Ritual 9
Presented on: Saturday, June 3, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We arrive at Ritual 9 and you're looking at the Great Goddess, the Great Mother, as some say. Her name, In Greco-Roman times was Cybele but her name in very ancient times was pronounced not with a C but with a K. It wasn't 'Ky' so much as it was 'Ku' and the original scripts that record her name before the Greek, this is ancient Hittite, going back to about 2000BC, her name was actually Kubaba. It's very primordial because like mama or papa, Kubaba is a primordiality of existence. She is not a type that fits into a set of types, she is the primordiality out of which other types come. Her name, when put into Pythagorean esoterica, was pronounced Cube. Her worship, secretly, was that of a black cube which had no inscriptions on it whatsoever. That black cube was not a metal so much as it was the shapedness given a meteorite. Another meteorite that came down as a black stone is in Mecca at the centre of Islam. At the centre of Islam in the Kaaba is the black stone, which is the meteorite, which is the guarantee that Islam is the centre of an ancient revelation, not something just from Mohammed's time but a celestial pivot going back into the farthest reaches of the ancient Near East, the ancient Mid-East.
The archaeology in what is today Turkey was in ancient times called Anatolia. The archaeology there has found that some of the oldest cities in the world, the oldest found so far is called Çatalhöyuk and the Great Goddess was already worshipped at Çatalhöyuk with large buttocks, large thighs, large breasts. She was the Mother of Life and she guaranteed fertility; not sexuality, but existence as a primordial quality. Without her existence would not have a way to be fertile and come into emergence. She is the portal by which the energies of nature come into existence and have their being. Have their shape, have a shape which is a figure which is objective.
It's only with those objective figures of existence does the process, the dynamic of experience have some way to have traction and found itself and become practical and pragmatic. It's practical that it is real, it really is objectively extant, has a definite shape and figure, has a structure which can be understood but also generates, out of that, the flow of experience and that that flow of experience are the images that bubble up, the images are like the carbonation. But it is the flow of language that is the water and so you get a carbonated beverage, you get the flow of the language that has image bubbles in it, that keep it alive. Those image bubbles as they come up in oral language give us the refreshment of emotion, that would be limited to the body objectively, is able to flow as feeling on the bubble images in the oral language. And so mythic experience, with imagery and feeling, is able to be generated out of the Great Goddess and her son.
Now, one thing about the Great Goddess, she has the ability to have a hieros gamos. She has the ability to have a sacred marriage without losing her ability to be a goddess so that she is a fertile goddess feminine but she is not a human limited feminine; when she has her sacred marriage she doesn't lose her virginity. She remains perfect. Parthenos in Greek means virgin but it also connotates perfection. Her son, then, is an emanation of perfection and carries the same qualities that she had with him but in a masculine form. Instead of it being a masculine form like a male would be in a human way, the masculine is almost a sinuous femininity, almost a feline quality of being able to understand, especially other women. A man who understands other women in the sense that he is able to energetically be with them without possessing them, to flow with them without taking them, to have an interface where he absorbs all of their flowing experience into his and together they are able to bring out of existence this uncanny resonance of a perfect quality of fertile spiritual life experience, that when it is integrated together in thought that mind becomes clear. Instead of having thoughts that are disparate, based on disparate images, different languages, different feelings, it has all of those in terms of unities that do not disappear and so you get a ratio of the real in a mind that is completely clear. The completely clear mind is able to do something naturally which could only be achieved by a supernatural means if you didn't have it naturally. The ability is this: to be able to behold divinity instantly.
So in the very ancient Near East, those who could do this naturally, who were raised so that they were able to have that existential figuration exactly, that flow of experience vibrantly, and to integrate it in their thought completely perfectly and naturally; their eyes were huge. You find all through the ancient Near East 5000, 6000. 7000, 8000BC, you find that the religious vision is of a pair of very large eyes and that these all seeing eyes behold the unity of reality, in the unbroken unity of existence. Those two large eyes are like owl eyes that appear on the breastplate of Athena. They also are the two large eyes that appear as the nipples of the breast of the Earth Mother going back at least 10,000 years. It is the direct open purity of being able to behold the divine reality in the unity of existence.
