Ritual 7
Presented on: Saturday, May 20, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
Let's come to ritual 7 and we're following the way in which three layers of traction are established existentially by ritual. And that this establishment, though it is characteristic of our species goes back deeper and deeper into time, into almost geologic layers, of not only life but of the way in which physical elements themselves are made. And we're pursuing this not in some kind of a story or in some kind of an ideational plan, nor in a collection of simply techniques that one could be trained to, or could be instructed in. But there is a maturation that exceeds and precedes all of those techniques and aspects. And one of the deepest of all of the layerings occurs in ritual action which establishes a sequence. And that sequence is capable, when it is completed, of having a completed set of actions which can be then woven with other completed sets of actions. And so the first traction is the sequence that is completed. The second traction is the wovenness and the third traction is that these woven layers that are brought together in our kind of species, Homo sapiens sapiens the weaving was usually archetypally for baskets or blankets. The weaving on a loom of clothing and blankets, the weaving of the grasses into baskets. The third traction is that of pottery, that of establishing a cycle and that this ritual action not only makes the sequences complete so that you now have something objectively practical and something which is woven into figured shapes, but you have also the ability to have all of these woven elements brought into a cycle. And it is the potter's wheel and the pottery that makes the cycle of ritual complete enough at that point to be able to then sustain the generated experience of culture that will come out of this.
Part of the reason that we are learning in a completely new way is that we're here at the vanguard of a new species. Now our species originally, Homo sapiens, developed about 160,000 years ago in Africa and was there in Africa for more than 110,000 before they left Africa. And the first place that they left Africa was not immediately across the bottom of the Red Sea into Southern Arabia, but the place that they left was up along through the Nile, what became the Nile valley. After a while it was just a swamp, 50,000 years ago, a swampy area of a very verdant Sahara grassland. And the first appearance of Homo sapiens outside of Africa was actually in what is today Israel and Palestine. And that dates archeologically, paleontologically, to about 47,000 years ago. Until that time the most sophisticated species in the world outside of the Homo sapiens in Africa was Homo neanderthalensis and burial skeletons of Homo neanderthalensis were found on the top of Mount Carmel dating back 200,000 years.
And the curious thing is that the main skeleton found was outlined by little archaic bits of pollen which meant that the body had been outlined by flowers at the moment of burial and internment. And so even Homo neanderthalensis were able to figure the shape of someone in their burial. When Homo sapiens came almost immediately you find that Homo neanderthalensis begins no longer to have traction in the landscape, in the world that they were and they are displaced by the emergence of Homo sapiens who are by this time had evolved to a very special refinement of Homo sapiens and so they're more properly called at this particular point, about 40,000 years, they called Homo sapiens sapiens. They double the term sapiens. Which means not only wise man, but wise about being wise. Not only wise men but wisdom now. So Homo sapiens sapiens are wisdom men. We live on the beginning of a cusp of about the next 500 years for a new species will be Homo sapiens stellaris, star of wisdom man, a species that inhabits a whole star system. And not just being wise about being wise man, but being wise on the level of star systems and inter-stellar range. The psychic precedent for this was already there 4,000 years ago. 4,000 years ago in central Asia, where the rituals had come to a very special place, they had disclosed that man's life on earth is not just to follow the pattern of the animals or to follow the pattern of the plants, but to follow the pattern of the stars. That the stars form not only constellations, but they form a sequence of constellations that when complete make a whole cycle which is large enough to contain a new scope for mankind and the rituals changed at that time.
One of the very first developments of their time was the training of the horse. And the training of the horse took place in Central Asia, in Greek times they were called the civians, we would today identify them as Northern Irani and the sage at that time was Zarathustra, Zoroastra, star gazer. And it enabled them not only with the horses being tamed, but to pair the horses together so that chariots for the first time began to be characteristic of them and it allowed them with the horse and the chariots and the carts and being able to guide themselves by stars to have enormous caravan routes. Instead of just having contact with those within walking distance, a human being can train themselves if one is athletic and yogic about it. I was able to work my way up in the prime of my early twenties so I could hike 50 miles in one day. But generally a normal average person cannot cover much more, consistently, than about 15 miles, but with a horse you can cover 100 miles a day very easily. And so the caravan routes began to be stretched out and enormous and about the same time the development on sea coasts was that the ships began to be designed for longer and longer voyages and so you had the beginning of enormous caravan routes that changed the way in which rituals now in their sequences were longer and more complex. The weaving of them became layered and much more complex and the cycling of them indeed became enormously complex so that by about 2500 BC you began to have for the very first time, not just cultures, not just inter-cultural contacts, but you began to have civilisations. And the civilisations were not just city centred, they were centred in a web of caravan routes that wove themselves together and so you had certain sites that were very rare in the world of having certain products, able to have them exchanged and interchanged and at the two ends of the great new European mass there were two places that provided one of the rarest metals that is available for mining and that is tin.
