Nile brings from his source.”

III.”O perfect, O luminous, O venerable!

O great sorceress!

O luminous mistress,

O gold of the gods!”

IV.“We laud thee with delightful songs,

For thou art the mistress of jubilation,

The mistress of music, the queen of harp-playing.

The lady of the dance,

The mistress of the chorus-dance,

The queen of wreath-weaving.”

V:”I am the one who guides the great ones who are lost and exhausted on the roads of the reborn…
Who guides those who are lost in the underworld,
I am Hathor, Queen of the northern sky,
Who watches over the reborn,
I am a haven of tranquility for the just,
A ferry for the chosen.”

From Hymns to Hathor, quoted after Lesley Jackson, “Hathor: A Reintroduction to an Ancient Egyptian Goddess,” published by Avalonia, Kindle edition

All quotes in this post come from this book, unless otherwise stated.

The Egyptian calendar started around 21 June with the star Sirius (Sothis) rising on the horizon, announcing the start of the inundation of the Nile. This annual spectacle always amazed the Egyptians: the river started swelling in its banks first turning red from the silt, then green because of vegetation floating on top of it. This was seen as equally magical as the daily eastern rising of another star – the Sun, which travelled across the sky to set over the western horizon every evening amidst a spectacular symphony of colors. Two deities ruled these two magical occurrences: Hathor and the sun god Ra. New Year’s Day in Egypt was also Hathor’s birthday. Egyptians believed that on that day she returned from her self-imposed exile. The Distant Goddess was back and celebrations could start. At the break of dawn, the priests carried her statue to the rooftop Chapel of the Union with the Sun Disc, where the rising sun bathed it in its light, rejuvenating the goddess believed to be present in the statue. This was the signal to start ecstatic New Year celebrations full of dance, laughter and wine. Hathor was celebrated as mistress of drunkenness and the fertility of the soil due to the silt carried during the inundation promised abundant grape harvest.

By Susan Seddon Boulet

Hathor was the greatest goddess of Egypt (before Isis took over in that role much later); originally she was called HetHert (“the House or Womb Above), later her name became the familiar Hat-Hor (“the House or Womb of Horus”). She was the sky in which the Great Falcon – Horus, the original sun god – lived; she was the womb from which he was born. She was a sky goddess of the primeval sky waters and a solar goddess, thus a bringer of all life. She was the Source of the Nile. In her Handbook of Egyptian Mythology, Geraldine Pinch thus summarizes her role: “Hathor was the golden goddess who helped women to give birth, the dead to be reborn, and the cosmos to be renewed. This complex deity could function as the mother, consort, and daughter of the creator sun god. As Lady of the Stars, Hathor was associated with the nocturnal sky. As the Eye of Ra, she could be identified with the solar disk or the morning or evening star (Venus). By the Greco-Roman Period, Hathor was honored as a moon deity. She was the goddess of all precious metals, gemstones, and materials that shared the radiant qualities of celestial bodies, such as gold, silver, copper, turquoise, lapis-lazuli, and faience.” Naturally, because of her connection with the sun god, she was mostly associated with gold. In fact, she was seen as almost a personification of gold, which was the metal most valued by the Egyptians. Her most notable epithets included:

Beautiful of Face

Eye of Ra upon his disk

Goddess of drunkenness

Lady of All

Lady of Heaven

Lady of Horns

Lady of the Sky

Mistress of all the Gods

The Great One

The Hand of Atum

The ruler-goddess

Great Female Hawk in the House-of-the-Falcon

God’s mother of the Falcon of Gold

King before Hathor

The Egyptians believed that the sun god was lifted up into the heavens on the head of the celestial cow. As Pinch summarizes, “the union of Hathor and the creator could be thought of in sexual terms or, more abstractly, as a merging of the creator with his own active power. Hathor was the goddess who personified both the hand that made Atum ejaculate and the divine ‘seed’ itself.” As the solar goddess, she took the weary sun god in his arms in the West. As a symbolic extension of that role, she was also the Lady of the Necropolis, who eased the transition from death to new life. She offered the newly dead nourishment under the shade of the sycamore tree. As Lesley Jackson points out, for the Egyptians shades and shadows were not sinister but benevolent, offering protection from the relentless desert sun. The canopy of the sycamore tree was a sacred space where Hathor offered refuge to her followers, also after their death. The presence of trees marked a change in the landscape and the much awaited presence of water.

The nursing cow goddess

Hathor, the Cow goddess was not named after a domesticated cow but after a wild cow which lived in the marshes where papyrus grew – a plant sacred to her and extremely important to the daily survival of the Egyptians. A hieroglyph in the form of a papyrus plant meant “fresh, flourishing, and green.” As Jackson explains: “In ancient Egyptian cosmology, the world was created when the first god stood on a mound that emerged from limitless and undifferentiated darkness and water, a mythical echo of the moment each year when the land began to reappear from beneath the annual floodwaters. Papyrus marshes were thus seen as fecund, fertile regions that contained the germs of creation. Papyrus thickets were seen as liminal zones at the edges of the ordered cosmos, symbols of the untamed chaos that surrounded and perpetually threatened the Egyptian world.”

For the Egyptians, cows symbolized loving care, nourishment and fertility. Significantly, the verb “to be joyful” was connected with a hieroglyph showing “a cow turning round to the calf at her side,” explains Jackson. Women were often depicted with their arms upraised to resemble the horns of a cow, the lunar crescent and the protective embrace of the goddess. The Celestial Cow who straddled the earth was the embodiment of the Milky Way. On this primeval ocean the solar barque guided by Hathor travelled each night. Each morning the sun was born and placed between the horns of Hathor. For the Egyptians, the sky was feminine and the mother. The goddess Nut represented the abstract, divine sky while Hathor its visible, physical and life giving aspect.

Hathor’s role was invariably of the one who regenerated, rejuvenated, and infused with life energy. She was fertility embodied. Very popular votive offerings she rejoiced in accepting were wooden and stone phalluses symbolizing abundance and fertility. Women would visit the crypts of her temple in Dendera if they had difficulty conceiving. She brought joy and ecstasy to her followers. As the Eye of Ra she embodied the active feminine principle, since the Egyptian word for eye, irt, sounded like the verb “to do.” Hathor had the power to revitalize anything and anybody that felt listless or stagnant. An instrument sacred to her was the sistrum, whose rattle was believed to promote fertility and scare the powers of evil. The shaking of sistrum brought about revitalizing powers and was used in all major rites of passage. Hathor was so closely associated with the sistrum that her face usually formed the handle. Also the menat, whose sound resembled the rustling of papyrus, was thought to make a revitalizing sound. Another object sacred to the goddess was the mirror, which was called “a living one.” It was regarded as “an active object, illuminating rather than merely reflecting as we would understand it now, and so was compared to the Eye of the Sun,” writes Jackson. Tomb paintings often show mirror dances dedicated to Hathor. Their significance is not clear, though perhaps they were associated with a play of lights and Hathor’s solar power. Aside from their role as an obvious symbol of eroticism and beauty, mirrors may have also been viewed as portals to other worlds. Hathor was after all a midwife assisiting women in labor but also by natural extension she was the one who assisted the deceased in their in the transition between death and rebirth. As Jackson says: “In many ways Hathor is a link to other worlds; those of the distant mines and foreign places, the otherworldly experiences of ecstasy and drunkenness and the afterworld of death and rebirth.”

Faience Sistrum Inscribed with the Name of Ptolemy I, via http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/546038

A menat from the Temple of Dendera

One of the most important festivals dedicated to Hathor was the Festival of Drunkenness. To achieve a state of ecstasy meant to honor the goddess. Hathor was the one who got the largest number of votive offerings, which she was more fond of than of hymns, and wine was a particularly suitable gift for her. The sacred state of drunkenness was believed to help her followers to get rid of anger and all negativity. Hathor had a dual nature as a benevolent goddess but with periodical bouts of anger in her Angry Eye aspect during which she withdrew and was referred to as the Distant Goddess. The god Thoth would bring her wine and calming words during these times in order to appease her. The angry side of Hathor was connected with Sekhmet, one of the aspects of Hathor.

Although it was Isis who had the most heka (magic power) and was known as the Great One of Magic, Hathor had at her disposal infinite energy and strength due to her solar aspect. After the younger Horus (son of Isis) escaped to the desert having been blinded by Seth, Hathor healed his eyes with the milk of a gazelle. Jackson saw this magic healing act as restoring the sun and the moon and ensuring the survival of all creation. Hathor buried the damaged eyes, which grew back as lotus flowers. The lotus was a sacred plant of Hathor dedicated to her son Nefertum, god of perfume, portrayed as a lion-headed man with a lotus headdress (in other versions Nefertum was son of Sekhmet or Nut). One of the Egyptian myths of creation tells about a giant lotus which emerged from primordial waters of Nun and which brought forth the sun god.

Nefertum

Nefertum

The magic powers of Hathor did not end with healing Horus. In her guise as the Seven Hathors she determined the destinies of all newborns in Egypt, weaving their fate with a scarlet thread. The Seven Hathors had a very strong magical aspect and would be frequently invoked in love charms. They were also able to predict a manner of a person’s death. In fact, as is stated in the Coffin Texts, Hathor was the goddess who held keys to the afterlife. She was “the doorkeeper of the house of life … she in whose hand are the keys to the West, to whom the portal has been assigned, without whom they do not close, nor do they open without her knowing.” On the prow of the solar barque she was the mistress of was the scarab – a symbol representing “the plenitude of life and its continual renewal.”

The Seven Hathors from the Temple of Dendera

Hathor was the main Egyptian goddess in the Old and Middle Kingdom but by the end of the Greco-Roman era she had been overshadowed by and eventually assimilated with Isis. This marked a clear cultural and archetypal shift and was a very significant occurrence. Hathor was the goddess who existed in her own right, which meant that all her relationships or offspring were secondary. Isis, on the other hand, was committed to and entangled with her spouse Osiris and their son Horus. The festivals of Hathor were full of joy and celebration, festivals of Isis focused on her mourning the death of her husband. Just as Isis lovingly collected all the pieces of his dead body, so she encompassed all Egyptian goddesses into her. She wore the cow horn sun disc of Hathor. She took over her epithets. As Jackson sums up, “By late antiquity Isis was the unrivaled Great Goddess of Egypt and her cult spread across the Roman Empire and reached Britain.” What was the reason of Isis prevailing over all other goddesses? I suspect it was the dawn of the Age of Pisces which brought about the archetype of wholeness. Isis epitomized “loss, suffering, compassion, healing and wholeness.” She was a savior goddess who brought hope to all those who suffered. What was lost at this juncture, however, was the angry and dangerous side of the feminine principle, which was highly pronounced in Hathor as Sekhmet and as the Distant Goddess. Isis, as Jackson puts it, was “the more socially acceptable face of the female divine.” Another aspect of Isis that was the sign of the coming times was the secrecy and exclusivity of her cult. With Isis the esoteric knowledge went underground.

This does not change the fact that the Summer Solstice carries the energy of Hathor who says in one of the hymns: “I am the Woman who lightens darkness.”

Birth of the sun in Hathor Temple at Dendera, via Wikipedia

Beautiful images of Hathor:

https://www.academia.edu/12489681/The_Goddess_Hathor_Iconography

A woodcut etching by Sogra Khurasani, via http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/my-name-is-red/article6630020.ece

1.“White and red combined are the colour of the mysterious rose, the whiteness of milk and the redness of blood, the white of light and the redness of fire.”

Eliphas Levi, “The Book of Splendors”

2.“Blood is the first incarnation of the universal fluid; it is the materialized vital light. Its birth is the most marvellous of all nature’s marvels; it lives only by perpetually transforming itself, for it is the universal Proteus. The blood issues from principles where there was none of it before, and it becomes flesh, bones, hair, nails . . . tears, and perspiration. It can be allied neither to corruption nor death; when life is gone, it begins decomposing; if you know how to reanimate it, to infuse into it life by a new magnetization of its globules, life will return to it again. The universal substance, with its double motion, is the great arcanum of being; blood is the great arcanum of life.”

Eliphas Levi, quoted by Madame Blavatsky in “Isis Unveiled”

Many years ago, at the time when I studied alchemy for hours every day, I had a vivid dream whose climax involved blood gushing forward in jets from a man’s liver. The vividly red blood flew through the air in tiny red droplets and landed on my books. Black flies started feasting on it. Gruesome as it may sound, the dream was a revelation. To me it felt like it meant that all my learning would be infused with life and energy carried by blood.

Blood of life flows through our veins. The tissues of our bodies form the substance of our heredity. Our blood ties are our fate. Blood is also symbolically linked with death, often a violent one. Its colour is the result of the high content of iron, a metal associated with Mars, the fiery god of war. Blood is fiery water. It is not surprising that Mars is associated with blood since he represents “the masculinity of the body, rather than the masculinity of the spirit,” as Liz Greene puts it in Astrology of Fate. And the body belongs to the Goddess. Ares emerged from the world of instinct and “the old matriarchal realm of flesh.”

In the old times, blood was people’s constant companion: women felt the pungent smell of blood on their newborns, there were no tampons to diffuse and absorb the menstrual blood before it can be seen or smelled, when warriors died in combat or when people sustained mortal wounds, nobody was sanitized and rushed to hospital. Nowadays we experience blood shedding vicariously through fiction, movies and TV shows. But the memory of history’s violent bloodbaths still runs through the veins of our unconsciousness. When the advent of Christianity ushered in the Age of Pisces, forgiveness and mercy teachings of Jesus were not subsequently adopted by many of his followers. The ritual of Holy Communion was meant to be an atonement for the atrocities committed during the Age of Aries, and a symbolic transference of the teachings of Christ to his disciples:

“When Jesus says, ‘Drink … this is my blood,’ what else was meant, it was simply a metaphorical assimilation of himself to the vine, which bears the grape, whose juice is its blood – wine. It was a hint that as he had himself been initiated by the ‘Father,’ so he desired to initiate others. His father was the husbandman, himself the vine, his disciples the branches.”

Blavatsky, “Isis Unveiled”

Moving away from symbolism to the realm of literal meaning, the Inquisition spilled torrents of blood in the whole of Europe. This infamous torch has been taken over by religious terrorists in our times.