We are at Ritual 9 and we are trying to appreciate and understand how the morphing of the sets that we are dealing with gives us an opportunity to do in a 21st century way what our ancient, wise forebears ... how far back does it go? The first appearance of the Earth Mother; the large hips, the large thighs, the large breasts, so large that the breasts make circles, that the buttocks make circles, that the thighs make circles, so that a seventh circle, her abdominal womb area is a central circle among the other six and those seven circles together, that Earth Mother, the earliest sculpture we have comes from central Europe 30,000BC. She is holding up a horn which is a crescent shaped horn shaped like a moon. But if you are able to look at this 32,000 year old sculpture, that moon that she holds is actually a ram's horn so that if you held that crescent moon to your lips and blew with your breath it would sound like a horn, which in Judaism is called a shofar. It is the horn calling those who can behold to behold the presences here now, the reality occurs now. But that horn as she holds it in this way, has a very peculiar phrase that applies to it.
There was a famous book done in the 1940s by Rachel Levy and the title of her book is exactly what that is, the title of the book was The Gate of Horn. The Gate of Horn is at the Earth Mother who holds the phasing of the moon in a ram's horn which at the same time is able to be opened up and become a cornucopia, where all of the fertility of the foods necessary for our life are in that cornucopia, where the call to beholding is in that horn, where the secret is that in the phasings of the moon one sees not the moon only but the moon as it reflects the sun in its various phases going around the earth. And so one gets a coordination of this world and the pair to it, the moon, and the third, the sun.
It's a curious thing that in this star system our moon is exactly the same size as the sun. And so you find like in all Tibetan mandalas of great power, you will find the sun and the moon in the two corners. What they are showing is a very ancient quality of what in symbolic gesture used to be this: this sun is unified, this moon has phasings, is able to do things, or this sun is radiant and this moon is collective of the radiance constantly. The two lights, the opposites, the polarities, are able to exchange meanings with each other and as they do, as one follows the exchange of those meanings they circumscribe out a cycle among the stars and the shapes, the figured shapes of that cycle through the stars, classically has a twelve part, twelve constellations, it makes a zodiac.
So that now we are getting deeper and deeper into the quality that the Great Mother is not just an Earth Mother, she also is a Moon Mother, she also is definitely related to the sun in several ways, through the moon and through the Earth. But she is related in such a way that she is able to accept the energy and turn it into the fertility of emerging shapes that will hold. She will not just be able to have babies, she will have babies who can have more babies. So that fertility is not just that something gets born, it's that it is born fertile to continue. And so the continuance of existence in its morphing flow is called life. So that she embodies, literally, embodies the portal by which life may flow and the only way that it can be stopped from flowing, because it will flow naturally, she will be that portal naturally, is if some skew happens in human life to stop up that portal, to skew off that energy.
This is what Euripides' great play The Bacchae is all about. It's all about a very curious family that involves this time the son of Cybele, who in The Bacchae is Dionysius and Dionysius has this uncanny ability. When he emerges in this Greek tragedy he comes out immediately and says this, at the very beginning. You have to picture for yourself, the whole theatre is called a Theatre of Dionysius. It is all about Dionysius and the Theatre of Dionysius was in Athens, carved into the big rock that is the Acropolis with the Parthenon on top. The Theatre of Dionysius, when you were on its stage, the front proscenium was 90 feet. The tiered seats held a very large population of people and we'll talk more about it next week. In this great D of the stage, the amplitude of the stage, one could whisper and in the farthest row you could hear what was being enunciated in that whisper. The acoustics were such that one did not have to shout to be heard but one had to enunciate to be heard. And so it wasn't about the power of hearing by loudness, it was the power of hearing by the purity of delivery, so it was the power of beholding.
A phrase I used to use a long time ago was that the Great Mother has knees to hold but she has the ability to give beholding. So it isn't just that one is held, one now has the ability to behold and one beholds, not her so much, but, through her, the divine. So when her son Dionysius comes his whole thing is that, 'You are not beholding me, you are beholding the power beyond me by which I am figured.' The only thing that stops it is that there is something in a particular man in this play, which takes place in Thebes, but it was delivered in Athens at the Theatre of Dionysius, there is something in this man that is monstrous, that hates everything that Dionysius does and hates, in particular, his mother.
Dionysius comes out and he says, and you have to understand that in Greek tragedy they always wore masks because it is not about some actor or actress, it is about the figuration that goes through the ritual comportment exactly, precisely, as it is designed to do so that drama is a very special aspect on this level. An existential drama is about the emergence of reality from a point of realisation. What is necessary is that all of the different kinds of actions with accumulate and accrue to a point of realisation, a single point of realisation. Not complex, not multiple, but single. That point of realisation will do one of two things: if you are stopped up, it will kill you or drive you mad. If you are open you will be able to behold reality.
