Myth 5
Presented on: Saturday, August 5, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
Let's come to Myth 5, and perhaps just review for a second our way of enquiring, of learning, is like the old Archimedean Screw that goes around and as it does it goes deeper in, and as it goes deeper in it also brings more out. And both of those qualities, the further penetration gives us a sense of going into the future, but what is being brought out gives us a sense of a different past. The phrase I used to use is the future and the new past are like a parenthesis within which occurs a present which is enormously complicated, and not just a present moment but a present field of possibility. That field of possibility becomes more and more revealed as we go along with our learning.
So that the future keeps penetratively expanding, the past keeps retrospectively expanding and the present keeps expanding its field. This is the maturation process in classic wisdom. Opposed to that was the style of education that was brought in when civilisations began to become very strong about 2500BC. The inculcation of civilisations introduced a mind that was too powerful to fit into the natural cycle and began to dominate and control the natural cycle. You do not have this problem in cultures, and the whole purpose of a tradition is to keep the perspective, to not let individuality of mentality take over and dominate, it would be considered a form of insanity.
The American Indian outlook was that the white men were crazy because they thought with their minds instead of their hearts. They wanted to think things through right rather than to live right. And so with Myth 5 we're coming to a deepening in terms of the future, and also a complexification in terms of the past. We started in Myth with the Prologomena to the Study of Greek Religion, and Inana, Queen of Heaven, her mythologies, by Enheduanna, and we saw that the classical understanding of the classical era was completely truncated during the late antiquity. The Greeks had already reduced everything down, and then the Romans codified that reduction and squeezed it even more, and when the Christian Roman Empire came into being with Constantine, in the early 300s, they squeezed it even more and reduced everything even more, until in the medieval period it was reduced down to almost inconsequentiality. By the 600s AD classical learning was limited to such a thin group of men, almost no women were educated, and the education was snippets of classic works like the sentences of Peter Lombard, they would take sentences that were pithy from 200-300 different works and put them together and schoolboys who were largely monks or priests would learn these little snippets in order to give themselves little quotations that then they would use in debates and in arguments and the Dark Ages, so called, came into play largely because learning vanished from the entire European scene, and vanished almost completely.
In his History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell said that by the late 800s was the first time in over 300 years that a philosophic genius lived in the European scene and his name was John Scottus Eriugena and that he stood out like a brilliant needle on a plain of mediocrity that then extended for another 300 years. And so in about a 600 year period, there was only one true philosophic genius. He's an Irishman and he went to the Court of Charlemagne and produced a short-lived Carolingian renaissance at the time. What was lost progressively was this reductive funnelling and what ballooned out more and more was an artificial mythology. Instead of having a mythology that came out of nature, a mythology of the sky and of the earth, of the clouds, of the springs, of the starts, instead of having a mythology that was based upon the rituals that emerge and existence, in existential ways of doing. They were made up, the rituals were made up, and they were made up to fit doctrines, mentalities. We're trying in our learning to at once penetrate through the baffled mind that has emerged because of that, and the baffled mind continues because the cultural confusion continues to support that. We see today the absolute insanity in the homeland of Enehduanna, where her father set up the first really great, international civilisation in the world, 4400 years ago, there's nothing but chaos now, and paradoxically Enheduanna and her father, Sargon, whose name was pronounced at the time Sharkin, Sharoukin, the true king, were Semitic. So that the first civilisation in what is today Iraq was a Semitic civilisation that was international. The trading routes went from India to Ireland, from the Scythian Central Asia all the way down into Nubia and Ethiopian Africa, 4400 years ago. It's a curious thing. We're trying, in this next pair, we're going to take the great little work by Gladys Reichard, Navajo Medicine Man Sand Paintings, and we're going to pair with it J R R Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and we're going to bring these two together because they help us in a very real way get to an expansion through a penetration that is somewhat unfamiliar and yet returns us deeper into what is actual in terms of existence and nature, and also brings out for us a recalibration progressively of how crazed our minds and our phoney civilisation has become, by the early 21st century. It's important to understand that these two works, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is at the very end of the middle ages, just one generation before the Renaissance, and the Renaissance brought back a very high quality of civilisation, of international civilisation. The American Indians, centred here on the Navajo tribe, go back to the beginnings of the Neolithic period that foreshadowed civilisation, because the American Indians go back to the Palaeolithic. They were still masters of Palaeolithic wisdom when they were contacted first by Europeans. And what is curious is that the South American American Indians were contacted first by the Chinese about 400AD. A great stone anchor, circular with a hole in the centre, was found in San Diego Bay, and that stone was quarried