Ritual 11
Presented on: Saturday, June 17, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Ritual 11 and I want to correct two errors that have appeared in the course so far, mis-statements. In Nature 1 I talked about how FuHsi and NuGua originated in the far west of China, the far northern Gobi desert area, and I misspoke, I called it the Kunlun mountains and of course the Kunlun mountains are in the southern side of the Gobi desert, in between Xinjiang province of China and Tibet. The mountain range where FuHsi and NuGua were 5,000 years ago is called the Tien Shan, the heavenly mountains, and heavenly because on the far side of the Tien Shan is a smaller version of the great Gobi desert but the mountains are so high in the Tien Shan that there are cirque valleys that have beautiful lakes. And one of those lakes is the site of Xi Wang Mu, who is the Queen Mother of the West in Chinese civilisation, and she is the bearer of immortality and the immortality is ritually encased in a peach tree which she grows and it is like a Garden of Eden fruit tree. The caveat is that it only fruits once every 1,000 years and so if you are not born in the time in which it fruits, and get immortality, you will have to have your ancestors 1,000 years from then, or however many hundred years, finally come to have the benefits of the fruit of immortality. The East Asia whole idea of there being supernatural at the centre of the peach comes all the way to Japan with the Legends of Momotaro Peach Boy, who is discovered magically like Moses in a basket or Sargon in his basket. Little Peach Boy is discovered by an old couple who raise him and do not know until he grows that he is an immortal and that they have been blessed.
The other is when I mentioned, about a month ago, around Ritual 7 or 8, Newgrange in Ireland. Newgrange is not oriented to the summer solstice but to the winter solstice. And of course, Newgrange being built about 3,200BC predates the Pyramids by many, many hundreds of years, almost 600 years, and Newgrange is of course contemporaneous with the original Osirion in Abidos. Both those were tubulous mounds that had a great underground character that went all the way back to Palaeolithic caves. But these are Palaeolithic caves, that are surface bubbles - that is the top of them are domes above the horizon of the earth so that it is like the slow emergence of Palaeolithic cave temples into above-the-horizon-of-the-earth temples - and after that you hardly ever find underground places of universal ritual and symbol: they're all above ground after about 5,000 years ago, 3,000BC.
What happens in Ritual is that for an incredibly long duration, through many species of hominids, more than 2,000,000 years' worth, the whole quality of mysteriousness was that the play on the surface of the earth was the life which the species, in their various incarnations and speciation events, they were used to that life. What was underneath was unknown and frightening: it was death, it was a netherworld not an afterlife but a netherworld. And there was hardly any attention paid to the upper world, to the celestial realms.
When our species, Homo sapiens, came into being about 160,000years ago in the southern reaches of Africa, for about 120,000 years of that our species as Homo sapiens was an improvement in many ways, but in particular over every other Homo species before them, Homo Neanderthal, Homo Erectus, Homo habilis, in that Homo sapiens developed a neurological structure that allowed them to speak language. Not just the grunts and the indications of all previous species, but Homo sapiens, for the first time, were able to modulate their breath more than 60 or 70 times per second so that they could speak a complex sound that became oral language.
About 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens underwent a species refinement. The refinement is indicated by doubling the word sapiens: Homo sapiens sapiens. Not only is it 'wise man' who can speak but it is wise about being wise man who can speak in depth. And what the depth is is that our species acquired, about 40,000 years ago, the ability to go into the netherworld and come back out onto the surface world bringing secrets of initiation about being wise about wisdom. And so the language changed. The oral language now, became instead of ritual based generative of experience, the language now had a double referent. It had a referent where experience did come out of what you do, out of your ritual comportment, out of your action - but it also had a double reflective quality where it had a referent to the symbolic mind for the first time.
And so Homo sapiens sapiens, about 40,000 years ago, developed a complex oral language that had a both symbolic higher integral and a very deeply mysterious complex ritual traction. And you find that these two aspects were always being balanced by the flow of mythic experience being balanced with the flow of nature. And so for the first time, about 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens sapiens coming out began to develop the quality of being wise about wisdom; not just having your experience, your mythos, flow with nature but having the balance then of ritual and symbol aspects of oral language.
About 5,000 years ago there was a deep refinement of this and the refinement came in the development of a written language. A written symbolic language now takes language out of the mythos, out of the mythic process, out of the mythic mode and jumps it, shifts it, to the symbolic mode so that it becomes formal rather than just an oral [9.46] it becomes a written structure. When it does this the double quality of language, which was ritual and symbol mitigated by the mythic oral experience, when you have a written language, now, that written language has a double property but its double property is that it has a genesis out of mythic experience, out of the oral language imagery feeling tones of experience but it's double, its correlate now is in visionary consciousness.
