Myth 3
Presented on: Saturday, July 22, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Myth 3 and what we're doing is we're building a series of phases that are like wave fronts and we're generating those wave fronts in a pair of ways. The initial wave front is the phase of nature and it is a dynamic. The second phase is ritual and it's all about form. So a dynamic, when it cinches, it becomes form and the form is the dynamic put into an energy now, that is measurable, and so form always has a measurable energy structure whereas the dynamis in nature is not measurable. So a process phase is followed by a form phase, which emerges out of it because of a polarisation which turns dynamic into energy in matter, in form. And this is how existence comes not to be so much but it is out of the emergingness constantly iterating itself many, many times per time unit so that it's always emerging. So that, when it's in a form, the form is vibrational and its vibration is the frequency of the energy and so matter made up of energy has a definite frequency structure. And of course it can be converted from matter back into energy in the frequency, in which case it is able to rejoin the dynamic flow.
The third phase is myth and myth again is another process, it's another dynamic phase only this time it flows within the flow of nature. And the ancient way to talk about this, in the ancient near East some 5,000 years ago, was that from God's throne flows the river of life. And that river of life flows within a mysterious boundless flow of his omnipotence, of his divinity, so that there is a flow within the flow of heaven itself and that river of life is also a river of light. And one used to be able to see it the night as the Milky Way. That the Milky Way was the river of light in the universe and it made the river of life here on earth flow as if it were like the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic ocean - or now we know the Gulf Stream goes all the way around the world, through all the oceans and is one great huge endless pretzel of current which would have made Benjamin Franklin, who was the discoverer of the Gulf Stream, that there is a river in the ocean, would have made him very happy. We know today, from atmospherics, that there are rivers like the Jet Stream in the atmosphere and that there are indeed rivers on super galactic cluster style, that there are whole regions of 400 million years , light years, of space with hardly any stars and then all of a sudden there'll be like great huge membranes of clusters of galaxies. And there's even, quite far, distant in our computation, something called the Great Wall which has billons of galaxies as if it were some kind of marker in the cosmos.
In ancient wisdom a temple always had a sacred ground that was adjacent to it and the wall that enclosed the sacred ground was called the temenos in Greek. The temenos was the largest bound of the sacred site and then within that sacred ground was a temple. But the temples that had their altars were an Olympian version, quite recent in terms of history, quite recent in terms of our species. The more primordial were not temples that had sacred precincts, not temples that were architectural buildings that had altars - those were like Olympian god things, divine mountain things, pyramid things. The earliest, for tens of thousands of years, were chasms in the earth where the deepest clefts in the earth and in the Greek ethos the deepest cleft of all was Delphi and we've talked about how Delphi was a very mysterious place. It is the mysteriousness because it is the experience of being there where one deepens nature into a mysterious flow and where existence is natural. Our kind of life is mysterious and has a peculiar quality to it: it is able as a process to emerge something that is mysterious as a form and that form is the mind.
And so the fourth phase that we'll get to are symbols: that symbolic thought is a structure but it has something even deeper than just the mystery of experience, of the flow of the river of life. It now has the ability to flow not only as the river of life but to flow under the earth as the river of the deepest mysteriousness of earth. And this was always something that was left in the care of women. And so in one of the books that we're using the Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and we're pairing that as usual with another work, Inanna. She writes, Jane Ellen Harrison, she writes of the fact that there women's histories that were kept primordial even though they were primitive and increasingly as the masculine maturity of the Greek ethos came into powerful tyrannies, and powerful thought and powerful symbolic forms, the women kept an experience flow to the most priomordial quality. And that was the clefting, the chasming, from this world into an access, rare but nevertheless real, of the netherworld.
