Myth 1
Presented on: Saturday, July 8, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We are ready now for our third phase, which is myth, and we're generating phases from the previous phase, so that nature generated ritual and now ritual will generate myth, and myth in turn will generate symbol, and when symbols comes into completion it constitutes a cycle of integral, which is characteristic of nature everywhere that it occurs, on every level. What we're doing is weaning ourselves away form a subject categorised egg-crate mentality that has gotten us into trouble on every level of our lives for several thousand years.
This is not a course, teaching a subject, but it is a yoga generating the phases that not only have an integral for nature but also have a differential for consciousness, and by putting four phases in the ecology of consciousness that interpenetrate with the four phases of the integral of nature, it gives us something that in ancient times was symbolised by the infinity sign, by that Mobius strip. And it allows us to carry ourselves through a slow motion pivot that the turning of which allows us to explore our inside and outside without having to destroy the continuity, and so our yoga is like any classic yoga but whereas a hatha yoga is for the for the asanas of the body, kama yoga for the asanas of action, jnana yoga for the way in which the mind will structure or raja yoga, which is all three of those put together in a colossal presentation, or even the classic yoga of yogas by Patanjali, which was the most sophisticated yoga in the world until our time.
This is a new yoga, this is a yoga of civilisation and the asanas are the phases of reality in the way in which they generate and yield each other in such a way that nature will come out of the eighth phase, which is science, which is the reality, objectivity of the cosmos, which generates nature as process, and that that process of nature has a flow that is able to have a flow within it so that the flow within it has a peculiar quality of being a mysterious nature, and that mysterious nature is experience. The fact that anything can existentially come into stability out of the process of nature, and that that existentiality, that existence, can not only harken back to the natural origins of it but can make a resonance forward with the mythic process of experience, is able to flow literally within the flow of nature. The ancient way to talk about that was best translated into French about 100 years ago by one of the wisest of the French savants, who was an anthropologist, a philosophic anthropologist. His name was Lucien Levy-Bruhl and he studied the anthropology of ancient man, prehistoric, Palaeolithic man, and he came up with the phrase participation mystique, that what primordial men and women did was to participate with nature so that their experience flowed completely within its flow, and by being literally absorbed au natural, they never went wrong. Their lives were all of a single, not a single piece but of a single flow, and that the difficulty later on, when that experience began to deepen and cultures came up, the problem for them was to how to keep the natural flow increasingly in a situation where the flow of experience was veering away from nature, veering away in ways in which the mind was beginning to come into play. And the number one energy by which the mind comes into play is language, and so whenever experience is able to engender a spoken language, an oral language, what the French used to call discourse, is a beginning of a skewing away of experience from its mystical participation within nature and the time honoured way to navigate that increasing rapids was to make sure that the rituals were done right.
When the rituals are done right, experience does flow within nature. As cultures became more and more complex and interpenetrated, the first civilisation found that the solutions used for cultures would not any longer work. They had to use a stronger language form and that's when written language really came in, to begin to be an outrigger, along with ritual, to keep the flow of experience within the flow of nature. About 4,500 years ago was the first time that a written language was able to be complex enough to have verbal time tenses, and to have ways of personally expressing the way in which nouns were used. And this personal verbal time-tense language, that written language, first surfaced in Mesopotamia, and the first great writer in the world was woman, Enheduanna, and she mastered that early form of language to the extent that her written works were used for over 2,000 years as the foundation of all civilisations from Egypt to India. And we're taking her Myths of Inanna in the translation by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, and we're going to take a look at the origins of the way in which Enheduanna set up the style of world civilisation in a written language. There is no earlier personal literature in the world.
Her dates go back to the 2300s BC and we're going to pair with her, the Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion by Jane Ellen Harrison because there is an interplay here. The Greeks were always forgetting that they came out of the Ancient Near East. They always modelled themselves as having been a deep transform of Egypt, when that is only on one level. The deepest level is that the mythology of the Greeks was always Ancient Near Eastern and not Egyptian. And so in order to get the feeling tones, the heart experience, of the roots of what has become Western civilisation, we have to go back to ancient Mesopotamia to understand the heart; to understand sentience. The Greeks posed a problem that became insoluble without recourse of going back to the mystery, the mysteriousness of experience flowing within nature, and for all of their intellectual brilliance, for all of the intelligence that Greek civilisation was able to harbour, the actual stability of life for Greek men and women for millennia was to go to the mystery religions, to go back to the Ancient Near East heart wisdom sentients, to get themselves refreshed, and this was available in the last third of every month when the moon, which had waned from the full to the half to that final quarter, from that period until the dark of the moon was the way in which the Eleusinian mysteries were put on. So that one went on a pilgrimage, hundreds, thousands, like an ancient Lourdes, and largely coming from the large city of Athens and walking the 15, 20 miles to Eleusis for the Eleusinian mysteries, where people would be encamped and the mysteries, which were never to be talked about publicly, were witnessing the way in which the last bit of the moon went into complete darkness, into the mysterious night, and the final wake-up from that was when the sliver of the new moon, the first crescent sliver, the Isis moon, appeared, it was the trigger of realisation that this cycle renews itself constantly and that the darkness, the night, was a necessary phase of that cycle. That the moon cannot stay full.