And so you have Homo sapiens sapiens who had developed immensely capable oral language cultures. When written language came in about 5-6,000 years ago, you had a deep modification because written language now needs to have experience correlate with visionary consciousness. It is not enough for mythic experience to flow with nature and to have mysterious nature in one's culture sufficient. Now that third process has to be brought into play of visionary consciousness. And the double quality of experience in oral language changes from moderating between ritual and symbol to now moderating between nature and vision, nature and consciousness. And so experience expands its ability to have its - not its confines - but these are processes like the banks of a river would be but instead of the banks of a river it's like a double river with a ridge in between.
You have then in civilisation an expansion of experience away from being contained by ritual objectivity and symbol objectivity to having a wilder, wider, flowing quality to its expressiveness and the mind, the symbolic mind, now must have its form in such a way that it does not just close with experience but is open to something beyond itself in vision. And so the mind now understands, for the first time in civilisation, in written language, that its written language structure must be such that the flow of experience can go through the mind, can penetrate the symbols, that the symbols now act as gateways, as thresholds, and not as summations. So that a written symbolic language and a civilisation have an imperative quality: experience must be able to transcend the mind in order for it to be healthy.
This is a very difficult realisation early on in civilisations, 3,000BC is like a watershed where you find not only FuHsi and NuGua inventing the written trigrams upon which the I Ching is based and the development of areas like Newgarnge or like the Osirion in Egypt at Abidos, everywhere in the world at the same time - in Sumeria you find the first confederations of city-states into unities, into places. All of this was an extraordinary difficulty that came to a head when civilisations became strong enough to dominate the cultural beginnings, to dominate the oral language beginnings, to dominate the experience that had come out of a natural flow and even experience which had its flow with nature and with visionary consciousness.
When civilisations became very powerful they began to squelch in favour of symbolic mind control, the structuring of civilisation, and it was a jeopardising situation to have free, or too much, visionary consciousness available. And so civilisation went through a filtering process where it would limit those who could go into the visionary mode; it would limit the access to the visionary mode to just a few individuals at a few given times. It's limiting the access to God to not just the priests but only to the high priest - and only once a year may the high priest alone go into the holy of holies and go into that deep wild visionary consciousness.
In every civilisation of the planet at the time, 'crisis point' came in the sixth century BC by ordinary reckoning. And everywhere on the planet you found special sages who recognised that a crisis point had come to play especially in the mind: that the mind was now powerful enough, extended through very large written language civilisations, completely different in scope from culture, and that these written language civilisations could now distort the existential basis of ritual, largely ignoring nature and nature's flow and commandeering the way in which spoken language would be done according to the written language mentality.
You find three great examples, exemplars, individuals, all living at the same time. You find Lao Tzu ain China, you find the historical Buddha in India and you find Pythagoras in the Eastern Mediterranean, Greece, and the near east. Pythagoras' family, his father's family, was from the Mediterranean cost of Phoenicia and it's usually thought that Pythagoras was born on Samos in the Aegean; it's only his mother who came from Samos, his father was a Phoenician merchant who had ties all over the world and that's why when Pythagoras was a young man he could go to Egypt, he could go to Persia, he could go to the Aegean, everywhere in Asia Minor, because he knew through his father's shipping business how to 'be' the different languages and how to live among a number of people. So that you have this triple example and there are others at the same time but these are three major. You have everything from Athens, Greece, to the development of the Euphrates-Tigris river civilisations clustered around Pythagoras, you have everything in India up to and including the trans-Hindu Kush area of the historical Buddha and for Lao Tzu you have everything from the east Atlantic coast of East Asia all the way out to the ends of the western reaches of the Gobi desert.
So everything from Japan to southern Italy at the very same time had a deep remaking of ritual basis of the referential language of experience so that the mind now would have to go back to a previous calibration: that its balance is ritual and symbol and that the experience, the mythic experience of oral language now no longer was commandeered by the mind but had to be returned back to its synergy, its flow with nature. The crisis came about 100 years later in the 400s BC, and one of the greatest documents of that crisis is Greek tragedy. The development of Greek tragedy was a direct desperate move to at last and at least be able to find some way to return human beings to their existential basis which alone gave traction to a real mind; a mind which is real is capable of realisation, whereas artificial mind is capable only of its artificiality, of its self identification of the ego.