And the reason why tin is so important, if you add the right amount of tin to copper you're able to make bronze. And once you can make bronze you now have a metal that will take an edge that is superior for the first time to the flint work of knives, of choppers, which had been in place for an incredibly long period of time. How long? Before Homo neanderthal there was a species called Homo erectus, and homo erectus learned to flake choppers into scrappers and primordial knives 2 million years ago.
But as Louis Leakey observed, once they had made a very sophisticated, Homo erectus had made a very sophisticated split flint, chert spearhead, arrowhead, they made them exactly the same way for more than a million years. He said they made beautiful points stupidly. They never varied it, that the ritual for making them was kept intact for more than a million years. The whole import of this is that ritual has an existentiality which stains as deep as the material. It's not an overlay, it is deeply there. Deeper than this and what we're trying to do as you can see in our inquiry we're trying to open and expand and take the blinders off because they're forerunners not only of interstellar species that is already here in small numbers indeed, but coming on very, very quickly and very strong. We're trying to acclimate ourselves to a completely new context and it requires a different method of learning. It requires a different layering of the past, and because it deals with the primordiality of nature in its transforms, which includes supernatural things like telepathy, one can only do this if you layer in the phases that we're offering here, layer oneself to re-mature, to re-emerge and the first primordial re-emergence is to come into existence again in a new way. The popular way of talking of it is to be born again, to be rebirthed. But the difficulty is that the original understanding of that, 2000 years ago, was already a transform of what had appeared 2000 years before that. The whole idea of transforming nature by a magi kind of a transform, a magi, magical transform 2000 years ago, was transformed yet again into a double transform, so that you had a three layer quality, rather than a two layer quality which had replaced the one layer quality of original unity. And so you went from unity to the tuning fork, to the trident, and these are three layers of maturing, the three tractions of ritual.
The first traction of ritual to establish sequences of objectivity is what nature does. The second to be able to tune that, is to take nature and experience together as the sources so that what comes out of that is not just a existential objectivity but is an essential integral of the existential. And that's the realm that we will get to at the end of our first year of symbols.
The existential ritual actions come out of nature, but when they do they generate the experience of the mythic horizon, so that one doesn't just have emotions but one now has feelings that can be raised to sentience. One just doesn't have figures but one has configuration that is able to engender images which collect together in image sets, which weave together and finally in an image base and which cycles together in the imagination in the symbolic mind. And so you have this layering that occurs. And the entire load of this whole ecology is one of integration, which stresses figures that can be configured into focuses.
The focus of a configured, completed ritual cycle will become an idea controlled by a synthesizing symbol. And it's true that one now can take one's symbolic ideas back to the rituals and reorganise them, reposition them, refigure them, so that the configuration becomes more refined. And at this point one doesn't have rituals, one now has ceremonies. We're not immediately talking about ceremonies; we're immediately talking about the primordiality of nature and the primariness of ritual, because it's important for us to make this distinction and not quickly lose track of the way in which the fundamentals apply. Otherwise we lose the practicality and we get in to speculation. And the word speculation comes from the Latin speculum which means mirror. Now the mind can be shaped into a mirror but if it is prematurely shaped into a mirror what it reflects is the ritual identity of what you think and what you do and they should match up. Whereas the true use of a mind as a mirror comes much later, many orders of transform later. Because in historical consciousness the ground of that square of attention is not only a mind that has allowed for the permeability of vision to come through, but now serves in a kind of a diffracting way as a mirror as well. And so one of the great classics that you get about 1000 years ago by the great Roger Bacon, one of the greatest scientists of that whole era, his sweet little book is called The Mirror of Alchemy. Seven little paragraphs that are just fantastically precise. What is important for us is to keep cycling ourselves back into primariness and that that primariness emerges out of primordiality and not to leap to conclusions which are based on presuppositions. And the presuppositions are only fortified, and they are indeed fortified and should be fortified by instruction and by training and by inculcation, but if you do that prematurely you addict yourself to whatever the presuppositions in the premature integral dictate. And this is one of the problems that is illuminated by Ruth Benedict in her great Patterns of Culture.