and shaped in China in the late 300s AD, and if you take a good look at Mayan Indians you will see the Chinese genetic influence on them. And as soon as the Chinese came into play in Central Latin America, you find the development jumps, not just because the Chinese were the masters of the situation, but because of the influence, the American Indians were able to take a quality that had been nascent in their culture and to make out of it a jump into civilisation that had almost no traction whatsoever in the Neolithic. That what took Europe and the Near East about 10,000 years go to through, the Mayans jumped from a Palaeolithic background into a very high civilisation within about two or three generations of time. The Navajos and the North American Indians have a different concourse. They were not contracted to jump by contact with the Chinese, but they were originally from the Northern reaches of East Asia, from Siberian China, not from south China. The South American Indians all come from Indochina, south, whereas the North American Indians all come from Tibetan, Siberian, Manchurian, almost like [14:13] North Asia. So you have two different groups that are almost incommensurate and they're separated by more than 12,000 years in terms of great incursions and not invasions but migrations. The South American Indians came largely by boats, by shipping, by Island Hopping, whereas the North American Indians came over through the Bering Strait Bridge about 12,000 years ago. So the Navajo are people who are at the cusp of where the Palaeolithic emerges for the first time into the Neolithic and within a very short period of time they were challenged completely by a European incursion which was not a migration but was an invasion, and the invasion came in the form of the Conquistadores. The Spanish Conquistadores went to the American Southwest 400 years ago, and in that period of time Cortes is the masterful figure for conquering Mexico and Tenochtitlan but the pueblo peoples suffered an incursion in the early 1600s and you find there that they considered the Europeans daemons. They were unfamiliar with the horse, they were unfamiliar with armour, they were unfamiliar with the rapaciousness and part of the rapaciousness was that the Roman Catholic Church accompanied the Conquistadores and used the imposition of religion to completely separate the pueblo peoples from their traditions, from their customs, from their mythology. And finally after about two or three generations there was a great revolt and the Conquistadores were thrown out of the pueblo lands for several hundred years, and they went back into a defensive mode, but at the very same time as they were going back into this defensive mode the Navajo came down in a great migration. They had started off in southern Alaska speaking Athabascan language, and settled into the lands held by the pueblo peoples, and it was oil and water; they did not mix at all. The Navajo immediately appropriated the horse, whereas the pueblo peoples shunned the horse, would have nothing to do with it. The Navajo ethos was that of very tall men who were able to ride and prided themselves on their horses and when you find a cover, like this Monument Valley and the Navajo Country, the archetypal Navajo is on his horse, great riders. And one of the early forms of Navajo weaving was to weave the saddle blankets for the horse and if I can find it I'll bring you the Yebechi saddle blanket, which is like a holy saddle blanket which is meant not just to ride on a horse but it's meant that wherever you sit on that Yebechi blanket, you are now in a holy place. I received that about thirty years ago in some work that I did with the tribes.
A medicine man sand painting is made to sit on. These sand paintings become the altar and that altar now is the place in which the person who sits there is sung over, and as they are sung over, all of the powers in the language, the images, accrue to that person, because the sand painting focuses that energy, that power, those images, that language, those feelings, onto the person, and that person becomes both very blessed and very dangerous at the very same time. They become supercharged with energy, but the energy is in a dynamic and, as we have been talking about, this dynamic is the mythic horizon, like a silvery cascade of special powers that flows in the larger unlimited flow of nature, and it's like not just the current of electricity which is a polarisation of positive and negative, but it also has a chirality, it has a spin. We today in 21st century physics are right on the edge of having a whole new energy source called spintronics, instead of just electronics, spintronics, using the chiral motion of atoms and particles as well as their electromagnetic polarity, their spin polarisation as well. A completely new field of energy, and it'll be here by the end of this decade, by 2010 there'll be spintronic beginning equipment and tools. The charge that the person receives is cautioned not to touch someone who's not been sung over, because you will kill them. They will not be able to handle the energy which you have, because the energy now, though it is a dynamic from the gods, that dynamic, because it is a mythological singing over, has been able to focus and come together and make an energy structure in the existential body of you. Your body now has stored the natural energy, the natural dynamic and the mythological dynamic, sandwiched together and literally not sandwiched so much but woven together. And what weaves together in this way now is a very highly charged, we would say colloquially that it's radioactive. Only someone who has been sung over in this way will be able to understand and participate, and one of the greatest of all the Navajo Medicine Men was named Repoint, and this is the original edition of The Navajo Medicine Man, published in New York 1939, and it was a limited edition of 500 copies. Sometimes called by his Spanish name, Miguelito, but his real name was Red Point. One of the most powerful of all of the medicine men, not a shaman. A shaman is a Palaeolithic quester. A medicine man is a Neolithic quester, there's a difference.