We're taking Euripides' Bacchae as the great exemplar because it was the last great Greek tragedy. It is Euripides in exile at age 70. And, as Faulkner said once, when Shakespeare finished writing the Tempest he broke his pen not to write again because he had come to the end of the tether which is the radius of the possibility of expressing a domestication. A tether is used to train a horse because the wild motions of the horse will always be stretched taught at the radius of the tether and eventually a circle of limitation to the random wild movement s of the horse is the beginning of the taming. The tether of the mind, that radius of the mind, is not in the mind but in the ritual comportment of one's actions, of what you do. And Greek tragedy is a tether. The length of it is the radius of possible actions of man until he finds that he cannot go any further and yet reality, nature, is vast beyond where he can reach with this radius, with this tether. And Greek tragedy is always about a point of realisation where the tether stretches as taught as it can and breaks and you are left plunged into the wilds of untameable nature, and the Bacchae is all about that.
The crisis in the 400s came in a sociological way in that the ritual comportment of cultures had been tightened and re-formed into the structure of tyrannical empires. And those tyrannical empires based themselves on continuous warfare, on conquest, that the old hunting qualities of Palaeolithic man - the hunting qualities that had been brought into the earlier civilisations, as keeping alive the origin of the courage of men, of the bringing home of the game to the times, complementing what the women could gather and bring together - warfare instead was not hunting for survival of the family, of men and women cooperating together, hunting and gathering together, but of a warfare to sustain the growing ambitions of the tyrannical forms of civilisation.
Of all the planet, the most anti-war writer for thousands of years was Euripides, and he took the most poignant pride of the tyrannical Greek empire of the late 400s; he took the Trojan war as his point breaking exemplar and wrote one of the most ... it was a Greek tragedy that brought him such ill will from the tyranny, that he went into self exile and never returned to Athens again and the Greek tragedy is called The Trojan Women. The Trojan women are three of the most powerful wives of the defeated Trojans and one of the Greek wives and the Queen of Troy, whose king Priam has been killed, is played by Katherine Hepburn. The daughter in law, played by Vanessa Redgrave, was the wife of Hector, the greatest warrior of Troy, who was not only killed he was massacred. Achilles in his wrath and anger not only killed the man but mutilated him and then dragged the body three times around the walls of Troy, maybe something like eight or ten miles, so that it was completely mangled. And Cassandra, prophetess of doom, the mad daughter of the Queen of the Trojans, Hecuba, is played by Genevieve Bujold and Irene Papas plays the fatal woman, Helen, who was the cause of the Trojan war. And so Micheal Kakogiannis in this great film and screen play, written by Euripides but translated by Edith Hamilton, one of the great classical popularisers of the mid 20th century.
We're using Cacoyannis's translation of the Bacchae, I do not believe that he ever made a film yet. Before The Trojan Women of course he made Sophocles' Electra with Irene Papas; he made Zorba the Greek with Anthony Quinn, just one of the really great directors. He understood the drama of Greek tragedy is a ritual comportment, not a symbolic structure. Why is not a symbolic structure? Because it is a ritual comportment that existence itself is in jeopardy and in jeopardy by the symbolic structure of the mind. And so the whole point of Greek tragedy is to not let the mind dominate the drama and so, in a 'special', the mind is given not only a secondary position but a position near the exit of the door where it can be booted out.
So that Greek tragedy is a ritual comportment showing that the power that is happening here is that nature and experience are going to flow again if the ritual combing is strong enough to get rid of all of the false spurs that have been put in by the symbolic mind. And that as soon as ritual is iron combed-out in this way, like in a Greek tragedy and all the false spurs are illuminated in the course of the performance of the Greek tragedy, the mind which has correlated itself referentially to the false ritual will now be faced with a broken traction base, a broken existence in terms of the mind and it will think it has gone mad or that it is now ready for death or that it has been killed because its whole referential structure is not to nature: it has ignored nature; it's not respectful of experience it has reconfigured experience on its terms. Its referentiality was that it had dominated what the action was, what people do. And the tyranny was that men had become permanent killers in organised warfare and that the women had become bartered objects as trophies to the victors and parcelled out or left to fend for themselves in impossible situations. And The Trojan Women of course is absolutely, as Kakogiannis writes in his introduction, the most strong statement against warfare in the world: that it is a bastardisation of the complete integral cycle by a mind which is so distorted that any corrective to cure it would be considered by that mind a madness or a death.
In the Bacchae which takes the critique, on a sociological level, of The Trojan Women and many others, he wrote tragedies about Helen, about Hecuba, about other figures in this, but the Bacchae is the summation of it and the Bacchae is all about king Pentheus who looks upon the life-energy divinity of Dionysus as a sham: he's a faker. He's a faker that comes from Central Asia - what is he bringing? - he's bringing orgiastic qualities to the women, teaching them to go out of the city into the wilds, leave the structured homes, leave their place as quiet cogs in the masculine dominated powers of the cities and the empires and the ongoing professional warfare, to leave all of that behind and go out and re-establish their experience flowing with the wildness of naturalness, of nature itself, nature in the wild.