She points out in 1934, after decades of work in not only anthropological work but work on herself, you recall from some of the previous presentations she was a very wonderful poetess, she wrote poetry all her life. She was also an extraordinary feminist, one of her mentors Elsie Clews Parsons was one of the most independent ingenious women of the earliest 20th Century and Ruth Benedict's personal hero was Mary Wollstonecraft whose vindication of the rights of women 200 years ago, still stands, still in print all this time and there are new editions all the time. She was an extraordinary figure and I have three photos: this is a photo of the beautiful Ruth Benedict when she first realised that she could do something extraordinary. And here's a photo of her later in life in a sketch right at the end of her life by the great psychologist Erik Erikson, 1948 she was 61 years old. Erik Erikson is famous for taking the stages of life and taking exemplary persons to explicate the different stages of life and he used people like Martin Luther, like Mahatma Gandhi, like Thomas Jefferson in a series of books to show the life pattern by exemplars and what it looks like if you put the whole set together in a harmonic. That what a human being is finally, is an enormously complex many orders beyond the mind of a conscious, spiritual array of possibility and not at all limited to an individuality. Not at all limited to a centre of a circle, of focus of a square, the fulcrum of a triangle. For the mind symbolically these are satisfactory because these are ultimate integrals that bring everything to a single pointed focus. And the psychology that does this makes not only a me, but makes an I. I am. But to stop that I am is to stop midstream and to forget that there is a bank that you came from and another bank that you going to get to and you get swept away, by the prospective of an ego that supposes that I am is the ultimate achievement in the universe, and in fact calls nature by that word, universe, it's a one place and I am at the centre of it. Whereas if it is so scintillatingly differential as the cosmos it is unlimited in its possibilities. It has boundlessness and infinities everywhere and it's not just on the level of science but on the level of art, one establishes that right away. There is no limit to the artistic genius of a spiritual person. And one of the ancient ways of proving this was the ability to have a spontaneous poem or spontaneous drawing of a sinuous line to make a sketch of a portrait or to make the beginnings of a landscape. And it is this ability to spontaneously create on this personal level that shows the jewel-like quality which is not there in the individual, because the jewel hits its scintillation from all of the facets and not from the centre of the crystal. It gets it because it's facets, if they are cut along the way creatively, that they actually existentially exist, you can transform something which was just a very interesting looking crystal rock into a diamond. And so the ancient way in which one would talk a thousand years is that the ability to transform oneself out of the individuality into the spiritual person is the act of a diamond cutter. That one now does not just weave a blanket, but one is able to weave the coat of many colours, which becomes then the covering of the bard, the spiritual poet, the poet seer. And once one has that level of achievement of refinement and transform for human beings for the first time then civilisation is possible and it's made possible because art is expressed by an artist who has undergone that transform and can continually refine themselves by a process known as a critique, or not just a critique by others but a self critique. An artist will know exactly when that work of art is finished, not just because it is complete but because it is to the place where it now can do its art work indefinitely.
One of my favourite things decades ago was a film I used to show when I was a professor of humanities in San Francisco. It is a film by the great Mexican Artist David Siqueiros. And Siqueiros to show his enormous energy made a museum of the march of humanity in Latin America. He designed the building, he designed all the sculptures, he painted all the freezes and so he made the entire complex. He used to wear a little hat and smoke cigars and right at the end where everything after years and years was in place in film, you see him at the moment he takes the cigar and he says perfecto!
The work of art is not complete, it is open now to an infinity of appreciation and it can be refined not only because the artist goes back and refines it, it is refined in those who participate with it in their critique ability, which is attraction of their appreciability. And the critique is always on the basis of the ritual basis that engenders experience and the symbolic basis which engenders creative imagination. And so one works with these two together and if you added a third level, and that is the historical, now you do not only have that ritual basis that engenders the experience and the symbolic basis which engenders the creative, imaginative consciousness, but you have the artistic person who engenders the historical consciousness of it. And that historical consciousness allows for a third quality to come forth and that is analysis, an analytic. And so the first transform is that it is able to be refined not by redoing the work, but by redoing the interpretation on the basis of a critiquing. And the second that one further transforms the critiquability and appreciability of it by an even deeper, even wider analysis.
And so a science in this way is a larger harmonic of art which is a transform of the whole integral cycle of nature, ritual, myth and symbol for us to have a new species. For us to have an interstellar civilisation we must now redo everything that we have done up until this point by going back and understanding, not only through superior analysis and superior critiquing, and through superior transforming, but we have to be able to go back to the original emerging emergence and that's why ritual is still so terribly important. The patterns of culture gain their traction because they are generated by the way in which the figuration of ritual action happens, it's called pragmatic. And that pragmatic, that pragmatos, the thusness of actions always founds itself somewhere in a locus, and when it does it is now called practical. The action sequence is pragmatic and when it is completed now one has a completed practicum. This practicality is there and can be worked with, it can be trusted, its objectivity will hold, it has a stability.