The ancient name for the moon god in the Ancient Near East was Nana, and when the Semitic peoples came into play with their Akkadian language, they said that Nana was the god Sin (S-I-N). The temple of Nana was in one of the earliest large, successful cities, Ur, and Ur was very close to one of the most ancient cities in the world, Eridu, which was right on the Persian Gulf at that time. The cities of ancient Sumeria, as ancient Mesopotamia was called, each had a controlling god and there would be a temple of that controlling god that would dominate that city, and the priesthoods of those temples were directly linked to the power structure of the palace and the military, so that literally you had a military palace theology controlling element. When Enheduanna's father, Sargon, came into play, was the first time that that entire structure was transformed in more completely and that each city was now but a single part of a larger matrix. It's the first matrix in world civilisation, a matrix of cultures, and the person who was in charge, entrusted to make sure that this happened, was his daughter Enheduanna, who was appointed then as the Head Priestess in Ur of the temple of the moon god Nana, and she became the En-Priestess, and the En-Priestess was more powerful than the En-Priests. The En-Priests were for individual gods in individual temples. The En-Priestess was the Priestess for the overarching goddess who included all the gods, an that this goddess was Inanna. She is the daughter of the moon god, but as the daughter of the mood god she also the master of the entire cycle of the earth. She knows the night as well as the day. She knows the underworld as well as the celestial world, and she is able to present the entirety of the earth as it really is in its existential happening, and so she became queen of the universe.
While various gods would have their temples in specific cities, she increasingly was like the omnipresent goddess over all the gods, so she became not only the mother of the gods, she became the guardian of all of the primordiality of life, and later on the phrase was used of her, the Lady of the Wild Things. She guaranteed that all the wildness of existence would be real and would be nourished and would iteratively reoccur all the time, and her central ritual figure had a mythic image that was indelible.
She had a face that had originally palm leaves that came down like braids, with her breasts prominent but not large, and wearing a hat which was called a pollos, and the pollos hat was like a crown but it was also like a feminine version of the omphalos. This figure of Inanna, 4,000 years later, appears in this Botticelli painting in the Renaissance Florence, as the Madonna, and the Madonna here, in the presentation notes you'll see it up close, there are palm trunks that are curved, much like sago palms, and this Madonna by Botticelli stands in between John the Baptist and St John Evangel. The way that this imagery of 4,000 years, this [18:49] of 4,000 years, got pristinely to Botticelli in the 1480s in Florence, this one is in the Uffizi, was that the Renaissance figures in Florence more than any other place in the world, were able to get an accurate lens to be able to re-generate originally in art the pristine actuality of the tradition that had been re-lensed and refocused many times in the 4,000 years in between them. And the genius of the Italian Renaissance in Florence was that it was able to align its lens with a set of lenses that went all the way back to Enheduanna and her father, Sargon, and to bring into being again all of the characteristics that were recognisable at every stage of history over those thousands of years. The civilisation that Sargon set up popularly was called the Fertile Crescent, and what it meant was not just the crescent of land from sea to shining sea, that was the phrase used then, from the [20:25 Irani Sea] to the Mediterranean Sea. And not just stopping with the coast of the Mediterranean but reaching out the island of Cyprus, because the island of Cyprus, lying off the coast of Asia Minor, lying off the coast of the far coast of the Mediterranean, Cyprus was the home of Aphrodite, was the home of Venus, and it is Aphrodite who is the most mysterious figure in the Inanna image in Greek mythology. In the Olympian gods, the twelve Olympian gods, Inanna was crushed into three feminine figures that were mulched in such a way that they were distorted and the other three feminine figures were abstracted so that they had very little to do with the mulched, distorted figure, but they also had very little to do with the actual mythos of Inanna and her complete femininity. And so the Greeks destroyed the viability of the mythic feminine in such a way that the only way that they could put it back together was to go to a pilgrimage to mystery religions like the Eleusinian mysteries, and recommit themselves, re-baptise themselves into the feminine.