Blood is synonymous with life itself, always in motion, ceaseless in its circulation. It is the opposite of “stagnation, absorption, calcification from old age, and death,” says Madame Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled. When we feel most alive, when we experience passion, jealousy, or other overpowering emotions, blood rushes through our veins, we breathe faster, our cheeks redden. As Cirlot noticed in his Dictionary of Symbols:

“In cases of relationships as close as that between blood and the colour red, it is evident that both are reciprocally expressive: the passionate quality characteristic of red pervades the symbolism of blood, and the vital character of blood informs the significance of the colour red.”

Color red is the theme of one of my favorite novels – My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk. In one of the chapters it is actually the color red which speaks to us:

“I hear the question upon your lips: What is it to be a color?

Color is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness. …

I am so fortunate to be red! I’m fiery. I’m strong. I know men take notice of me and that I cannot be resisted.

I do not conceal myself: For me, delicacy manifests itself neither in weakness nor in subtlety, but through determination and will. So, I draw attention to myself. I’m not afraid of other colors, shadows, crowds, or even of loneliness. How wonderful it is to cover a surface that awaits me with my own victorious being! Whenever I’m spread, I see eyes shine, passions increase, eyebrows rise and heartbeats quicken. Behold how wonderful it is to live! Behold how wonderful to see. Behold: Living is seeing. I am everywhere. Life begins with me and returns to me.”

In Mysteries of the Dark Moon, Demetra George devotes considerable space to the significance of the menstrual time for a woman, and equates this time with the symbolism of the dark moon. Menstrual blood was sacred for many ancient cultures. Demetra George writes that menstruation time is “a woman’s most powerful time of month, a time when her psychic and spiritual energies are most highly sensitized.” Because men feared the women’s psychic powers during that time, they created laws to isolate women while they were bleeding. A menstruating woman withdraws from others because she needs to nurture herself and draw from her psychic power within. What is more, “because a woman’s greatest sexual desire occurs around her period, men became terrified of what they perceived to be her assertive, voracious sexuality that would devour them.” Apparently, if we want to distill the wisdom of the ancients we may say that the flow of blood changes women into powerful sorceresses full of erotic fury, channeling the dark goddess. Of course in the West we call it PMS.

Image from Aurora Consurgens, a woman bleeds within a zodiac circle

The Egyptian goddess Sekhmet wore red garments. In one of the myths associated with her, Sun god Ra sent her to punish humanity, but she fell into frenzy doing it and got inebriated on the blood she was drinking. That put the whole humanity in danger of extinction. Ra made Sekhmet drink beer colored by red dye to deceive her and thus subside her frenzy. In India, the dark goddess Kali was a counterpart of the Egyptian Sekhment. She was the one who drank blood. The blood of Kali was believed to have had regenerative qualities. As Barbara Walkers wrote in Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets:

By Susan Seddon Boulet

“In Kali’ s cave-temple, her image spouted the blood of sacrifices from its vaginal orifice to bathe Shiva’ s holy phallus while the two deities formed the lingam-yoni, and worshippers followed suit, in an orgy designed to support the cosmic life-force generated by union of male and female, white and red.”

Frida Kahlo, “Just a Few Nips”

As usual, Jung’s reflections on the color red and the feminine strike me as the deepest and most appealing:

“The relation of the love-goddess to red dates back to ancient times. Scarlet is the colour of the Great Whore of Babylon and her beast. Red is the colour of sin. The rose is also an attribute of Dionysus. Red and rose-red are the colour of blood, a synonym for the aqua permanens and the soul, which are extracted from the prima material and bring ‘dead’ bodies to life. … The stone … is the son of this whore. …

Certain of the ecclesiastical symbols prove to be acutely dualistic, and this is also true of the rose. Above all it is an allegory of Mary and of various virtues. Its perfume is the odour of sanctity… At the same time it symbolizes human beauty (venustas), indeed the lust of the world (voluptas mundi).

Like the rose, the figure of the mother-beloved shines in all the hues of heavenly and earthly love. She is the chaste bride and whore who symbolizes the prima materia, which ‘nature left imperfected.’”

C.G. Jung, “Mysterium Coniunctionis,” CW vol. XIV, pars. 420-422

Lust, XI Arcanum of the Thoth deck

In alchemy rubedo (reddening) is the crowning stage of the opus. Having achieved illumination outside the body in the Albedo (whiteness) stage, during Rubedo the adept returns to the earth in order to fully incarnate his new enlightened consciousness into the body’s flesh and blood. The alchemical gold, claimed Greek alchemists, was “the red blood of silver.” The Red Sea had to be crossed in order to reach the Promised Land. We all have to cross our own sea “bloodied with wounds and sacrifice” (Cirlot, Dictionary of Symbols).

Jeff Grygny, Alchemy Series, via http://www.jeffgrygny.com/Alchemy_series.htm

“Summer,” terracotta via http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/207350?utm_source=Pinterest&utm_medium=pin&utm_campaign=summer

1.“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk roses and with eglantine.

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.

And there the snake throws her enameled skin,

Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.”

William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

2.“…he drank a bottle of the scent of a summer evening, imbued with perfume and heavy with blossoms, gleaned from the edge of a park in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, dated 1753.”

Patrick Süskind, “The Perfume”

All color flowers in full bloom, canopy of leaves, carpet of grass, bees swarming, the sun oozing heat lavishly – wherever I look, I see bountifulness, I feel how life peaks in me, but how also summer weariness and sweet sensual confusion descend upon me. I am all smell. That reminds me of Christopher Moltisanti, a character from “The Sopranos,” who said he “got high off the smell of popcorn at Blockbuster.” Well, I do find all the collective aromas of the summer intoxicating; I keep catching myself wanting to smell everything around me, whilst imbibing on the hot air. I pick up The Healing Power of Trees: Spiritual Journeys through the Celtic Tree Calendar by Sharlyn Hidalgo, which is one of those effortless reads that keep me nodding and smiling lightly all the time. “I want to be able to understand the novel half-drunk on rosé,” wrote a critic from The New Yorker in an article recommending perfect summer reads. This is it but without losing the depth. Hidalgo’s book is not a scholarly work, but it does have enormous spiritual scope, lots of intuitive wisdom and was written with a true passion for the subject. I appreciate her ability to weave together various cultural traditions such as Celtic, Greek and Egyptian myths, astrology and the runes. Recently, the most exciting plant I have been checking upon in my immediate neighborhood has been the vine (below is a low-quality amateur snapshot I took of it). According to Hidalgo, on 11 July Celtic month of the vine started and will last until August 7. The guides and totems of this month are Lion, Dionysus, the Green Man, Pan, sylphs, nymphs, elves and fairies, the sun god Lugh, Strength card of the tarot, Sekhmet, Kuan Yin, and all mother aspects of the goddess (mother earth offering her bounty for the harvest).

Martin Schongauer (German, c, 1435/50-1491), Shield with Stag Held by Wild Man. Engraving. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A few glasses of wine bring a feeling of warm gregariousness, loosen ego boundaries, open the heart and endow with a feeling of expansiveness. In a further stage, imbibing on wine may result in ecstatic frenzy, in the likelihood of the female followers and priestesses of Dionysus – the Maenads, whose name signified “the raving ones.”

Wine brings forward the deepest emotions by dissolving the boundaries that hold us back from full self-expression. Hans Biedermann writes this on the symbolism of wine in his Dictionary of Symbolism:

“The custom of intemperate drinking, in various cultures that revered Dionysus, was part of a religious tradition and was believed to join mortals with the god of ecstasy. Wine supposedly could break any magic spell, unmask liars (“in vino veritas”), and slake the thirst even of the dead when it was poured out as a libation and allowed to seep into the ground. Called ‘the blood of the grape, wine was often closely linked symbolically with blood, and not only in the Christian Eucharist. Poured out as a libation, it could replace blood sacrifices for the dead.”

Bacchantes (Maenads) dancing

In John’s gospel, the very first miracle Christ performs was turning water into wine. This miracle underscored the ambivalent significance of wine, as Juan Eduardo Cirlot in his Dictionary of Symbols aptly noted, wine pertains both to fecundity and sacrifice. It is a symbol of life in its fullness, and life in its fullness must encompass death and suffering. The vine will not produce good quality wine without ample sun: almost no other plant channels the vigor of the sun in such a marked way. But the height of the summer carries the seeds of death within, symbolized by the harvesting scythe. Sharlyn Hidalgo writes:

“The idea of the sacrament of the last supper of Christ was originally a Dionysian ritual wherein women ate a piece of bread shaped like him (representing his body) and drank wine (his blood). Through this ritualized consumption, the women took in and absorbed the wild, potent power of nature. The ancient Greeks used tools resembling T-squares to cultivate grapevines. Later, these Tau crosses morphed into the structure adopted by the Romans for crucifixion.”

Celtic cross (Celtic art is said to have imitated vine)

Quite a free leap in associations, but I appreciate it. Christ said of himself that he was the vine, while his disciples were the branches. He was the one who gave life to his followers. He poured his divine substance into them. In medieval art, the cross and the tree of life were both represented as grapevines. Saint Hildegard von Bingen said that wine was endowed with the mysterious and secret vital force (viriditas). The poet Dylan Thomas understood viriditas perfectly,  because he knew that life force and death force are essentially the same; in one of his most wonderful poems he wrote: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age;/ that blasts the roots of trees/ Is my destroyer.”

From the point of view of the soul, the miracle work of wine endows us with wings of fertile creativity. This creativity sometimes seeks to destroy, for example by dissolving any boundaries or barriers in order to claim a wider territory on grounds of the psyche. The creative spirit of the season was best captured by the genius of Shakespeare in his Midsummer Night’s Dream:

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”

Paul Gervais, “Folie de Titania”

I remember seeing it many years ago in the theater and being completely overpowered by its Dionysian message of loosening of boundaries, and an invitation to unbridled revelry. I remember being struck by the impression that I was being exposed to an unlimited geyser of creative force. Summer is often the time taken off from our everyday, constraining social roles. As the character in Shakespeare’s play, we are invited to frolic around in the woods governed by freedom giving divine laws of the fairies.

Jozef Mehoffer, “Strange Garden”

Gustave Moreau, “The Birth of Venus”

If our exact time of place and birth is like a lodestar to interpreting our qualities and our destiny, it must make a lot of sense to look closely at the birth of Venus and relate what we find to her archetypal significance. She has a most extraordinary birth tale, after all. At the beginning of time, the sky god Uranus and the earth goddess Gaia were locked in never ending lovemaking. Yet there was no happiness, for she was groaning under the oppression of constant pregnancies as Uranus chased all the offspring back into her womb. In desperation, she gave a white sickle to her son Kronos, who castrated his father and threw his testicles into the sea:

“Earth took into herself the bloody drops that rained down. Within a year she gave birth to the powerful Erinyes, the Furies. … From the immortal flesh that fell into the surging sea there arose in time a white froth, or aphros. Inside the foam was nurtured a lovely girl. First she floated toward holy Kythera, and then to Cyprus pounded by the sea. Out she stepped from the waves, a queenly beautiful goddess, and around her slender feet fresh grass sprouted.” (Martin)

“Circles formed on the surface of the water, and one of them was edged with white foam. From the middle rose Aphrodite, together with her first serving maids, Apate and Zelos, Deceit and Rivalry.” (Calasso)

Dissecting the myth, which Liz Greene is particularly good at, it is worth pointing out that Kronos is “not an independent masculine principle, but rather the masculine side of the generative principle over which the Mother presides.” He is associated with the yearly ritual of king sacrifice, whose purpose was to “fertilise the earth and renew the crops.” Right at the beginning, as it appears, the principle of Aphrodite/Venus and the principle of fertility go hand in hand. Other Venusian principles in plain sight would be: conflict, strife, violence, which eventually beget breathtaking beauty and harmony. Furthermore, Aphrodite seems to combine celestial and terrestrial aspects in her archetypal make-up: she has the Uranian disembodied, abstract aestheticism and perfection coupled with an equally strong chthonic, carnal and sensual aspect. By standing up against the father, the titan Kronos made a necessary step in his individuation process. When the principle of Venus is activated, families may get shattered, which will awaken the Furies (Erinyes). There is blood and suffering at the core of Beauty, it seems.

Odilon Redon, “The Birth of Venus”

As progeny of a primordial god, Aphrodite is older than the Olympians. She has enormous generative power at her disposal, and is a solar (the Golden One) rather than lunar deity. As Venus she competes in her brightness with the sun. Sworder remarks:

“…the phallus of the sky god is the sun and the saw toothed stone which Cronus takes to it is the jagged ridge of the western horizon, and the very moment of excision is that lovely moment as the sun sinks slowly out of sight beneath the world’s edge. Then the western sky is reddened by bloody member till in the midst of it appears the Evening Star.

…

For as star she is seen to stand above the sun after he has sunk beneath the western horizon, as she stands above him before he rises in the east.”

By the same token, Friedrich, quoted by Greene talks of her “sunlit sexuality” – she unashamed, usually portrayed nude, as opposed to other more modest goddesses. Her incarnation is fully blownl: she openly chooses mortal men as lovers, and does not punish their desires as Artemis or Hera did. Liz Greene quotes Paul Friedrich:

“The drives of sexuality are natural; on the other hand, sophisticated love-making is highly cultural. Aphrodite mediates between the two, ‘puts them together’. Or, better, she does not make them identical but interrelates them and makes them overlap to a high degree. To put it yet another way, we can agree that she is a ‘goddess of rapture’ but ought to recognise that this rapture harmoniously blends natural and cultural ingredients.”

William Blake Richmond, “Venus and Anchises”
“Yet in turn Aphrodite laughed at them and boasted of how she had driven gods to mate with women, but never herself had wanted a mortal’s bed. Zeus decided he’d change that. He filled Aphrodite with sweet longing for Anchises, who lived in the rugged uplands of Mt. Ida near Troy. He was a handsome young man with a common trade: herding cattle. One day she was sitting on Olympus, assured of her powers, smugly looking over the world, when she noticed him. That was all it took. Aphrodite instantly began to feel the pangs of desire for this unsuspecting youth. She hurried to Paphos and her temple there, filled with the scent of cypress. She gently closed the shining doors of the inner chamber and undressed, bathed luxuriantly, then clothed herself (with the help of the Graces) in a gown permeated with the most alluring perfumes. Then she rushed north toward Troy, striding high above the clouds, until she set herself down on Mt. Ida. The place was well known as “mother of beasts,” and as soon as she set foot there, they came out to greet her. Gray wolves that fawned at her feet, lions with glaring eyes, bears, leopards. Aphrodite was delighted seeing them, and by her very presence she infused them with the joyous urge to love. Two by two the animals went to lie and mate in the shadowy woods.”
Richard P. Martin

Uranian blood shedding finds its reflection in the two most typical Venusian symbols – the apple and the rose. They are united by the sensual symbolism of the color red. In this connection, Sworder offers his own take on the symbolism of the birth of Aphrodite:

“Red are our lips and nipples and our most private parts, reddest when closest to the consummation of love. Then they distend and bloom with the redness of blood. This is the blood shed by Cronus when he castrates his father Uranus and the phallus falls into the sea. The phallus is the sun which froths and colors the white cloud and the star of the goddess appear standing over its redness.”