And because it has a stability, the whole flow of experience can check its own stability in a precarious world by going back and reiterating the rituals. The rituals reconfirm our stability, that it is well founded, that if we chip these flints in the right way we will make a very usable spearhead. Louis Leakey was the first man since Palaeolithic times to learn how to make a perfect spearhead, or perfect arrowhead out of chipping rocks, and he could do it in about 30 seconds. You don't have to hum and haw and measure, you get the feel of it and figuration in ritual is all about the body being very wise in feeling it in a sense way. So the sensuality of the body is the basis of sentience in feeling an experience. And the body can be emerged in such a way that it becomes not just sensitive, the right word is that it is sensorially alert. It's not just aware but alert. In Los Angeles there used to be a news stand decades ago downtown and the newsstand owner was blind. And he could make change in dollar bills because he could tell the difference in the feel of the 1 dollar bill, or 5 dollar bill, or 20, whatever it was. And you could stand there and watch this minute after minute for hours and he did not make mistakes. And asking him one time he said a 1 dollar bill will be very used and all the denominations up will have less and you get the feel of it, of the textuality of it. I remember talking to an Eskimo artist in Canada, from Nome, Alaska, this was in Calgary Alberta, about 30-some years ago, and he said that there is a form of Eskimo sculpture that is not seen but is only felt. It's kept in the parka and one runs ones thumb over it. And that if you run your thumb over this little sculpture you tune your alertness and sensitivity of your body so that you can feel where the game is, and you don't have to guess fruitlessly because you will die if you're not with them and know where they are and the sensibility of that comes in this way. It is the same principle that jet pilots take a point and run it through their fingers; they used to get their Eskimo hunter sensitivity because you cannot keep track of things at Mach 3 if you're waiting to see it before you respond. And so you have to have the feel for the aircraft, you have to have the feel for the hunt. And it is the body in its ritual compartment that establishes the traction for this. Without that we leap right away to a speculation that is mental, that reaches back with such power that it muffles the whole existentiality and this is the basis of then drying out life into an abstraction. Symbols do not need to be abstract at all, they can be scintillating. They can be scintillating to the point of being transparent and allowing the scintillation to go through into visions. Someone who is abstracted not only cannot have visions, they cannot have experience. And because they do not have experience they cannot tell when they're in artificiality, except that nature doesn't co-operate for them. And they find at every turn that instead of there being the straight lines of identity, there are all these swirls, because nature is not into straight lines, the mind is. Nature is into curves, she loves curves. And if the curves are given an integral what the curves do is they weave into the basket, they weave into the blanket. And one can tell that here the weaving is happening before you and as it does so it creates the space within which experience now has a voracity which is based upon a participation with nature. The field of nature outside the basket is the field of the space within it. The warp and the weave from the loom has a number of variants that one can learn and as you learn them you realise that fabric now becomes an extraordinary thing. One of the deepest of all of the figures who worked with anthropology was a woman named Ruth Bunzel and Ruth Bunzel did a classic work and we'll get to it after the break in just a moment, called The Pueblo Potter. And she was a secretary to Franz Boas, she was a lifelong friend of Ruth Benedict. She was the first one to be able to understand the feel of the pottery conveyed the entirety of the ritual traction that allowed for the culture to thrive.
We'll come back after the break and take a further look at this.
Let's get back, we showed this last presentation last week, the cover of the Penguin edition of the 1 volume Golden Bough and this a Maori Chief from about 1880, the design is used on the 150th anniversary edition of Moby Dick and is the frontispiece in this little monograph, Lecturer Notes in Physics.
Time Harmonic Electromagnetic Fields in Chiral Media published by Springer Verlag in Germany, Lecturer Notes in Physics, and published here it was about 1989. The vibratory tattoo has a chiral quality to it, not fractal, but chiral. Which means that it's iteration unlike fractals does not simply repeat but expanse and extend itself out. In the Mandelbrot equation in fractals, x + x2 +1 will yield an indefinite repeat of what it is into an infinity of smallness or largeness. It will be a reiteration of the set but a chirality is a symmetry a left-handed and right-handed symmetry that has the ability to generate itself out into an infinity of variations. Another volume Chiral Quark Dynamics, again published by Springer Verlag, this one a little bit later, this was published in 1995. There is an ability to be able to take fundamentals that are existentially real, they're not just true but they are real and one builds then the basis of what you do in the emergence spontaneously of not just a repeat of actions but an iteration of activeness so that the sequences are just now fresh and emerged new and real. One of the great mysteries for so called civilised people, for city people, for mental people, for people addicted to abstractions, is to not have the feel of the ritual done right and it isn't that the ritual isn't done right because it's done according to formula exactly the same way but that what has emerged has just now emerged iteratively fresh.