One of the geniuses of Jane Ellen Harrison is that she was the first person to be able to take the masculine dominated classical studies, not just that the British Empire or the German Continentalists, or any of the Europeans who studied classical Greek were mostly men, they were mostly men in the Renaissance as well. They were mostly men in the Roman Empire as well. They were mostly men in classical Greece itself. So that one finds all the way through several thousand years, the inability for the masculine mentality to discern that the feminine complement of reality had been distorted in two distinct ways: 1) it was abstracted out symbolically, and 2) it was mulched together and crushed literally so that it was blurred. So it was freeze-dried or it was blurred. And in between like an insane, demonic Ping-Pong game, the mythos of femininity had very little rest and very little stability. Jane Ellen Harrison points out, in a very deep, beautiful way, towards the end of her book, that men understood that Demeter in the Eleusinian mysteries was the mother and that Persephone was her daughter, and one even finds still masculine genius like Karl Kerenyi, in his book on Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, Jane Ellen Harrison says this is not the case. It isn't about mother and daughter; it's about mother and maiden, and the maiden is the younger phase of the older mother phase, they are the same goddess. And when one speaks then of Demeter, one speaks of Demeter/Kore (Persephone) and Demeter/Persephone are a single facet of a goddess, two other facets of which are Aphrodite and Hera.
We inherit, from European traditions, which inherited from Renaissance, late Classical traditions, which inherited from Roman traditions, which inherited from Greek traditions, which misunderstood their own origins, we inherit all the time the inability to understand, and this is why we have to go back to Inanna. Inanna is a warrior goddess to protect existence, and she protects existence not just from enemies like men and women who do not understand; she protects existence from the other gods, especially the top male god, and the top male god 4,500 years ago in Mesopotamia was Enlil, and Enlil had a temple called the Ekur, and this is from Samuel Noah Kramer's little contribution, the University of Wisconsin hosted one time in 1986 a conference on temples, temples in societies all over the world, and Samuel Noah Kramer, being the world's great expert on Sumeria, his History Begins at Sumer and Mythologies of the Ancient World have been in print, in paperbacks for 50 years. Listen to this:
The Ekur (Enlil's temple) was the most hallowed and revered temple in all of Sumer, since it was the home of Enlil, the leading deity of the Sumerian pantheon throughout Sumer's recorded history. According to a well-nigh perfectly preserved devotional hymn, dedicated to Enlil, this city (Nippur) and his temple (the Ekur) where Enlil himself, the great, mighty lord, supreme in heaven and earth, the all-knowing one who understands judgement, who had set up his seat in the Ekur, known as Dur an-ki, centre of the universe, and made prince-ship preeminent in his great palace, the Kiur, and erected his dwelling in Nippur, the city that unites heaven and earth, and one of the most salient things about the Ekur is that it had extensive torture chambers.
It had dungeons that imprisoned people in night without end. Those deserving punishment were punished and so at the base of the temple of the head of the masculine gods in Mesopotamia was a virtual hell on earth. Inanna protects existence, especially life, from that kind of devastation. She has a poem, and the title of it is Lady of Largest Heart and it begins in this way, just a few lines. This is by the High En-Priestess, Enheduanna, challenging all the rest of the gods including Enlil, including her own Nana, moon god. She writes:
Lady of largest heart, Keen for battle Queen,
Joy of the Anuna, Eldest daughter of the moon,
In all lands supreme, Tower among great rulers.
Queen of rare deeds, she gathers the may,
From heaven and earth surpassing great An,
She of the gods has power.
She executes their verdicts before her matchless word,
The great Anuna crawl, ever sneak away,
And An is ignorant of her plan.
Never stands against her command,
She is changeable and hidden. She completes the Great Me,
The great powers of reality.
(There are seven of them and she wears them all.)
She makes flawless the ordained powers,
She is foremost of the gods, She pulls the nose-rope with her hands,
She is a wood-clamp pinching the gods.
Shimmering fear shrouds the mountain, strikes the roadways silent,
She shrieks and the gods start shaking.
She raves, the Anuna quiver, crouched like a bending reed at her roaring,
Dumb, damned, they grab arms and legs and hide.
Without Inanna, An is indecisive, Enlil cannot fix dates.
Who dares defy her? Queen of lifted head,
She is greater than the mountain. When she speaks,
All the circles of the world quiver.