Georgia O’Keeffe, “Red Hills with White Shell”

Among its many significations, an apple seems to bring to mind the infamous “apple of discord.” Love can bring harmony and satisfaction of desire, but just as often it causes misery, jealousy, rivalry and all sorts of destructive passions. Roberto Calasso ingeniously links Aphrodite with Ananke – the goddess of necessity. While Ananke, together with Kronos, symbolizes the precision of karmic laws, with their austerity and relentlessness, Aphrodite seems to embody “a rebellion of lightness.” To quote Calasso with his uncanny precision:

“Olympus is a rebellion of lightness against the precision of the law, which at that time was referred to as pondus et mensura, “weight and measure.” A vain rebellion, but divine. Kronos’s chains become Hephaestus’s golden web. The gods know that the two imprisoning nets are the same; what has changed is the aesthetic appearance. And it is on this that life on Olympus is based. Of the two, they prefer to submit to Eros rather than Ananke, even though they know that Eros is just a dazzling cover for Ananke. And cover in the literal sense: Ananke’s inflexible bond, which tightens in a great circle around the world, is covered by a speckled belt, which we see in the sky as the Milky Way. But we can also see it, in perfect miniature, on the body of Aphrodite when the goddess wears her ‘many-hued, embroidered girdle in which all charms and spells reside: tenderness and desire are there, and softly whispered words, the seduction that has stolen the intellect even from those of sound mind.’ Unraveled across the darkness of the sky, that belt denotes not deceit but the splendor of the world. Worn by Aphrodite, the girdle becomes both splendor and deceit. But perhaps this was precisely what the Olympians wanted: that a soft, deceiving sash should cover the inflexible bond of necessity.”

Our Venusian encounters are sealed with fatedness. Lightness quickly and imperceptibly becomes heaviness. Consequences weigh on lovers with Ananke’s unforgiveness.

The cycle of Venus, Detail from James Ferguson’s, Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, 1799 ed., plate III, opp. p. 67, via http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/anti-masonry/venus.html

In astrological symbolism, Venus relates to the golden ratio – the measurable aspect of beauty. Nobody has expressed the beauty of the birth of Venus in a more outstanding fashion than Rilke in his poem “The Birth of Venus,” in Edward Snow’s translation:

“In the morning after that night which fearfully

has passed in outcry, tumult, uproar,—

the sea split open once again and screamed.

And as the scream slowly closed again

and from the sky’s pale light and brightness fell back into the mute fishes’ chasm—:

the sea gave birth.

From first sun the hair-froth shimmered

on the wide curl of wave, on whose lip

the girl stood—white, wet, confused.

As a blade of new green leaf stirs,

stretches, uncoils itself and slowly opens,

her body unfolded into cool sea-air

and into untouched early morning breeze.

Like moons the knees rose brightly

and ducked into the cloud­ rims of the thighs;

the calves’ slender shadows retreated,

the feet flexed and grew luminous,

and the joints came alive like the throats

of drinkers.

And in the hips’ chalice lay the belly,

like a young fruit in a child’s hand.

Within its navel’s narrow cup was all

the darkness that this bright life contained.

Beneath it the small wave rose lightly

and lapped continuously toward the loins,

where now and then there was a silent ripple.

But translucent and yet without shadow,

like a birch stand in early April,

warm, empty, and unhidden, lay the sex.

Now the shoulders’ quick scales stood already

in perfect balance on the upright body,

which rose from the pelvis like a fountain

and fell hesitantly in the long arms

and more swiftly in the hairs’ cascades.

Then very slowly the face went past:

out of downtilted darkness

into clear, horizontal upliftedness.

And behind it the sharp closing of the chin.

Now, with the neck stretched like a ray of light,

and like flower-stalks in which the sap rises,

the arms too stretched out like necks

of swans, when they are searching for the shore.

Then into this body’s dark dawning

came the first breath like morning wind.

In the vein-trees’ tenderest branches

a whispering arose, and the blood began

rushing louder over its deep places.

And this wind increased; now it plunged

with all its might into the newborn breasts

and filled them and crowded into them,-

so that like sails full of distance

they drove the light girl toward the shore.

And thus the goddess landed.

Behind her,

as she strode swiftly on through the young shores,

all morning the flowers and the grasses

sprang up, warm, confused,

as from embracing. And she walked and ran.

But at noon, in the heaviest hour,

the sea rose up once more and threw

a dolphin on that selfsame spot.

Dead, red, and open.”

Sandro Botticelli, “The Birth of Venus”

References:

Roberto Calasso, Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Kindle edition

Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate, Kindle edition

Richard P. Martin, Myths of the Ancient Greeks, Kindle edition

Reiner Maria Rilke, New Poems, Kindle edition

Roger Sworder, Science and Religion in Archaic Greece: Homer on Immortality and Parmenides at Delphi, Kindle edition

Wilhelm Kotarbinski, “Water Nymph”

“She shook the bright drops from her hair

And gazed upon the anchorite;

To look upon her form so fair

The good monk trembled with affright.

And he beheld her from afar

With head and hand strange signals make,

Then swifter than a shooting star

Dive back into the silent lake.”

Alexander Pushkin, “Rusalka”

We do not have any written records of Slavic mythology; sadly, we have to make do with second-hand accounts and archaeological findings. As much as I am fascinated by Greek and Egyptian mythology, my roots are Slavic, and consequently any exposure to the Slavic lore has a visceral effect on me, not comparable to anything else. Stories of water nymphs, mermaids and sirens are fascinating, but none of them bear quite the same imprint on my unconscious as the stories of the rusalki (Slavic water nymphs, plural of rusalka). Recently, I have come across a great book by Joanna Hubbs Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture. One of its section is dedicated to the rusalki lore. In the nineteenth century, these mythological creatures were vilified as death demons, but for ancient Slavs they were predominantly kind, though powerful and sometimes feared, nature spirits. They played a key role in pagan fertility rituals. Their predecessors were called bereginy (bereg means ‘shore’) and connected water and earth in their cult. Their sacred tree was the birch. The later rusalki or vily were believed to live in water and also on land and in trees; they were half women – half fish or half women – half birds. Hubbs refers to them as “spinners” who regulated “human and animal fertility, the cycle of the seasons, the moon, and the weather.” As it is in Rusalka, the famous opera by Antoni Dvorak, rusalki were usually part of a group of mysterious maidens – daughters of a sea or bird king. Their roots are very archaic, says Hubbs:

“Every incarnation of the water nymph suggests the archaic image of the bird-headed transformational goddess who accompanies humanity from the period of the hunt to that of horticulture, herding – and warfare. She is the goddess who creates parthenogenetically by bringing moisture to the earth from below and above, unaided by male consorts. She is one yet multiple, chooses her mate like the shamanic Mistress of Animals, and confers power (military or otherwise) on the male, whom, like the Great Goddess of the Neolithic, she then destroys. She is virginal like Artemis, and yet the giver of life and death.”

Walter Crane, “Swan Maidens”

The rusalka was portrayed as half-bird or half-fish (sirin), sometimes with a lion or a horse, sometimes as “a dragon or lion-tailed creature with the wings of a bird.” Other animals strongly connected with her were the deer and the snake. Her hair looked like entangled snakes – combing it produced rain, called “the milk from heaven.” She was the goddess of the sun, the moon and the rain, fertility, renewal and rebirth, which was symbolized by the snake shedding its skin and the deer shedding its antlers. As birds, rusalki rode on clouds to direct the rains. Floods were caused by too energetic combing of their long serpent tresses. They had under their dominion phases of the moon and the production of winds. Continues Hubbs:

“Artifacts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries found around Kiev show that the Slavic bereginy, like the Russian rusalki, were emulated in their moisture-making functions by young girls, whirling in long-sleeved blouses,… who played the part of rainmakers, bringers of fertility. The very name for ‘girl’ in Russian, deva, suggests linguistic ties with Indian and Persian religious and mythological figures of feminine divinity. … Div or deva in Sanskrit means ‘light’ and ‘pure.’”

Arthur Rackham, “The Rhine Maidens”

While reflecting on this etymology, a thought occurred to me. This lightness and purity of the archetypal feminine means that rusalki, as well as their mermaid and water nymph sisters, stand for the forces of the unconscious struggling to become conscious. In Dvorak’s opera, the title-character falls in love with a prince and decides to accept human form for him. The story does not end well, though the characters learn the value and power of true love. There seems to be a mortal danger present in crossing the line from the unconscious to consciousness. Paradigms are not shifted peacefully but rather in tumultuous birth pangs. This is beautifully expressed by Dane Rudhyar in his interpretation of the Sabian Symbol for 29 Leo (A MERMAID EMERGES FROM THE OCEAN WAVES READY FOR REBIRTH IN HUMAN FORM):

“KEYNOTE: The stage at which an intense feeling­ intuition rising from the unconscious is about to take form as a conscious thought.

The mermaid personifies a stage of awareness still partially enveloped by the ever­ moving and ever elusive ocean of the collective Unconscious, yet already half formulated by the conscious mind. Any creative thinker or artist knows well the peculiar mixture of elation and anxiety characterizing such a stage. Will the intuitive feeling fade away reabsorbed into the unconscious, or will the inexpressible realization acquire the concreteness and expressible form of a concept or a definite motif in an art form? This fourth symbol in the thirtieth five­fold sequence suggests that the fire of desire for concrete and steady form burns at the root of all techniques of self-­expression. An unconscious energy archetype is reaching toward consciousness through the creator, as cosmic Love seeks tangible manifestation through human lovers. The whole pre­human universe reaches eagerly to the human stage of clear and steady consciousness. It is this great evolutionary urge, this elan vital, which is implied in this symbol of the mermaid seeking human incarnation — the YEARNING FOR CONSCIOUS FORM AND SOLIDITY.”

Odilon Redon, “Mermaid”

As our culture progressively divorced itself from its archetypal bedrock, so did the meaning of rusalki and their Greek mythological counterparts transition, stressing now their destructive powers, luring men into their deaths. Unwanted and ignored, they had to exercise their powers from the underworld (the unconscious). The denigration of unconscious powers always ends in a horrible backlash. What was suppressed is now rising with an upsurge. It looks like the magical powers of the feminine have been finding their way into the collective consciousness. We are culturally ready to be reinitiated into the deepest mysteries of Her nature.

Apollo of Mantua
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_of_Mantua

1.“I am the eye with which the Universe
Beholds itself, and knows it is divine;
All harmony of instrument or verse,
All prophecy, all medicine, is mine,
All light of art or nature; – to my song
Victory and praise in its own right belong.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Hymn of Apollo”

2.“In Classical times, music, poetry, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and science came under Apollo’s control. As the enemy of barbarism, he stood for moderation in all things, and the seven strings of his lyre were connected with the seven vowels of the later Greek alphabet, given mystical significance and used for therapeutic music. Finally, because of his identification with the Child Horus, a solar concept, he was worshipped as the sun, ….and his sister Artemis was, rightly, identified with the moon.”

Robert Graves, “Greek Myths”

Jacopo de’ Barbari, “Apollo and Diana,” engraving, via http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/360380

3. “Coronis was washing her feet in Lake Boebeis. Apollo saw her and desired her. Desire came as a sudden shock, it caught him by surprise, and immediately he wanted to have done with it. He descended on Coronis like the night. Their coupling was violent, exhilarating, and fast. In Apollo’s mind the clutch of a body and the shooting of an arrow were superimposed. The meeting of their bodies was not a mingling, as for Dionysus, but a collision.”

Roberto Calasso, “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”

As nothing can surpass the radiance of the Sun, so no other Olympian god was perceived as more radiant than the superior and grandiose Apollo. Liz Greene calls him “an image of loftiness of spirit,” Walter Otto “the manifestation of the divine amidst the desolation and confusion of the world.” He bestows grace and sublimity even on the most godforsaken places. It was exactly so with Delos, where he was born. Roberto Calasso wrote that it was “a hump of deserted Rock, drifting about the sea like a stalk of asphodel.” Yet, this barren piece of rock was surrounded by swans as if waiting for the miracle about to occur. Leto had been running from the wrath of Hera, who, jealous of Zeus, had forbidden her to give birth on stable earth. A floating poor island of Delos gained a lot from being the birthplace of Zeus’ favorite son. Calasso:

“Then Apollo emerged, and everything turned to gold, from top to bottom. Even the water in the river turned to gold and the leaves on the olive tree likewise. And the gold must have stretched downward into the depths, because it anchored Delos to the seabed. From that day on, the island drifted no more.”

Delos temple, white lions, via Wikipedia

Apollo, the Sun god, has been likened to no less than the Holy Grail by Liz Greene. He is the light of pure divinity of the Jungian Self that is possessed by each of us. He is the inner jewel of royalty that can shine on any desolate landscape and conquer the direst of circumstances. He is the spiritual centre of gravity; he is what sustains us when all the other modes of support have failed. Calasso calls him “unnatural,” “serene,” “abstracted,” looking down on the world, with his “eyes … elsewhere, as if gazing at an invisible mirror, where … (he finds his) own images detached from all else.”

Where there is so much blinding light, the shadow must be deep and equally enormous. Apollo’s dark side is his deadliness, his vicious competitiveness, and utter lack of forgiveness. His is the power that obliterates whatever came before it.  As he is a master archer, death by his hand comes swiftly and unexpectedly. The Homeric hymn to Delian Apollo begins with a startling scene showing the gods frightened of Apollo:

“I will remember and not be unmindful of Apollo who shoots afar. As he goes through the house of Zeus, the gods tremble before him and all spring up from their seats when he draws near, as he bends his bright bow.”