The success of a good ritual is that this objectivity is freshly new and therefore what we do with it is the first time that anyone has worked with this iteration of it. And so the woveness of those ritual figure shapes out of it, will be just recently done and will not be copies of something else. They will be literally themselves and the mind in its habitual, integral assignment says that they are representations of things and this is not true at all. They are in themselves objectively fresh and have their own reality so that the ritual figures live, they have the ability to be the basis of attraction of life. So the rituals are as deep as something like this, just published 2006, The RNA World: Third Edition, almost 800 pages, published by The Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory Press on Long Island. James Watson is the director he's been there for a long time, in fact they reprint his beautiful prologue to the first edition. He says:
With the basic scheme for how RNA participates in protein synthesis known, the path became open for definite experiments on the exact nature of the genetic code, using enzymatically synthesized RNA as messengers for in vitro protein synthesis, the correct assignments for all of the triplet codons was determined by early 1966.
And this is 40 years after that, what has occurred is that there is a sub-title, explicit, the RNA World: Third Edition. The nature of modern RNA suggests a prebiotic RNA World. Before there was a DNA world there was an RNA world. And that carries back all the way to where we now are able to have volumes like this. This is by Niles Eldredge, one of the authors of the book that was paired with Watson's double helix in nature, the book on macroevolution, Niles Eldredge and Elizabeth Vrba. This one Eldredge and Joel Cracraft, published by Columbia, 1980. Phylogenetic Patterns and the Evolutionary Process. That the patterns that are noticed by Ruth Benedict go all the way back not only into the evolution of life forms, but go back into the way in which material itself is emerged and brought into a stability. All of this means that we are doing a recalibration. It isn't that rituals are done by primitive people because they don't know any better. It is not done simply to reproduce something that was done before. It is better to call these persons, those who configure their experience on the primordial flow of nature that emerges original existence, instantly that the sequence is completed. So that the traction, the first traction is not only that a ritual sequence is completed, now has made this thread, but that that thread can be woven and that the weaving of it will make the baskets and blankets, metaphorically, that can be used now to sustain and generate our culture. An experience flow that not only flows with nature and participation but firmly has traction upon the ritual basis freshly done every time we do the rituals right.
These baskets can be rewoven out of freshly made threads. In fact the most sophisticated use of this kind of understanding of ritual was made 2500 years ago by the historical Buddha, who's one of the most masterful yogis that the planet will ever, or any planet will ever expect us to host. The original monks were given a begging bowl and a needle. The begging bowl was the third traction, the pottery, to eat whatever is put in that bowl; the needle was for the weaving and the weaving was in the form that the monks every spring during the rainy season in India would go to the cast off fabric bins and take scraps of thrown away fabric and their needle and sew together a new robe out of the fragments during the rainy season so that when it was over they would go back out into the world with their new robe, freshly woven, which would carry the needle, put into usually the top fold of one's robe. And so the pottery of the third traction, the weaving of the second traction and the first traction to be able to get the feel of doing a ritual completely all the way through was to be able to speak a sutra of the Buddha completely through flawlessly. Sutra in Sanskrit means thread. That if you could speak in the right rhythm completely all the way through that sutra would then be freshly real and just for now the first time heard. Thus have I heard is the phrase that every sutra begins with because that's the way that you start the thread, 'thus have I heard'. Because it's the hearing that is the more primordial, more than sight it is the hearing that is the basis of the way in which a sequence will be able to be detected that it flows all the way through. It takes a lot of discipline, geometrically schooled, to be able to see the completeness to the same level of refinement is being able to hear it. And not only does the Buddha's sutras all begin thus have I heard, in the Vajrayana the word for thus is evon and the character for evon the letter for it, is very much in Tibetian like the very first moment of the re-emergence for the first time of this wisdom. And if one is able to hear it all the way through, 'if you have ears to hear', said Jesus,' let them here'. If you could hear it all the way through it's like a piece of music that you have heard completely. You may not know the fugue form but you can hear that it plays all the way through to its conclusion and the piece is now finished, it is finished in its ritual play but the experience engendered out of it has a vitality, it has a freshness. And so the ritual lays the traction on three different levels, so that our experience will be lively, will be alive.
