Ritual 8
Presented on: Saturday, May 27, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Ritual 8 and you're looking at two coloured plates of Kachinas. They're in this beautiful reprinted volume, Zuñi Katcinas by Ruth Bunzel, who, like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict and many, many others, studied under Franz Boas. The original of this was in the 47th annual of the Bureau of American Indian Ethnology in Washington DC. The reprint brings in a lot of colour plates that were left out of the original because of expense. Ruth Bunzel was famous for her book The Pueblo Potter. Among many of her publications this is perhaps the best-selling, this is the Dover reprint of the original. I'll bring a copy of the original in next week.
What is interesting here is in her translation of Zuni ritual poetry, this is an example of a prayer ritually intoned when one is stalking a deer, to hunt it: 'This day he who holds our roads, our son-father, has come out, standing to his sacred place. Now that he has passed us on our roads, here we pass you on your road' this is to the deer, 'Divine one, the flesh of the white corn prayer meal, shell, corn pollen, here I offer you, taking the prayer meal, the shell, the corn pollen, this day my fathers, my mothers, in some little hollow, in some low brush, you will reveal yourselves to me, then with your flesh, with your living waters may I sate myself in order that this may be. Here I offer you your prayer meal.' The most conspicuous aspect about ritual is that they come together, they conglomerate and in their conglomeration they make a body that has shape and that that shape has a figuration to it which is resonant.
In many different cultures in the world, the terms that are applied to ritual are distinctive in that they always carry the resonances of the figuration of the shape. It will have an existential shape but the figuration will continue to extend itself and expand. The Greek term for this action was pragmatos, from which we get the term pragmatic. The Romans took a different term, practicae in the Greek but we would understand it, in Roman terms, as 'practical'. A ritual to the Romans was practical because it did something and once it was done it was accomplished.
The Roman child growing up would characterise themselves by drawing a body and then putting the arms and legs and head out from the body. It was a centred practicality of the body and that all ritual shapes were things, and the figurations from them were the appendages to those things. The Greek child, classical Greek child, growing up did not draw a figure that had a big body centre and little appendages like sticks coming out but drew a mobile stick figure that would have like a triangular shaped body. It would have definite thighs, definite calves, definite arms, definite head, so that it was a mobile figure. The shape of a man, to the Classical Greeks was that he was pragmatic, in that he did things and what he did had the resonances. It was the entire mobility of the ensemble that carried the figure into the configuration of experience. The Romans saw that if you're going to carry the resonance of the shape of the figuration into configuration you need to practically help it along and you did this by putting in laws, by putting in roads, by putting in the rules by which all of this would be channelled, whereas the Greeks did not look at it in this way.
In classical Buddhist India the word was karma. The actions that one did had a ritual objectivity and the resonances of it were indeed always carried into experience exactly as they had really occurred. When we get to our interval between Ritual and Myth we're going to use the classic Satipa??h?na Sutta in both the short form and the long form. The short form is in the Majjhima Nikaya, the middle length sayings, and the long form is in the Digha Nikaya, the long sermons of the Buddha. Karma is the configuration that always then carries the figuration exactly as it happened and in order to follow this precisely one needed to have Satipa??h?na Sutta training, mindfulness to a precision. But the classical Buddhist karma is a transform of the original and the original understanding of ritual in India was yoga.
We can see as far back as the Indo civilisation to about 2700BC that there are glyphs that occur that have not been able to be deciphered like Linear B or like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, no one can read them but many are understandable. One of them is Shiva who is sitting in a Hatha yoga position and is there 4700 years ago. The yoga principle in ritual is that the shape and its resonance are not able to be separated and what is primordial in it is the hearing, the sound, so that the coherence of the sound intoned is the resonance of the shape and carries the figuration. Only later when it is integrated into the mind does it become Vidya, does it become visible, so that one then sees the resonant configuration of experience brought into sight, brought into the term, anciently, was darshan, one is brought into the beholding of seeing it now for the first time but in the seeing of it was presaged by the hearing of it, originally. And so one will find, even in the great transforms of yoga into karma by the classical Buddha, he begins every sutta with 'Thus have I heard'. The basis of Indian logic was always on sound and not on sight.