The original ceremony that was most primitive, and it went back before 3,000BC but first occurred in the Greek ethos about 2,000BC - Greek at that time was not classical Greek, it wasn't even the forerunner of classical Greek which was Linear B but an earlier form called Linear A which has never yet been deciphered because it comes from a very rare combination of the ancient Near East. It comes at a time when the dominant mythic language in that part of the world was an interface between the ancient Akkadian Sumerian and the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic. And the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic gad a very subtle kind of a wisdom that had a cognate in the subtlety of the wisdom of the ancient Near East from Akkad in Sumeria and the subtlety was all wrapped up with the moon. And the easiest way to understand it mythically: the ancient Egyptian sky goddess was feminine not masculine, Nut. And the earth god, not earth goddess but the earth god: Geb. And there was a special forbidding for nut to have any children whatsoever, she had this power but she could not have children. And yet the god of wisdom in Egypt, Thoth, noticed that the moon cycle was not a complete perfection, that there's a slight, what is called in astronomy a libration: the moon wobbles just a little bit in its orbit around the earth and shows about 1/70th of the back surface of the moon at its complete libration. And so Thoth, in gambling with the moon, excerpted on 70th of the solar year and came up with five extra days that are not computed in a lunar calendar, they come at the end of the year and before the beginning of the year. And so Nut got to have five children on each of those five days.
And the first child she had was Osiris and the second child she had was Horus, the third child was Set, the fourth was Isis and the fifth was her sister Nephthys. Now it's interesting because Set, in the middle, becomes the bad guy of Egyptian mythology. He originally is the storm god of the desert, frequently imaged in very ancient Egypt as a red dog out in the desert loping to pounce on whoever dares to come out there. And there's a great, huge mythic battle between Horus and Set that it is handled by Thoth.
But one of the qualities in the ancient Greek ethos that was preserved only by the women was called the Thesmophoria. And the Thesmophoria was celebrated in three days at the end of what is today in our calendar October and the first two days of Novomber. So we would be familiar with them Halloween, as All Saints day and as all souls day. It is the time when the access to the netherworld is at its most transparent and by being most transparent it works both ways: the netherworld has its easiest access to our world at this time. And so the women in very ancient mythic experience - thousands of years before the classical Greeks, thousands of years before Linear B, literally tens of thousands of years - tended this in the Thesmophoria, which later on became the Eleusinian mysteries.
They had an underground temple that had a pit and in this pit lived the sacred snake guardians of their temple, of their cult, not so much a temple but this cleft in the earth, this ritual cleft. And they would take down, on what is our Halloween, pigs and cereal paste shaped like a phallus and fur cones, pine cones, for the testes. And they would go down with great din to scare the snakes out temporarily so they could bring these ritual times and place them at the closest interface to the netherworld where the snakes would be able then, during the next year, to feed on what was there. And whatever was left at the end - rotting pig remains - was brought up to the surface and mixed with seeds of the plants and with semen from the men. And this was then put into the trenchings of the plantings to ensure that it was in vibration with the great dynamis of nature and was in the iterative measurement of a seasonal cycle of maturation so that not only would the plants be able to grow but human beings would be fertile to be able to have children. And that this was not something that was just fathered but it was a carefully choreographed quality of rhythmic flowing of experience through the right rituals into the great dynamis of nature.
This was a very difficult thing 3,000 years ago because it reached a crisis point where the very ancient wisdom, for the first time, was being obviated in such a way that it was in danger of being lost. It had run across that some thousand years before that, almost like a millennial challenge because a thousand years before that thousand years was also another challenge and it seemed like there was some great cycle: larger than the lunar cycle, larger than the solar cycle, larger than the computations that the lunar cycle had a 19 year cycle, larger than that the solar cycles had a 60 year cycle. And finally it was understood in the age of the early classical Greeks, in the time of Pythagoras about 500BC, that there was something called the great year, almost 26,000 years, 25,000 many hundreds of years, and that in this cycle, evidently - the sun itself with its solar moments, no matter how complex, carried with itself through the stars, through the zodiac of the ecliptic, the twelve constellations that the motion of the sun would make in the stars over almost 26,000 years - that this great year had some enormous amperage to it . And that its amperage was such that it would short out any sequences that were smaller when its time came.
And out of this came the computation, mythically, that there are time cycles: there's a time for everything. And when its time has arrived, no matter what has been set up in the polarised structure of existence, much less of the mind which is dependent upon that, all of those old forms would go back into the energy, would dissolve out of their matter and would be as energy now flowing in the mysteriousness of experience and in the huge incomprehensible power of nature. So the women in the Thesmophoria were trying to keep everything in life in tune, as much as possible, with the advent of the dynamic of nature permeating through the ritual structures and actions so that the experience would be able to survive whenever these great shifts came as well as to survive from year to year, from lunar cycle to lunar cycle, from day to day, from hour to hour, from moment to moment. And that the deepest mysteriousness of this was not just to be fertile, to have children, and not just to have the land fertile to have crops but to keep a realisable integral active all the way through from the incomprehensible power of nature through the actual existence of all things into the mysteriousness of all experience so that the mind in its understanding, in its symbolic forms, eventually would be able through the integration to come to a realisation.