A Neolithic outlook is different from the Palaeolithic in that it tames. The Palaeolithic goes with the wildness of the animals, the wildness of the plants, the wildness of one's powers, whereas the Neolithic tames the animals, tames the plants, tames one's powers. But the taming is on the basis of ritual not of symbol. The control is a control by the actions that you do, not by the thoughts that you think, and then control the actions by those thoughts. The symbol function in a culture is completely different from the symbol function in a regressive civilisation. And one of the most difficult things for us to learn, and this is why we're pairing Tolkien with this, because he was one of the masterful figures of understanding this. His whole influence was because he did not begin with a mental idea of the mythologies, but his whole basis of beginning was with language. He was a master of languages, and because he was raised in South Africa he had a completely different calibration for plants and animals, for landscape, and when he went to England, he saw England as a kind of middle earth, a middle world. It wasn't the primordial Africa, and it wasn't the over-sophisticated Europe, but that there was some kind of mysterious bucolic quality in the English land. When he became a professor at Oxford, one of the earliest works that he produced was an edited edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 1925. It's edited in the original Middle English language, the language of Chaucer, one of the world's great languages. In order to master how Middle English came out of Old English. Tolkien was one of those Oxford Dons who went into the origins of these ancient languages, how Old English emerged out of a conglomerate of Germanic languages, out of Norse languages, out of the Icelandic use of the Norse languages where there wasn't a mythology but there were sagas, and as he developed his sense of languages, the vocabularies, the grammars, began to speak to him, literally. The words leapt out to him and so he would begin to have these deep questions: what are these images; what are these feelings that we have from these words? Classic instance is that in 1937 he was correcting papers at Oxford and he just wrote a sentence down, 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit' and he wondered, 'What's a hobbit?' And this is the beginning that opened up not only to The Hobbit but to The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. Out of the word, the language itself, and in a way this is the primordial way in which a mythology gets born, because the words come out of the doing, the actions that have been done, before the words were made, and that the words had been generated out of the things done. And so in order to understand in this way, one has to reverse ones mentality. One goes back to the ritual traction of myth in order to find out what do you do then to get this word to generate, to come into being? Because the word will carry the feeling, will carry the image, and an image, feeling tone loaded word is protean. It will be not just a noun and a verb but it will be the point at which the noun goes into the verb. The noun, as a ritual energy structure, will go into the process of the language, and it is this mythic process of the language that has a dynamic quality to it, and if you take a word ritually and you put it into a mythic-charged dynamis field, what comes out of this is a very peculiar quality, it's not a mind quality. It's that the body becomes charged. The physiology becomes charged. One begins to have the power in the hands, the power in the heart, the power in the feet, the sense of movement shifts into mysteriousness. Instead of just walking, you begin to glide. Instead of just reaching for something, you work with accepting it. And in this way, the mysteriousness of experience changes the orientation so you stop looking to the mind for direction and you start looking to the mysterious interplay of the language with the action, and Gladys Reichard says of this, 'This is not just now language, but is a special rhythmic form of language called chant.' Chant. Now the term chant that came into play in this way owes a great deal of its existence to the great American poet Walt Whitman, where he did not call what he was writing so much poetry but he called it chants. Long chants. And in a way Whitman's long chants are a kind of mythology, a mythological dynamis that is based upon doing, not upon thinking. And that doing is something that then merges as a focus between the chanting language with its feelings and its images, and the protean quality of nature coming into play, so that the physical body now has two sources of dynamic that weave together, and the weaving is such that you can weave a mythology but you can also weave a spell. You can weave a chanting. Now