About the time that Ruth Benedict was putting together Patterns of Culture for the very first time, a very sophisticated German philosopher of ideas' work was being translated for the first time and articles for the first time being written in the West. And the man's name was Dilthey, Wilhelm Dilthey. He was born about 1833, he lived until about 1911. He was educated in Berlin and then he became a professor in Basel, Switzerland and then he went back to Berlin and became the great professor there. In July 1925 Philosophic Review had an article on Dilthey and it's interesting because Ruth Benedict is one of the first people to be able to utilise some of the wisdom and ideas here from Dilthey and she recognised that what he was able to develop over many years, many decades, was an understanding of the importance that man in a very conscious way lives in a field of history and does not live in a field of now. That cultures thrive in a field of myth and individuality is able to be integrated out of that, but that man does not simply stop as the individual centres of a culture but are able to transform themselves and go beyond and in fact go all the way into a historical consciousness. She writes, on page 52 of the Patterns of Culture in the Chapter 3 'The Integration of Culture', 'In the social sciences the importance of integration and configuration was stressed in the last generation by Wilhelm Dilthey. His primary interest was in the great philosophies and interpretations of life.' And she goes on to show that it is a deep quality of understanding that for life to be vital it must base itself on the reality of existence and not initially upon the abstractions of mentality. If life is turned inside out, is turned upside down, it will trust for its traction then a mentality which is unable to give it a vitality. The vitality comes from the ground up as it were and not from the mind down. What comes from the mind down is a mentality rather than a vitality. And so it is the vibrance of the body in existential actions that brings the iteration of reality into existence freshly and for the first time. In the July 25th issue of the Philosophical Review in which this article and Dilthey that Ruth Benedict read, the first article is by John Dewey on value, objective reference and criticism and in 1925 just in the time that this was being brought out the first edition of Experience and Nature was brought out by John Dewey and this was written just as he was returning after teaching in China for a year, actually he was there a little more than a year. John and his wife Evelyn went to China in the early 1920s and the professor who was there before him teaching in China was Bertram Russell. And Bertram Russell got very ill. Lord Russell was very used to English food and I think Chinese food finally got to him so John and Evelyn Dewey nursed Russell back to health, it took a couple or three weeks, and while this was happening Dewey began to understand that China was a completely different philosophic environment and civilisation and so he emerged himself. He emerged himself into the Tao Te Ching, into the I Ching, into the confusion classics and so his book ,Experience and Nature, is an American Dallas classic. He has a number of chapters and they all have to do with the experience, nature or existence. Experience and philosophic method, existence that's precarious and stable, nature ends and histories, nature, nature, nature, existence, exist, experience, existence. He writes:
Anthroplogists have shown[1925] incontrovertibly the part played by the precarious aspect of the world in generated religion with its ceremonies, rights, cults, myths, magic and that it has shown the pervasive penetration of these affairs in tomorrow's law, art, industry, beliefs and dispositions connected with them are the background out of which philosophy and secular morals slowly developed.
and he goes on to say:
The life of early man is filled with expiations and propitiations. If in his feasts and festivals what is enjoyed is gratefully shared with his gods, it is not because a belief in supernatural powers, created a need for expiatory propitiatory and communal offerings. Everything that man achieves and possesses is got by actions that may involve him in other or obnoxious consequences in addition to those wanted and enjoyed. His acts are trespasses upon the domain of the unknown, and hence atonement, if offered in season, may ward off dire consequences that haunt even the moment of prosperity or that haunt that moment.
The rituals done right are not so much to protect as to ensure that the freshness is just now manifested, that this action which has been done, not just by a single figure, but done by a community of figures that go together to make this set complete.
In American-Indian stepping, the stepping is always in the same kind of progressive, rhythmic, movement that walking would have except that it is a walking not to go in a direction, but it is a taking of each step four times, so that all four directions are done in this single step. One has covered the four directions at once in this stepping so that one's stepping has a one, two, three, four set that each step then, in that sequence, will have that four-directional composition. So it's the emergence then of that dance by that stepping will have a emergent freshening that can be shared by the line of those that participate together in that ritual action. In the Blackfoot sun-dance the Okan, the most feared society was the Ets-kin-ai-eh which is the horns society. The buffalo horns meant that they were men who were empowered to kill. To kill the game for the sustenance of the tribe and if they had to be killing for the community they were the ones, modern Hollywood would call them the hit men, tough men. What's interesting about their horn society, Ets-kin-ai-eh, is that they had staffs that were curved and those curved staffs looked to all the world like the crosiers of Bishops. But they're not the crosiers of Bishops, they were showing that this authority ends not in the point that I have the authority but curls into the spiral which is the release back into the larger supernatural of the power that one has temporarily, assumed for oneself to make certain actions done right. And the stepping is not only in like the four movements of each step but that the gesturing ritually then is with the four fingers together, that one gestures in this way, one doesn't point, one gives this kind of a gesturing and this kind of a stepping. It is for the completeness that every step in a sequence will have all of the dimensions of time and space, the four directions as I said, and that those four directions now have, if one is centred, not a centre point but an axis. And if that axis has its extension into the earth and into the sky, into the heavens, so that one's posture of being upright in the stepping carries the axis of the zenith and of the root and the earth, that one can bring any amount of lightening into the power of what one does and it is grounded in the earth so that you will not die and you will be able to convey that energy, not just into the earth, but to convey it into the activity of the sequencing of your actions so that the traction becomes ever so much more powerful. And if someone does this comprehensively in this way, one gains a tunability to the axis to tremendous power, tremendous power.