She is the lioness, protecting existence, and is able to hunt the gods who would distort, who, because of men being distorted, they recognise that these gods, not knowing that they're distorted, are just like them, and therefore they must fit together. Inanna brings that deep reality back into play, not wisdom so much but the sentience of the heart that is only at home when it is flowing in nature, and nature itself has that mysterious core vibrating through it. And when nature has in its flow the mysterious core of experience flowing through it, whatever emerges out of nature will have a tell-tale quality, a tell-tale sign, a tell-tale taste, a tell-tale smell to it. The existential things of the universe will all have the ability to be fertile, to not only live but to make other life from themselves, and that the coming together the gender breeding is meant to be the alchemical test proof that fertility is real in life, and therefore life is not ended by any death, by any distortion of madness, by any distortion of artificiality, but that life is sinuous and is able to re-occur and re-appear and not just after death but after any kind of night, after any kind of moment of darkness, after any split second of seeming oblivion, the very next spontaneous second is not only alive again, but alive fertilely again, and so she is the protectoress of life in its reality.
There is a beautiful way in which this is shown on the web. You can find Enheduanna research bibliography, and you can later on get the website here, a chronological roadmap to Enheduanna re-emergence in the 20th and 21st centuries. And Enheduanna visual evidence, the alabaster disc restored and unrestored, the inscription on the back of the disc, the three cylinder seals, and I've brought in a little reproduction of it where one can see 4,500 years ago Inanna in Ur, leading the whole style that this is, this temple in Ur, for Ur belongs to Nana, the moon god, but when I am here, this temple is a part of the 42-temple matrix of all of Mesopotamia, all of Akkad and Sumer, and that when I am here Inanna is the goddess over all the gods. And so powerful was Sargon, he ruled for 56 years. He, as a little baby, was put into a reed basket, sealed with bitumen and set adrift on the Euphrates River, and was found by a royal personage. He was the gardener for the king of Akkad, and he was the date-grower, the wine-grower, and he raised Sargon and of course you recognise Moses. Moses was born about 1,000 years later from Sargon, he is a millennial reiteration of Sargon of Akkad. And it is this reiteration that paces, and one can trace, by millennia, each time that 1,000 years goes by, one finds a deep resonance. Abraham lived exactly 1,000 years before Solomon. Solomon lived exactly 1,000 years before Jesus. One can go back and find again and again these deep iterations and when one does, one realises by 2350 BC Sargon had extended the matrix of the Fertile Crescent, that first great world civilisation, not only stretching to Cyprus out in the Mediterranean and north all the way to the Black Sea through Asia Minor, all the way down to Egypt, all the way down to the southern tips of Arabia and across the Red Sea to the ancient origins of Kush and Ethiopia, all the way across the Indian Ocean to India and the Indus civilisation, he brought together everything from the Aegean to Ceylon in trade, in a common overseeing language, and the Semitic language of Akkadian became the first lingua franca of the international trade.
And Enheduanna was the founder of the literature, the three great sections of the Inanna epic and the 42 temple hymns that were the model that were used for 2,000 years, teaching people how to write, so that every site where one finds cuneiform written, and it was written until the time of Alexander the Great, it was still read and still readable, one finds Inanna's literature used as the symbolic crown of a written language that integrated the sentient largest heart that was the mysterious flow of the mythic quality of experience, being able to be absorbed by nature to the extent that it was the secret, shimmering sunlight on the stream of nature itself, and that wherever nature now emerged, existential forms, they would have a bit of the light reflected like the sparks of the divine, and this spark was able to make the life fertile and renewable, world without end.
You can see that if you study subjects, you can never get to something that is comprehensive. One of the things that we're doing is to be able to understand the absolute genius that was exhibited by the feminine to survive all this time in civilisations without having an ostensible complementarity to the masculine all this time. The civilisation we're engendering now will be the first true complementarity civilisation made on the planet, since the times of Enheduanna, since the origins of civilisation. The deepest appreciator of this was Jane Ellen Harrison, of understanding when you look at someone who is ostensibly as boring as Hera, the jealous wife of Zeus, what does she do? This is Homer's hymn to Hera, and then we'll take a break. Hymn number 12.
Of Hera I sing, whose throne is golden,
Whom Rea bore, the Immortal Queen,
Beyond compare in beauty of form,
The glorious sister and spouse of Zeus,
Who Thunders loud, whom all the gods,
Blessed gods upon tall Olympus,
In dread and honour equal to Zeus,
Whom thunder delights.
She was the equal to Zeus.
Let's take a break and we'll come back.