language, the mythic oral language, has a double source of power, and it calls out a special quality of the mind, and that quality is that the symbols now do not just focus something, but they bring it into a picture. All of the images, all of the language, fit together and they make a frame, not just a frame of reference but a frame which we are calling a square of attention. One is able to look at this picture, at this frame, and with a special quality of that gliding, of that accepting and gifting quality of action, the frame is addressed in just this way and instead of it just being a picture it now becomes an openness. It becomes a transparency like a window, like a gateway, like a doorway, through which one can with the ritual energy that one has, one can walk through that doorway. One can walk through that gateway, one can see through that window in such a way that as you look to see, your visionary seeing sees more and more, and the great Black Elk, in Black Elk Speaks, when he was in Europe, dancing with Buffalo Bill's Indian Show in Europe, dancing for all the royal heads of Europe, he got an insight that his family were ill and so he went into a visionary mode and flew in his spirit all the way back over the South Dakota lands, and he honestly wrote that as he looked he could see more and more, and he could see the sickness of people in their tepees and he had this x-ray vision, this mystical vision. This now is a third quality of dynamis and when it is woven with the mysteriousness of experience and the vast powers of nature, you have this triple weave which gives you a very interesting quality. The French weave techniques calls it a Jacquard pattern. You can see two distinct patterns at the same time, with a slight shift of perspective. They are both there at the same time. And what occurs to you is not only are there two patterns there, but there is the weave itself, which plays these patterns but is itself a distinct third quality. For Gladys Reichard, she wrote to her mentor Elsie Clews Parsons, in New York City, and we've talked about her before and we'll talk some more about her.
I had started the study of Navajo social structure by accident. The genealogical method being used by my sponsor. [Parsons] After working three summers at the job it seemed that I had come to know a good deal about Navajo class, about linked clans, about marriage and related abstractions, but very little about the Navajo themselves. Personality was not largely used at the time. I concluded that a study of structure is indispensible for any kind of social study, but that it is by no means enough for the understanding of behaviour, attitude, motivation. I was interested in crafts and decided that learning to weave would be a way of developing the trust of the women, as well as of learning to weave and to speak the language. By this attempt I would put myself under a family aegis and my work would be primarily with women, and I could observe daily the round as a participant rather than as an onlooker.
And almost as if it were like an incredible, magical, happening, the family that she was apprenticed to was the wife of Red Point, Maria. And as she learned, she learned that it isn't about just weaving a rug but that you must raise the sheep, and you raise the sheep to the point where you must shear the sheep, you must card the wool, you must make your yarns out of the wool with spindles. You must then make your loom, you must then weave your rug and that this entire operation takes about one year. So that a rug, a Navajo rug, is an annual cycle from nature through the ritual to the mythology to the rug itself, which now is capable of being a symbol, but not a symbol in the mind, a symbol because its symbolic quality is referential to its ritual existence. The objis itself has a symbolic referent, not that the symbols have an existential referent. The mind gets it inside out. It things that things are the reference to its thoughts, whereas it's the other way around in a culture. The symbols are the reference of the physical things. The body in its actions is more primordial than the mind in its thoughts. It is the referentiality. And when you understand this, you understand that we have a inside-out, regressive idea of meaning. Meaning is in what you do in your body's integrity with nature and its traction and existence, and the thoughts are the completion of that, not the controlling aspect of it.
Literally, most education over the last 2500 years has been an inculcation of the ways to become artificial and crazy. We're reversing all of that by a recalibration, so we're taking our time and we're not going to get to symbols in the mind for another couple of months, because we want to be prepared to have a heartful sentience before we get to the whole question of what is intelligence.
Let's take a little break.