One of the most powerful of all of the Navajo sand painters was named Hastin Klah and he was driving with a woman named Franc Newcomb. She and her husband ran the trading post on the Navajo reservation just over towards the New Mexican side of Arizona, not far from Canyon de Chelly. She was driving in a car with Hastin Klah in the early 1930s and a tornado spun out of the dark overcover and wouldn't you know it, hit the highway and because of the heat of the highway was following the highway directly towards her car. And about a quarter of a mile off Hastin Klah got out of the car, this is on her own testimony, he walked over to the side of the road, he picked some sage and he chewed it in his mouth with saliva and he walked towards the tornado and when it was about a half a city block away from him he spat it, it split into two and the top part went rolling off to the side and the bottom part rolled off into the sand and petered itself out. And he came back and quietly sat back in the car and she drove them on. Franc Newcomb has many books and one of them is Sand Paintings of the Navajo Shooting Chant with Gladys Reichard, and we're going to use, when we get to myth we're going to use Gladys Reichard's Navajo Medicine Man Sand Paintings. Gladys Reichard, like Ruth Benedict and like Ruth Benzel and a number of other talented women, all studied under Franz Boas in New York City and Gladys Reichard learned how to make Navajo rugs herself, how to weave, how to raise the sheep, how to shear the sheep, how to card the wool, how to spin it on the spindles and bring it together, how to get the minerals and the plants to make the colours, how to make the loom out of bits of branch and of thong, fine thong cords, and how to weave and make your Navajo rug. And when they saw that she could do this she was welcomed into the tribe. And they taught her so that she would know the complete gestalt of the entire cosmos of the Navajo people, the Dine is what they call themselves.
And out of her dozens of great works the big two volumes Navajo Symbolism is still in print and is one of the great classics in the world, of someone who understood from the inside of why reality is made in this way and carries its energy all the way through into the development of visionary consciousness.
We are taking our time because the laving and layering of what is being presented here needs to have its iterative cycling for it to be real. To pluck one thing out and to think that that's what's going on here is to be grossly mistaken on many, on all orders, on every single order that there is. For instance if you'll notice the centre of the ritual phase has two women, Ruth Benedict and Jesse L. Weston. The centre of the nature phase had two women, Mary Leakey and Jane Goodall ,and when we get to myth the pair of women is paired so there will be four women but in a very special kind of a ratioing. The first group of pairs will be two women, Jane Ellen Harrison and the ancient original poet Enheduanna from 4400 years ago. Then Gladys Reichards Navajo Medicine Men, but paired with that will be in the third Suzanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key, with a pair of men in between, J R R Tolkien's version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Plato's dialogue The Phaedrus. So you begin to get that there are ratioings and relationships. And just like the end of myth will be the interval of a pair of the greatest Chinese poets, Li Po and Tu Fu, that echo the interval one which was Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, and in between the Tao Te Ching and Li Po and Tu Fu is the Buddhist marvellous sutra, the Satipatthana Sutra, the mindfulness sutra. In both of its renditions, the shorter one, that's in the Majjhima Nikaya and the longer one that's in Digha Nikaya. Why is it that there is a greater and lesser? It's because when you teach the memnonic it's very difficult for someone who is trying to learn not just this sutra but having to learn hundreds of sutras to memorise them all. And so one learns to memorise the lesser one first and then the greater one as an expansion of that later and it teaches you how to expand this and do this. This is the ancient technique by using the memory in the mind to remember not the written language but what you have heard, the oral language. And the only way to remember it because it's not based on visuality, it's based on an audio hearing, one has to be able to hear it in its flow so that all of the images that one is saying flow in the same stream, and that the language keeps that flow so that all of those images move together like all of the electrons working together to keep an electric current going and that the feeling tone then is the relationality of the average of the oral language and the connectivity of the images into sets and an image base so that the feeling that comes out of it then is a configuration. And if feeling configures, life is not only vibrant but is real. That configuration cannot be falsified. There's all the difference in the cosmos between something that as EE Cummings once spoofed in one of his great little short poems, he said, 'It comes out flat like a ribbon and lies dead on the brush.' It's just toothpaste, you can't live on it. But something that is done with a voracity of ritual attraction on its three levels done right has this quality where one's experience has that vivacious voracity that now the mind that integrates from that mysterious flow will have a pristine quality. Its centredness will not stop with itself but will open into the transparency of the open mind.