In China as we saw when we took nature and then brought it into Ritual, we began with the I Ching, we intervalled with the Tao Tê Ching, then we brought in the beginning of Ritual with the Analects of Confucius and related that all the way back to the I Ching, that the I Ching originally was a set of eight trigrams by FuHsi and NuGua about a celestial configuration of constellations not following the sun's path, not following the Zodiac, not taking in the planets and the sun and the moon as the star features of the configuration, of the figuration, but rather they took the Milky Way. The Milky Way was this great dragon, celestial dragon in the sky. Where the hump of the celestial dragon came closest to the northern horizon in the Milky Way was the North Star, the star we called Polaris. If one drew a perpendicular line at the winter solstice of Polaris coming down from the great Milky Way dragon and touching the Earth, that was the beginning of the year in Ancient China.
All of the American Indian tribes in North America as far south as Northern Mexico all have this ancient Chinese cosmology whereas the Indians further south do not have this and in fact they have a different blood type. The American Indians from Northern Mexico to the Arctic all have an AB blood type, all of the Indians of Central and South America have an A blood type; two completely different incursions, two completely different groups of people that came separated by somewhere around 10,000 years in between them. The North Star Milky Way has its first directing pivot The Great Bear, The Big Dipper, Ursus Major. Right where one would see how Ursus Major, The Big Dipper, touches towards the North Star, points towards it, there is a Little Dipper, Ursus Minor, that is right there to focus it, to bring it into this cone focus.
What is interesting is that one can trace this all the way through human history in the Northern latitudes and at certain latitudes it no longer holds, and the sun and the moon and the planets and the zodiac come into play. One of the interesting things is that when you look at something anciently founded like Glastonbury, it is originally founded in terms of a Middle East zodiac and related to that and had a cycle of 12 around a centre. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus and Lazarus and several of the women from the time of Jesus went there and built a central wattle chapel and surrounded it by twelve meditative, contemplative cells that all related to the central dining hall, and reproduced in that way the ancient Therapeutae community in Alexandria, there in the Somerset area of Western Britain.
But when it was redone it was redone at the time of Arthur's death and Arthur or Uther is very close to Ursus and the Arthurian Britons looked not to the Middle East zodiac but they looked to the Northern Great Bear. The Great Bear of course to them was not just a bear but also carried with it the connotations of a wagon. By the time you come into Middle English, Chaucer's time, Sir Gawain and the Green Knights time, that constellation is called The Wagon. It is the great long caravan ritual vehicle that was able to carry the migrants and the immigrants all the way from Central Asia on across Northern Europe and into ancient Britain about the time of the third remake of Glastonbury. The huge cathedral that was put up in 1190s was all configured then to include the large shape of the opening of the heavens not by the zodiac but by the Milky Way. Right where one would expect to have The Great Bear, the burial of Arthur was exactly at the position that you would have to transform what had originally been a zodiacal scheme into a Milky Way scheme.
The carrier of this, of course, one of the most comprehensive men of all time, was St Patrick. St Patrick's great helper was St Brigit. One still finds there a frieze in stone, still surviving, after all the desecrations, of St Brigit milking the celestial cow because it's the Milky Way, it's the milk from the celestial cow who opens this vesica piscis, not a vulva, but a whole era of new transforms, the light behind the stars, the super light behind the stars is able to come through in that aspirant way. And so one has a Gothic Glastonbury instead of just the wooden Glastonbury that had been built in Arthur's time over the wattle sanctuary, originally built about 37/38AD.
There is a definite quality when one comes to try to understand rituals and the Chinese understanding of it is one that we began with and paired up with the ancient Egyptian because they gave us something primordial that was not in our normal confusion, our normal confused, artificial culture which we have been immersed in now for several hundred years, increasingly artificial. The Chinese understood that ritual shapes figure in such a way that they always exhibit Tê. They are always a unity and the correct seeing of existentiality, of existence itself, of anything that exists, is to see its unity, to see its Tê, and that its Tê is a unity that carries the power of the resonance of its shape in a figure that then definitely affects the configuration. But the configuration is in terms of this very large flow, not put into a twelve part sequence of constellations but into a waterfall of a complete flow and so the unity of Tê carries with it the emergence immediately from Tao. The flow of Tê's power is because Tao has emerged Tê and while the shape, while the figuration belongs to the ritual, it is nature who gives the amperage to the resonance of ritual things.