Let's come back to an image for us, from the Renaissance, this is not a Madonna, this is Inanna but presented almost as if she is a Madonna, and she is the centre of a great painting by Boticelli called the Primavera, one of the greatest paintings in the world, done about 1477/1478. She is the centrepiece but she is presented in such a way that all of her resonances are there. The nymph who's been blown through in a spirit way by zephyrs, Homer says of Zephyr, his moist breath breathes life, through her, and she becomes a flora, she becomes the goddess of spring, the goddess of fertile life reoccurring. And on the other side the three graces, three aspects of the feminine in their Kore, their Persephone mode, and these goddesses that are brought together in this way are Aphrodite, Demeter and Hera, which become distorted and mulched so that it was almost impossible for anyone to really appreciate or understand.
Aphrodite was made the goddess of sex. Her mythic configuration is not about breasts or buttocks; it is about her smile. Her smile is the beauty of the invitation of life to have its wonderful opening and career, and the great beautiful smile of flora shows us the ancient understanding again, in 1478, of her smile which is not allure, it is an invitation to reality and she has a complement. The Primavera was one of two paintings. The other one is the Birth of Venus, also done at the same time by Botticelli. He worked on both paintings at the very same time. They were done for a branch of the Medici family, the Dei Medici, and there was a Lorenzo there as well, and a brother, and for their palazzos these two paintings were done. The birth of Aphrodite, the birth of Venus, from a seashell, again Zephyr blowing his [pleuronic 45:27] breath through and launching her and bringing her. Homer says in his beautiful several hymns to Aphrodite:
I will sing of that beautiful goddess who wears a crown of gold,
Revered Aphrodite, who owns all Cyprus surrounded by sea,
Each circling head-dress of towers.
There strong Zephyr's moist breath,
Through crashing waves conveyed her to shore.
One of the qualities of Inanna is that she arrives vibrantly, she arrives with iterations that pile up into an energy front that when it reaches existence she surges her vibrancy not only into life from things, but into fertility from life. It's very important to understand. As we saw in ritual, the whole phase is about existence, in myth the whole phase is about experience. That experience is a vital, not a thing but is a vital frequency that is not limited to being in things, in existentials. Its power, its amperage, is that it is absorbed like a phantom ripple of scintillation in the flow of nature, so that a wisdom tradition was extraordinarily clear that one has to understand this above all other things. As Shakespeare wrote in one beautiful, memorable quotation: If to thine own self you be true, then as day follows night life will ... be livable, will shine. Not shine with a superficial happiness, shine with reality.
Inanna, while she is celestial and she is also terrestrial, she must also go to the netherworld. She has to go to the underworld and the underworld is fearsome because no one can come back out from the netherworld. It's a universal principle, once you're there you must stay there. And in order for her to go there, she must divest herself of all seven of the ritual figurations that together make her mythic configuration as the queen of heaven, the protectoress of life in its fertility on earth, and the translation of N K Sanders in the Penguin Classics Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia, she translates it this way:
She took the signs in her hands, Put the sandals on her feet,
The seven insignia she set on her head, the shibura, the desert crown.
Over her forehead arranged the wig ...
Her braids that are like palm fronds, that are like the ancient segmented graduated energy ripple wave that her hair is, that her palm groves are, that the palm fronds are, and they carry all the way through. When Jesus enters Jerusalem at the very end palm fronds are cut and laid before him as the path of Inanna's ability to come back into existence, fertile.
The crown, the [50:22 Shagura], the wig of the braids, she held in her hands the measuring rod, the sceptre of rule. It is of such and such a length because this is the standard way in which structure will be able to be geometrised and hold its stability. It isn't just a sceptre to rule, it is a sceptre to measure and make a measurement which is commensurate then with whatever is built will not only stand and be stable, but it will be fertile in the sense that it can instruct others later, other generations, other centuries, other millennia, to how this was done, how it is done, its meaning. The crown, the wig, the measuring rod, a pair of large gems that hang just over the breasts, a beaded lapis lazuli necklace that goes in a neckline, not a neckline like a choker but a neckline almost like a string of pearls would be, and a golden ring for her hand. And then the pectoral gems that dazzle men were bound on her breasts and then the dark kohl shadow for the eyes, the invitation eyes, the bewitching call, and over her body she drew the [pala 52:20], the robe of sovereignty. And so Inanna walked away down to hell.
And when she comes to the gate of hell, which is a monumental threshold, the greatest artistic presentation of the gate of hell was done by Rodin about a hundred years ago. There's an enormous Rodin bronze, 12-15 feet tall, and powerfully presented that it is a monumental threshold, once you pass through that you may not come back. It does not open back out again for you, for anyone.