Towards the end of the lives of two of the most profound people of the middle 20th century, Niels Bohr and J Robert Oppenheimer, both did little books called The Open Mind. They both said now that we have atomic energy and weapons, there is no alternative to the open mind for man if he is to survive. But the open mind on a scale of billions of persons is going to be the threshold out of which that new species will come, because if that open mind opens itself not to a mutation but to a transformation of the species itself. This is what we are doing here. It takes a while to do this. Not only are we doing the presentations, but if you are working the course, if you are doing the ritual right, you're reading the notes of the previous phase in tandem, this is ritual 7, you're reading the notes of nature 7 at the same time, so that when you're looking at this you're now reading notes to do with Mary Leakey and Jane Goodall. With chimpanzees whose culture goes back 70 million years and with Mary Leakey's concerns with species that were here before the genus Homo was even risen millions of years ago. At the same time that we're taking a look at Ruth Benedict and Jesse L Weston. We're going to get deeper into both of them next week. I want to bring out something that is very important here, that we began today.
We're talking about the origins of civilisation and how it is so easy for the abstracted mind to misunderstand, to misunderstand life, to misunderstand voracity and to misunderstand what reality is, completely and never know. Mithras slaying the bull. For hundreds of years in the later Roman Empire, Mithraism was the most powerful religion that there was, not Christianity. Not the old Greek mythology. But this is The Mysteries of Mithra by the great Belgian savant Franz Cumont, who was a friend of Jesse L Weston's and who influenced heavily her From Ritual to Romance. Cumont shows very clearly here this has a, this is a bull, it's Tauro, Taurus, a Tauro not just Mithra, a marble group from the second century in the British Museum. Where the knife is striking the bull, it is not blood that is coming out but is three sheaves of grain. Cumont writes: 'The remarkable feature of this group is that not blood, but three spikes of wheat, [bread wheat]issue from the wound of the bull, according to the Mithraic theory, wheat and the vine, bread and wine, spraying from the spinal cord and the blood of the sacrificed animal.'
It is the spinal cord which is the cable of all the threads of the neural capacity and in yoga of cause the two kundalini paths that go up through it, so that the whole ecology of its upright stance is not to have good posture, but to have the axis of the condensing of it, and that the condensing of it is from the cloud of unknowing into the roots of the below the horizon, the netherworld. The original way of keeping track of that was not through the zodiac of the equatorial disc but through the other cycle that runs perpendicular to it. And for Zoroaster, for Zarthustra, he was the originating sage for that huge different perpendicular cycle. That cycle is not the zodiac but is the Milky Way.
In China like anywhere else, where the Milky Way is taken, the spiral cycle is not a circle with a centre but is an unfoldingness of the entire dynamic spread and distributed through its total field. And the starting point of that was always the North Star has a perpendicular closest to the horizon of the earth in midwinter. And at that point the Chinese say the Milky Way is like the great celestial dragon, they go for fire, the West is always going for Milk. At Glastonbury Cathedral in the ruins there is a stone freeze of St Bridget who is a great Irish sage, friend and companion of St Patrick, both of them are buried at Glastonbury, and it shows St Bridget milking a cow. It is the milk of that celestial cow, she used to be called Hathor in Egypt, like Hera. Whenever there was a like a female pharaoh like Hatshepsut, she was always given the look, not only of the celestial Hathor, but her face had that kind of a feline, almost cat-like lapping of the milk kind of quality. And what it shows is that the Milky Way then is another orientation that when it's brought into juxtaposition with the zodiacal, the sun and the moon are no longer the arbiters of how the energy integrates, but they're only one vector in a pair of vectors that make not just a right angle but a right angle that is moveable and mobile around the pivot. The Chinese phrase was the pivot of the four quarters.
We're going to come back to this deeper next week. We're going to go deeper into the way in which Jesse L Weston and Ruth Benedict of this generation of genius wise women brought out more and more the qualities that the male-dominated scholarship of universities had consistently missed. They, like some over refined baroque group, drew and drew and drew until there were no open spaces. Because it is the primordial open spaces that counted as much as what was put there and this was one of the things that Ruth Bunzel found out in The Pueblo Potter, that the original Zuni pottery had a lot of open spaces. And all of a sudden later on, with Okemo there were no more open spaces. And the potters could no longer tell Ruth about the individual items in the composition, they said each one is whole and cannot be taken apart, whereas the original Zuni pottery was that the pot makers all understood what every single individual speck and the spaces were.
More next week.