And that that realisation, if it were aligned, if it were iteratively encased in such a way that the target would yield a centre, that centre, instead of being a closed-off centre, instead of just being a two dimensional abstraction on some kind of a plane, on some kind of intellectual geometricity, that it would be indeed open again to another process: that a third process would flow through the centre of that target. And that third process would be vision and that visionary consciousness would then be a gift from the divine in such a way that the gift from the divine would be able to not only flow within nature but be able to transform nature. And so for the first time you would have the ability of a population of beings who are able to transform nature: an alchemy is now possible for the very first time. But with it came a fearsome responsibility because it was a process unlike nature and unlike experience it flowed other way, not just because it was counter-clockwise to the clockwise motion, it flowed in a differential way and not in an integral way: it didn't come together it went apart. And so visions, instead of making sense in terms of the symbolic mind, instead of being able to be tacked down in the ritual certainty of the existentials, visionary consciousness, once it began, opened out and opened out and expanded and expanded and there was no form in existence, there was no form in the mind that could handle this kind of differential visionary conscious dynamic: there was no way to make anything.
And this is where art came into being. That art was a prismatic differential conscious form and that it would be able to not contain the energies of consciousness but to be like a prism and release the entire spectrum of the possibilities. And the earliest mythic way to talk about this is that it was the rainbow. And in the Torah, in Genesis, the first covenant between God and man is between God and Noah after the flood. And as Moses wrote it down about 1,300BC, God says to Noah, 'I set my bow in the clouds so that you will know that never again will the waters encompass you,' because almost all life was ended, mass extinction.
This quality in the women's celebrations in the classical Greek ethos was always maintained by the most conservative of the women's groups who went back to times immemorial. And just to let you see how immemorial it was I'll show you the cleft, the chasm results from the surface in a cave, not just a chasm but a cave that goes deeper than a chasm into the ground. And this is a view of one of the last of the Palaeolithic caves in France, Niaux, from about 14,000 years ago and you can see the deep mysteriousness of it. And what is interesting about Niaux is that it's not just a cave but is an enormous complex of many miles of caves that link together. And to be able to go through this ecology of Palaeolithic caves one had to have not just a spelunking curiosity to go into the mysteriousness but one had to be able to go into it in such a way because you were exposed now - like for us today it would be radioactivity - you were exposed to the most devastating dynamic energy there was because in the netherworld is the death frequency and you had to be able to survive that. And the death frequency was specifically made so that you would not have to wait for some Great Year, that this exposure was immediately something that you could die from instantly and not return whereas the whole procedure in the mythos was that the return was only possible if you were able to exchange your life for another surrogate that would represent you.
And of course we now come all the way back to the myth of Inanna, written about 2,400BC, 4,400 years ago. Inanna who is not only the queen of earth and queen of heaven, she goes to visit her sister Ereshkigal, who is the queen of the netherworld, and she goes to the netherworld she must denude herself of the seven mei, the seven principles of power, the seven boundaries of her royal celestial capacities, of her terrestrial queenship and she must lose them all. And when she does of course she is reduced not just to nudity but she is denuded of her life and Enheduanna says, 'Like a bag of bones and skin she is hung on a hook' in hell. And in order for her to be rescued, brought back, she must be replaced but in the original replacement it was not the replacement t all that one would expect later on that came from just images or from symbols, one had to replace a spirit being with a spirit beingness.