And as she pounds at the gate to come in, the keeper of the gate conveys to her sister, Erekigal, who is the queen of hell, that her sister has arrived demanding to come down, to be there, and Erekigal says every time she comes to one of the seven portals, coming down, she must give up one of those me, take them, each time, until they are all gone, so that when she arrives, the last thing that she has is the cloak of her sovereignty, the cloak that's being thrown over Venus, over Aphrodite being born, the cloak which is the dress of Flora, it is the cloak which in Greek is called the peplos, and it was the introduction of the peplos in the Parthanon over Fidius's 40 foot statue of Athena, that gave her the feminine power to wisely rule as the goddess, the patron goddess of Athens. Usually when you see Athena she is dressed as a warrior goddess with the owl's eyes, the ancient, Palaeolithic eyes on her breastplate and helmet, the war spear, the shield that she holds, has an infinity curved python on the inside; it's the only way that you can grab the shield of Athena, is to be able to hold the infinity python in one hand, but the statute, 40 feet tall in the Parthenon, was covered by the peplos, which is the gown of Venus, of Aphrodite, of Inanna, of her pala robe of sovereignty that is embroidered like Ray Bradbury's Illustrated Man, with all of the embalms that can come to life and bring the stories in their movement and that when one looks at them they are not just designs, embroidery, they are insignia placed there, but they are like the triggers that open the mythos to occur then, and broadcast out, project out from that, and the robe of Athena, the peplos, being 40 feet long, was covered with every conceivable life symbol.
It was the sacred duty of the women of Athens every spring to go into the Parthenon and take the peplos down, and take it, walk it five miles to Piraeus, to the Gulf of Salamis, and wash it fresh and clean it every spring, and with great songs the women would come back and bring the peplos into Athens, paying homage first of all, when you come into the gate of a city like Athens in a wisdom way, the first respect you pay is to the temple at the entrance to the city, the main entrance to it, the temple of Hestia, one of the least known of the Greek goddesses. Hestia is the goddess of the hearth, the hearth which is there as the first welcoming into the place, the centre of the home, the centre of the welcoming, of the vibrant, living, fertile population of a city which is real because of this, and it is the imprimatur of Hestia's welcoming that allows then for the peplos to be carried, by hundreds and hundreds of women, singing her songs, up the Acropolis, into the Parthenon, and to re-cloak Athena.
In the midst of all of this masculine, tyrannical, male power, she is transformed into a Inanna by that action, by that course.
When she arrives completely naked before Erekigal, she is immediately killed and hung on a hook, peg, like a carcass, and one sees this image in Michelangelo's great painting of The Last Judgement, at the end of the Cysteine Chapel, the whole back wall is this massive painting, The Last Judgement, and god is holding a pelt of a man, and it's Michelangelo himself, eviscerated ,no bones, just the bag of the skin being held like a falcon would hold a dead rabbit. She is hung in hell and left there. But before she has gone, before she has collected the me together, before she has gone with them into the descent into hell, she has made an arrangement, and she has said to a great, wise man friend of hers, Ninshubur, Enheduanna calls him, 'My loyal minister, the angel of eloquence, who tells the truth.' So her friend is the angel of eloquence, not just a person but a divine spirit person, and she has told him, 'Tthere are three steps for you to do. 1) You go to Enlil's temple in Nippur and say, "Do not let Inanna die in hell."' Enlil's home in Nippur, inside the temple, 'Cry to Enlil, "Father, do not let your daughter die in hell. Do not let the dust of hell bury her bright metal, nor the lovely lapis lazuli be ground into rubble by the stone-breaker, nor the sound boxwood be lathe for the carpenter."' Boxwood is actually a rosewood, all the statutes of the gods in Mesopotamia, where lumber, timber, is very rare, they were made out of rosewood and then covered with the precious metals and the precious jewels and so forth. So it was the literally the flesh of the gods, rosewood.
'"Do not let the young girl, Inanna, die in Hell."' But Enlil will not listen. She knows this and so she asks the angel of eloquence, her minister of poetic, 'If Enlil will not listen, go to Ur. Weep in the temple of Nana, Ekish-nugal, and say, "Father Nana, do not let your daughter die in hell, do not let the dust of hell ..."' And of course he will not help either.
Neither Enlil in Nippur nor Nana in Ur, but the third is the charm, the third is to go to Eridu, and there she will have her angel of eloquence contact the god of wisdom in Ancient Mesopotamia, Enki, who is the alchemist of them all. 'Go to Eridu, to the house of Enki ... "Do not let your daughter die", and father Enki, he is wiser than the gods: he knows where the bread is and the water of life. At the end, he will redeem my life.' And Enki, as the figure that configures wisdom, understands that there has to be a way to make an exchange, that while Inanna cannot go against universal principle of coming out, no one has ever tried distributing the hell, condemnation, the curse of the netherworld, of not being able to come out, no one has ever distributed it in an equanimity between two beings.