We are pairing with Euripides' Bacchae Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North. It's a Zen travel log. Before Basho wrote Zen travel logs in the 1600s in Japan, there was a Zen theatre called Noh drama. Noh drama is like Greek tragedy, it builds exactly and precisely to a point of realisation. That point of realisation was honed by the greatest Zen playwright in East Asian history, his name was Zeami. He lived in the 1300s. Almost all the classic Noh plays that are still performed in the 21st century, come from the design of Zeami, some 7, almost 800 years ago. Like Greek tragedies, we are taking Euripides' Bacchae which was produced in 406BC so we are celebrating the 2400th anniversary of it. This edition of The Bacchae has a jailed Elvis Presley on the cover because it has been contemporaneous for 2400 years through all the vicissitudes worldwide. It's played in Japan just like Noh dramas are played in Europe, are played here.
These are belonging not just to the human condition but they are essential for our kind to be real. Because what we have are so few opportunities to grow up and live purely so that is very easy and simple to do, we grow up in a staggered junkyard of complex artificialities so that almost all of us have to re-learn, have to comb back through the tangles and the snarls. That's what this learning is all about, it's the patient yoga of going back and bringing ourselves, in a very short time, two years is nothing in a lifetime of 90 years, to bring ourselves through so all of the aspects of it, at least we will be able to appreciate, this is exactly the primordiality of how this happens and how this works, and in your own way to make whatever adjustments you need to make in your lives to take advantage of these.
Right now we're coming back to that point of realisation that Zen and Greek tragedy both share. The whole purpose is that that realisation should be transparent. The deepest transparency is openness. One can have a transparent symbol and it will work, it will function. It will allow you to see through to vision, by just being able to see through a transparency means that you can vision, you can go into consciousness but you cannot step into it. The transparency must be opened for you to step through and be there. The person who is able to step through the open mind and be in that transparency emerges as the artist.
It is art that is the proof, the cinch, the litmus test, that you are able to step through your mind into vision and emerge a new form out of it. Not the individuality of the mind but the artistic person, who in the artistry has exercised a kind of supranatural creativity, has taken the images of experience and put them into the imagination of the mind and released that as the creative imagination of consciousness and emerged from that the forms of art. So one has, in Greek tragedy, in Zen literature, you have this shared point of realisation, not to come to a point but to come to a no point. Not just a no point which is transparent but a no point which may be opened. To take a transparency and open it is a very esoteric process.
It is easier, far easier to go back to the ritual body comportment, back to pragmatic action and do your rituals in such a way that when you have a point of realisation in the mind it will automatically be open. So you can do rituals in such a way that the mind will be open, when it integrates to its individuality it will be an individuality that is not an I that stands in the way of anything, especially oneself but an I which in all humility is able to cooperate with others in a community that is more important than me. So the ritual comportment is to build the shape of a community that together form a receptivity to nature such that the energies of nature will come into the community. The shape of community will hold an openness in itself like the seats of the round table. Each seat was taken except one that was open, and it was called the Siege Perilous in our Arthurian mythology, mythos. No one sits there, that's the open place. It's like in certain feasts of leaving a special place at a table for the unknown guest or strange who might come. They are always welcome.
Or it's like the Zen Sumi-e circle that doesn't close but it goes powerfully into the approach to an openness. One is still able, then, to do this if the artist has come out of his purity completely, his body will not betray the art. So if you've not ever seen a Sumi-e Zen painter do his work, he will have a table with many jars and many brushes, many different inks, many different washes and the paper behind him will be stretched taut on wood rollers so that he must, in one move, go to the table, to a brush, to his ink and turn and make his circle. If he pauses it will tear the paper. The slightest pause will put a pressure and ruin the piece, so that you must do this in one flowing move, though it seems like you could say there are different steps to the move, the ritual is to do the steps as a flow. So that the art of it is not the ritual of it but it's the transform of the ritual from the steps to the flow so that the basis of the traction is in experience for art and not in the ritual.
The ritual is essential to deliver the experience as a pure flow so that it will be the right background because the flow of experience and the flow of consciousness, when they are put together, consciousness flows exactly in the opposite way to experience. When they flow exactly opposite they interflow together in such a way that the field of dynamic now is a perfectly merged field that is pure of experience and consciousness without any break in them whatsoever. That pure field is the openness so that the mind now has a done something uncanny. It has taken the flow of experience, that flowed participantly in the flow of nature and has left nature and gone to super-nature, to a super-symmetry, consciousness is like a super-symmetry of nature. In that super-symmetry now experience doesn't flow with nature but it weaves with consciousness. That open field of the weave of experience in consciousness is not a form but is itself a complex process out of which then will come the art. The art will achieve its excellence because the forms of art will be able to be a complementarity to the symbolic forms of the mind.