We saw with Lao Tzu you can translate Tao Tê Ching as a way of having the unity that comes out of something that cannot be enumerated. Of course the traditional way that we are using here is that nature must then not be assigned one but be assigned zero and that existence, existent things, existentiality is assigned one. So that when you have a four quarters in Chinese understanding, the four quarters are not one, two, three, four but zero, one, two, three. We know now from sophisticated mathematics of computing, if you have an initial quaternary matrix of one, two, three, four, it is possible to generate imaginary numbers out of that that will be on the paper but will not be able to be real. They are imaginary. But if you have a zero, one, two, three matrix whatever is engendered out of that is able to be engendered actually to be brought into reality.
The deeper qualities came out as we saw when we took a look at how the development in Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture, when she is writing about the pueblos of New Mexico and she is saying, 'The ideal man of the pueblos is another order of being. Personal authority is perhaps the most vigorously disparaged trait in Zuni. A man who thirsts for power or knowledge, who wishes to be, as they scornfully phrase it, a 'leader of the people', receives nothing but censure and will be very likely persecuted for sorcery and he often has been. Native authority of manner is a liability in Zuni and witchcraft is the ready charge against a person who possesses it. He is hung by the thumbs until he confesses. It is all Zuni can do with a man of strong personality. The ideal man in Zuni is a person of dignity and affability who has never tried to lead and who has never called forth comment from his neighbours.'
It is not just a fitting in, it is a fitting together because the community, the tribe, the city, the place, the clan, the family, all of these are unities. They are resonances of unities. They may not be transgressed without incurring a contamination, without incurring a skewing that can only then increase its skew. It will then eventually contaminate all the unities that there are so that the unity of the so-called individual in pueblo society, in most American Indian society, is to make sure that you are nested in your unity in the concentric nests that surround it. These nests are not in a hierarchy like a Roman hierarchy but that they are in a shared, distributed mobility of the objectivity of figure and shape being able to come into configurations that all have a similar kind of a resonance, so that when it is finally brought together in symbols, the symbols will not be at the centre so much but they will be in the distributed whole of the entire existential actuality of it. So that the symbols are not in the mind, the symbols are distributed through the ritual objectivity in its completeness.
Jessie L. Weston, one of the wisest women to live in the early part of the 20th century reiterates this again and again in her book From Ritual to Romance. She says that before commencing the investigation of the symbols that go into the whole grail story, like in any kind of a deeply symbolic ensemble, she writes, 'There is one point which I would desire to emphasise: the imperative necessity for treating the symbols or talismans, call them what we will, on the same principles we've treated the incidents of the story, the ritual, i.e. as a connected whole. That they be not separated one from the other and made the subject of independent treatment but that they be regarded in the relation one to the other and that no theory of origin be held admissible which does not allow for that relation as a primitive and indispensable factor.'
One must understand that our modern penchant for dividing things up into the workable elements and then identifying those elements as if they were separate, they would only be separate on the level of their being a unity as an existentiality but when they're brought into play with anything else, the unity jumps its order to that whole connection. One then has to be able to follow, not how this element and this element and this element are there, but that the ensemble now is the unity, is the thing, is the existentiality of it.
One has a sliding frame of reference that if one goes down to the particle, down to the quark, it is all but impossible to say what a quark is. For one thing they never occur individually, they always occur minimally in pairs. And they don't like to just remain in pairs, they like to have a pair of unities in which those pairs can pair, so that you have three that come together in one way and three that come together in another way. If you have three together in a certain way you get a proton. Is the proton made up of quarks? One can say that intellectually but it is not an existential actuality ever and so one has to be circumspect, in our time especially, not to be duped by the artificiality of a game of elements, of fundamentals, that do not carry over. Whatever unity they had is now in the unity of the larger aspect of it.
When you have a molecule of water you do not have hydrogen gas and oxygen gas, you have a molecule of water, so that the deep wisdom of ritual is to see that the figure, the shape, will always carry its unity, its Tê, its resonant capability of not only establishing existence but of being the traction for what experience really will come out of that. One has to follow that in all of its, not hierarchy, but in its morphing to ever more complex communities. When one gets several hundred thousand codons in a DNA there are certain snippets of it that will convey, by a messenger RNA, exactly that seed, which if symmetrically paired will produce then that particular protein. After tens of thousands of proteins you will have a cell that is viable on the level of complexity which we are.