The commandeering of the tyrannical masculine empire mind is that they just want to go out and cavort, to drink wine, to go off in the bushes with nice looking men or power appealing natural men or just simply to dance together in celebration of life, in celebration of existence, being freed from the tyranny of the mind to going back to being held in the flows of the wildness of nature and the wildness of our experience of life unfettered by falsity. But Euripides puts in, in the chorus, saying that the dignity of a human being is in the natural character - not in the mind as an artificial individuality, but it's there in the sentient feeling-toned image flow languagable relationality between other human beings that the dignity of the women is not in the strictures of the masculine dominated homes, cities, empires etc but it's in their own character. And that a woman will find the truth of her character and her actions will be in accord with that - not that the actions will be in accord with the ritual actions so much but the experience of the character will be flowing with the naturalness of nature, and in that the actions will support existence in its truthfulness rather than the structure of something imposed.
Here's how one translation of a section of the Bacchae reads ... the chorus, a series of twelve masked feminine figures who have come with Dionysus from Asia Minor, 'O, for long nights of worship gay with the pale gleam of dancing feet, with head tossed high to the dewy air, pleasure mysterious and sweet. O for the joy of a fawn at play in the fragrant meadow's green delight who has leapt out free from any woven snare away from the terror of chase and flight from the huntsman's shout and the straining pack and skims the sand by the river's rim with the speed of wind in each aching limb to the blessed lonely forest where the soil's unmarked by human track and leaves hang thick and shades are dim. What prayer then should we call wise?'
And you hear this, even in translation, you hear the power of this incredible complex cadence, not a cadence that's meant so much to be read but to be heard. It is a spoken language that has not yet given itself over to a written language with a symbolic structure as its real integral basis, is not concerned with the integral of the mind, its concerned to express in a natural ebullient cloud making quality out of the ritual action that really is happening, the drama on the stage that the language - in Sanskrit the term for this was called papancha, cloud churning - that this just simply occurs because the action is so precise and intense, it's like flints striking and making the sparks and finally the fire comes and fire is the flaming of language out of the intensity of actions which have been generated because they are primal, from nature, fresh just now. They're not a repetition of anything. And so the performance of a Greek tragedy is that this is the first time ever in the history of the universe that this has happened, because this performance is unlike any performance; it's not repetition, it's not a play bill, 'And now we're doing this performance,' it's that this is happening for the first time originally out of the complete openness of nature and just now is occurring.
There was a little note in the latest issue of Nature, The International Journal of Science, 'According to quantum theory, a vacuum is far from empty. It seethes with photons that pop in and out of existence. An object moving through these photons should feel a slight drag type, called a Casimir Effect, it might be possible to measure.' What happens is that the photons, as they come in and out of existence, exceed the speed of light when they're out of existence and hold to the speed of light when they're in existence and they're popping in and out and because it is both ways, the Casimir Effect is that there is a synchrotron radiation that is sent out because what is happening here is that the speed of light is being exceeded every non-moment. And each time the photon comes into existence as a particle, it is just now a particle, and when it went out it is no longer a particle but a dynamic wave much faster than light -they don't say - it's about 10 to the 9th, it's about ten billion times the speed of light. You could cross most of the known universe in the time it takes to blink your eye.
We're pairing with Greek tragedy the great Zen travel journal of Basho and we'll come to it after the break for a little bit to see - but not only that but Zen theatre, the Noh theatre, is very much like Greek tragedy ... One of the really great little studies came out, published by Princeton, just a few years ago, The Artistry of Aeschylus, the founder of Greek tragedy, and Zeami, the founder of Noh drama, Zen drama in Japan. It is interesting to see that as we pair Zen and Greek tragedy, both are concerned that a point of realisation exceeds the mind's ability to keep it tethered. In Greek tragedy it's that one is returned to the wilds of nature, in Zen it's that one is returned to the wilds of reality. Let's take a break and we'll come back.