Let's come back from our break. We're using pairs of books to get a ratio, and we're doing this constantly so that we have an array of ratios. If you have two-thirds and then you square two-thirds, and then you cub two-thirds, and then you raise two-thirds to the forth power, you now have the basis of a Pythagorean musical octave building. Once you realise that we're weaning ourselves away from texts, from doctrines, from subjects, from categories, from hierarchies, from a whole tradition of sedimentation that has become a mud that has buried almost everything of value in the world, and we're taking our time to un-layer that in such a way that each of the layers occurs to us as interesting as we pass through it, so that when we emerge I believe that the saying is like the lotus coming through the mud and the water, when it reaches the sunlit air it will blossom, it will open. That blossoming as a differential conscious form is not in the mud. There is no layer of the mud that makes that blossom, but the blossom will come through all of those layers and then will open, will be there. And whether it's the lotus of the east or the rose of the west, it isn't just a simile or a symbol, but it is a ritual traction of doing that actually occurs, and what blossoms out of it is a new quality of experience that now is the basis for a new square of attention that can extend all the way to art forms. And when our experience is the basis of the meaningfulness of a mind integral, that mind integral will have its transparent symbols and allow us to vision through that, and out of the visionary dynamic will emerge new kinds of forms. Art forms are not integral forms. They're not the forms of ritual, of existentials. They're not the forms of symbols, of ideas. They are differential forms and their structure is made to open out rather than to focus in. One of the deepest understandings of this was written by a man, Heinrick Zimmer, I'm going to bring a couple of his books in next week, one of them contains Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an essay on it along with several other myths from India. It's called The King and the Corpse. In one of his esoteric books on ancient Indian art, Zimmer said we in the west need to understand that when we look within, the eye of seeing is a singular eye, and what that eye sees is not singularity. It sees all. It sees the allness. And so the differential consciousness learns that when seeing one doesn't look to the thing, to the focus, one sees the unity in every aspect of every level expansion into infinity. It is the infinite field of the spiritual person that is one of the forms of art. So that one's person, one's spirit person is an art form. And as an art form it is capable of something that the integral cycle cannot do. The integral cycle can complete but it cannot perfect. And so we're looking at a learning that takes us patiently for a year each week in a paced way through four seasons of a natural cycle, so we get the complete integral. We will have gone week by week, pivoting ourselves and seeing finally the complete circle, the complete cycle, but having done that we will not close it but we will pivot and come back through it, but in a different way. We'll come back through it in a differentiating way, showing arrays of possibility that open and open and open, and the possibilities open on a structure which is a harmonic.
We're looking at Gladys Reichard's Navajo Medicine Man Sand Paintings and J R R Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Now with Tolkien his translation appears also in the collection called The Tolkien Miscellany. Even though his edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was Oxford 1925, and the second edition 1967, it's in Middle English. The English translation was never published in his lifetime. It was only years after he died that his son Christopher, putting together his father's writings, put an edition out of Tolkien's translation. It's an important thing because Tolkien was one of the few writers of the 20th century who understood the difference between fairy tales and mythology. A mythology is the oral language of experience where feeling toned images are the way in which the dynamic progresses its way through a beginning, a middle and an end. A sense that this is the plot [48:11] movement, not the plot as a structure but the plot as a dramatic movement. It is a narrative dynamic and that narrative dynamic has a vectored purpose. It begins, it has its complications and developments, and leads to an end, a conclusion. That particular narrative line is not a geometry line but it's like a sinuous fibre which now can be woven with other sinuous fibres but the fibres are not existential, they are durational. So that a mythology is a woven cable of the fibres of myths not as existential things but as dynamic flows, processes. And it's out of that that the mind will emerge. So the mind comes not out of nature directly, but comes out of experience directly, which is why the all-important quality for human beings has always been to have experience which flows within nature, so that when the mind emerges out of that experience it will carry nature with it, but it will not carry with it as a content, but as the dynamic context within which experience is realisable. And the mind is a structure that is made specifically to complete the nature cycle in realising an idea. The image of it is in the cartoons the light-bulb going on. 