And so the oldest form of this that we have evidence from, archaeological evidence from, goes back to Lascaux, to 20,000BC. And in the great ambit of Lascaux there is a place where there is a fall-off, there is a chasm within the cave of Lascaux and it plunges some 40-50 feet and off this little ledge on the far curve of the cave is a rhinoceros - in France some 20,000 years ago there were still rhinoceroses and many other things - there's a rhinoceros that is charging a man who has a bird head and who is carrying a staff that has a bird on top of the staff and his penis is in full erection and he is scared to death. He is at that moment because he has been suddenly, with the torches - the little clay oil lamps - put out, blown out, he is in complete, total darkness and has been pushed over and falls, free-falls in this elevator shaft into nothing. But just before he would die, like a bungee chord, a triple twined rope, saved him and had elasticity enough to keep him from being killed and the lamps were then relit and he would be brought back up. And he would be someone who had gone through the threshold of the death and had returned and what was left in his place was the spiritual drawing of him dying at that moment. And so the art work carried the spirit that was able to displace adequately in a transformed nature, in a transformed ritual because now not only does vision transform nature, art transforms ritual. So that if it's an art performance it is able to take the place of what would have been an existential death, for sure, and just be a death in the performance of this art drama.
And so you have now a mythology that has a very interesting cross current, it is a mythology that has come out of ritual but it's also a mythology that has this energy wave coming from the future back, in retrospection, in a different kind of differential counter-clockwise way so that now the mythos has the ability to flow within nature and to weave within vision, to be both ritual based and art-domed. So that the art now pulls, as an attraction so that the mythology, instead of just resting on the ritual traction basis ad being integrated into the symbol mind, is also drawn through the mind by the energy of visionary consciousness and the great attraction of the art forms. And so myth is able to be the third phase out of a four phase frame of natural integration but it is also at the same time able to be the first phase of a whole new frame square of attention which includes art, vision and symbol myth is the first.
And so experience for our kind, up until about 40,000 years ago, our mythic horizon of experience was always ritual based, always participation in nature, always leading to some symbolic integral in the mind. But about 40,000 years ago with the development of the ability to have a visionary consciousness that carries through and emerges its own kind of prismatic forms, now experience was the beginning of a new square of attention: a square of attention that yields a spiritual person who is more real than the existential person because they can survive death. More real than someone who is integrated by their mind, for whom symbols are the ultimate synthesising core. Now the prismatic rainbow is much superior, at least two orders superior, to the synthesising mind and at least four whole orders superior to just the ritual confines of existence. So now mythology becomes extremely fruitful in its complexity and you face increasing qualities of not only mysteriousness in experience but mystical qualities in experience that come from vision.
So now the mythic horizon is both natural, it is mysterious and it is mystic all at the same time, three, three levels, thrice greatest. And so the cross currents in this complexity would almost stagger the ability for beings like ourselves to work it in and it gets pushed one more order further. And that is the development because every phase form generates another phase that has its complement and so art, being a form phase, generates a fourth process phase called history, historical consciousness which is not a dead form, 'You're history. Man, this is just history,' no, historical consciousness is as more high powered to visionary consciousness as mysterious experience is just simply to nature. And when historical consciousness comes into its emerging quality it is so powerful it emerges a form called the cosmos itself. And to cut a long, long story short, the cosmos generates the dynamic phase of nature without any effort whatsoever. Let's take a break.
Let's come back and just reconnoitre for a moment. This is a full spectrum learning, it dwarfs what used to be called education. One of the facets is that we always have four films in every phase and they're selected so that they will make a cinemagraphic square of a attention as well. For the myth phase the first of the films is Black Orpheus set in Rio De Janeiro of about 50 years ago and there is also a CD of the music of Black Orpheus available. And you can probably rent the film and find the CD online. If you get interested in Black Orpheus and the music as an integral part of it, the greatest singer in Brazil is Cesaria Evora and I brought a number of her Brazilian hit CDs her so you can review this after the lecture.
In addition to the films we also have musical selection for each of the phases and each of the intervals and it is meant to musically bring out, like for the myth, the musical work is Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and there are several versions that are very interesting. One I might mention to you is the version that Ernst Ansermet has done with the Swisse Romande orchestra. What makes this interesting is that when Stravinsky was a young man in St Petersburg he lived just a few blocks from the great Mariinsky Theatre for Ballet and on his way, in about the middle, Rimsky-Korsakov lived and one of Rimsky-Korsakov's sons was the best friend of the young Stravinsky and so Stravinsky was always in the Rimsky-Korsakov house and he played his first composition for one of his friends and the old genius composer heard him and came out and said that he would be very glad to have him ask him any questions about composition. Later on when Stravinsky started to become quite famous, in order to compose he went to Lake Lugano in Switzerland, his next door neighbour was Ernst Ansermet. And so Ansermet learned from Stravinsky a great deal about both Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky but especially about Rimsky-Korsakov and how to perform Scheherazade which is not a symphony but it is something that spreads like a peacock the symphonic form. And I think you'll enjoy that.