Let's come back and we're trying to appreciate something here which is of permanent interest: when the mind dominates, ritual becomes method and the method is all geared to a codification of dominating the ritual so that it is no longer a ritual that is generated by nature, but it is a method that is controlled by the mind, by its mentality. The only conscious way to transform then is to have the method generate a quality of vision called theory. And theory is able, through visionary consciousness, to engender a transform of method into technique - techne, meaning art. So instead of having a mentality dominated method, now one has a person-prismed technique which is able to do something which the old natural-generated ritual used to be able to de vis-à-vis the symbolic mind. But whereas the ritual of existence was like the traction base of the symbolic structure of the mind, the new art form techniques, instead of being a base for the mind are a forward attraction for the mind: they're a magnetic future for the mind, they're something that the mind must ascend to, aspire to. And so vision, when it is an active theoretical transform, puts the imagination of the mind into imagining in visionary consciousness which becomes insightful, it becomes attracted to, it becomes look-forward looking to.
And in the ancient Greek ethos this, someone who could do this, was called a seer and the Greek word for seer is a mantis. Now we get the English term 'mantic' out of it meaning out of control, out of control of the mind. But mantis is a seer who has the gift of prophecy and that early theoria - the Greek word theoria means contemplation - it isn't theory as a structure of the mind, it's theoria as a contemplative practice of vision which when it is tuned becomes the creative imagining that is very close to prophesising. And so a Greek seer, a mantis, would be somebody who has the gift of prophecy. And prophecy is a feature of Apollo, because Apollo is not a mental form, it's not a symbolic state of form but is an art form, is a differential prismatic form.
In the Bacchae, the mantis figure is Tiresias and he is the most powerful figure in the whole drama, in the whole Greek tragedy. Because Tiresias has received the gift of prophecy because he was blinded so that his physical existential eyes were permanently blinded and to make up for it the person who blinded him gave him the gift of prophecy of insight, of visionary insight, that he can see visionarily not only really what is there but what is coming, that leads to what is really there as well. And the goddess who blinded him was Athena. And it is Athena who gave him also the gift of prophecy to make up for the fact ... why was she blinding him? Because he saw Athena bathing nude. And it is curious because the mother of Tiresias was with her, bathing with her, when the son saw her and Athena, seen nude, isn't that she blinded him because of that but her nakedness blinded him and at the same time opened his visionary eyes.
Why was Tiresias there? Because he was the only figure in the Greek ethos who was at one time a man and at another time a woman and then another time brought back into being a man again: he had been both sexes. And that the two sexes came because he saw two very sacred serpents copulating on a sacred mountain at a sacred site and the seeing of that changed his gender. And the second time that he saw it, later in his life, it changed his gender again and changed him back into a man. And so he had lived for a long time as a woman and he was used to just being around women bathing together as a woman, and when he had been changed back to a man, he forgot momentarily that he was now a man and seeing his mother and Athena bathing together, the sight of Athena's nudity blinded him and because the mother said, 'Well, my son cannot live without being able to see,' so Athena gifted him then with the gift of prophecy. And in the Bacchae, when he first comes into play - enter Tiresias the Blind - he makes his way unaided to the door because he can see not only with vision, seeing visually, but one can, though vision, one can hear, one can have all of the senses working but they work now not as five different senses but of five senses brought together quintessentially.
So that visionary consciousness is a quintessential interpenetrating of all the senses together and all of their senses together constitute a gestalt which is a sixth sense. The sixth sense is not a sixth sense added to the five but that the five together, gestalted not at as a whole integrally but gestalted as an array, differentially, convey the harmonic of the array: not the integral of the five but the harmonic of the five. So you get a pentatonic scale which in itself then is like a sixth sense, called insight and that the insight has all of the earmarks of a super perception. And that super perception, its insight immediately because it is just one remove, one transform beyond the integral of the mind, its first insight is that it has a telepathic quality to it. The first super power in a yoga is that you begin to understand what people are thinking, other people are thinking - not telepathy of their words but telepathy of knowing what they're thinking. And the next of course is the extension of that: that one begins to have this sense of a super space that reaches out and, with practice, one can begin to sense, intuitively, space and time and their integral into future space and future time.
Tiresias comes in and the first thing he says, he comes onto this 90 foot wide stage, the theatre of Dionysus in Athens, carved into the great Acropolis rock complex, and he steps in and says, 'Who keeps the gate?' He's not seeing, but he's perceiving, that something has happened that the city no longer has any shape, it does not have a shape where there is a gate and though Thebes classically had seven gates, there's no one keeping any of the gates. And Tiresias senses this right away: that the city has faded away from wherever it was, it is no longer there, it is in a 'never never land' of no one being there.
This is harkening back to the Odyssey. In the Odyssey, Tiresias appears in a very peculiar place, he is the only person in Hades who has still kept his intelligence. The Homeric Hades is that one goes to Hades and slowly fades and fades and fades away and the ability to have language, to speak language, becomes not only faded but it becomes confused and Homer says in the Odyssey that in hell people speaking sound like the gibbering of bats in the darkness and they fade as if they were like old flowers that keep getting older and older. The phrase translated into English from Homer is, 'The fading fields of asphodel without scent, without hope.'