The difficult thing to understand, and it is like a primordial knack that all human communities had, up until the arrival of civilisation about 5000 years ago, you would never on the planet anywhere have found men and women who did not live this way. It wasn't an understanding, it was their life voracity, their vitality, so that when you go to something say like yoga, ancient yoga in India, what you find is that there is a sliding unity of the body, a Hatha yoga, there is a Karma yoga of your action, there is a Bhakti yoga of your dedication, relationality. There is a Raja yoga of all these brought together into a symbolic centre where one would have not a centre but would have the distributed unity all the way through all the levels and that would be the Atman.
The Atman is not some centre of the mind or soul centre of the mind in the body but is the distribution of its unity all the way through all of the levels at the same time consonant. And so the reverberation, then, of an Atman is that it carries all of our body, all of our life, all of our relationalities, all of our symbolic thought, all as a unified, not quality or quantity, but a unified complexity which now is able, on that level of resonance, to resonate to the cosmos, to Brahman, immediately.
So one understands, then, what we are working here is patiently our phases which allow us for the first time not to separate things into their elements but to be able to learn again all of the ancient wisdoms of the planet and all of the future wisdoms of the interstellar species that we are becoming. Not at the same time but in a kind of harmonic set where they are all nascently there but the focus, the square of attention is just immediately on the movement through, not through each presentation as if they were just steps, but to move through a phase which is a sequenced set which then naturally morphs itself, not into just another phase but into a complementary phase to it.
A process will always deliver a form and a form will always deliver a process so that you have a curious interpenetration. The interpenetration is visible, if one, let's go back to our example of Glastonbury; at Glastonbury the hill upon which the tor is, is all terraced and configured. A number of decades ago a couple of very savvy, intrepid Brits walked those terraces and went into the configurations of how they have maintained themselves for several thousand years now. It is two great waves that interpenetrate perfectly and hold that hill, as it were, as if they were hands brought into a prayer, not a prayer like this, not a prayer like this, but a prayer where they are intertwined so that the interface of where they are is a sinuous energy zigzag that has for its apex where the tor is built on the top of the hill.
But this was not just a thing, a place, but that hill, with that tor, is in a line of many tors and many hills that go all the way to the south western end of England, of the British isles, at Cornwall. There is a mound there, St Michael's mound, and the line that runs from there through all of the hills, all of the tors, is called St Michael's line. It comes, eventually, to a place called Avebury and at Avebury, Silbury Hill, the breast of the Earth Mother, whose scooped out environment, when rains come, create a lake around it so that when one is at the nipple of the breast of the Earth Mother after the land is re-fertilised, that breast is seen to float in the sky in the reflection, so that the heavens are brought to earth and life is renewed. There is a second line that crosses it there from Stonehenge to Avebury to the Rollright Stones, into Compton Wynyates and into Northern England.
These lines are not just lay lines as we're understanding but these are the ritual figurations of shapes teasing up into ever more complex levels, all of the unities that there are. One doesn't go back then to the basics in the elements that can be separated out. The complexities, as they maintain their unity, they are the basics. So when we come to ourselves in the largest form of mankind as a whole, mankind as a whole is not a speculation idea but is the largest unity still fundamental, still absolutely primordial of our kind of life on this particular planet. But as we go off the planet, what is teased into a unity is a trans-world humanity. As soon as that happens the old form must be addressed with a very special quality; rituals that do two things at once, rituals that lament that the old form that had been unified now is broken but that the new form that will come in will be sacralised and so it will be praised. So you will have lamentation and praise at the same time.
The particular, before we take a break, the particular Zuni Indian ritual poem, it's long, it runs for about 175 lines, it is the ritual prayer when the personator of the Kachinas - and we will get to masks and mask gods when we come back from the break - when the personators of the Kachinas are making prayer sticks, plumed wands, is the better translations, the Hopi call them pahos. Prayer sticks that have the feather, that have this ritual poem always recited exactly in this way and it begins: 'And now indeed it is so at the new year' the winter solstice 'of our fathers four times prepared their precious plume wands. With their plume wands they took hold of me this many days. Anxiously we have awaited our time when the moon, who is our mother, yonder in the west, as a small thing appeared carrying our father's precious plume wand with your, our poor plume wand, fastened to our father's plume wand at the place called, since the beginning ...'