The second film is Chinese, it's called The Bride With White Hair, one of the great Chinese cinemagraphic treatments of [??42.18] and in fact was so successful they brought out The Bride With White Hair volume 2. So we have a French version of Brazil, we have a Chinese version and no American myth, of course, would be complete without Westerns. So the greatest Western film ever made is Red River, Howard Hawks, and its mythic quality is that of the hero becomes an antihero. The archetypal Western hero in cinema was John Wayne and he plays the increasingly bitter rancher who finally turns out to be the pursuer of everybody who was working for him and especially to kill the adopted son played by Montgomery Clift. The other side of the Western is Shane: the lone hero who's trying no longer to be a hero, who's just trying to be a farmer, just trying to forget that he is someone who is too dangerous to be around. And of course Alan Ladd plays Shane to a T and hardly anyone who ever sees this can believe the complexity of the relationship between Shane and the little boy, the young son.
So these are the four films and the music for the myth phase and as usual we're using pairs, pairs of books that are classic to set up the frequency, the wave form for our ongoing and we began myth with Inanna whose mythology goes back to the origins of written literature and then pairing with that Jane Ellen Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion which, about 100 years ago, set a completely new tone: she brought archaeology and anthropology into focus. That changed the way in which philosophy and literature, that had dominated classical studies forever since the classical age itself, and the Renaissance had added art to it so that in Renaissance, Renaissance mythology had philosophy, literature and art. But when archaeology and anthropology were added - by Jane Ellen Harrison, James George Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski and a great slew of archaeologists and anthropologists right at the turn of the century - all of a sudden it was revealed that the ancient Greek ethos that was considered to be the origin was actually an artistic prism: that it had as much time behind it in the past as it had from its time to us.
We think of Pythagoras as being ancient, Pythagoras is about half way back to the origins of civilisations about 3,000BC. All that time one of the deepest qualities of myth was to have itself have a chthonic, under the earth, netherworld, afterlife quality in a certain layer and the celestial quality of Olympian gods and divinities. And that the terrestrial was somehow in between these two parentheses that clashed and set up a kind of a cacophonic symbol quality to life on earth where it was constantly jittery and anxious because of the clash of the overworld and the underworld coming together constantly in iterations, in vibrations, in periodic wars and juxtapositions. And that terrestrial human life was unable to keep itself steady or balanced unless those two realms could be brought into a membrane interface that no longer was an element in between the two but was a kind of a permeability membrane that allowed the celestial and the netherworlds to penetrate through the terrestrial plane without causing the clash.
And so the beginnings of civilisation were to assume a new responsibility: that the angels and the demons must learn to exchange through a membrane which man would bring into being: that his culture would no longer flow just with nature but his culture would also now flow in such a way that it was attracted by art. And increasingly as this became apparent, the cosmos began to loom as something that could penetrate all the way through the earth, all the way through the terrestrial into the netherworld, into the realm of chasms and clefts: the world of caves. And so right at the point where the Pythagorean fulcrum between the origins of civilisation, 3,000 BC, and ourselves, 2,000 years after, right at that juxtaposition the most powerful of all of the tandems was between Homer and Plato with Pythagoras coming slightly weighted towards the time of Plato. In the Pythagorean understanding Homer had delivered something which was in the Odyssey, in the 13th book of the Odyssey and it is always known as, in its treatment, as the Cave of the Nymphs. And here's a translation of the short few lines from Homer, from the Odyssey, which is one of the year-long reading tracks that we have in the first year: we have the Odyssey, we have Moby Dick, we have Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji and we have Ovid's Metamorphoses.