Via http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0138%3Ahymn%3D3

Albrecht Dürer, “Poynter Apollo”, holding a bow and an orb, via http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/63.212

He was a conqueror in love, too, though with varied success. His first love was the aloof nymph Daphne. As Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses, “the smitten god went up in flames until his heart was utterly afire, and hope sustained his unrequited passion.” And in a further brilliant passage, “admonished by his own passion, he accelerates, and runs as swiftly as a Gallic hound chasing a rabbit through an open field.” According to Graves, the myth of Daphne metamorphosing into a laurel tree to escape the hot pursuit of Apollo refers to “the Hellenic capture of Tempe, where the goddess Daphoene (‘bloody one’) was worshiped by a college of orgiastic laurel-chewing Maenads.” Apollo and a new solar religion took over all major mother earth shrines with the most famous one at Delphi (a subject of my next post).

Bernini, “Apollo and Daphne”

I admire Roberto Calasso’s perspicacity when he observes that in fact Apollo did not want to possess Daphne. This aloof god was after the idea of Daphne, her divine essence, and to him her worth was embodied in a symbol she left behind – a laurel leaf that he made into a poet’s crown. The Greek word “nymphólēptos “- “possession” comes from the word Nymph. Apollo made extensive use of archetypally feminine trance and possession states in all of his major oracles. He took the wild young girls from Helicon to train and cultivate their skills. The Greeks believed that he imposed the laws of civilization, divine order and measure upon the wild chaos – thus the Muses and Art were born. In the Homeric hymn to Pythian Apollo, summarized by Graf, “As soon as he enters the assembly, ‘the minds of the immortals turn to lyre and song’, and the Muses sing a hymn about gods and men. ‘The fair-tressed Graces and joyful Seasons, with Harmony, Youth, and Aphrodite the daughter of Zeus, hold hands by the wrist and dance’, and Artemis, Ares, and Hermes join them. ‘But Phoibos Apollo plays on the lyre, stepping fine and high.’” Apollonian mousika was an ultimate expression of beauty and harmony; it could still the most turbulent and confused hearts.

The songs performed by and for Apollo were paeans, which also connect with Apollo’s healing powers (the subject of my future article). Paeans, as Graf describes, were sung “before battle or after victory, at the beginning of a symposium, or before any risky undertaking, such as setting sail or, in comic parody, going to court.” They were also sung at weddings, “yet another uncertain beginning.” Apollo was seen as the Averter of Evil addressed by paeans in situations of danger and uncertainty. In a beautiful Orphic hymn to Apollo we read:

 “You make everything bloom

with your versatile lyre,

you harmonize the poles.”

Gustave Moreau, “Apollo Receiving the Shepherds’ Offerings”

Sources:

Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Kindle edition

Fritz Graf, Apollo (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World), Kindle edition

Robert Graves, Greek Myths

Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate, Kindle edition

Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Charles Martin, Kindle edition

The Orphic Hymns, translated by Apostolos N Athanassakis, Kindle edition

1.“I count the grains of sand on the beach and measure the sea; I understand the speech of the dumb and hear the voiceless.”

The Pythia

2. “Tell the king, the fair-wrought house has fallen. No shelter has Apollo, nor sacred laurel leaves; The fountains now are silent; the voice is stilled.”

Pythia’s last oracular reply

John Collier, “Priestess of Delphi”

In an extraordinary poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” Reiner Maria Rilke is faced with the ultimate mystery of divinity. A torso of the Greek sun god reveals to him his own inner God image – that elusive, transcendent centre of the psyche, which, like the mysterious centre of a mandala, or our inner galactic rotational centre, attracts, magnetizes and organizes all of our psychological processes. Jung called it the Self. The last line of the poem – “You must change your life” – echoes the famous inscription “Know Thyself” from the Apollonian oracle in Delphi. To know oneself means to accept the supremacy of the Self, that mysterious mover and shaker that brings about what we call Fate for lack of a better word. This process must and will result in a transformation. I am quoting the poem in Edward Snow’s translation:

“We never knew his head and all the light

that ripened in his fabled eyes. But

his torso still glows like a gas lamp dimmed

in which his gaze, lit long ago,

holds fast and shines. Otherwise the surge of the breast

could not blind you, nor a smile

run through the slight twist of the loins

toward that center where procreation thrived.

Otherwise this stone would stand deformed and curt

under the shoulders’ transparent plunge

and not glisten just like wild beasts’ fur

and not burst forth from all its contours

like a star: for there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.”

On of Apollo’s epithets was Phoebus, which meant pure or holy. He presided over most of Greek renowned oracular shrines, where multitudes flocked to reconnect with their own inner pure and holy place, and thus find answers to questions of various magnitude. His was Didyma, Delphi and Clarus, while only Dodona belonged to Zeus, whose priestesses called Sybils interpreted the rustling of oak leaves. Porphyry thus described the three methods of divination used by three main Apollonian oracles:

“There are those who give oracles having drunk water, such as the priest of Clarian Apollo in Colophon; others are sitting over openings in the ground, such as the women who give oracles in Delphi; others again are breathing inspiration from water, such as the prophetesses in Didyma.”

Delphi was by far the greatest and most renowned. It marked the centre of the Greek inhabited world. As Roger Sworder explains:

“Inside the temple of Apollo at Delphi was a certain stone, the navel stone or omphalos, …. The story went that two eagles or swans flying in opposite directions from the furthest parts of the earth had met in Delphi at this stone. … The navel stone was hemispherical and sacred to the goddess Earth. …

The stone was inside the temple of Apollo. Also inside the temple was the oracular shrine of the Pythian prophetess. As in a womb, delphys, male and female, waking and sleeping, light and night were joined here. What was done here enacted the hidden point of the cosmic genesis and organized the ancient Greek world after its pattern. The omphalos showed that this was where the womb was. …

It was called the navel stone because it marked the representation of the cosmic womb. In this place the heart of space, the heart of thought and the heart of generation were at one. It is usual for oracular shrines to be placed at geographic centres. In the Vedas it is said that all oracles are set as is the nave within the wheel. A word for an oracular pronouncement in Greek is omphe, which is connected with omphalos. From here the Greek world opened out, guided by the principal thought at its center.”

The Omphalos

He continues:

“Delphi was the location of Mount Parnassus, a favorite place of Apollo and the Muses.

… The early Hymn to Pythian Apollo describes how the god came to Krisa, a foothill facing west beneath snowy Parnassus, and there decided to site his temple. Then he laid out all the foundations, wide and very long. The longer sides of the building were aligned east and west; the shorter sides, in one of which was the main entrance, north and south. … Guided by Justice Apollo surveyed the earth from his chariot, going from west to east in his yearly journey round the zodiac. In his temple he was the geographer of the Greeks. His laying out of its foundations symbolizes his nature. The lines he drew on the surfaces of earth and heaven ran straight as the arrows he shot from his bow. With this bow he killed Tityus and also the dragon from whose decay Delphi was called Pytho. These were victories of the mind which measures rather than of the reason which overcomes passion. He is pictured on many vases seated on the omphalos inside the temple, his bow and quiver hanging from a peg. The omphalos is covered with a net or knotted ropes, other symbols of geodesy.”

J.M.W. Turner, “Apollo and Python”

Similarly, Fritz Graf calls the establishment of the oracle at Delphi “a mythical feat that has cosmic dimensions, marking the beginning of the world as we know it.” According to the Homeric hymn to Apollo, the god killed a serpent/dragon and proceeded to call the place Pytho (Stinkton) after the stench of the rotting beast. We can also choose to read the story as one of an aggressive male God taking over the place, which long before him was sacred to earth goddess (with the snake as one of her attributes) and famous for its oracular properties. However, one simple fact seems to disprove that version, at least in my eyes: The Pythia, the high priestess of Delphi, was the highest spiritual authority and the only channel of divine will. She was the true and only messenger of the gods. Oracles revered the powers of the earth, its sacred springs and lofty rock formations. That was perhaps not a conquest but a loving assimilation, showing deeper understanding of the nature of divine inspiration.

A vase depicting Apollo on a winged tripod over the sea with dolphins

Before Apollo, the presiding deity in Delphi was Gaia, the earth goddess. In a scientific (and yet deeply spiritual) book on Delphi’s secrets, which was a true revelation for me, William J. Broad describes how from a geological perspective, with its mountains, canyons and cliffs, this is an absolutely unique, one-of-a-kind place in the world, “a place where primal forces have thrown open the secrets of the earth to human inquiry.” Behind the temple, the view was dominated by twin limestone cliffs called the Phaedriades (the Bright Ones or the Shining Rocks), which put on a golden hue as the sun rose and set. The cleft that nested the sanctuary was indeed like the womb, naturally flanked by imposing mountains on three sides. The place abounded in crystalline clear springs, which were believed by the locals to possess magical qualities. All this made Delphi a secluded retreat and a stunning sanctuary. Pilgrims must have been dazzled by an awesome display of Oracle’s wealth. A wide road lead through a row of impressive statues donated to Delphi by grateful rulers of ancient cities, past imposing buildings, up to the monumental Doric temple. The peak of Mount Parnassus, home of the Muses, a mountain sacred to both Apollo and Dionysus, towered over the sanctuary. Broad writes:

“First-time visitors surely gazed about in reverential silence. Some probably wept. Scores of statues of Apollo greeted pilgrims, one looking down from a height of nearly sixty feet. Made of bronze, it could gleam in the clear mountain air, not unlike the god of the sun himself.

The temple itself was a Doric gem. A bit smaller than the Parthenon, it arose in the fourth century BCE during Greece’s classical age and represented the culminating edifice of a series of temples that were increasingly large and stately. Its entrance bore such inscriptions as ‘Know Thyself’ and ‘Avoid Extremes’ lest visitors doubt their arrival at the epicenter of wisdom.”

Bronze head of Apollo from the Temple of Apollo in Pompeii

The importance and centrality of the Oracle in the culture of Ancient Greece cannot be overestimated, Broad emphasizes:

“No seer or diviner stood higher. No voice, civil or religious, carried further. No authority was more sought after or more influential. None. She quite literally had the power to depose kings. …

The evidence suggests that her words repeatedly changed the course of history. Over a vast period—ages in which peoples came and went, empires rose and fell—the Oracle proved to be the most durable and compelling force in what was arguably the most important society that humans ever devised. She was the guide star of Greek civilization. We have no equivalent. No religious or secular figure, no pope or imam, no celebrity or scientist, commands the kind of respect that the Greeks accorded the Oracle of Delphi. Her sacred precinct on the flanks of Mount Parnassus was the spiritual heart of the Hellenic world.”

A French archaeologist was quoted to say that the place was “full of mystery, grandeur and divine terror.” He was referring to his team unearthing the adyton – the sacred chamber positioned in the temple, where Pythia delivered her prophecies. She prophesized sitting on a tripod inside the adyton, which in ancient Greek means “do not enter.” She inhaled mysterious vapors rising from a cleft beneath her feet and enveloping her in a supernatural mist. Before a consultation, the Pythia would bathe herself in the waters of the Castalia spring. Priests would purify themselves in its waters, too. Next, they would all proceed to yet another holy spring – the Kassotis, which emerged from within the sanctuary itself. There the Pythia would drink its sacred waters.  Finally, the Oracle would descend to the adyton, where she would sit on a tripod with the view of the omphalos flanked by two golden eagles of Zeus. Other sacred objects included a statue of Apollo and Grave of Dionysus. Her spiritual union with the god aided by her inhaling of sacred pneuma ensued. Broad summarizes: “The Pythia, presiding over the adyton, rapturous in her divine intoxication, would turn inward, reflect on the question, shake a laurel branch as the spirit of Apollo swept through her, and utter the god’s response. As the Pythia spoke, the priest recorded her words.”

“Around 440 BCE, an Athenian potter decorated a large cup with a portrait of the Delphic Oracle in the midst of a prophetic session. It turns out to be the only surviving image that we have of the Pythia from her own day. The illustration shows neither a rustic maid nor a youthful seductress. Rather, it portrays a woman in her prime, with full breasts and supple gracefulness, her long alb coming down to her ankles. She sits on the tripod, her bare feet dangling off the floor, her body slumped, not quite herself, thoughtful, her eyes gazing down, looking into a small dish, presumably filled with water from a sacred spring, perhaps fragrant with a sweet aroma. In her right hand she holds a sprig of laurel, Apollo’s holy plant. The ceiling of her oracular chamber is low, and beneath her feet, below the floor, the artist has depicted a void.”
William J. Broad

Who was the Pythia? Contrary to what a twentieth-century scientific consensus claimed, she was neither a dupe nor a tool in the hands of savvy priests. She was not a junkie babbling under the influence of subterranean gas, either. Nor was she possessed by the devil who was violating her disguised as Apollo, as believed early Christians. Those outrageous modern claims have nothing in common with what respectable ancient sources and greatest intellectual authorities stated about her. For them, she embodied the holiest of all mysteries: of the possibility of human connection and communication with the divine. She was revered by the greatest minds of her times. Granted, ancient Greece was to all intents and purposes a misogynistic culture. Broad writes:

“Such regard was extraordinary for anyone, much less a woman. Most of ancient Greece lived by a code of extreme male chauvinism, at times of misogyny. Philosophers taught that men were superior to women even as artists such as Euripides railed against the oppression of females. For the middle and upper classes of Athens, a woman’s place tended to be in the home, working as a mother and a domestic manager, rarely allowed out except during festivals. Female babies were often victims of infanticide because of the economic drain of dowries. Men ruled public life. Some temples banned women and pigs. Some gods, such as Heracles Misogynous, sang the virtues of hating women. Even in the sacred environs of Delphi, woman petitioners seldom if ever had the authority to question the Oracle directly but instead had to put their questions through male intermediaries. Yet the jarring contradiction—suitable for any number of psychoanalytic studies—is that the greatest authority of ancient Greece was a woman.”

More precisely, there were numerous Pythias, one succeeding the other. They were members of mystical sisterhood, a sorority carefully guiding their sacred secrets. They enjoyed high social standing and freedom, unlike other Greek women. Men working at the sanctuary knew little of their comings and goings. One of the Pythias named Clea was close friends with Plutarch, himself a high priest of Apollo. He held her wisdom in extremely high esteem and had a lot of respect for her secrets.