So now we have something very interesting; we have mind forms, symbol forms, which are able to have referential representation in similarity and identity, even, with ritual objective forms but the forms of art will always be complementarities to the forms of the mind. If the mind is artificial, if it is confused, if it is ignorant it will not only not know this, it will specifically deny that it is even healthy for it and will seek to close things off. The first thing it closes off is it closes of the energies of existence at the source, that is shut off the access of ritual existence from the un-tampered-with nature.
This is exactly what happens in The Bacchae. Dionysius comes out on this wide stage, The Theatre of Dionysius in Athens. He says, 'I, Dionysius, son of Zeus, am back in Thebes. I was born here, of Semele, daughter of Cadmus, blasted from her womb by a bolt of blazing thunder.' He points and in this 90 feet of the stage of the Theatre of Dionysius, right in the centre, right at the edge of the Proscenium is a mound of smoking vine covered rocks and from time to time a little wisp of smoke will come out. Dionysius says, 'My mother was killed there. She is still smouldering. She was blasted when she was a daughter of the King, of King Cadmus.'
Not only was Semele a daughter of King Cadmus, she has three sisters, one of which, Agave, is the living sister of the man Pentheus who is the grandson, the next king, was not the father, but a grandson of Cadmus and he is the one that denies divinity to Dionysius, in fact jails him, locks him up because he has come back and as Dionysius comes back all of the women of Thebes leave their homes, they leave their families. They go into the wild pine covered mountain outside of town, Cithaeron, and there they go into this orgiastic dance together. It's interesting because we tend to have a skewed misunderstanding of these things. It's not an orgy of sexuality and of decay, this is an orgiastic energy that has come into its wild resonant, so that the resonant of that set will be the very calibration of the right hum for human existence to come into a correct pure language expression between people. That without that pitch pipe tone of that resonant language, human beings do not know if they are speaking truthfully to each other. So it is the women, who together in their dancing, establish the vibration, the exact vibration, each one in their own way a vibratory wave so that together that vibration is one of nature coming into the forms of life fertile, so that existence can not only be real, existentially, but the experience that comes out of it will be able to flow purely enough, so that the mind that comes out of that will be open and one can behold the reality of the divine.
It is interesting because Pentheus, being the son of Agave, and Dionysius is the son of one of her sisters, Semele, they are actually cousins. But it goes deeper than this. Cadmus was the king but was his grandfather, who was his father? In between King Cadmus and King Pentheus the father had a very peculiar quality to him and it is a mysterious thing until one goes to something like a learned Oxford commentary, this one by the great E.R. Dodds On Euripides' Bacchae. He did this commentary in middle of the London blitzes in World War II. He worked on it 1943 and it was published by Oxford in 1944, right in the midst of the World War II Nazi blitz of London. An extraordinary man, his great book is called The Greeks and the Irrational, to understand that irrational is not madness but is outside of the individual self-assigned forms of distortion because according to a highly indoctrinated artificial mind nature is irrational. God is irrational. Uncontrolled experience is irrational.
And so one finds exactly at this point, and after the break we'll come exactly to this quotation, one finds that the classical Greeks, in the century of Euripides came more and more to an unbreakable tension. They held more and more power to have minds and doctrines that were organised to the nth degree and suspected nature and wild experience and eventually transcendent consciousness. Those who were still primordial enough to be able to do this, who felt imprisoned by the city, imprisoned by the religion, imprisoned by the politics, imprisoned by their own enforced artificial personalities and wanted to get out. So you had people wanting to get out and others wanting to stuff them in. It came to a crunch at the end of the life of Euripides at age 70 he finally could not take the disgust of Athens and in self-exile went to live elsewhere. He died of a broken heart and posthumously The Bacchae was the last play of his that was performed. It's all about the breaking of the mind of the classical Greeks by the beholding that reality was completely outside of their grasp in any kind of an enforced way.