'Let's shed some light on this.' An idea is made to emerge out of an enriched experience of feeling tones and images that flows beautifully , participatory within the grand concourse of the river of life. And so the boat of our experience or the swimming in our experience in that stream of life is extremely important. Aldous Huxley once observed, he said the psychotic is someone who drowns in the very same water that the mystic swims in, in The Perennial Philosophy. Tolkien understood that when you make a grand work of art like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, there is a quality where the language at its origin is a mythic experience that must flow through the transparency of its symbols into a visionary consciousness which allows then the work of art to emerge not at a rhetorical language but in a poetic and when it successfully does this, the mythology transforms into a fairy tale. The mythology is made so that the mind may realise but a fairy tale engenders so that what occurs is real. And the difference between realisation and reality is the difference between the mind and the cosmos. The cosmos is quite real and we are, because we are not part of that cosmos, we are a part of the harmonic of that cosmos. When Tolkien begins Sir Gawain and the Green Knight he has an appendix which is son put in the back, the verse forms of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and he says, 'The word alliterative as applied to the ancestral measure of England is misleading, for it was not concerned with letters, with spelling, but sounds judged by the ear.' And so the ancient phrase is always, 'Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.' And it isn't Jesus that originates this, but that phrase originates 2400 years before Jesus in Enheduanna, in her temple hymns in ancient Akkad, not far from where Bagdad in Iraq is today, within half an hour's drive of Bagdad, 4400 years ago. She, as we saw, had her father set up the world's first great intercultural trading realm, stretching from [53:41] to India, from Central Asian to the Central African, and within all of that the trade routes had to go through many different cultures, different cultural areas. The Indus civilisation was already an amalgam of dozens of cultures. The Nile was already an amalgam of all of the Egyptian nomes and many other districts. The Euphrates and the Tigris the same, and so you had this tremendous array for the first time, of hundreds of different cultures that had to be knit together. The matrix of that was the responsibility of Enheduanna. To weave together the myths of each of the 42 temples in Sumer and Akkad that over thousands of years had evolved 42 different temples, each with their own god, each with their own mythology. Her task was to weave all of these together, not in a super-mythology but in a transform that would allow a new form to come out. And so her 42 temple hymns are not made for the temples but for the connecting of the dots of all the temples together into a new gestalt. And the gestalt was that of all these gods, all these mythologies, there is a deep mysterious similarity of sourcing which can be experienced if we expand ourselves from identifying with a single culture and learning about dozens of cultures, dozens of different gods and mythologies and this comparative method at the time, 2400 BC, yielded a sense that the temple is a mythological ritual focus and is technically a cult location. Whereas the divinity is a concourse of the dynamic charging the energeya of the structure of individuals, of persons. One experiences now the divine not just feeding at the cult trough of a temple, and so in the myths of Inanna that we took we saw how mythology in its first great civilised form 4400 years ago became a quality that progressively influenced the world. Inanna's myths and the temple hymns were standard schoolbooks all the way through the history of the Near East and resurfaced in a tremendous burst of a renaissance at a time of a king called Sargon the Second. He took the name Sargon for himself, and Sargon the Second was the one who invaded Israel in the 700s BC and was the subject of the warnings of the two early prophets of the time, very powerful: Amos, who was the first of the independent prophets, and Isaiah. It was Sargon the Second who made the first exile. He took all of the Jewish citizens of Sumeria and transported them, not just them but any of the cultures that he conquered, any of the kingdoms, he shifted their populations so they would have to live and grow up in different areas from where they were founded in their customs, where they were founded in their traditions. And so people were transported all over and this was a development of the technique that the original Sargon had used but Sargon the Second enforced this in such a way that he established an Assyrian (not Syrian but Assyrian) control and an empire, and its centre was in Babylon. Eventually, 100 years later, the second part of the holy land, Judaea, was conquered about the time of Jeremiah, and a second wave of exile was put into play, but in between those two layers, the great prophet Ezekiel was the first one to use the phrase 'son of man'. And he did this about 590 BC and saw, was shown, in his vision, that there were now no longer any places that could sustain the developed energy of god, that it was so powerful it would not fit into any particular temple nor any group of temples, but that it was made to go into a population of spiritual people of unlimited numbers. So that it was mankind, spiritualised, was the only likely alter for the now greatly realised and greatly more real power of the divine.
This quality one finds is of historical consciousness, not of myth, and so the great transform comes because works of art will generate a historical consciousness, but in order to do so the mythic experience must let itself be transformed, so that the basis now of historical consciousness becomes the symbolic mind, and if the symbolic mind is not transparent, it will not have consciousness, it will not have vision, there will be no works of art generated to be prismatic, to take that conscious dynamic and allow it to be differentiated further into historical consciousness. So when you come to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the book itself survived miraculously.