In winter months, the oracle grounds were taken over by ecstatic worshipers of Dionysus. It seems that Clea was a member of that cult as well. Plutarch did not reveal her secrets, but just wrote instead: “Let us leave undisturbed what may not be told.” Dionysus was an inherent part of the Delphic mystery. The east side of the temple was dedicated to Apollo, but its west side was sacred to Dionysus – the god of wine and animal impulse, the loosener of civilized bonds. His side of the temple faced the setting sun and connected to Night and eerie orgiastic cults of the maenads. As Broad describes:

“In the chill night air, often under the stars, accompanied by torches and a beating drum, led by a double flute and a youth playing the role of Dionysus, the worshippers would dance their way up the cliffs behind the temple and climb seven miles to the Korykian cave, where their rites continued amid the large stalagmites that were easily seen in flickering light as divine phalli. Little is known of what occurred there because the rite was part of a mystery cult whose initiates pledged to keep their activities secret. It appears that the orgy could include sexual liberties in which the women might swiftly embrace their male companions, though scholars say the god did not demand such tribute. His rapturous devotees were free to act, or not, amid the surrender of the human spirit to the will of the god. The frenzied women were known as maenads, after the Greek verb meaning to be mad or furious.

Plutarch tells us that the rites culminated in screams and shouts and heads thrown back.”

Apollo and Dionysus at Delphi, Attic vase, fourth century BC

After the secret rites of winter brought about rebirth through a reconnection with the sacred chaos, the Oracle could proceed with its sheer blinding brilliance and keep delivering its uncannily accurate predictions in the months when the sun was at the height of its power. The messages of the Oracle were lofty but never arrogant. She always acknowledged the limits of knowledge. She protected the sanctity of life, regardless of the person’s social position. Notably, she used her power to free thousands of slaves. And she had little patience for arrogant wealthy supplicants.

Orestes at Delphi, via Wikipedia

The greatest minds of the time – Socrates, Aristotle and Plato – were closely connected with Delphi. In a famous prophecy, the Pythia professed that no man was wiser than Socrates. Humbled, the great philosopher spent his life searching for the meaning of this prophesy. In Broad’s words: “Even as his constant questioning made him poor and unpopular, religious duty kept him asking and searching, trying to understand the Oracle’s meaning. In the end, he decided it meant that real wisdom is the exclusive property of the gods and Apollo’s reference to him was ‘as if he would say to us, the wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless.’” I know that I know nothing, as per the Socratic paradox. When another great man of his times, Cicero asked the Oracle what he should do to attain the highest fame, she responded that “he should make his own nature, not the opinion of others, his guide in life.” He became a master orator.

In the fourth century, the oracle ceased to operate. The site was pillaged, its ruins buried under a village now called Kastri. Nobody remembered the glorious past until in 1463 Cyriac of Ancona, a Renaissance scholar, climbed the Parnassus and realized with astonishment what he was looking at. William Broad’s extraordinary book narrates the history of rediscovery of Delphi, most notably the scientific discomfort with the mystical aura surrounding the place until this day. First, the hypotheses of subterranean gases was vehemently rejected on the grounds that the Oracle was nothing but a fraud. When it turned out that there were in fact gases emitted into the sacred chamber, a new theory emerged, according to which the Pythia was high, and her babbling incoherent mutterings had to be made worthy of the gods by the male priests. Wisdom and inspiration of the Pythia accompanied by her obvious psychic abilities was not something readily accepted by science. She will remain elusive and unknown. “The wisps of ethylene and bouts of rapturous intoxication” do not prove that what happened in Delphi was a purely physical process. As the scientist Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, the scientist chiefly responsible for the discovery of the Delphi subterranean gases, remarked in an interview with William Broad:

“… the chemical stimulus in no way explained the Oracle’s cultural and religious power, her role as a font of knowledge, her liberation of hundreds of slaves, her encouragement of personal morality, her influence in helping the Greeks invent themselves, or—by extension—whether she really had psychic powers. Even if her prognostications were judged to have no basis in literal foreknowledge, it gave no explanation for how she reflected the underlying currents of ancient Greek society and how her utterances stood for ages as monuments of wisdom. It said nothing of how the priestess inspired Socrates or functioned as a social mirror, revealing the subconscious fears and hopes of those who sought her guidance, or of how she often worked as a catalyst, letting kings and commoners act on their dreams. In futility, the situation was like attributing masterworks of twentieth-century literature to the fact that major authors indulged in heavy drinking.”

The Pythia eludes all attempts to demystify her. A Victorian painter John Collier captured her spirit wonderfully in his painting done in 1891. In this wonderful canvas, her eyes are closed, her concentration deep, “as if her mind was moving through all time and space” (Broad’s description). Will we ever fathom her divine ecstasy?

Giorgio de Chirico, “The Enigma of the Oracle”

Sites with photos of Delphi:

http://www.discovergreece.com/en/mainland/central-greece/delphi

http://ancient-greece.org/history/delphi.html

http://ancient-greece.org/archaeology/delphi-archaeology.html

Sources:

William J. Broad, The Oracle: Ancient Delphi and the Science Behind Its Lost Secrets, Kindle edition

Fritz Graf, Apollo (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World), Kindle edition

Roger Sworder, Science and Religion in Archaic Greece: Homer on Immortality and Parmenides at Delphi, Kindle edition

Related posts:

http://symbolreader.net/2015/08/23/to-apollo-the-averter-of-evil-the-bringer-of-harmony-part-1/

http://thetarotnook.com/2013/09/06/the-fascinating-flickering-tongue-of-the-pythia/

Self Portrait

“Was it true that, according to her final wishes, the ashes of the Polish-Russian artist Tamara de Lempicka were dropped from a helicopter by her daughter Kizette into the crater of the Mexican volcano Popocatépetl? What an Olympian, cataclysmic, magnificent way for the woman to say goodbye to this world, a woman who, as her paintings testified, knew not only how to paint but how to enjoy herself, an artist whose fingers imparted an exalted and at the same time icy lasciviousness to these supple, slithering, rounded, opulent nudes who paraded before his eyes: Rhythm, La Belle Rafaela, Myrto, The Model, The Slave. His five favorites. Who said that art deco and eroticism were incompatible? In the 1920s and 1930s, this Polish-Russian woman with the tweezed eyebrows, burning, voracious eyes, sensual mouth, and crude hands populated her canvases with an intense lechery, icy only in appearance, because in the imagination and sensibility of an attentive spectator the sculptural immobility of the canvas disappeared and the figures became animated, intertwined, they assailed, caressed, united with, loved, and enjoyed one another with complete shamelessness. A beautiful, marvelous, exciting spectacle: those women portrayed or invented by Tamara de Lempicka in Paris, Milan, New York, Hollywood, and in her final seclusion in Cuernavaca. Inflated, fleshy, exuberant, elegant, they proudly displayed the triangular navels for which Tamara must have felt a particular predilection, as great as the one inspired by the abundant, succulent thighs of immodest aristocrats whom she stripped only to clothe them in lechery and carnal insolence. … He slowly turned the pages of the book, barely stopping at the mannered aristocratic men, with blue tubercular circles under their eyes, pausing at the splendid, languid female figures with shifting eyes, hair as flat as helmets, scarlet nails, upright breasts, majestic hips, who almost always seemed to be writhing like cats in heat.

…

He was ecstatic over these beautiful damsels decked out in low-cut, transparent dresses, gleaming jewels, all of them possessed by a profound desire that struggled to become manifest in their enormous eyes. ‘To go from art deco to abstraction, what madness, Tamara,’ he thought. Though even the abstract paintings of Tamara de Lempicka exuded a mysterious sensuality.”

Mario Vargas Llosa, “The Discreet Hero”

“Girl with Gloves”

“Surrealist landscape”

Poliphilo enters a dense and pathless forest

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream or Poliphilo’s Struggle for Love in a Dream), more than just a book but rather a milestone in depth psychology, was published in Venice in 1499. It featured beautiful woodcut illustrations and told a bizarre story that resembled the logic of a dream:

“The action of the ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’ takes place in a dream. The books opens on the hero, Poliphilo, who has spent a restless night because his beloved, Polia, has shunned him. At the break of day, he finally falls into a deep slumber and his ‘Hypnerotomachia,’ or, as it can be roughly translated, ‘struggle for love in a dream,’ begins. The action is particularly absurd, however, even by the standards of the genre. Poliphilo is transported into a wild forest. He gets lost, escapes, and falls asleep once more. He then awakens in a second dream, dreamed inside the first. Within it, he is taken by some nymphs to meet their queen. There he is asked to declare his love for Polia, which he does. He is then directed by two nymphs to three gates. He chooses the third, and there he discovers his beloved. They are taken by some more nymphs to a temple to be engaged. Along the way they come across no less than five triumphal processions celebrating the union of the lovers. Then they are taken to the island of Cythera by barge, with Cupid as the boatswain; there they see another triumphal procession celebrating their union. The narrative is uninterrupted, and a second voice takes over, as Polia describes the erotomachia from her own point of view. This takes up one fifth of the book, after which the hero resumes his narrative. They are blissfully wed, but Polia vanishes into thin air as Poliphilo is about to take her into his arms.”

Via http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-books/HP/hyptext0.htm

This “frenetic, fantastic specimen” of a book, as Liane Lefaivre describes it, is full of mysterious messages in various languages. It is a testament to boundless creativity and simmering mutability of the psyche, ceaselessly spouting foam, creating mirages, blowing soap bubbles, while painting internal, breathtaking landscapes of the soul. Poliphilo chases Polia through grottos, landscapes and gardens which get increasingly fantastical, with an aquatic labyrinth taking the crown. Poliphilo, “lover of many things,” and Polia, “many things,” symbolize the boundedness of Psyche to Eros – as one cannot exist without the other. Yet they both delight in endless hot pursuit.

Links:

http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-books/HP/index.htm

http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/search-results?q=Hypnerotomachia+Poliphili

“Coronis was pregnant by Apollo when she found herself attracted to a stranger. He came from Arcadia, and his name was Ischys. A white crow watched over her. Apollo had told the bird to guard the woman he loved, ‘so that no one might violate her purity.’ The crow saw Coronis give herself to Ischys. So off it flew to Delphi and its master to tell the tale. It said it had discovered Coronis’s ‘secret doings.’ In his fury, Apollo threw down his plectrum. His laurel crown fell in the dust. Looking at the crow, his eyes were full of hatred, and the creature’s feathers turned black as pitch. Then Apollo asked his sister Artemis to go and kill Coronis, in Lacereia. Artemis’s arrow pierced the faithless woman’s breast. … Before dying, Coronis whispered to the god that he had killed his own son too. At which Apollo tried to save her. In vain. His medical skills were not up to it. But when the woman’s sweet-smelling body was stretched on a pyre high as a wall, the flames parted before the god’s grasping hand, and from the dead mother’s belly, safe and sound, he pulled out Asclepius, the healer.”

Roberto Calasso, “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”

Apollo

“When he promised to resuscitate the dead son of king Minos, Glaucus, Asclepius retreated into the woods in order to think about a cure. A snake wound itself around his staff; angered at being disturbed, he killed it, but then observed another snake bringing an herb and reviving its dead companion. He used the same herb to cure Glaucus, adopted the snake as his sacred animal, and made the staff with the snake his symbol.”

Fritz Graf, “Apollo (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World)”

The rod of Asclepius

When grown up, Asclepius became the best physician that ever existed. Carried away by his success, however, he forgot the limits that Zeus had set to mortal men: he tried to resuscitate the dead. Zeus killed him with his lightning, restoring the cosmic order which Asclepius threatened.

Fritz Graf, “Apollo (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World)”

Asclepius, a healer, a redeemer, a son who by his tender devotion atoned for his father’s haughtiness and hubris, may be the most sublime figure of the Greek pantheon. Similarly to Chiron, who raised him, Asclepius, the “unceasingly gentle”, bridged the gap between nature and culture, as Fritz Graf put it, by connecting the material world of the sense with the abstract world of the divine mind. Always accompanied by his daughters, most notable of whom were Hygeia and Panacea, he redeemed the feminine violated by his father and other prominent Olympian gods. Asclepian healing practice was very different from that administered by his formidable father. The healing granted by Apollo, the Averter of Evil, the Purger and Purifier, was swift, coming from afar, abstract, detached, and as sudden as a lightning bolt, since he was a god of healing and a god of punishment in equal measure. Apollo healed the plagues he sent. The followers of the path of Asclepius, however, relied heavily on ritual (incubation), honored the right time and place, and always paid homage to the earth goddess.

There are at least three different versions of Asclepius’ birth. In one of them recounted by Robert Graves, it was not Apollo who snatched the baby out of the funeral pyre, but Hermes. I find this tidbit quite appealing, because Asclepios seems to be a very Hermetic figure to me. He walked the earth with a staff in his hand (known today the rod of Asclepius), devoting his time to “praxis kai logos,” i.e. “treating with hands and by speaking magic words.” To describe the process, Meier quotes from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus: “He ascends to Heaven from earth, and again descends to earth, and is endowed with the strength of the Powers above and below”. Asclepius is in fact one of the prominent characters of Corpus Hermeticum, in which he makes an appearance as a devoted follower and disciple of Hermes Trismegistus himself. Hermes admonishes Asclepius to devote himself to the world rather than escape it by saying to him in Book IX that “sense and understanding both flow together in man, as they are entwined with each other. It is neither possible to understand without sense nor to sense without understanding.” Higher understanding must be rooted in the body – this is the essence of hermeticism. Furthermore, number three seems to be of special significance to Asclepius, as it is to Hermes. There are three myths related to his birth, there are three animals sacred to him – the snake, the cock and the dog. The cock, like Hermes, connects to the inherent duality of being as an animal that, as Tick puts it, “straddles yin and yang, darkness and light, day and night. It calls us to consciousness, crying at the break of dawn to awaken us from dreams.” It heralds the sunrise, and so did Asclepius derive his divine gifts from his father, the sun god.