The odd thing is, it is a characteristic of civilisation, not just of the Greeks. That's why there is a Zen drama in Japan, they face the same issue. There are dramas everywhere in the world. About the only place that you do not find this is in the ancient American Indians. In the ancient American Indians like with the Medewiwin, the grand medicine ceremony, you find that there is a perfect melding of the ritual steps that one takes in the medicine lodge to a place where those steps go into a vertical. While you take the steps as a human being, you take the steps as a human being surrounded by an ancient animal guardian spirit, the bear, and one brings oneself in those human steps to vertical steps that only the Great Spirit could take. While your human steps cannot walk up that vertical your spirit does. In this great L shape one has almost a superior kind of transformative ritual to anything else in the extant civilised world. Let's take a break and we'll come back.
Let's come back, this is a Greek tragedy of Euripides, Electra, one of the great Greek tragedies, it's one of the models, there's not only an Oedipus complex but an Electra complex. This is a film with Irene Papas done by the great Michael Cacoyannis. Michal Cacoyannis directed things like Zorba the Great and we are using his translation of Euripides' Bacchae because Cacoyannis, not only a wonderful Greek, but a great director and being able to understand the first edition of it was this rather primordial quality and the later one shows a panel from the ruins of Pompeii: the room of the mysteries.
The whole aspect of the mysteries was that they are not mysteries of the mind, they are mysteries of life. They are mysteries of life because they emerge from the dynamic of nature which is a process and it is the oomph of the current of life so that nature has this primordial quality that it instantly comes into existence whole. It doesn't plan bit by bit and then piece it together but it comes whole. The mind which is artificial must take pieces of a puzzle and put the puzzle together. The mind is satisfied when all the pieces of that puzzle are together, it then looks at the completed puzzle and does not know enough to look at the picture. It sees the picture as the completed puzzle but if you look, not at the puzzle, and look in such a way that you're not puzzling, the picture are the images that flow together and the best way to think of that is that is an image base. That image base is the sinuous flow upon the traction of the uncontaminated ritual steps in their sequences as resonant movements in action that amount to groups that are able to be woven together.
And so the best ritual comportment is that one now can weave and one can also make the pots, the pottery, the ceramics. One knows how to take a wheel, a circular motion and bring a pot into its ritual being and then that pot, if it is fired, if it is made right, it will fire, it will take fire and it will become a ceramic. Or the weaving is such that it will take an imagery, an image base into the weave and that there are many different kinds of weave. This weft and this warp of the weaving can be done in such a transpositional way that you can get an ironic quality to the imagery like a jacquard pattern in a French silk, where you can see two different patterns at the same time from the same image. That image base is able to show two different facets. That's the fine art of the craft of weaving but in the art of weaving one can do such a thing that you now get a complete rainbow kaleidoscope of imagery in the same presentational field.
So when we get to art, we will use the basis of generated mythic experience to build the frame of which art is a part and that frame is not a frame of reference, necessarily, the best way is not even to call it a frame but to call it a square of attention; that one is looking with this square of attention but one is looking with the cube of the field of spontaneous alertness. And so the name Cybele, the ancient, ancient Middle East, Near East version of her name, Kubaba, is actually the generative of the cube. She is the cubic space of existence that actually comes into being, not for itself just as the cube, but as the cubic space by which existence now has a three dimensional, stable form that takes the dimension of time. And so it has the ability to flow as a ritual three dimensional form in the experience of time.
As nature has no set time in itself, in herself, in himself, the experience flow of life that goes with nature will take time outbound. So that it has temporality but it does not have limit time. So that one does not live just for this many years, this many seasons, one lives with the ongoingness of life and so our body generating the experience of life is not only able to integrate together to make a clear mind, an open mind, but to go all the way back and to sense the primordiality of nature coming into, not into one's body but becoming emergent as one's body, so that the body itself has an existence that is fresh. It is primordial because it does not come into existence statically, it comes into existence resonantly, iteratively. So each moment of the body is its fresh emergence just now into actuality so that the action of ritual is an actuality of objectivity.
The Greek word for that: pragmatic, pragmatos, means that that action happens as it happens and does not necessarily have a past time tense or a future time tense different from the present perfect time tense. You notice that when civilisation first begins to come into its form, its complex form, spoken language becomes written language but the written language in civilisation has a watermark difference from the written language of cultures. The difference is this, the watermark is this, two things: verbs now have the ability to have time tenses. Language, spoken language in its written form, is syllabic and able to have a gender inflection in the syllables. And so the nouns and the adjectives, now it is syllabic gender language, you will have masculine, feminine endings for all words and verbs that have tenses. Now, one has a different kind of language, the written language now is capable of building a highly complex mind that if it is open it is open on a massively complex presentational reality.