These plumed wands are then taken, with great ceremony, at ritual times to ritual places, largely to the south of Zuni in this case, there are mountains that have springs there and the springs all are sites where the irrigation for their crops, for the peaches, for everything else comes from. There you will find that the Kachina priests will always have shrines and those plumed wands are carried there. They are carried there, not from superstition, but to convey they have understood the collecting of the resonances into this figure, into this shape, and now carry it as a seed, so that wherever it goes, all of those seeds together will make a larger figuration, a larger shape, which is the fertility of the land.
We'll see when we come back from the break there are always ten very special Kachinas. They carry the energy of the seeds in the primordial figuration, not as separate elements, but that those seeds are able together to make a new complexity of seeded land. So the rituals, instead of being something that one can dispense with, they are always the actual traction for the existentiality.
Of course, we'll see, when we get to Myth in another month, that mythic experience as a configuration, a process that comes out like vapour from the waters, from the lands, that ritual posits and makes possible. It is not just the land or the water but its primordiality is existence itself, so that experience, in order for it to be affine to nature must be real in terms of its existential traction. It's extremely difficult for us over the last of couple of hundred years to understand; the mind does not come into play in actuality in all of this yet and will emerge out of the complexity raised to an even higher level, the level of symbolic thought. Let's take a little break and then we'll come back to this.
Let's come back to, we're enquiring about phases that occur and they are like the notes of an octave: doh-ray-mi-fah-sol-la-ti-doh. This octave allows us in eight phases to go through a double cycle that has a flow that is uninterrupted. The time honoured symbol for that is the infinity sign. This is from From Ritual to Theatre: the Human Seriousness of Play by Victor Turner. We mentioned him and his wife Edith Turner as two of the really greatest anthropologists. When they first met and got together they lived in a gypsy caravan for a number of years and they got used to seeing the flow, not of nomads, but of people who were at home wherever they were. They carried their homeness with them back through thousands of years to the origins of the Romanys in India, many thousands of years ago. My spirit mother, Madame Valda[? 46.19]was a Romany princess. The infinity sign that comes out of this is because a cycle of nature that comes to its completion does not stop but flows into another cycle, not a mirror opposite, but a continuation of it and that this is a universal pattern.
If you take any chaotic action and run it fast enough, long enough, it will develop a double attractor and the configuration will make an overlay which eventually becomes a resonant infinity sign. We're looking at a way in which our phases will continue and make this infinity sign, so that it has for us in our learning several other vectors, other than just going forward, and being in that infinite flow, we have a retrospective that comes into play. It is, in the Western tradition, deeply founded in Pythagorean communities. In the Pythagorean community for the first five years, you were enjoined, not to speak, but to learn to listen and that community level was called akousmatikoi, those who were learning to hear, 'Let those who have ears to hear, hear.' Or, as we mentioned earlier, like in India the beginnings of yogic logic are in hearing and not in seeing, vidya comes much later.
The retrospect of the akousmatikoi became vidya when they were able finally to have a mind that would have a natural seeing. When they had a natural seeing they saw the unity of all things on all levels of complexity and so they saw unity not just as one but they could see one as a one over one ratio, or that the resonance of a 2:3 or a 3:4 was a unity and that ratio-ed proportion and resonance, then, when it was put into its set was a harmonic. Those who could see, now, were called mathematikoi. They could see the mathematic which was there initially in what one was able to hear but it was only by collecting the resonances, ritually, of what one heard in the spoken language that you were able then to emerge out of the collected resonances of a spoken language for the first time, a clear, precise, ratio-ed seeing which later on was called rationality. What it is, is to be able to see ratios real.
What we do in our education, in our learning, is a retrospect that follows exactly one phase before as it progresses towards completing that particular phase and moving to the next phase, the retrospect follows it exactly one phase behind. So we are at Ritual 8 today; that means that the written notes from Nature 8 need to be read along with this presentation. This is an oral presentation, that would be a written retrospect of that oral presentation exactly three months before. As one continues to do this through the cycle you build up not only the basic vector of the ongoingness of the sequence of what you are hearing but you are developing another vector of the retrospect now of what you are reading three months after you had heard it.