One of the books that we're using, for a whole year, as a track, is the Odyssey. We're also using Moby Dick by Herman Melville or Ovid's Metamorphoses or Lady Murasaki's The Tale of Genji. These year-long reading journeys weave together with the pairs of works that we continually use. We change them every moon cycle, every month we change them but we change the year-long reading track with a solar cycle. So that any given time you have three and with three you are able to braid and to weave, you can get a complex weave with three strands. And of course if you're doing the continuous respective, the Pythagorean respective, you'll have the pair plus the reading journey from the previous phase that folds in together and you'll get a six part, you'll get a double braiding, you'll get a very complex weave.
In the Odyssey, how does Odysseus get to the underworld, because in his travels he is constantly stopped by Poseidon? Zeus favours Odysseus - he's the sky god - but Poseidon is the sea god and Odysseus is blinded. One of his favourite sons is Polyphemus the Cyclops, and he says 'He will never get home, I will stop him every time.' And Zeus who is a brother of Poseidon cannot help. Poseidon is a brother, he's equal, 'You control the sky, that's fine. I control the sea; he doesn't get home.' But there's a third brother: as Zeus is the brother above, Hades is the brother below. So there's a sky god, a sea god and a netherworld god and in order to undo the curse of Poseidon, Odysseus has to go to the centre of the netherworld, has to go to Hades in the netherworld to reverse his magnetism. So that now he can come back to the sea and he can get home because Poseidon cannot, when there are two brothers above and below, he can't stop Odysseus on both counts if both brothers, above and below, are willing for him to have his day of homecoming.
It isn't that he just gets home, it's that there is a ritual day of homecoming and that that day of homecoming is a future certainty that can be prophesised and if it is prophesised it will happen. Like the day of Yahweh, the Judgement Day, if it is prophesised there will come a day, there will come that day. What is that? That is the moment that is the point of realisation that is the transform of everything that has been integrally brought together will lead into its array that leads to reality. And the day of homecoming will be a future time in reality which is much more powerful than any day that's there in the natural cycle. Odysseus knows nothing of this; the person that tells him is Circe. And Circe tells him because he has managed not only to save his men - she was turning his men into pigs, they were swine in a little corral that she kept, because she's a fearsome goddess, if you mess with her you're turned into a swine, you're put there and you'll be food later on for somebody - but Odysseus does not turn into a swine, he is able because of his heritage, because he is a man of many minds, he is able to hold his own with the goddess.
And so she lives with him for a year until he is healthful again and the full spirit back into his life and she knows that that moment with the full spirit back into his life he will want to go home and she knows also he cannot go home because Poseidon will not allow him. So she tells him:
You will have to sail to hell and go to the centre of hell and then you will be able to come back and go home.' And of course he breaks down and he weeps. In the Odyssey, 'So she spoke and the inward heart in me was broken and I sat on the bed and cried and did not the heart in me wish to go on living any longer nor to look on the sunlight. But when I had gutted myself with rolling about and weeping, then at last I spoke aloud and answered the goddess "Circe, who will be my guide on that journey? No one has ever yet gone in a black ship all the way to Hades." So I spoke and she, shining among goddesses, answered "Son of Laertes and seed of Zeus, resourceful Odysseus, let no need for a guide on your ship trouble you, only set your mast pole and spread the white sails upon it and sit still and let the blast of the north wind carry you. But when you have crossed with your ship the stream of ocean, the bound of the natural world, when you have crossed the stream of ocean you will find there a thickly wooded shore and the groves of Persephone, tall black poplars growing and fruit perishing willows, then beach your ship on the shore of the deep eddying ocean and yourself go forward there into the mouldering home of Hades."
And then she tells him the ritual which must be done when he gets into Hades, because since he is no longer in life on the surface, if he goes into the netherworld, the netherworld is a death world and contaminates life by ending it. It's like entering into a radioactive field, you will not be able to come out, you will be radioactive so you will have to do something to ensure that in between everyone that you talk to in Hades, every beholding that you have there, there must be this ritual followed, which will provide a traction which is reversible. You will be able to come in and be there, talk with them and learn what you must and then back out from there and return. And she says, their hero[1.01.38] 'You must go close in and do exactly as I tell you: dig a pit about a cubit in each direction.' A cubit is about 18 inches, from the elbow to the tip of the fingers. A cubit in each direction is a cube and you remember a couple of weeks ago we were talking that the original name for the fearsome goddess Cybele was Kybele: cube. She is the unknown dark black cube out of which primordiality gels first and allows for existence to come into play: she is the cube of vacuum emptiness.