But to keep the purity of a culture, any culture, into the complexity of a civilised form is the most difficult transition that human beings are capable of. When we were in cultures, we were in cultures for over 150,000 years as a species, Homo sapiens. But when we came into civilisations, we had to have a sub-species of Homo sapiens come into emergence: Homo sapiens sapiens. Not just wise hominids but wise about being wise hominids and that was about 5000 years ago. We are at the cusp of another enormous evolutionary change. We must now not just be Homo sapiens sapiens, we must be Homo sapiens stellaris. We have to be Star Wisdom Man. We have to be able to live out among the stars in our bodies, in our experience, in our minds and keep all of the ancient opennesses operative. This is extremely difficult to do because the specific techniques that civilisation has developed almost all the way through lose touch with the primordiality with nature. Lose the capacity to have that experience flow which is able to come into an open mind. What gets in the way is the mis-stepping of our bodies in rituals because they are not stepping to the rhythms of natural energy but they are stepping to the artificial designs of inculcated human doctrines.
And so when we come to something like Dodd's little statement, 'Who was the father of this King Pentheus who imprisons Dionysius?' Dionysius comes to Thebes. He comes to Thebes to initiate something that is 10,000 years ancient in Asia. Centred originally in the southern Anatolian mountains, centred at least 9000 years ago in the archaeological site of Çatalhöyuk, where Kubaba, Cybele, the Earth Mother was there, and not just an Earth Mother, but the feminine by which the Earth is the gate through which existence may come fertilely, existentially, real and that this must carry over to us as well.
What interrupts this is that Pentheus has a father that has gotten in the way and has gotten in the way because of what his father had done. Pentheus' father is named Echion. Echion in Greek means snake man. He is a snake man. How did he get born? The phrase that he is commenting on in The Bacchae is, 'What rage, what rage he shows, the earth child, the old dragon's breed. Pentheus whose father was earth-born Echion.' Echion was one of the sewn men, that is, Cadmus had slain a dragon and had taken the teeth of the dragon and had slit, sewed those teeth of the dragon. Instead of being born from a woman, who is a resonance of the Earth fertility goddess, he comes out of the dragon's teeth sewn by a man into just the earth as earth, as some kind of artificial vessel, to bring forth what he wanted to bring forth, paying no attention to the earth's fertility but forcing it by the inculcation of the teeth of the dragon. What came out are children who are now of a different nature. They are, in ancient, ancient time they were called giants. In Moses' writing, he said there were giants in those days. In Greek mythologies the Titians, like Prometheus.
They are men who are larger than men, larger than life men. They are not only larger than life, they are larger than nature. They are larger than the Gods, they are the enemies of the gods and so they fight them. They fight them in a particular way; they starve them out. They make sure that there are no real sacrifices to the gods so that the gods will receive no nourishment. Instead they will keep all the power for themselves on Earth in giant men's ways. Whereas Euripides points out, it is not that the man is a giant, it is that that man is an ordinary man that has a monstrous thing in him, demonic, that hates divinity, all divinity, is jealous of all divinity. Because if divinity is real the demons are not. The only place the demons have to be real is being sheltered by man in his ignorance because if man is not ignorant they will behold God. But if they do not know how to do this then they are like a fertile subterfuge jungle in which the demons can be safe from the divine, they think.
The snake man, one of the sewn men who sprang from dragon's teeth which Cadmus sewed, references to Pentheus' curious ancestor is strikingly frequent in the play and he gives more than half a dozen instances. Another writer thinks that we are meant to see in him a symbol of the Dionysic element in this man which makes him, like the snake, a potential vehicle of the God. The chorus, however, draws the simpler conclusion that the earthbound giants who fought against the gods, he comes of a monstrous inhuman stock and is therefore the natural enemy of what is divine. These were special types in the fifth century of classical Greek who used the gods in a very private power play way.
The experience in the classical Greeks is clearer than many other places and this is why it's a good reference. They had four ways in which to relate to these experiences. One was a traditional Greek religion, the other was a local deities of the geography of where you happened to live. The third was the cult of the rulers of that kingdom, of that city, of that place and the fourth was like extraneous deities that were not of the locality, they were not of the ruler cult, they were not of the standard customary traditional religion. What Pentheus tries to do is to put Dionysius in the extraneous deities, 'From where you come from you may be a deity but not in my town. You are not a part of the ruler cult and you are not a traditional customary member of the Greek gods of the Olympic Pantheon, there were six women, six men that were twelve gods in Olympus and you are not among them. In particular you were offensive to the feminine goddess of the Greek Pantheon, Hera', who is the wife of Zeus.