There is a third vector that is developed because all this time there is a year-long journey that one takes in terms of reading because being able to read something complex on the level of world class epics, we're using four in each of the two years. The first year we are using The Odyssey, we are using Ovid's Metamorphosis, we are using Melville's Moby Dick and we are using The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki. But the readings of them are portioned out, five or six pages, each week for a whole year so that you distribute the reading of that throughout the entire annual cycle of it. By going through this twice, one the cycle of nature, the other the cycle of consciousness, those paired reading journeys will allow for a pair of distributed symbolic comprehension in terms of world class journey literature. That will make an underlay, it's like a reference wave, a third vector, and what comes out of this eventually is something that is almost impossible to get in any other learning process, other than if you study something like relativity theory by Einstein and the developments out of that; you get the ability to have a tensored complexity of consciousness towards infinitely complex form. Instead of infinity being an idea of endlessness or boundlessness, one puts it into a pragmatic, practical, yogic ability to live with it. Not just to think by it by it to live with it. The living then matures itself all the way to a cosmic scale. The cosmos is infinite. Its oneness is infinity and so one needs to follow this in all of the complexity.
There are, if you are doing The Odyssey, you are reading Anthony Quayle reads selections of Richmond Lattimore's Odyssey. It's an extremely wonderful way to get into it. If you are doing Moby Dick there are two: Burt Reynolds outdid himself by reading Moby Dick and then there's Charlton Heston and Keir Dullea and a number of others reading it in the Caedmon version.
The next pair that we will take for four presentations, because we are always working with a kind of Pythagorean yogic quality, we are pairing and then we are pairing pairs. We are seeing that one can come up with squares but that there is a triadic quality, a cubic quality that comes into play. All the time we are working towards opening up what, in Plato's Timaeus, for the first time you had the Lambda; that the squares and the cubes related in a very special way, will always give you a unity. It was developed by Kepler about 400 years ago, he is the first one to understand that if you take the squares of the distance and the cubes of the periodicity of any planet in the star system you will always come out with a ratio that achieves oneness. It doesn't matter if you're working with Mercury or Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, whatever it is. Those unities will always have a resonance, relationality, between them. Everything is mathematical, everything is ratioable, it's just that our scrambled, unsophisticated civilisation, a civilisation in ruins, now, is fixated on trying to find fundamentals that are separate when the unification on all the different levels is what is really important.
The next pair that we are going to take, we're going to deepen ritual understanding, ritual shapes, figuration, to two of the most sophisticated levels that it ever achieved on the planet. One is with Zen Buddhism and the other is with Greek tragedy. We are going to take Euripides, The Bacchae. I prefer this translation by Michael Cacoyannis. Cacoyannis did the film Zorba the Greek a number of years ago and The Trojan Women, a great filmmaker. His translation of The Bacchae is one of the best. If you like the old classic British Empire classic version, Gilbert Murray's is one of the best there is.
If you want an adventure in high consciousness, there is a translation, this is a translation of The Bacchae of Euripides by Wole Soyinka. who is a Nobel prize-winning other from Nigeria. He sub-entitles his translation, 'The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite'. It's interesting to see a Nigerian African wise man understanding Greek tragedy poignantly enough to understand that what was important was not that you saw the tragedy but that you and everyone who saw it together made a communion, made a community, because it is the unity of the community that absolves the fracturing, death-dealing realisation which the tragedy delivers. That that communion and that community of that communion could sit together and see something so horrific that it would fracture your mind, it would disrupt your life. It would crush your physical ability to sustain yourself.
The tragedy is always a, as Aristotle called it, a denouement. A denouement is not that something bad happened, it is that it is inevitably going to happen to you and there is nothing you can do about it, nothing whatsoever. The communion is that you will always survive that if you continue to look at it through its fracture, you will see a new quality instantly come into play. The new quality will not be a new form, it will be a new process, and the process of the shattered mind that will come into play spontaneously is the process of visionary consciousness. One learns to see. So one went from the theatre of Dionysius where the tragedies were there and one made a pilgrimage to Eleusis where life is renewed spontaneously from out of the depths of the netherworld.