So you're going to dig a pit in the netherworld of a cube of vacuum emptiness otherwise if you don't have this initial seal, you will have the radiation of death and you will not be able to ever return. 'Pour it full of drink offerings for the dead.' So in this cube of vacuum you're going to give food for the dead. What will he do? 'Honey with milk and then a second pouring of sweet wine and a third water. And over all of them sprinkle white barley and promise many times to the strengthless heads of the perished dead that ,returning to Ithaca, you will slaughter a barren cow, your best, in your palace and pile the pyre with treasures and to Tiresias, apart, dedicate an all black ram and one conspicuous in all your sheep flocks.' Because the first person who will manifest out of this black cube, the dark empty vacuum of hell, by three kinds of libation, will be Tiresias. He's the only person initially, who will have enough strength, his intelligence intact, to be able to begin to call up the other dead so that you can then talk to them.
Honey mixed with milk, sweet wine, water with barley flour. Now the barley and the water together will make bread, it's the food of Demeter; the wine is the food of Dionysus - bread and wine, they're always an ancient sacrificial pair. But the third, milk and honey, they're a combination like the land, the land of milk and honey is a promised land, it is a future land, it is a prophesised land, it is the food from the prophesised future land that you will get to. That milk and honey, this bread and wine, those three together, as nourishments in the cube of the emptiness at the threshold by which you will go into hell and the gateway by which you will return back out again: this is the ancient journey through the netherworld, mitigated by Osiris so that anyone following through this will be able to pair themselves with Ra who already has done this and has done this every day in the existential actuality of the earth. How many days? The Egyptian Book of the Dead says millions of years, it's even longer than that.
When we go to the historical Buddha, just for a moment, how long is this? Historical Buddha talked about there being six kinds of figures who are able to understand world cycles. There are members of other sects, there are ordinary disciples, there are great disciples, there are chief disciples, there are private Buddhas and then there are Buddhas. Members of other sects can call to mind former states of existence for 40 world cycles; it's a long time, but no more. And why? On account of the weakness of their wisdom - for their wisdom is weak as they are unable to define and name form. Ordinary disciples can call to mind former states of existence for 100 or even 1,000 world cycles on account of the strength of their wisdom. The 80 great disciples can call to mind former states of existence for 100,000 world cycles. The two chief disciples for one immensity and 100,000 world cycles. Private Buddhas for two immensities and 100,000 world cycles. But the Buddhas have unlimited power.
The graduated stepping-up is a form - George Gamo, one time a great mathematician, titled one of his books One, Two, Three... Infinity - that there is an asymptotic jump where the scale goes literally off the graph, that this is that the cycles are a time curl within which space has blossomed. And so the movement of time is like the sap and the space, the three dimensional space, is like the fruiting that comes out of it. But just as there would be a fruit which would then be the luminal of that time space integral, at a certain development before the fruiting begins, there is a blossom. And if one follows, not the blossom to the fruit but follows the blossom to the perfume, the fragrance, that sacred incense then carries it not just into the integral but carries it into the perfuming of super nature, consciousness. This is why all religious rituals have incense. It is the perfuming of the time space which carries it into visionary super space time.
Historically, in only one place, the Buddha took the time to give a five part series and the fifth part of it was called the Parayana, Parayanam iti, this is the way across, this is the way beyond. Para means beyond, parapsychology, paradise, parayana, the way beyond. And it is written of here, 'And being all satisfied they all embraced the higher life as follows, convinced that all-seeing kinsmen of the sun, lord of enlightenment supreme in law, now whoso walks the Buddha's answers teaching shall win across and gain the shore beyond. The way across my lips shall now proclaim and discerning it, set it forth.' In almost all of the classic Buddhist teaching it comes to a closing off of the complications of existence and mind to a Nirvana, to a moksha, a vanishing. But in the parayana teaching it is that the perfume of the flowering is able to carry one across this entire threshold, which is a threshold of super nature, super symmetry nature. And there is a shore beyond which is another kind of a land, another kind of a form that you have never seen before in nature; you can get there by this.