There was only one copy in the entire world and it was in a private library in the Midlands of England, and it was a part of a purchase that went to an academic library and in this volume there were four words and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the first. The second is called Pearl, the third is called Purity or sometimes translated as Cleanness, and then there was a forth. Tolkien says in here out of the hundred-and-one sections of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , each one of them ends with a five-line special form known as the short first line, which is the bob and the other four lines which is the wheel. And what this means, it's like the oral language form of the spindle which will take the carded wool and put it into thread, put it into yarn, and with the distaff or the spindle one allows for its pivot to spin, and it's the spinning of the pivot, the chirality, the angular momentum of that, that pulls the thread, pulls the yarn into its weaveable line out of the carded mound of wool. This is something that Gladys Reichard herself learnt to do. It's something that Tolkien learned to do in language, but he learned it because his work initially was not so much with just written documents but learning to read them well enough so that they could be read out loud. And the great exemplar of a work of art that must be read out loud, must be heard to be appreciated, is Chaucer. You cannot read Chaucer silently off the page. You have to lift it off the page orally. It's the only way that you can hear it. And when you do, the sound of Chaucer, the sound of great Middle English comes through with that mysterious tone that one recognises right away, that this is not a barbaric, primitive language, but this is a deep transform, this is a humaneness speaking. That no one that you have ever talked through in your life, or your own talking to someone in your life, has ever had this quality of the depth of heart. Chaucer said of his works, 'I write of a fair field full of folk' that the facets are humanness are so enormous that every single human being who is humanely hearted and they are realisable, not in their individuality but in their character. It is the sentience, the wisdom of the heart of someone's character that is the first sense that forms. It's the configuration of what one does in the humane-hearted life that one lives. It isn't that you are your experience, it's that your experience is the configuration of the figures of what you do. And the configuring is based on the figuration of what you do, and it's not so much that it's geometrical to be true, but that it is woven in such a way that the character of your sentience will be natural, in the sense that there will be no bifurcation because of your actions between the way nature is dynamic and your experience is dynamic. And when they are that way, one says then that the rituals are pure. And if the rituals are pure and the myth and the nature phases are flowing, the symbolic mind will emerge as a natural completion for that. It will be a symbolic structure where the ideas will be realising and that realising then will be an understanding. Its origin is the sentient human-heartedness. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is written about the same time as Chaucer's works, written in Middle English, and Middle English is this great, huge transform of Old English. And we talked about this at the beginning of today's presentation, that Old English had a very curious quality to it, it took blunt languages like Latin and the ancient Germanic languages, the ancient Scandinavian languages, but juxtaposed them in such a way that there was a pilot light of humanness that was possible. And one of the classics of Old English is the national epic of England, Beowulf. Beowulf is written about 730 AD, 730 CE, but its language was a woven language that was made by a man named The Venerable Bede, and the Venerable Bede lived in the late 600s/early 700s and he wrote [1:07:50 break in recording] people. It's in Bede and in Beowulf that you find that Old English has a pilot light that Middle English finally turns on and lights up the fireplace. It is the fireplace, hearth light of Middle English that Shakespeare transforms into a cosmic art language. Elizabethan Renaissance English with not just Shakespeare but many, many writers of the time, from Marlowe on through, Elizabethan English becomes like the sun compared to the hearth light compared to the pilot light. And then English of course is transformed one more time in the great age of the Romantic revolution, by writers like Blake and Coleridge and Wordsworth and Shelley, the Shakespearean language is transformed a third time, and instead of just being a Shakespearean cosmos, one now has an almost endless dimentiality to the possibility of English as a language. English now has become like the world language because it was the only one that had the ability to go into endless dimensions of possibility, literally into a transplanetary humanity, worlds without end.
Tolkien is one of the great writers of the 20th century. His translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight focuses on several of the mythic thresholds through which experience will go in reading this out loud, and here's how it sounds. I'll try to give you a little bit of Tolkien's style and tone and just the beginning.
When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy,
and the fortress fell in flame to firebrands and ashes,
The traitor who the contrivance of treason there fashioned
was tried for his treachery.
The most true upon earth, it was Aeneas the noble and his renowned kindred who then laid under them lands,
and lords became well-nigh all the wealth in the Western Isles.
So that it begins after the siege of Troy the defeated Trojans, led by Aeneas, found Rome, but because of an inadvertent murder his great-grandson, Felix Brutus, left Italy and found Britain, which would have been somewhere around the time of Solomon. Solomon lived until 928 BC, he was born somewhere around the year 1000. He became king about 967 BC and as you might remember, his mother was Bathsheba, and out of all of the sons and children that David had, he promised Bathsheba that their son would be the next king after him, and their son was Solomon. So Solomon figures prominently as one of the symbolic figures in the historical consciousness but it is in a ritual figuration that it is most indelibly there in the mythos of this work. Solomon is extremely famous and this is the part of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I'll leave off the Tolkien tone: This is the emblem that is on Sir Gawain's livery, it's on his shield, it's on his horse's saddle, Gringolet, it is in everything that he does, it is the five-pointed pentangle star.