So that Enki finds that her lover, Dumuzi, can be seized, can be taken to hell, and stay there for six months and Inanna can come out meantime for six months, that there must be some way, and because Inanna is needed in the world it won't be Inanna that goes back then, but it will be the sister of Dumuzi, Geshtinanna, and she and her brother Dumuzi will exchange six months of keeping a constant figure in hell while Inanna is free to come back and be not only the goddess now of the netherworld and the celestial world, but to be the protectoress of fertile life in reality on the earth, and this is done. The descent of the goddess is so famous, this little volume done in Toronto, Studies in Jungian Psychology, and this is just a very beautiful presentation by Sylvia Brinton Perera, The Descent of the Goddess. One of the really beautiful translation, Stephanie Daily has done it for Mesopotamia, Oxford University Press, about 20 years ago, she has something here ... 'On the day when Demuzi comes back up and the lapis lazuli pipe and the cornelian ring come up with him, when male and female mourners come up with him, the dead shall come up and smell the smoke of offering' so they are welcomed back into life, and what has happened here is that Inanna has erased the irrevocability of death. Death as a terminal event has been put into its place in an ecology that includes it now, but includes it in a distributed way. It is not something that only happens to a person and is irrevocable, but when a community, when a pair, share, the distribution of this can be spread and shared in such a way that death is still death but is not permanent.
Not only is the cycle able to continue, but now death is re-woven back into the fertility of reality, and so the netherworld is no longer a nether-world, an under-world, but is part of an expanded universe that now includes beyond terrestrial, the celestial and the netherworlds together. In order for this to work, there had to be something called the sacred marriage, one of the great little books published about 17-18 years ago, The Sacred Marriage Right, Samuel Noah Kramer, published by Indiana University Press, and it is a way in which the goddess Inanna has left all of the elements for a reweaving of life, so that the sacred marriage is not only for a fertility, for flesh and bone, but is now a distributed, expanding fertility that is not limited by time nor by circumstance. That all life now is able to, in every way, come back into its fertility: the plants, the animals, men and women, for all time, world without end.
Jane Ellen Harrison, who we'll get deeper into next week, she has a little section, page 534, on the sacred marriage, and her first sentences are like the death-knell of a whole tone of artificiality, of which she was the prime mover in shaking it to its foundations.
She writes, this is 1903:
By a most unhappy chance, our main evidence as to the sacred marriage of the mysteries comes to us from the Christian fathers. Their prejudiced imaginations see, in this beautiful symbolism, only the record of unbridled license. We may, and must, discredit their unclean interpretations.
Toes were curling. If they'd have had phones they'd be ringing.
But we have no ground for doubting the substantial accuracy of their statements as to ritual procedure. They were preaching to men who had been initiated in the very mysteries they describe, and any mis-statement as to ritual would have discredited their teaching.
So she does an end-run around millennia of artificiality and deception. She says 'they did not change the artefacts', like the illustrated ceramics, like the sculptures, like the architecture, so we need to go archaeologically to all of the ritual figurations and the artistic expressions and presentations, and take our evidence not by what these traditions have said they mean, let's hold all of that in suspension. Let's go to an archaeological figure-based investigation of the mythos, and let's weave into that now the developments that are just beginning (in 1903 they were just beginning), of a new kind of cultural anthropology that included dozens and dozens of enormously brilliant, talented women like Ruth Benedict or Gladys Reichard, whose Navajo Medicine Men sand paintings we're going to do, after we do a couple more presentations with Jane Ellen Harrison and Inanna.
In the midst of all of this, because the criticisms piled up so quickly, Jane Ellen Harrison had to come out five years later, in 1908, with a second edition, and the criticisms piled high, wide and deep, and so in 1922, at the pinnacle of her infamy and her success, she was the only female teacher in Cambridge University for some long while, in 1922 she brought out her third edition, which this is a reprint of. And in the third edition, contemporaneous with T S Elliot's The Wasteland, James Joyce's Ulysses, her third edition of this book stood with all of them. She said, 'We must bring the weaving of a cultural anthropology among all cultures of the world into an archaeological recalibration of the entire,' not just the classical tradition of Greek and Roman, but all of the traditions that we have learned about in the meantime through archaeology: Egypt and Mesopotamia and ancient India and ancient Iran and ancient China, the whole thing saying that we are just now beginning to understand for the first time, that almost no generations of human beings for the last five or six thousand years have had a reality check. It hasn't happened. And the best that can be done, and she leaves off with her third edition in 1922 saying, 'The best that we can do is to put back on the table again every single issue of civilisation. Every single possibility of our reality and patiently build again from scratch, train ourselves to go back into nature as nature, train ourselves to go back and do the rituals to see what it is that we're doing, to rekindle that fertile experience so that it is ours, it is a living experience, that we in our sharing, in our distribution, have now a completely new basis on which the mind for the first time can integrate itself into ideas that will be alive and true, that will be fertile and real.' And of course in the midst of all of this, as one would expect, it wasn't the success that happened first, it was the fact that the civilisation that had been falsely and artificially propped up for so many centuries, cracked and broke. It shattered. Like Humpty Dumpty it could never be put back together again.