Odysseus, because of Tiresias, is able to do this in the odyssey. Only one figure survives in Euripides' Bacchae because of Tiresias, and that is the old king Cadmus. And even though he is old he puts on the fawn skin, he carries the thyrsus, the fennel seed wrapped with ivy, twirls ivy in his old hair and tries to dance his sexy dances so that Dionysus knows that he's joined in with the Bacchae: that he is celebrating as best he can, dancing as fast as he can, to celebrate that life comes out of the wildness of nature and has existence primordially and is styled this and that and the other, later on by developments but that originally, primarily, freshly existence has all the wild tang of its origins. And that that wild tang of its origins is not mantic, like in crazy, but it is delicate as like in a baby. In the Tao Tê Ching, Lao Tzu uses the simile of a baby, he says the Tao, when it is freshly Tê, has the qualities of a baby which are unlimited, can develop into anything whatsoever.
We're learning, in our education, that ritual is not a repetition that jails one into mediocrity but is the essential objectivity that sustains the weave of existentiality so that the actions that we do are sequences that are not open ended but the sequences come to a purpose and that these purposes, these sequences, are able to be woven into groups and the groups are able to be woven together. And so one gets a complex hierarchy where all the straws are woven into the basket; it is the space of the basket and it has the same wild primordiality of the space outside the basket because it is left open, it is left into its shape. And so that good rituals always have openness that is left there and the saying is 'The baby has a soft spot at the top of the cranium,' the skull is not fully formed.
And it is through this soft spot, kept open into maturity, that the songs of praise to the Great Spirit are able to be a voice sent. The American Indian phrase translates directly as 'I send a voice,' not through my speaking, not through my mouth but through the speaking of the super-conscious voice of my spirit which the great spirit hears and hears not by my voice just going there: I send the voice but the Great Spirit pulls the voice to him/her. And by having pulled the voice to him/her of establishing a prophetic future where you will be with the Great Spirit because your voice has been heard and since it has been heard, you are already there in that visionary voice and you are already known. And the Jewish phrase is, 'Your name has been inscribed in the Book of Life,' you are known, you are expected. The promise is not simply one that will be kept, the promise is real in terms of the mental idea of keeping a promise: it already is established. So that super consciousness is always a future attraction rather than an old natural propulsion push, you don't need to push to get there. In fact, you cannot push to get there but you can create the space within which the visionary voice can be sent and, it being heard, you will arrive there on that day.
The quality of the chorus confirms that Tiresias now, in the Bacchae, speaks a long series, like a monologue. I'll just give you the first few sentences and you can hear the quality of the tone. He is blind, he has been both man and woman, he is a great seer, he says 'When a clever man has a plausible theme to argue, to be eloquent is no great feat. But though you seem, by your glib tongue, to be intelligent yet those words are foolish. Power and eloquence in a headstrong man can only lead to folly and such a man is a danger to the state.' He is a danger to the family, he is a danger to anyone who is close to him, he is a danger to himself, he is a danger to everything because he is not satisfied with any of those relational forms: always wants more, wants the empire, which completely grows because of unceasing warfare.
Tiresias says of Dionysus, to the man who refuses to hear, we're going to tough it through, we're going to do it, we're going to be heroes. 'This new divinity whom you ridicule, no words of mine adequately express the ascendency he is destined to achieve through the length and breadth of Helos [all Greece]. There are two powers young man that are supreme in human affairs, first the goddess Demeter, she is the earth, call her by whatever name you will and she supplies mankind with solid food,' the bread of life, 'second Dionysus, the son of Semele, the blessing he provides is the counterpart to the blessing of bread: he discovered and bestowed on men the service of the drink, the juice that streams from the vine clusters.' And through them, together, mankind receives the blessing of life, not the blessing of life simply to have food and drink but to have a food and a drink that sustain him even in the difficult life, even in a suffering life. Because it's endemic in man to have artificialities constantly crunching the naturalness of life into superficiality, so that the experience by this time in civilisation, is that life for most ordinary people is wall to wall suffering; in themselves, in their bodies, in their houses, in their families, in the districts of their cities, in their cities, in the states, in the empires that are now vying with each other through ceaseless overlapping wars, that everywhere life is a complex layer of suffering and yet the bread and the wine can sustain - in the future promise of arriving out of that permanently, those things sustain life even in the midst of suffering.
We are next week going to take a look at the theatre of Dionysus because it was not something that you just went to because you had tickets. Every adult person, male or female, in Athens had to go to these festivals where the Greek tragedies were performed. You had to go there were state proctors that went from house to house rousting everyone. Why? Because it was it was recognised by this time that the complications of empire were so sealed tight that only by desperate actions could one get through this and just as soon as the Bacchae ended the golden age of Greek tragedies the first super drama was written and produced. The first super drama after Greek tragedy and Greek comedy was the beginning of Plato's dialogues: dramas of wisdom realisation, not just of tragedy or comedy. We'll get to this next week and take a better look at what rituals are doing. Thank you.