As a figure that united opposites – both god and human – Asclepius represents further dualities; for example, he was often portrayed both as a boy and as a mature man. He was born amidst fire and died being struck by a lightning bolt, but his life on earth revolved around sacred groves and springs, and was of a very earthy nature. After he was killed, thanks to his apotheosis he became associated with the constellation of Ophiuchus (the Serpent Bearer, the Snake Charmer). Furthermore, Ophiuchus was understood as “the fetus attached to the umbilicus cord”:

“Ophiuchus, from Greek Ophiukhos, literally ‘holding a serpent’, from Greek opis (or ophis), the Greek word for ‘serpent’, + Greek ekhein, ‘to hold, keep, have’. … there is a suggestion that there is a likely relationship between the Greek words ophis and *omphi-. [Omphi from the Indo-European root *nobh-. Related words ‘umbilicus’, ‘omphallus’, ‘navel’, ‘nave’, the hub of a wheel]. The constellation Ophiuchus is identified with Asclepius who was cut from his mother’s womb as a foetus. The long tube-like shape of a snake bears a resemblance to an umbilical cord. When the snake is curled up it might appear to be like the nave or hub of a wheel. [The womb is represented by Delphinus.] Ophiuchus was called Ciconia, the Stork, by the Arabian astronomers. They had depicted a stork in the place of Ophiuchus.”

Via http://www.constellationsofwords.com/Constellations/Ophiuchus.html

Asclepius entered and exited the world in an equally dramatic fashion, indicating his connection with liminal states, balancing between death and life, being exposed to the ultimate realities of existence symbolized by the divine fire.  Those who received a healing from him saw him as a kind, compassionate and gentle figure, like Chiron.  He was compared to both the sun and the moon: his wisdom was solar and paternal, his care and tenderness lunar and maternal. One of the versions of Asclepius’ origins has him as a pre-olympian primordial god of the earth, one of the “chthonioi” or spirits that lived in “the dark recesses of the earth.” As such a demon, he was not only a healer but also an oracle. The vestiges of this myth are visible in the choice of animals sacred to Asclepius: both the dog and the snake have an obvious affinity with the underworld. They are conjoined symbolically in the mythological figure of the hydra which was both the snake and the hound. A large number of underground monsters such as the Erinyes, the Gorgon or Cerberus shared the characteristics of both animals. Further, both the serpent and the dog, as guardians of inner treasure, connect to the underworld and the souls of the dead, the dog being their guide, while the snake being symbolic of death and rebirth. After Medusa was slain, her blood was divided between Athena and Asclepius. It was believed that the blood from her right vein cured, and from the left killed. Any healing work requires a careful and loving unification of opposites. Both the name Medusa and the word ‘medicine’ come from the same Greek root word med– which means ‘to devise, to use powerful means, to consider, judge, estimate and measure.’ It was Apollo who called for moderation in everything at his Delphic oracle; with excess any remedy could turn into poison.

The snake as a healing symbol has a long-standing tradition. In his essay “The Snake is Not a Symbol,” included in his book Animal Presences, James Hillman provides a summary of twelve meanings of the snake, some of which are:

1.The snake is renewal and rebirth, because it sheds its skin.

…

4. It is a feminine symbol, having a sympathetic relation with Eve and goddesses in Crete, India, Africa, and elsewhere.
5. The snake is a phallus, because it stiffens, erects its head, and ejects fluid from its tip. Besides, it penetrates crevices.

…

7. The snake is a healer; it is a medicine. …
8. It is a guardian of holy men and wise men – even the New Testament says that serpents are wise.
9. The snake brings fertility, for it is found by wells and springs and represents the cool, moist element.
10. A snake is Death, because of its poison and the instant anxiety it arouses.
11. It is the inmost truth of the body, like the sympathetic and para-sympathetic nervous system of the serpent power of Kundalini yoga.
12. The snake is the symbol for the unconscious psyche – particularly the introverting libido, the inward-turning energy that goes back and down and in. Its seduction draws us into darkness and deeps. It is always a “both”: creative-destructive, male-female, poisonous-healing, dry-moist, spiritual-material …

It is worth pointing out that all chthonic gods had a strong connection to phallic energies perceived as regenerative and procreative.

How was healing effectuated in the Asclepeion, i.e. a healing temple of Asclepius? In the most famous sanctuary at Epidaurus, built in the valley below Apollo’s shrine, harmless snakes and dogs accompanied the sick throughout all healing rituals. Other outstanding features were the ubiquity of water (supposedly flowing through a sacred labyrinth) and musical performances. The central healing ritual was incubation, which can be likened to a dream questing. As Meier points out, for Greeks dreams were not figments of imagination but “something that really happened.” They were perceived as stimulating the natural “soothsaying of the psyche.” Symptoms were always viewed as external expressions of the deeper underlying reality of the psyche. In other words, the correspondence (synchronicity) between body and mind, the outer and inner world, is what constituted every symptom. While incubating, the sick person slept in the abaton, lying on a klinē, from which our modern word “clinic” is derived. The abaton or adyton was, as Meier describes, a “place not to be entered unbidden.” It was the holiest part of the temple. Scholars conjecture that it was supposed to be entered only by those who were invited or called to do so. The ritual of incubation was very much an initiation into a mystery, a crossing over to the higher dimension of being. In a similar fashion, the healing sanctuary of Isis in Tithorea, Greece, could not have been entered by those not invited by the goddess in a dream. Coming uninvited incurred a harsh punishment. The rite of incubation brought about healing on many levels. The participants were encouraged to wear white garments that symbolized purity and receptivity of the soul, its return to the original innocence. Before approaching such sacred powers, the daily mind had to be silenced, the body cleansed, senses purified. Meier adds that the rite also “healed people of bad fate or destiny.” Asclepius himself appeared in a dream or a vision, touched the sick organ, thus healing it.

The Orphic hymn to Asclepius calls him mighty and soothing, one that “charms away the pain.” He, like the earth goddess Demeter, was invoked as “a blessed spirit of joyful growth.” Interestingly, Demeter was also regarded as a healing goddess that was accompanied by serpents. Meier says that the Demeter-Persephone mysteries of Eleusis featured Asclepius as its prominent deity ever since he himself was initiated into the Mysteries. Like most secrets of Eleusinian mysteries, the intricacies of the healing that occurred under the cover of the night at an Asclepian sanctuary will forever remain veiled to our daytime understanding. The work of healing incubation was highly individualized and case sensitive. Each case was treated as different and unique, because “the waking have one world and a common one, but when asleep everyone turns away from it into their own world,” as Heraclitus wrote in the famous fragment 89.

Sources:

Fritz Graf, Apollo (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World), Kindle edition

James Hillman, Animal Presences, Kindle edition

C.A. Meier, Healing Dream and Ritual: Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy, Kindle edition

The Orphic Hymns, translated by Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow

Edward Tick, The Practice of Dream Healing: Bringing Ancient Greek Mysteries into Modern Medicine, Quest Books 2001

She is splendid, imposing, imperial. 9 metres high, she slowly revolves round her axis, revealing all the facets of her provocative ensemble. In her left palm sits a naked minuscule pope, in her right – a minuscule naked emperor; both look ludicrous in their Hats of Power. This landmark statue, towering magnificently over the harbor of the German city of Constance, was installed clandestinely at night in 1993. Its controversy did not sit well with the city council, who, however, had no jurisdiction over the harbor, controlled by the German Railways, who welcomed the statue of Imperia with open hands. The woman portrayed by the statue is called Imperia. She is the work of Peter Lenk Bildhauer, who, inspired by a short story by Balzac, wanted to commemorate the notorious Council of Constance (1414-1418).

Jan Hus

Before the Council was convoked, as many as three popes had been claiming the right to the papal throne. The church was corrupt and in disarray. The general public was kept in the dark about it. “Sancta Simplicitas” (Oh, Holy Naiveté), Jan Hus was supposed to have exclaimed when he saw an elderly pious woman eagerly adding brushwood to his burning stake. This enlightened church reformer, an intellectual, a Czech precursor of Protestantism, who made a grave mistake of condemning the dubious moral conduct of the clergy, was sentenced to death by the Council of Constance. The integrity of the Council was questionable for yet another reason: with the arrival of holier-than-thou men of the cloth, the city of Constance observed a steep rise in prostitution (1500 prostitutes alone arrived as permanent members of churchmen’s retinues). In Balzac’s story, which inspired the German sculptor, the magnificent courtesan Imperia holds sway over numerous pious members of the council. They are not able to withstand her seductiveness and one by one let themselves get swept off their feet.

The name of the city – Constance – seems to point to what is truly constant, unchanging: the eternal power of the feminine. To me, by her gesture, Imperia evokes the Minoan Snake Goddess (ca 1600 BC). Her snake invested power is immortal, and she has the magnificence of Lilith in her stature.

“All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again.”

Ecclesiastes 1:7

I have had the opportunity recently to see a splendid exhibition that arrived in Basel, Switzerland from Athens. Its subject matter was the most important ancient shipwreck ever recovered: the Antikythera wreck. Most media attention was captured by the most famous artifact recovered from the wreck – a highly sophisticated mechanism, which was a precise astrolabe (an astronomical computer) used for calculating the position of planets, timing of the eclipses, casting astrological charts, etc.  Its significance, which stunned scientists, has been well documented both by esoteric (astrological) (http://www.demetra-george.com/resources/articles/164-the-antikythera-mechanism-revealed-a-2000-year-old-astro-computer) and mainstream sources (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q124C7W0WYA). My focus, however, was mainly on the collection of the marble and bronze masterpieces recovered from the wreck. Two statues startled me most: the marble Odysseus and the bronze Apollo.

The corroded, horror-like appearance of the marble statues on display was a testimony that this material does not withstand salt water well. Centuries spent on the sea bed led to their gradual disintegration. The parts that were buried in the sand withstood the cruelty of salt water. Marble is very fragile (Venus of Milo comes to mind), yet even the crippled, chipped, maimed fragments of Greek sculptures that survived until our times have an aura of stunning, perfect beauty about them. As if Father Time cannot claim them, because they are mightier than him. The weathered, corroded look of Odysseus was extremely becoming, I thought. It made him lifelike, human, and incarnate. I imagine the polished marble Odysseus would not be happy as an objet d’art in a Roman villa (the ship is believed to have been sailing from Greece to the territory of the Roman Empire). Doesn’t his decrepit look reveal more of his years of wearisome suffering?

Odysseus, via http://antikythera.whoi.edu/artifacts/marble-statues/

Bronze, as opposed to marble, withstands the ravages of salt water very well. In classical antiquity, there were some bronze alloys, notably the Corinthian bronze, which were considered to be very precious. The main composites of bronze are tin and copper, which correspond symbolically to Jupiter and Venus, the ancient benefic planets. Copper, the metal of Venus, is soft and pliable, but when combined with tin to create bronze it does not lose its beautiful reddish hue, yet it gets hard and resistant. Bronze statues are created for eternity. The perfectly preserved statue of Apollo (a copy of a Pompeii statue) had a supernatural, spine-chilling aspect to it.  I could not look away, though it was a haunting, disconcerting experience.

Apollo

The exhibition made me also ponder the symbolism of ships and navigation. Perhaps in symbolic terms, the Greek ship’s cargo, destined to decorate the villas and palaces of the Roman Empire, found its more fitting abode on the bottom of the sea. For many ancient cultures, especially the Vikings, the sea was both the cradle and the coffin. By sinking the ship before it left the Greek waters, the Aegean Sea Mother seemed to have claimed her due from ancient Romans.  In her Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara Walker traces back the etymology of the Teutonic Schiff (ship) to the word fate. A strong feeling of fateful necessity accompanied me during my whole trip to Basel. The ship sank, its whole crew drowned, yet the Sea Goddess chose to cradle its treasures over long centuries. There is fatedness in the ship getting so much attention only now. Perhaps we are finally ready to fully comprehend how much ancient wisdom has been lost and needs to be retrieved from the depths of the collective unconscious.

Giorgio de Chirico, “The Awakening of Ariadne”

“Enter the turret of your love, and lie
close in the arms of the sea; let in new suns
that beat and echo in the mind like sounds
risen from sunken cities lost to fear;
let in the light that answers your desire
awakening at midnight with the fire,
until its magic burns the wavering sea
and flames caress the windows of your tower.”

Denise Levertov, “The Sea’s Wash in the Hollow of the Heart…”

The threads of Ariadne’s mythical story are manifold and contradictory. Her name, according to Graves, meant “most pure” and “high fruitful mother of the barley.” According to this scholar, she was the Cretan snake goddess, and the Mistress of the Labyrinth, where she led other maidens in a sensuous winding dance. In a popular myth, she helps Theseus catch the Minotaur by offering him a ball of thread to navigate his way through the Labyrinth, where the monstrous half man, half bull lived, and feasted regularly on human flesh. The Minotaur was a dark and beastly shadow figure, contradictory to Ariadne’s purity.  He was the offspring of Pasiphaë and a beautiful white bull, which Minos – Pasiphaë’s husband and Ariadne’s father – refused to sacrifice to Poseidon due to greed. Poseidon made Pasiphaë fall in love with the bull as an act of revenge on Minos.

Picasso, “Minotaur kneeling over sleeping girl”

Because she had fallen in love with Theseus, she renounced her family and her native land to follow him to Athens. But Theseus abandoned her on the desolate island of Naxos:

Evelyn de Morgan, “Ariadne on Naxos”

“Not the home where she was born, and certainly not the home she hoped to be welcomed in, nor even some country in between. Just a beach lashed by thundering waves, an abstract place where only the seaweed moves. It is the island where no one lives, the place where obsession turns round and round on itself, with no way out. A constant flaunting of death. This is a place of the soul.

Ariadne has been left behind. The clothes fall from her body one by one. It is a scene of mourning. Awake now, but still as the statue of a Bacchant, Minos’s daughter gazes into the distance toward the eternal absentee, for Theseus’s swift ship has already disappeared over the horizon, and her mind rises and falls with the waves. The thin ribbon that held her blond hair slips off, her cloak falls away leaving her chest bare, her breasts are no longer supported by their sash. One after another, the clothes in which she left Crete forever fall and scatter at her feet. The waves toy with them in the sand and seaweed.”

Roberto Calasso, “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”

The possible continuations of the story were many, as Calasso continues:

“Abandoned in Naxos, Ariadne was shot dead by Artemis’s arrow; Dionysus ordered the killing and stood watching, motionless. Or: Ariadne hung herself in Naxos, after being left by Theseus. Or: pregnant by Theseus and shipwrecked in Cyprus, she died there in childbirth. Or: Dionysus came to Ariadne in Naxos, together with his band of followers; they celebrated a divine marriage, after which she rose into the sky, where we still see her today amid the northern constellations. Or: Dionysus came to Ariadne in Naxos, after which she followed him around on his adventures, sharing his bed and fighting with his soldiers; when Dionysus attacked Perseus in the country near Argos, Ariadne went with him, armed to fight amid the ranks of the crazed Bacchants, until Perseus shook the deadly face of Medusa in front of her and Ariadne was turned to stone. And there she stayed, a stone in a field.