Hera is the one who says, 'The Olympic family is the divine family. I am the wife of Zeus who is the King of Gods, so I am the mother, the matron of the official customary Greek religion. In fact Dionysius' mother Semele was blasted by a bolt of lightning from Zeus, my husband, because he understand how I told him that you were trying to unravel the Olympic family cartel. In doing so, you endanger the local ruler cult because Pentheus, then, is not going to be the King of Thebes, your energy is going to be the primordial thing in Thebes. So you are destroying the Greek Olympic Pantheon, you are destroying the ruler cult and you are trying to take over, not only this locality of these deities but all the different localities because wherever you have done, from India to the Aegean, you have, in your primordial energy, have replaced all of the local deities, have cracked all of the mythological pantheons, have sabotaged and replaced all of the local ruler cults so that all of those three groups are now extraneous deities and you are the only pantheon member, you are the only ruler cult head. You are the only local deity and so you are absorbing all these divine powers to yourself. Therefore we not only do not believe in you, we are going to jail you and you are not going to take hold here.'
Here is what Dionysius says to goad all this right at the beginning of the play: 'This town must learn, even against its will, how much it costs to scorn God's mysteries and then need to be purged so shall I vindicate my virgin mother and reveal myself to mortals as a God, thus son of God. Now hear this, King Cadmus has conferred the powers of his throne, with all attending honours on his grandson Pentheus. This God-fighting upstart snubs me, banishes my name from public sacrifice and private prayer. He'll soon find out, and every Theban with him, whose birthright is divine and whose is not. Once that score is settled I'll move on to manifest myself in every land.' And so Euripides points out right at the very beginning that this is not a contest between a stupid guy and some kind of odd religious freak but this is a tension in the very reality of existence.
Is there any way for man to seal off the primordial energies, the primordial dynamic of nature? Because that's where Dionysius gets his power. The only way to seal that off is to make an abstraction hold so that the basis of human power is in the mind and not in nature, that it's in a form, not in the flow of nature. In order to do this, then, the mental form must be airtight. It must be a doctrine that has every aspect abstracted from nature and held in such a way that the rituals do what they are told by the mind. If they do what is told by this mind and all of our minds are cinched and cinched in sync together so that it is the mind that all of us agree on, and the Greek word for that was a tyranny.
The individual who does that in themselves is a tyrannical master of themselves. A true Freudian ego. It is this thing that Dionysius cracks but he does it from the primordiality of nature coming into play and it isn't just the ritual objectivity that will change. It will not crack, it will just change but what cracks is the tyrannical mental form, the mind breaks. Worse than death: madness. True irrationality. Irrecoverable because once that mental form is shown to be fragile in the sense that it primordially breaks. It shatters. What it shatters into are shards, like an old window pane that's broken, you can never put that back together unless you are able to take those shards and melt that glass down and recast that window anew, or to make a new pot or to weave a new fabric but that that old one is no good anymore. But by the time of Euripides that mental tyranny of a monstrous community mentality had been made and remade and remade so many times that they felt that they were very close to having something perfect. And so they built temples, ostensibly like the Parthenon to Athena, but not built just to Athena but to disclose that men in their mentalities had mastered all of the difficulties and now were able to make a perfect place in the terms of their mentality, their symbolic minds.
In order for the Greek men and women to live in that kind of mentality empire, they would do that in their normal civic lives but they would leave the city and they would go out on pilgrimages, in Athens they left and they went out to Eleusis, about 15-17 miles outside of Athens, where the Eleusinian mysteries were celebrated. They were allowed to be celebrated by the power structure in the urban mentality because anyone who participated in those mysteries, it had two aspects to it; it was common, ordinary, everyone did it so it was not esoteric and two, you were never allowed to talk about it. So you only had your own experience in a common, ordinary way so it was just ordinary, it was not something special, everyone does this, this can't be anything extraordinary because it's common, everyone does this. Two, no one can talk about it publicly. Those were conditions that were laid down, not just by the tyranny of Thebes or the tyranny of Athens, later on the tyranny of Rome and all the other tyrannies, all have the same kind of form.
If you line them up, which it is possible to do, by the 21st century, one can take computer graphics, it looks like a series of croquet wickets. Alice in Wonderland sees the Queen of Hearts playing at croquet with flamingos and little hedgehogs that they must roll themselves and become balls and the flamingos must hold their necks straight and anyone who interferes with this, off with their heads. Not to kill them but they are going to be crazy, 'They don't play our game and the only thing that is going on around here is our game. If you are not a part of our game, if you are not a member of our game you don't belong here.'