We are going to pair with Euripides, Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a Zen travel log by the greatest of all the Zen poets, the founder of haiku, Basho. So next week we'll go to Basho and Euripides just as previously we went to The Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Analects of Confucius and now with our pair of ladies, Jessie L. Weston From Ritual to Romance and with Benedict Patterns of Culture. As we move these pairs through the presentational delivery with the retrospect and the substrate of the year-long reading and giving it all the nourishment, giving it musical selections. Our ritual musical selection is Mozart's great opera The Magic Flute and Ingmar Bergman did an exquisite film of The Magic Flute and there are several performances on video of The Magic Flute, James Levine at the Metropolitan in New York.
The music and the films that we are using always four films, you can nourish this as much as you can take. If you put a lot into it, a lot will come out. It's graduated in this way that however you little you put into it, at least that little will come out and be there. So it is, like Hemmingway used to say, of Paris in the 1920s, it's a moveable feast. On every level of endeavour and application, it will respond in like level into indefinite enrichment. As a community would grow, that community would have a unity, not made by mental or political or worldly structure, but delivered as a function of nature and consciousness being infinity-ised together.
Let's come back to the Zuni Indians. One of the aspects that Ruth Benedict brings out in Patterns of Culture is she tries to take three cultures, the Kwakiutl Indians of Vancouver Island, the Dobu of the volcanic terrible island in the South Pacific and the Zuni in the American South West and with these three anthropological cultures put them in the setting of a fourth culture which is her contemporary culture, Western civilisation, the European American civilisation, especially from the late 17th to the late 20th century, in those 300 years. She points out again and again that there is a fatal flaw in the culture of the time and has been there for these past 300 years. The fatal flaw is to consider that we have, as the Victorians once said, we have crawled ashore from the ocean of evolution and we have arrived. We are no longer subject to the vicissitudes of evolution and of life. We are now arrived and we have all the answers, all we have to do is to learn them and to apply them. We are right and we will be ever more right as we do so ever more so. She points out that this is a fatal flaw, that every primordial culture in the planet goes through this kind of a hubris, this kind of an arrogance and either comes out of it or remains frozen in that particular pattern which then becomes like a little circular prism which they cannot escape and its rut holds them fast.
Here is the end of the ritual prayer of making prayer sticks, plumed wands, which then will be taking by special groups out to the sacred springs where the shrines of the Kachinas will be there. Those prayer sticks will carry the seed of the next level of unity, that when all those shrines and all those springs, all those prayer sticks together, they will come into a blessing of the land which will then yield the fertility of the land and allow for life to continue and to happen. It reads this way: 'Those with snow upon their heads, with moss upon their faces, with bony knees, no longer upright but bent over canes, now all of us, that is the dead as well as the living, in any season, for all time. Now all of us shall pass our fathers on their roads and the women with snow upon their heads, even those who are with child, carrying one on the back with another in the cradle board, leading one by the hand and yet another going before, even all of those shall pass on your roads, indeed it is so, the thoughts of our fathers, who at the new year with our precious plume wands appointed us. Their thoughts we now fulfil.'
Now, this cycle, as we talked about earlier, before the break, is a cycle of the polar North Star, the Ursus Major, Big Dipper, Celestial Wagon and the whole Milky Way configuration. It is a way of understanding that there is a unity available by the sun and the moon but that that availability by the sun and the moon is also indexed by another coordinate which changes the cardinality of the zodiac to an ordinality of a focus across eras. It is this ordinality that carries the unity of the sets of resonance from note to note in a larger set ever more and yet harmonic. There are many octaves. A standard piano has more than eleven. There are special versions of pianos that are put into a special harmonic that have even more.
The quality is that ritual comportment brings existence into its shape so that the shape figured will have resonances that are able to be configured by the process of experience. If this is done with a distributed plainness, not with anyone trying to take the lead, but the distribution through the entire participant community, then the harmonic that will be delivered in experience will be able to participate with the actual mysterious flow of nature. If experience is natural to that extent then we are without any danger whatsoever. We will flow in the way in which nature flows. The rituals, as the seal, of those two flows do not seal them together as two things but they ratio them together as a proportion that still holds its oneness.