Not only the First World War, and not yet the Second World War, but that generation in between those two world wars, through the 1920s and the 1930s, suffered a catastrophic breakdown. In the twenties it was drink and party and forget it. In the thirties it was we cannot forget it, we have nothing to drink, we have no party. And by the time the second world war came, it was like a quality where what had been shattered was reduced to rubble. And the cold war after that irradiated the rubble so that it was radioactive, so that in our time, the early 21st century, we have on several removes nothing to go back to, and it would not be worth going back to anyway. That the past that was dead has to be recalibrated so there is a new past, so that its fertility is a part of a new woven civilisation that includes not only the entire planet but the entire star system, all of its possibilities of life and fertility.
As it was about a hundred years ago, the first difficulty is that it meets with a blankness and the old saw is that the first thing they say about something radical like this, it's not new and it's not true. We've tried all that, it doesn't work. We know that that's not true, because we can criticise it on every single detail. This has been true for the last five or six thousand years. What we're presenting ourselves is an opportunity to do a yoga that carries with it the ability not to radically make a reformation or to revolutionarily make a renaissance, but to recalibrate every aspect, every iota as they used to say, of ourselves. The myth, the mythic experience, the mythic horizon, is the most crucial part of it, is the most crucial phase, because as we get to the completion of four phases that will make our frame, our square of attention, our frame of reference, when visionary consciousness comes into play as a quintessential fifth frame, nature will allow visionary consciousness to be the new forth part of the square of attention, and nature, because it is not a structure, will gracefully give its place over to vision. The difficulty comes that when art comes into play as a sixth phase, ritual will not give up its place unless it is deeply emerged, not founded upon nature but emerged from nature in such a way that art can come and displace the ritual comportment. The doctrinaire mind depends upon the ritual comportment being co-opted, and so ritual is doubly fortified by the tyrannical mind not to give up its place, because if art displaces ritual the mind now is no longer the kingpin at the top of the heap but is put into place underneath art, and experience now and vision flow on both sides of the symbolic mind as if it were a new kind of river, a double river of process, and this is very difficult for the mind to do. It cannot by itself maintain the tyranny. It has to commandeer and co-opt the ritual, and so the most deep beauty of a living, fertile mythos is that its wholeness is generated by truthful, existential actions. The sentience of the heart is the only place in reality that can tell whether this is mysteriously, deeply true and natural. The mind cannot tell. It can realise later when it is true, but it is only the heartfelt sentience that is the truth bearer. This is a very deep thing, because the heart has to be awakened by the smile of the feminine first, because the masculine is a response. It's a very deep, mysterious thing.
Yes, the masculine, lightning and thunder, definitely needed, but needed to answer an invitation from life in its fertility. One of the beautiful things that one finds in Botticelli, and he learned all of this at the feet of Marsilio Ficino, when Zephyr blows on a nymph, his moist breath blowing through the nymph matures her to Flora. She becomes then not just the nymph, but she becomes Flora herself, and this is a form of Persephone becoming Demeter, of the younger and the mature single woman coming into the vibrancy of being able to not issue the smile, but the smile being of her personal expression. So the response then is not to a ritual instruction, it's not just to a mythic configuration, it's not even just to a symbolic understanding, but that there is conscious element like a third process that comes into play, along with experience being the golden light embedded into the flow of nature, consciousness now becomes ... it's like a fireworks scintillation of the light flowing in nature, and so nature becomes extraordinary, becomes like a celebration. Now instead of just a ritual existence coming into play, one has a magical existence that comes into play. The magical existence alone is complex enough to not have to have its ends meet. And so it extends infinitely. And when it extends infinitely, it means then that whatever occurs existentially is literally suspended in the space of creativity. One of the great things about Botticelli's Primavera, it's the first painting in the world that has all of its artistic elements suspended in the space of a sacred orange grove.
More next week.