The lines in Homer, translated, are this way and this is a translation made by Thomas Taylor made in 1789, about the same time that Washington took office as the first President and at the end of his life made a revised version, in 1823, about the time that Jeffersonian America was reaching its pinnacle of 1826. Lafayette and Jefferson met 50 years after the Declaration of Independence to celebrate the fact that the world had really gone through a revolution. The reported meeting was four words, 'Ah! Jefferson! Ah! Lafayette!' Here is Homer on the Cave of the Nymphs, 'At the head of the harbour is a splendour-leafed olive and nearby it a lovely and murky cave sacred to the nymphs called Naiads. Within are craters and amphoras of stone where bees lay-up stores of honey. Inside too are massive stone looms, there the nymphs weave sea-purple cloth, a wonder to see. The water flows unceasingly, the cave has two gates, one from the north, a path for men to descend while the other toward the south is divine, men do not enter by this one but it is rather a path for immortals.' That men and immortals enter into the same cave because the cave now is not just a part of the netherworld but is a part of the permeability of the terrestrial plane.
One of the greatest of all paintings based on it is William Blake's The Cave of the Nymphs and he bases it not on Homer but upon Porphyry's little essay on the Cave of the Nymphs. Porphyry was the prise student of Plotinus, lived about 300AD, and he says in here that the whole notion of caves has this, 'Likewise the Persian mystagogues initiate their candidate by explaining to him the downward journey of souls, and their subsequent return, and they call the place where this occurs a 'cave''. First of all according to Eubulus Zoroaster consecrated a natural cave in the mountains near Persia,' Zoroaster lived in Scythian Central Asia where the Amu Darya river supported cities like Samarkand 'a flowery cave with springs in it to honour Mithras, the creator and father of the universe since the cave was for him an image of the cosmos.' Notice it's not a plan it is a mythic image, 'image eternal'. In mythology there are no doctrines, there are no plans, there is no structure, there is no design, there is a flow within a flow and in this flow within a flow the dynamis is now not the dynamis of nature but the dynamis of imagery which flows within nature's dynamic. And because it flows within nature's dynamic it has a feeling toned libration with the images so that the images vibrate feeling. And because the images vibrate feeling which is a refined emotion, refined action, refined ritual, the ritual sounds that beings make turned into a sweet discursive narrative language, oral mythology.
And it is the oral language that is no longer just the little grunts, the little nouns, the little verbiages, now oral language becomes refined by feeling vibrating from imagery and language assumes two primordial changes from whatever it had been before. The first change is in verbs, verbs now have time tensing: they have a past tense, they have a present, they present perfect, they have a future, they have a future perfect, they have a past perfect: time tensing. And in primordial languages, not refined over civilised languages like we have with Indo-European and so forth but when you go back to the first emergence of the refined mythic languages in the Palaeolithic you find a quality of time tensing you do not find in civilised languages. Fortunately, the beginnings of linguistics, in the world, was in the United States in the study of American Indian languages. Algonquin for instance has five different declensions of time tensing, not just three with some variations.
If you go back to the original Palaeolithic languages and art, some 40,000 years ago, one finds that human beings for the first time began to have the ability to talk in such a way that the versions of time moulded into this kind of flow which looks very much, if one would graph it out, like French marble paper: great swirls of different tensing that came through this and did not appear in symbolic written language until about 25,000BC. And it's the first time that you find that there are ways to deliver time tensing for verbs by modifications of the written signs so that they now tend towards being something that is only pronounceable and doesn't have a representation in existence, it has only the dynamic of intonation, of pronounceability. In Chinese, for instance, the same character, the same word, with different intonations means something different and yet cognate. The Chinese word for business is 'M?imài,' 'm?i' with a rising tone is buy, 'mài' with a falling tone is sell, business is buy-sell 'M?i-mài.'
This quality of language is not only that verbs become time tensed and refined but that there now are aspects of nouns that are no longer just names of things but the adjectival quality of it changes and modifies and refines nouns to such an extent that that refinement always carries over to the verbs and one now has adverbs as well as adjectives. One now has the ability to have, in a spoken language, a refinement where the feeling-toned imagery-laden oral language has the ability to make a narrative flow. And that that narrative flow will have a kind of a beginning, a middle complication and an end but it will not be a snippet where the beginning is just 'That,' and the end is just 'that,' and the middle is only 'that,' now the understanding is that one can weave any kind of narratives together indefinitely into larger and larger fabrics. So that oral language now will make a fabric of experience and that fabric of experience, in its vibrancy, will deliver a field of mysteriousness in nature whose edges cannot be soon. So that the whole notion now of ritual boundaries to the shapes of existence becomes permeable through experience and we can now flow through the supposed ritual boundaries of anything including existentials, including existence itself. And now we can permeate and go into netherworlds like caves, into higher worlds like stars and zodiacal shapes - constellations, clusters.