The difficulty is that in really good games there are always wild cards. A wild card sabotages the possibilities, the odds and the more wild cards you have, the more the possibilities exceed anyone to be a game master or any group to be handling the controlling techniques. What has happened is that as civilisation has progressed, the last 3000 years especially, there are more and more lineages of wild cards than there are game players. There are more possibilities for men and women to find specific ways to come back out of nature absolutely whole in that their bodies and their rituals, their ritual comportment, their action sequences are natural, one can go back to nature and become refreshed. One can go back, as Thoreau said, in wilderness is the preservation of man. One can go back into this in such a way that nature takes us in an immersion of the primodiality of the process.
One of the most extraordinary testaments of this in recent, about 100 years ago, an American named John Muir was hiking in Yosemite and he was on Half Dome. He was so entranced at seeing the great Yosemite valley that he edged down and edged down. He was appreciating the sunset of the Merced River and Yosemite and The Falls. Then he realised it was going to get dark and he had to get back up. He worked at it and worked at it and as he did he got more and more exhausted until finally the sun was setting, the darkness was coming and Muir did not have the strength to go any further. He was going to die by plunging into Yosemite Valley from his beloved Half Dome. And so he let his hands go into the energy of the rock and without any effort whatsoever climbed back up to the top and bowed his head because the land had saved him by absorbing him into itself. You don't need human strength if you are at home with rocks.
A meteorite is a celestial rock, it's a heavenly rock. When a meteorite comes to earth it is a bit of heaven. Not a bit of heaven, it is the seed of the unity of heaven in and of itself. When that meteorite, and most really heavy meteorites are a nickel iron meteorite, is shaped into a cube, that black cube of that meteorite is the sacred heavenly stone which now is the cube of the Kubaba, of the Cybele, of the Great Mother. Not just the Great Mother of the Earth but the Great Mother of all Earths, of all stabilities among the stars and so it has a primordiality. And this was the mother of Dionysius. He is really the son, through Semele, of this Kubaba, of the Cybele, of this cube, of this celestial bringing of the existentiality of the stone of heaven.
World literature has many of these things, we talked about how the Kaaba, in Mecca, has the black stone, right at the centre, embedded so that this is not the point to know this is the point of realisation but that that point of realisation when it is put into the dynamic of consciousness becomes a pivot. It is the turning of the pivot that generates the magnetic field that holds all together. It doesn't hold together because it is thought to be together by doctrine.
When the Hollerith catalogue first came out in San Francisco the cover was a photo, the only photo at the time we had of the full Earth. And the caption was, 'We can't put it together, it is together.' We live in a unity that has emerged out of an infinite. It is real and the infinite is fertile to have emerged us. Our thanks is exactly the right resonance to make the harmonic complete, it now includes all of us.
This quality, by the way, was stressed in Al Gore's movie that has just been released. Also, he pointed out that the cameras of Voyager II when it was going beyond Neptune, Triton, on out to the edge of the solar system, the camera turned and he displays in the film that the Earth from that distance looks like a blue star and actually looks like a tourmaline blue star. But the fact is that that photograph was not just of the earth, the photograph was of all of the planets together with the suns and moons. It was a photograph of the family of the solar system and just as that happened, just as that was able to be accomplished, sometime in the early 1990s, the very next day was the beginning of the planning of the new horizons mission to Pluto and Charon and to the Kuiper Belt.
This is the mystery in our time in the way in which this actually does happen. As soon as we achieve the vision of a unity on the level of a star system we are given the exploration and adventure of the next unity that is ever so much larger. If you go out to Pluto, you go out about what is called 30 astronomical units. The Kuiper Belt goes out more than 1000 astronomical units and actually our star system goes out to an oort cloud that is almost a light year away, almost a quarter of the way to the next star system.
So we are learning, as we achieve the completeness of a unity, the next adventure for the next expansion of unity presents itself as a possibility to us. It is now doable, whereas it was not thinkable before, now it is just now known, just now discovered, freshly, and just now the capacity is there. This is called a fertility of reality. Our learning is to take each of eight phases and by fulfilling the structuring and the presentation of that phase, the next phase's capability opens up spontaneously and expands our ability. After doing this in eight successive, expansive ways, that further whole now has, what is called in math, it has a harmonic analysis, which includes the ability to deal with infinities. At that point we are free, forever. More next week.