No other woman, or goddess, had so many deaths as Ariadne. That stone in Argos, that constellation in the sky, that hanging corpse, that death by childbirth, that girl with an arrow through her breast: Ariadne was all of this.”

Dionysos surprising the sleeping Ariadne; Pompeian wall painting (House of the Vetti)

In his Seven Sermons to the Dead, C.G. Jung wrote: “The sexuality of man is more earthly, while the sexuality of woman is more heavenly. The spirituality of man is more heavenly, for it moves in the direction of the greater. On the other hand, the spirituality of woman is more earthly, for it moves in the direction of the smaller.” The heavenly luminous and pure feminine essence shudders at the encounter with the lustful Minotaur, which symbolizes the dark, maze-like entrapment of the senses and desires. But liberation can only happen by entering the Labyrinth. The movement of the spiritual towards the earthly inevitably entails suffering through multiple symbolic deaths, as was the case with Ariadne. The Worthy Bull was one of the epithets of Dionysus, whom Ariadne married and for whom she bore many notable children. In some versions of the myth, after marrying Dionysus Ariadne received a new name – Libera (Liberty). Her wedding gift from the god was a crown, made by Hephaestus of “fiery gold and Indian gems, set in the shape of roses.” (Graves). It was set among the stars as the constellation of the Corona Borealis.

Corona Borealis

On the website The Constellation of Words, the author discusses the manifold symbolism of the crown, going as far as linking it to the Statue of Liberty. The crown encompasses a rich symbolism of being bounded by fate, being bound like slaves, but also being bound by an auspicious and fruitful (marital) union:

“The Statue of Liberty symbolically represents Libertas (liberty), Ancient Rome’s goddess of freedom from slavery, oppression and tyranny. Ariadne was marooned on an island. To be marooned is to be put ashore on a deserted island or coast and intentionally abandoned. A Maroon was the word for a fugitive slave in the West Indies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Liberia, a country in West Africa, was founded and settled mainly by freed slaves. …The crown has associations with both liberty and also slavery ‘in ancient times slaves taken by right of conquest were sold wearing garlands, and hence were said to be sold ‘under a crown.’ …the crown was a sign that those who were being sold were captives.’”

Retrieved from http://www.constellationsofwords.com/Constellations/CoronaBorealis.html

Ariadne – both a mortal woman and a goddess, abandoned and rescued, bounded and liberated, a Labyrinth guide who became lost and marooned on a desert island, is one of the most fascinating faces of the eternal feminine. Her gentleness and purity is palpable in Picasso’s painting showing a blind Minotaur being led by a girl with a white dove.

Pablo Picasso, “Blind Minotaur Led by a Girl in the Night”

After the beast was slayed, she told Theseus to sacrifice the Minotaur to Poseidon – the god of the sea. It is in the sea where all the opposing forces dissolve: power and tenderness, lust and love, slavery and liberty, become One again. However, in the earthly world of the senses, Ariadne had to experience the awakening to the world of piercing, conflicting desires and emotions.

“From love’s first fever to her plague, from the soft second
And to the hollow minute of the womb,
From the unfolding to the scissored caul,
The time for breast and the green apron age
When no mouth stirred about the hanging famine,
All world was one, one windy nothing,
My world was christened in a stream of milk.
And earth and sky were as one airy hill.
The sun and moon shed one white light.

From the first print of the unshodden foot, the lifting
Hand, the breaking of the hair,
From the first scent of the heart, the warning ghost,
And to the first dumb wonder at the flesh,
The sun was red, the moon was grey,
The earth and sky were as two mountains meeting.

The body prospered, teeth in the marrowed gums,
The growing bones, the rumour of the manseed
Within the hallowed gland, blood blessed the heart,
And the four winds, that had long blown as one,
Shone in my ears the light of sound,
Called in my eyes the sound of light.
And yellow was the multiplying sand,
Each golden grain spat life into its fellow,
Green was the singing house.

The plum my mother picked matured slowly,
The boy she dropped from darkness at her side
Into the sided lap of light grew strong,
Was muscled, matted, wise to the crying thigh,
And to the voice that, like a voice of hunger,
Itched in the noise of wind and sun.

And from the first declension of the flesh
I learnt man’s tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts
Into the stony idiom of the brain,
To shade and knit anew the patch of words
Left by the dead who, in their moonless acre,
Need no word’s warmth.
The root of tongues ends in a spentout cancer,
That but a name, where maggots have their X.

I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;
The code of night tapped on my tongue;
What had been one was many sounding minded.

One wound, one mind, spewed out the matter,
One breast gave suck the fever’s issue;
From the divorcing sky I learnt the double,
The two-framed globe that spun into a score;
A million minds gave suck to such a bud
As forks my eye;
Youth did condense; the tears of spring
Dissolved in summer and the hundred seasons;
One sun, one manna, warmed and fed.”

I find this poem strikingly beautiful. It has been viewed as rendering the evolution of a poet from the simplicity of childhood through the complexity of confusing adolescence back to the simplicity of conscious maturity. The first stanzas, which describe the budding consciousness of a child, are smoother and lighter, in comparison to the closing lines, which are slower and heavier, as if loaded with complex and manifold life experience. Reaching maturity means returning to oneness that characterized childhood, yet it is now of a deeper and more substantial quality. The poem seems to point out that mature consciousness is both simple and complex, simultaneously turning inwards and outwards. In childhood it is undifferentiated, then it differentiates and polarizes (especially by means of language and thinking) amidst the turmoils of adolescence, only to subsequently reach a synthesis, but now from a richer perspective. Manna – the nourishment sent by God to the Israelis wondering through the desert – has a deeply human and maternal connotation, and yet it is warmed by the rays of the Sun, which is the most universal symbol of distant divine consciousness. On account of its tremendous maturity, it is extraordinary that Dylan Thomas was only eighteen when he wrote the poem. I cannot think of a better expression of growing into consciousness than this.

Alex Grey, “Promise” via http://alexgrey.com/art/paintings/soul/promise/

Source of inspiration for interpreting the poem:

Helma Louise Baughan Murdy, “Sound and Meaning in Dylan Thomas’s Poetry” Via https://archive.org/stream/soundmeaningindy00murd/soundmeaningindy00murd_djvu.txt

“Mercurius is an adumbration of the primordial light-bringer, who is never himself the light, but…who brings the light of nature, the light of the moon and the stars which fades before the new morning light.” C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies, par. 300

“And as all things were by the contemplation of the one, so all things arose from this one by a single act of adaptation.”

The Emerald Tablet

By Bartholomaeus Spranger

The chief figure of alchemy was Hermes/Mercurius. He was both the beginning (the prima materia), the middle (the process, the means) and the end (the philosopher’s stone – Filius Macrocosmi or the Cosmic Son) of the opus. As a symbol of wholeness, the animating principle and the world soul, he gathered all elements in himself. In Alchemical Studies Jung thus summarizes the role of Mercurius:

“The multiple aspects of Mercurius may be summarized as follows: (1) Mercurius consists of all conceivable opposites. He is thus quite obviously a duality, but is named a unity in spite of the fact that his innumerable inner contradictions can dramatically fly apart into an equal number of disparate and apparently independent figures. (2) He is both material and spiritual. (3) He is the process by which the lower and material is transformed into the higher and spiritual, and vice versa. (4) He is the devil, a redeeming psychopomp, an evasive trickster, and God’s reflection in physical nature. (5) He is also the reflection of a mystical experience of the artifex that coincides with the opus alchymicum. (6) As such, he represents on the one hand the self and on the other the individuation process and, because of the limitless number of his names, also the collective unconscious. (par. 284)

His fiery aspect was sulfurous, active and masculine, and yet invisible and working in secret. He was the fire of hell, “a rearrangement of the heavenly, spiritual powers in the lower, chthonic world of matter,” found in the centre of the earth, in the dragon’s belly (Jung, Alchemical Studies, par. 257). At the same time, he was “the universal and scintillating fire of the light of nature, which carries the heavenly spirit within it.” This fiery spiritual seed impregnated the Virgin, i.e. the feminine aspect of the hermaphroditic Mercurius. He was also synonymous with divine water, “the spirit of life, not only indwelling in all living things, but immanent in everything that exists.” (Psychology and Alchemy, par. 528) Further, he is the “great south wind,” who is both an active agent in its fiery aspect and a passive receptacle in its watery, quicksilver aspect. Jung reminds us that Hermes was originally a wind god, and so was the Egyptian Thoth, who made the souls breathe. As quicksilver, Mercurius was imagined as fluid and volatile, like water “that does not make the hands wet,” “that indefinable, fascinating, irritating, and elusive thing which attracts an unconscious projection” (Alchemical Studies, par. 257). Like the serpent of wisdom that encircles everything, Mercurius “has something of everything in herself.” (Psychology and Alchemy, par. 528). As the World Soul, the mercurial serpent was said to impart “beauty and ripeness to all things, life-giving power like a glue, holding the world together and standing in the middle between body and spirit” (Alchemical Studies, par. 263). He was present when the world was created; his role was to impregnate the waters with the seed of life. Although he bore the light that filled the whole world, he remained hidden and worked in secret.

Mercurius as Anima Mundi

A question arises whether the alchemical Mercury ties in with the Greek Hermes and his Egyptian counterpart, Thoth. Very much so, but we need to dig deeper than the conventional descriptions of the nimble footed messenger of the gods, the god of merchants and thieves. Hermes is both young and old, or perhaps he defies time, as his beginnings are untraceable. In Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G. Walker, we can read that Hermes, god of magic, letters, medicine and occult wisdom, was “one of the Aegean Great Mother’s primal serpent-consorts, partaking of her wisdom because he was once a part of her.” Hermes and Aphrodite begot a child together – Hermaphroditus – or alternatively, according to some occult understandings, they were one god – a symbol of unity.

Hermes from Palazzo Altemps, Rome

In Greek myth, his mother was Maia, the oldest and the most beautiful of the Pleiades. Her name can be linguistically traced to “mother” and the Sanskrit name Maya, mother of the Buddha, goddess of creation and manifestation, says Munya Andrews in her wonderful book The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades. One of Hermes’s first inventions was the seven-string lyre, which symbolically connects to seven divine sounds that are the source of creation and the foundation of cosmic order. Madame Blavatsky claimed that the Pleiades, together with the stars of Ursa Major, control cycles of time and destiny. Also Hermes, as the guide of souls in his union with the Great Goddess, ruled over death and rebirth. In his incarnation as Hermes Trismegistus, he was the “creator of civilization, responsible for medicine, chemistry, writing, laws, art, astrology, music, magic, rhetoric, philosophy, geography, mathematics and much more,” to quote Gary Lachman from his book The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus. Hermes was both celestial and terrestrial, and so hermetic wisdom connects what is above with the plane of manifestation lying below. In Phrygia and Samothrace he was worshiped as a phallic deity and part of the trinity with Mother Earth and father Hades. The phallic stone pillars with the head of Hermes, called herms, used to protect crossroads all throughout the Greco Roman world. Also among the Saxons Hermes was closely connected to the Mother Earth and the phallic principle, as Barbara G. Walker summarizes:

A herm

“Saxons worshipped Hermes as the phallic spirit of the Hermeseul, or lrminsul, planted in the earth at the Mother-mount of Heresburg (Hera’s Mount). It is now known as Eresburg, and a church of St. Peter stands where Hermes’s ancient sanctuary united the phallic principle with Mother Earth. Other Germanic tribes worshipped Hermes under the name of Thot or Teutatis, “Father of Teutons.” Hermes-Mercury was the same as the Germanic father-god Woden, which is why the Hermetic day, Wednesday, is Woden’s Day in English but Mercury’s Day in Latin languages.”

The number four was especially sacred to Hermes. He was the liminal god of the crossroads (and thus of all boundaries, which he was allowed to cross with no restrictions), the four elements, the four seasons, the cardinal cross, the cross of incarnation (of spirit into matter). The astrological symbol of Mercury is a circle (spirit) with a cross of matter, which is an expression of Logos, i.e. the word of God made flesh, crowned by a lunar crescent, tying him to the goddess.

Every god, like every archetype, had an ominous shadow side, and so did Mercurius. In Alchemical Studies (par. 303) Jung warns that Hermes comes as the lumen naturae (light of nature) only to those who are mindful and vigilantly strive towards it, while for many the same light “turns into a perilous ignis fatuus [foolish fire, an illusion], and the psychopomp into a diabolical seducer.” He is, after all, the son of Maya, a great goddess of Illusion. In an Orphic Hymn, Hermes is called “the Interpreter of All.” There is indeed a real danger connected with Mercurius, which is being caught in the web (Maya) of lies, sleek word propaganda disguised as the ultimate truth. As Nietzsche ironically put it in “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense”:

“truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”

As we engage in interpreting messages constantly coming to us from within and without, we would be wise to remember that truth is not fixed or constant but it is always shifting with quicksilver speed. The Greek word for truth is alétheia, which means un-concealing. Truth is hidden, concealed, elusive, always somewhere “out there.” Un-concealing the veils of Maya means embodying and manifesting that which lies as a potential in the depths of the individual psyche. Perhaps it can be uncovered only by “the meditation of the One,” to quote once again from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus.

Hermes Trismegistus of the Siena cathedral

Related posts:

http://symbolreader.net/2015/01/25/jung-on-alchemy-1-the-moist-and-earthly-foundation/

http://symbolreader.net/2015/02/23/jung-on-alchemy-2-the-mandala/

http://symbolreader.net/2015/03/22/jung-on-alchemy-3-meditation-and-imagination/

http://symbolreader.net/2015/04/23/jung-on-alchemy-4-materia-prima-the-one-who-art-all/

Johannes Vermeer, “The Lacemaker”

Lately, my thoughts have been spiraling around a deep need to focus, to cut off all the extraneous details by finding a focus of devoted dedication. In a painting by Vermeer that I have always loved and was lucky to see in the Louvre many years ago, a young lacemaker is utterly dedicated to her task. We are feeling the sheer density and gravity of the moment. Our eyes gravitate towards the centre of the painting with the V shaped threads that are sharp in focus as opposed to the rest of the painting, which forms a blurry background. But at the same time and quite miraculously, out of that gravity arise extraordinary lightness and luminosity, as if the moment was transcended and made eternal. A famous quote from Rilke’s letters comes to mind:

“…it is our task to impress this provisional, transient earth upon ourselves so deeply, so agonizingly, and so passionately that its essence rises up again ‘invisibly’ within us. We are the bees of the invisible. We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.”