The cave quality, classically is in Plato's Republic as well as Homer's Cave of the Nymphs and Robin Waterfield has done the best current translation of the Republic and you'll find Plato's myth of Te Cave in there. Caves, this is a good little book on the Republic, caves also, as I have shown, were the Palaeolithic site chosen most likely to be used for initiations. And just to show a few photographs of how Palaeolithic caves from the south of France, from the Pyrenees of Spain. The caves were not only mysterious but they became resonant in such a way that the mythology of it came into a quality where the caves, or the grottos, were able to have presences, some of them from the netherworld, like ghosts, some of them from the terrestrial world, like great beings, heroically coming into play and some celestial like spirits. And one of the classic presentations about 50 years ago is Donald Duck and the Ghost in the Grotto, this is a classic reprint from 1947, it was published at exactly the same as The Roswell UFOs. I brought an original 1947 first edition of just don't take it out, it's very valuable but you can appreciate the quality.
It is an odd thing but the origins of Egyptian civilisation were is such a grotto which had Osiris who had to be re-membered, not only that his members, 14 different parts of him - he was cut by his brother Set into 14 different parts and distributed all over Egypt so they could not be found in any one place and Osiris/Isis collected all of the members and brought them to a place called Abidos. And this is the first volume of the original archaeological explorations of Abidos and Abidos was the place where a very odd pair of blunt mountain cliffs encompassed a fertile ground where the flooding of the Nile would make a farmland but there was a cleft in the cliffs in the back where one would experience the severe Saharan weather every once in a while, sweeping through. There was at Abidos the origin of Egyptian civilisation and the centre of it was called the Osirion. And the Osirion, the classic book on it was by Margaret A Murray.
Now, many of you will not have remembered or heard of Margaret A Murray, she lived to be 100 years old, in fact her autobiography was My First Hundred Years and she is also not only a classic archaeologist, she was the one who did the exploration at Abidos at the turn of the century, she is the author of The Witch Cult in Western Europe and of the classic book called The God of the Witches and she is the founder of Wicca. She is also one of the world's great archaeologists and she was the one - I brought her Egyptian Sculpture and Egyptian Temples - but her work on the Osirion with Mrs Flinders Petrie who was a great archaeologist in charge of the expeditions, she is the one who pieced together patiently that what we're dealing with here is not the masculine dominated divinity mythology but the feminine re-weaving of it, the feminine re-membering of it. And one of the difficulties is that only 13 parts of Osiris could be found in the myth, his phallus was missing and he could not be re-membered so that he could return to fertility. The phallus was eaten by a rare fish in the Nile that is a blind fish, it's a bottom feeder and it navigates purely by sonar, by electrical vibrations through its body and navigates the muddy Nile very nicely with sonar going back to the origins of fish life.
She writes, Margaret A Murray writes, this was published in 1903 for the expedition that she headed up, 'The great hall in the Osirion. The great hall: the floor of which was more than 40 feet below the surface of the desert was 15 feet wide, 34 feet long and 17 feet high. There were three doorways: one to the south leading to the south chamber, one to the east to the sloping passage, one to the north to the north passage. The north and south walls were covered with inscriptions. The west wall is divided into three parts vertically, one of the original triptychs in art.' Abidos was 3,000BC, 5,000 years ago, 'It was filled with a colossal scene of the vivification of Osiris,' of him not just being brought back and re-membered so that his physicality was there but Isis was able to re-member his vitality. And it is her re-membering of him that includes his ability to be fertile through her gift of re-menberance so strong that he was again fertile. And so Osiris in the underworld is green: he is mythically vibrant.