In this way nature becomes mysterious in experience and it's the mysteriousness of nature that allows for the emergence of the symbolic mind because the symbolic mind is not at all different from the unity of the body in ritual but that its ordinal is two orders above that, of the body. But if the mind's ordinal is not able to be in sync with the ordinal of the ritual body, then you get a tendency for the mind to try and redo rituals, so that they now fit whatever the mind has got to and in this way distortion begins to creep in. This is why all of the attentiveness, everywhere that primordial men and women, not primitive, but primordial men and women were able to sustain, not a ritual purity, but a ritual existentiality. Their experience was always able to be flowed with nature.
We want to look at something here from Ruth Bunzel about masks because in our ritual projects we're to make two masks: one a mask of something you eat or drink and the other a mask of a feeling. Those two masks, something that comes from the outside in and something from the inside out; those two masks will have an interface that is an ordinal location of the unity of the whole, of the whole of the body. Kachinas are raw persons. They are ostensibly dead persons who are revived ritually by the masks. When the masks are made and worn they are able to come and inhabit again in their power but it is a raw power so that the Kachinas then need to be put in their ritual comportment into sets of a priesthood. But the priesthood is not some separate group from the community, it is chosen from the members of the community every year. There will be different groups or sometimes the same group will go with just an exchange of a new member or two so that through all of the cycles of the years you will find there are six groups, every winter solstice, that are assigned crooks.
These crooks, there will be adjunct figure to the Kachina priesthood who will assign these crooks to different kivas in the community and they will put the crook on top of the kivas. That means that all of the people living in that kiva are assigned to be able to support a Kachina coming at the end of the year at the great public ceremony, the great 14 day ceremony in early December and that all during that year the preparation will be that that kiva, that family, that clan, will work together to support the expense and the cost and the endeavour, the prayerfulness, the intent, that that sponsored figure will be able to participate in all of the things throughout the year, like each full moon there is a special planting. Different seeds are planted at different times and each full moon for ten full moons there will be a special planting.
Then in early October the planting shifts from a month, from a lunar cycle to every ten days. Every ten days until a 49 day cycle is completed and then comes the great public ceremony proceeded by four days of retreat for the Kachinas to prepare their holiness to come together. The configuration of the ritual is distributed among the entire community over the entire year. Its cycle is one of renewal at all times because the complete unity for the pueblo peoples to be real in their lives is that the unities have been achieved at every single stage, every single level, all the way up to the final ordinal and that is their life in the universe that includes life beyond this earth.
There is only one time in the entire cycle when it is not only advisable and permissible to be creative and that is a time when they come to open themselves up to vision. At that time, the individual is encouraged to speak spontaneously as long as they can in an uttering of a hymn, a prayer, that just occurs to them, has nothing to do with the tradition, nothing to do with the custom, nothing to do with the ritual, but is a visionary release. When we get to Basho and Euripides next week we'll bring this up again and make it clear; there is a tension that holds the distribution of existence on all the ritual comportment's actions: the karma, the pragmatos, the practicality, the physicality of it, holds its figured shape and configures experience and even integrates to the mind. But that mind has the ability to open itself up not by breaking its particular symbolic shape but that the symbolic shape in the first place was made so that there was a slight opening.
That slight opening is there in the baby when the baby is born, at the top of the head. At the crown of the head is a soft spot before the cranium, before the skull closes over. That soft spot is there for all human Homo sapiens babies. It is through that soft spot that is maintained that the prayers are able to be a voice that can be sent. Otherwise the prayer sticks would not be able to function and work. They carry the singing, not just by the voice but through the resonance of the top of the head and one is able then to send a voice and to receive back, to hear the response in your hearing before you see it and eventually to be able to see it. The proof of it is that when the time comes that you are able to offer a spontaneous prayer for a very, very long time, hours on end, sometimes deep into the night, that you were not closed off but that the symbolic form that you made was made with an entrance, an opening, so that its interior is of the same space as the surrounding space.
Another way to understand it was through transparency, that the opening is not in the rim but that the opening is distributed in the entire form so that the entire inner space of it is transparent, is not closed off. What is at stake? If it is closed off the mind will tend to become more and more abstract and will destroy life because it will artificially manipulate everything to fit its speculations, its specifications. It is only the transparency, or the openness, the achieving of vision, that gives the proof in the ability to sing spontaneous hymns of praise to the new quality of the supernatural transform that we are capable of. More next week.