“Letters on Life,” New Prose Translations by Ulrich Baer (excerpts of Rilke’s letters arranged by theme), Kindle edition

Every moment carries seeds of eternity. Like in another widely celebrated work of art – Utagawa Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo– the artist intensely focuses on the moment in space and time in order to experience the transcendent lightness of the Invisible breaking through the hard crust of matter. As an art critic wrote:

“Hiroshige’s vision is evident in the name he gave to this collection. Within the title, Meisho Edo Hyakkei—literally, ‘one hundred views of the famous Edo,’ the word meisho carries multiple meanings. The word means ‘a place with a name,’ but it implies that the named place contains poetic attributes. In other words, these ‘views’ are less important than their poetic associations are. Hiroshige chose to depict these views because of what they symbolize poetically and artistically. His woodblock prints are not postcard pictures, but rather visual allegories.

…

But unlike the Impressionists, who strove to depict the transience and immediacy of a single moment, Hiroshige instills his images with a poetic vision that renders them timeless. Hiroshige’s prints follow the tradition of ukiyo-e, meaning “pictures of the floating world.” Ukiyo-e embraces the Buddhist idea of the transience of the visible world and the impermanence of nature, an ideal that sounds like that which the Impressionist project attempted to achieve in its paintings. Unlike the Impressionists, however, the Japanese did not intend to depict this transience but rather to capture the eternal essence of each moment as it passes.”

Michelle Knudson, “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo,” Columbia Daily Spectator, Volume CXXIV, Number 42, 29 March 2000, retrieved from http://spectatorarchive.library.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/columbia?a=d&d=cs20000329-01.2.28&e=——-en-20–1–txt-txIN——#

Part of the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, no. 101, part 4: Winter, via Wikipedia

Giovanni di Paolo, “Madonna of Humility”

In the new issue of National Geographic there is an absorbing article on “Mary: The Most Powerful Woman in the World.” The article, which I cannot recommend enough, can be read here: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/virgin-mary-text

The holiest woman, even in the Koran, until the 12^th century had been portrayed as a royal, imperial figure but later on evolved into the universally accessible force of Love that knows no political or social boundaries, as we know Her today. She attracts millions to shrines, where her apparitions have been recorded, though only 16 have found the official acceptance of the church. There is no one, self-proclaimed skeptics included, who can resist the force of this archetype. From the symbolic standpoint, I have not seen a better account of the meaning of Mary than the one in The Lost Language of Symbolism – An Inquiry into the Origin of Certain Letters, Words, Names, Fairy Tales, Folklore and Mythologies by Harold Bayley (published in 1912). The following are excerpts from chapter “The Star of the Sea” devoted to Mary (page 232):

Sandro Botticelli, “Madonna of the Book”

“The worship of the Queen of Heaven was flourishing long before the time of Jeremiah,and when the Christian Church appointed its festivals, it fixed upon 25th March as “Lady Day” for the reason that this date was celebrated throughout the Grecian and Roman world as the festival of the miraculous conception of the ” Blessed Virgin Juno.” The month of May, now dedicated to the Virgin Mary, was likewise the month of the pagan virgin mothers. The titles of ” Our Lady,”” Queen of Heaven,” and ” Mother of God ” were borne by Isis the immaculate, and, Assumption-like, Isis was represented standing on the crescent moon and surrounded by twelve stars.

…

Among the titles of Queen Mary is Stella Maris, the Star of the Sea—-an appellation for which it is difficult to discern any Biblical justification. “Star of the Sea” was, however, one of the titles of Isis and other pagan goddesses, and one must assume that it was sanctioned by Christianity for the usual reason that the people obstinately refused to relinquish it.

The Star of the Sea is represented in the accompanying Water-Mother emblems, Mary, Maria, Myrrha, Miriam, or Mara, the sparkling light of the waters, the virgin daughter of Labismina, the Great Abyss.

…

There is hardly a nation whose history has come down to us that does not record the existence of some Saviour God born of an Immaculate Virgin, and not infrequently this Virgin Mother is named Maria or an equivalent word, pointing to the Sea. Dionysos was born of the virgin Myrrha; Hermes, the Logos of the Greeks, was born of the virgin Myrrha or Maia, and the mother of the Siamese Saviour was called Maya Maria. All these names are related to Mare, the Sea…

…

When the letter M was taken over from the Egyptians by the Phoenicians, it was supposed to resemble ripples and was christened Mem, “the waters.” The word em is Hebrew for water…

…

The Indian Goddess of Beauty was, like Aphrodite, said to have been born of the Sea, and there is an inscription to Isis which hails her as:

“Blessed Goddess and Mother, Isis of the many names,

To whom the heavens gave birth on the glittering waves of the sea,

And whom the darkness begat as the light for all mankind.”

Sandro Botticelli, “Madonna of the Pomegranate”

I.“Now I know that I am the sphere, and all life in rhythmic fragments moves within me.”

“The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you.”

“Love is the veil between lover and lover.”

Khalil Gibran, “Sand and Foam”

II.“And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.”

“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”

Khalil Gibran, “The Prophet”

On 6 January, birth day of Khalil Gibran, The New Yorker shared an article “Prophet Motive,” which was originally published in 2008. To speak of Khalil Gibran without any kind of spiritual sensitivity is a travesty, and this is precisely what I thought of the article. The author gleefully expresses her contempt that The Prophet, though largely shunned by literary critics, is the third best selling book of all time, giving way only to Shakespeare and Lao-Tsy. The article contains a lot of unfounded conjectures concerning Gibran’s private life (also his inner life) and relationships, while simultaneously dismissing his writing in passages such as this, devoted to The Prophet:

“Almustafa’s advice is not bad: love involves suffering; children should be given their independence. Who, these days, would say otherwise? More than the soundness of its advice, however, the mere fact that “The Prophet” was an advice book—or, more precisely, “inspirational literature”—probably insured a substantial readership at the start. Gibran’s closest counterpart today is the Brazilian sage Paulo Coelho, and his books have sold nearly a hundred million copies.

Then, there is the pleasing ambiguity of Almustafa’s counsels. In the manner of horoscopes, the statements are so widely applicable (“your creativity,” “your family problems”) that almost anyone could think that they were addressed to him. At times, Almustafa’s vagueness is such that you can’t figure out what he means. If you look closely, though, you will see that much of the time he is saying something specific; namely, that everything is everything else. Freedom is slavery; waking is dreaming; belief is doubt; joy is pain; death is life. So, whatever you’re doing, you needn’t worry, because you’re also doing the opposite.”

The profound mystical truth of the unity of opposites was first put forward by Heraclitus. It reverberated in the work of the greatest mystics of centuries to come: Nicholas of Cusa, Meister Eckhart, Paracelsus, Carl Jung, Gershom Scholem, William Blake, to name just a few; as well as in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and Sufism. Coincidentia oppositorum was the aim of the alchemical opus. Thus, the secret of Gibran’s appeal is not his simplicity but its quality of uniting and transcending all creeds, religions and dogmas, finding their shared spiritual and mystical core. Comparing Gibran to Paulo Coelho is both sad and hilarious, if I may add another paradox to the writer’s list. But calling The Prophet an advice book captures rather ingeniously everything that is wrong with the arid shallowness and soullessness of Western intellectualism.

Khalil Gibran, “Divine World”

The Prophet is, to me, one of the most profound works ever created. Surely, from purely literary perspective it may be lacking (English was not Gibran’s first language – he came to America not speaking it at all), but its spiritual impact, its wisdom and the way it stirs the heart, more than compensates for all its alleged shortcomings. Also, some turns of phrase are sheer beauty. And perhaps most importantly, i strongly believe that the words of Khalil Gibran possess a healing quality, though I cannot prove it. It is an extraordinary legacy to the strength of his spirit how he, a child of poor parents from Lebanon, whose mother was forced to leave her native country, with the help of rich patrons and his own strength of character managed to overcome his initial cultural and linguistic handicap. Not completely, though, because as an Arab immigrant he was never able to quite shed the stigma. He remained a second-class citizen, which might have driven him into alcoholism and depression, though this is sheer speculation. In a BBC documentary much more sympathizing with Gibran than the New Yorker article, it is suggested that being an immigrant he was not able to marry his lifelong patroness Mary Haskell because she would have lost her job and her family if that had happened.

Mary Haskell

However, the New Yorker article claims that he never intended to marry her and simply took financial advantage of her weakness towards him. How does gold digging fit, though, when even if he was making a fortune on his royalties (which came much later in his life) he never left his New York studio apartment, which he lit with candles and called his hermitage? The same article deals quite offensively with the year 1902, when Gibran’s mother, brother and sister all died, suddenly leaving him alone in the world. The following quote from the article is simply stunning in its arbitrariness: “…there is no evidence that Gibran mourned any of them for long. It is hard to escape the thought that this ambitious young man was not inconvenienced by the loss of his slum-dwelling family.” The BBC documentary, on the other hand, paints a picture of a young man deeply struck by tragedy. It was this painful experience that made the lines in The Prophet devoted to pain and suffering so deeply moving: “It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.”

Kahlil Gibran, “Towards the Infinite (Kamila Gibran, mother of the artist), 1916, via http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/487710

What The Prophet imparts is not simplistic or fluffy or “new-agey.”  My personal favourite passages are concerned with the role and nature of evil in the world. Consider this excerpt and its implications:

“And this also, though the word lie heavy upon your hearts:

The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder,

And the robbed is not blameless in being robbed.

The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked,

And the white-handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.

Yea, the guilty is oftentimes the victim of the injured,

And still more often the condemned is the burden bearer for the guiltless and unblamed.

You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked;

…

And if any of you would punish in the name of righteousness and lay the axe unto the evil tree, let him see to its roots;

And verily he will find the roots of the good and the bad, the fruitful and the fruitless, all entwined together in the silent heart of the earth.”

Khalil Gibran, Sketch for “Jesus the Son of Man,” via http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/487711

In Gibran’s lesser known, but excellent work called Jesus, the Son of Men, those who knew Jesus are given voice to speak about him. For example, John, his beloved disciple, says of Jesus: “I loved Him because He quickened my spirit to heights beyond my stature, and to depths beyond my sounding.” Gibran is said to have had a lifelong fascination with Jesus, and the above quote is also true of his impact on many souls of his contemporaries and of those who still continue to discover the book today. By Muslims he is predominantly viewed as a rebel. He advocated the rights of women and called for reforming Islam. Yet, he is the most overpowering when speaking of universal and eternal themes that do not touch religion or politics but express the profoundest depths of the human soul, like this famous passage on love from The Prophet:

Drawing by Gibran

“When love beckons to you, follow him,

Though his ways are hard and steep.

And when his wings enfold you yield to him,

Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.

And when he speaks to you believe in him,

Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.

Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.

Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,

So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.

He threshes you to make you naked.

He sifts you to free you from your husks.

He grinds you to whiteness.

He kneads you until you are pliant;

And then he assigns you to his sacred fire

that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.”

Source of quotes:

Kahlil Gibran, Collected Works, Edited by Dr Chandrad Prasad, Kindle edition

The video to David Bowie’s “Blackstar” overpowered me immediately when it was released on 19 November last year. It is a visual poem and a symbolic feast. Despite the iconic yellow smiley face flashed at the viewer at the very beginning of it, it penetrates deep. The solar eclipse from the opening scene brought to mind the alchemical Black Sun, associated with death and putrefaction. The nigredo or the black stage in alchemy is the chaotic state in which all elements are separated and swirling around in a dance of creation and destruction. During the solar eclipse, when our star turns black, the ego becomes overshadowed and must yield its power to the serpentine forces of chaos and death. In the opening scenes, we see the “Starman” who has left his mortal coil; yet later we find out that his skull is encrusted with jewels. A beautiful woman, majestically swinging a tail like an Egyptian goddess, opens the Starman’s helmet, unveiling his glittering and indestructible hidden essence. She proceeds to carry the skull like a relic though a dreamy scenery of an oriental looking city. The first stanzas say:

In the villa of Ormen, in the villa of Ormen
Stands a solitary candle, ah-ah, ah-ah
In the centre of it all, in the centre of it all
Your eyes
​
On the day of execution, on the day of execution
Only women kneel and smile, ah-ah, ah-ah
At the centre of it all, at the centre of it all
Your eyes, your eyes
​

Ormen is a mysterious reference; most interpreters seem to go with the idea that it relates to a Norwegian word for snakes. It does seem to be a profound homage to women’s power as the guardians of the mystery of life and death, the magnificently swinging tail signaling a connection with the root chakra, the earth and the rising of the kundalini energy. The blindfold suggests the awakening of inner vision of the centre, symbolized by the solitary candle. The forces of chaos are further suggested by the peculiar shaky dance movements of the three figures while the circle of women moving in trance brings to mind shamanism and ecstatic wisdom achieved at the moment of dissolution of boundaries.

What follows is a moment of self-irony with Bowie holding a book like a communist leader speaking to a crowd. I absolutely love the following stanza:

I can’t answer why (I’m a blackstar)
Just go with me (I’m not a filmstar)
I’m-a take you home (I’m a blackstar)
Take your passport and shoes (I’m not a popstar)
And your sedatives, boo (I’m a blackstar)
You’re a flash in the pan (I’m not a marvel star)
I’m the great I am (I’m a blackstar)

I love the jester tone of self-mockery accompanying this dialogue with Death/God/Higher Power. Do not make me into a prophet, he seems to be saying. Someone else will replace me as an idol soon enough:

Something happened on the day he died
Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside
Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried
(I’m a blackstar, I’m a star star, I’m a blackstar)

The song oscillates between high and low tones of the sacred and the profane. When he reaches the mystical heights, the music sounds almost almost like a Gregorian chant, in other parts the trademark Bowie trickster rock is palpable. I love the three scarecrows in the field, echoing Jesus hanging on the cross with the two thieves on his sides. Their pelvises move rhythmically. It is hard to decide if the dance is that of ecstasy or are these bodies writhing in excruciating pain? But do we need to decide? Pain and ecstasy, death and creation are morphing into each other in the sky where the Black Star shines. The last minute of the video conveys a feeling of the dread of dying. How did a dying hand manage to scribble such an eloquent testimony of the most final of all experiences?