Some of the most peculiar events in history have taken place at Abidos and one of them was in our time, there was a British woman, Dorothy Eady, and this was the announcement in the BBC documentary made in 1981:
An incredulous smile froze on my lips as I watched the chronicle film Omm Sety and her Egypt. Could I be absolutely positive it was all a lot of eye-wash? Of course I couldn't and neither will you be able to. In any case it makes marvellous television. The facts, briefly, are these: Dorothy Eady, a Londoner, then 3, fell down stairs, was concussed, given up for dead, woke up, started crying because she wanted to go home,' she was at home, 'and started dreaming about an Egyptian temple. Subsequently, sitting among the glass encased mummies at the British Museum, she felt these were her people. Years later she visited her ancient Egyptian temple at Abidos and recognised the figures in the bas reliefs as if they had been so many photographs in her family album. To the end of her life, Dorothy Eady died last month, she believed a priestesses spirit had entered her body during her childhood coma and she spent her last years within a stone's throw of her beloved temple, a frail but resilient old lady surrounded by cats and homage prayers from all the world. An example of her irreverent sense of fun she said, 'Osiris and Isis two of the figures on the temple walls, were brother and sister as well as husband and wife. Good system said Omm Sety, it did away with the mother in law.'
One of the qualities in myth is we're looking at in phase form instead of as a subject, is that it recovers its vitality both in its ability to have the permutation from nature come up through the ritual form and the permeability of the symbol forms to have visionary consciousness come through them. And when visionary consciousness, which has emerged art forms, permeates through the mind into experience it carries the prismatic forms of art with it. So that the mythic horizon now becomes shimmering because it has almost as if it were a holographic quality of imagery and feeling and the language now changes from just simple narrative to an artistic narrative that has a poetic quality to it. One can always tell: a literate teller of myths always has a rhetorical tone whereas someone who ghas the permeability of the spirit will set up the story teller's cadence.
I have used this example before when I was teaching at Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and teaching a myth course in the early 1970s, instead of teaching it at the college site, which was beautiful and new, I took the course half time to downtown Calgary, to the North American Indian Friendship Centre and joining the 100 students from the College were 200 tribal people from the Algonquian nation - includes the Blackfoot, the Piegan, the Stoney, the Sarcee, even some Cree, some Kootenai invited - so we had about 300 people and I brought in old Hanson's Bear Paw who was blind, he was nearly 90, spoke no English but one of his nephews who was in his 60s did the translation. And when he told the myths - he started with the myth of Morning Star, Venus - and you could tell in the chant rhythm and the way that he delivered it with his like homer blind, had this quality where the cadence is not literate in terms of a plan, in terms of a symbolic symmetry but has an interwoven symmetry where each part slides through each other part so that you get this kind of French paper swirl but in a language, oral language, delivery. Everyone was absolutely glued to listening not to the translation but listening to the old blind, not just a one delivering a myth but who was spinning the mythology in the very moment that you are beholding it, right in front of you and the quality that came out of it was kinaesthetic. Everyone later felt the ebullition as if your lungs in your rib cage, now, were breathing energy and not just air and when you talked with someone you talked with them, your language and their language interpenetrated with each other as if you had become temporarily x-ray-able by saying together what could be shared.
One old Canadian-Indian actor, Rufus Goodstriker, was so moved that he stood up and he made an announcement that he was going to let his hair grow and he was going to braid it so that his grandchildren would be able to see a man in braids and that he was not going to be a dime store Indian any longer in films. My spirit mother at the time had been adopted, Madame Valder[?1.15.49] was my spirit mother, she had been adopted by a spirit father whose Blackfoot name was Tatanga Mani - Walking Buffalo - who had been adopted himself by a rancher named George McLean. Tatanga Mani lived to be 97 and he was the only American Indian representative in 1893 at Chicago at the World's Parliament of Religions. And he actually exists in an Alan Ladd film, I'll bring it next week, and there's a section in there where Tatanga Mani at about 80years of age on his horse with a great smile at one moment - you don't hear him talk so much but you feel the pressure of the spiritual energy and vibration of someone who inhabited the experience on this level, on this quality. He wore a buffalo headdress which was the skull of a buffalo with the horns still in it and Madame Valder showed it to me just before she died, wanting to know what to do with it. We decided to have it buried in the Blackfoot lands. The reddish brown hair of the buffalo skull, almost 100years old, was still lanolin rich and vital and the black horns still sharp in the sense of not just sharp like pointedness but of tunedness. For one moment I put the headdress on and it was like receiving that kind of energy crown which the mythographer had delivered by voice. And one sensed here man is indispensible in the ecology of the real because he contributes permeability to what otherwise would be a geometric plane of interference between the above and the below. More next week.