Then they brought him his blazon that was of brilliant gules
with the pentangle depicted in pure hue of gold.
By the baldric he caught it, and about his neck he cast it:
right well and worthily it went with the knight.
And why the pentangle is proper to that prince so noble
I now intend to tell you, though it tarry my story.
It is a sign that Solomon once set on a time
to betoken Troth, as it is entitled to do;
for it is a figure that in its five points holds,
each line overlaps and is linked with another,
in every way it is endless; and the English, I hear,
everywhere name it the Endless Knot.
That five point star, that pentangle, that endless knot, is a figure that can be drawn without lifting the stylus or the pen from the page and carries all the way through so it's like an infinity sign, but that five-pointed star is at the end of each of the hundred and one sections of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as that bob and wheel, the five lines. So that the pentangle is not a symbol, a mental symbol, for understanding the poem, it is a figuration which is the traction for the configuration that is the realisable depth of what all this is about. Its meaning is something that is realised in the mind, not made in the mind. It is made because experience flowing mysteriously with nature does these actions from this beginning through that complication to this end. And that each of those fibres is woven in such a way, in a dynamic fibre way, that the experience has a tenacity to it, a palpability that registers first in the body and references itself in the mind. So it isn't so much a psychophysical actuality but a physio-psycho actuality. The body first. The actions first. The figuration of life, of what you do, first. So that ritual has a primordiality to it, not the other way around. The symbols have a completion.
Here's what Gladys Reichard writes:
The Navajo religion must be considered as a design in harmony, a striving for rapport between man and every phase of nature, the earth and the waters under the earth, the sky and the land beyond the sky, and of course the earth and everything on it and in it, in order to establish and continue this rapport.
The beings which dwell in all these places must be controlled. Not controlled by the mind, but controlled because one does these actions right from the beginning, through all of their extent to their end, and because of this, because they are existentially finite, they are the stuff of what existence is. Existence is finite, it's definite, it is a unity; each part of each part of each thing of each thing has unity to it. We use the Chinese term, when we began our education, Tê. It has the power to be. But its be is not a static be, it is a becoming, so existence is constantly, vibrantly there. Its theirness is because the vitality of its vibration is dynamic. Were nature not to be dynamic, not only would nothing occur, there would be no occurrence. But because occurrence occurs, thusness now is thus. And experience comes out of the interplay between the dynamic of nature and the objectiveness of ritual figure action, and when they're together, experience now is a resolving third, not of two things but of a process and its things. So that experience now is able to have the things in images and the flow of nature in language. And what holds the images in the language are the feelings. The feelings if they were things they would not be able to do this, but it's the gel, the dynamic fluid glue in between that holds the images in the language and allows then for experience that is of that to be the mysterious centre of nature. When the mind is able to realise this, the mind now is pure.
She says: The Navajo differentiate between masked gods and holy people, and in so doing confuse their own categories as well as ours.' That if you try to understand something, initially through categorical plans, doctrines, you will always produce a bafflement, a confusion which is not really realisable, it's not really complete. So one has to turn it around and go the other way.
When Gladys Reichard was first working on the Navajo language, she eventually wrote the great grammar of Navajo, having lived with Red Point's family intimately, season after season. When she first went there she went to a great Franciscan Father, Berard Haile, because he was supposed to be the expert. Here's part of the letter that she sent to Elsie Clews Parsons at Barnard and Columbia Colleges.
I thought he had my point of view. He answers me at length and with enough great detail saying he doesn't think I know enough to even wash behind my ears. Holds up Mrs Armer as a model of how to do work among the Navajo, even mentions a nice house with curtains and an easy armchair etc. I guess except for linguistic help I can count him out.
She was one of the first great women anthropologists who was a quiet woman, a lonely spirit they used to say of her, and because she wasn't larger than life like Elsie Clews Parsons or Margaret Mead or Ruth Benedict, she was shunted in such a way that her work was eclipsed all during her life and it wasn't until a generation after her death that the realisation of the greatness of Gladys Reichard's work was founded. One of the great volumes that contributed to this was the Bollingen Foundation put it in the Bollingen series. A big two-volume Navajo Religion by Gladys Reichard is now reprinted in one volume in paperback, but when it was brought out it was astounding how completely she had covered the entire range of anthropology and that some forty or fifty years after he work had been done, modern anthropology follows her methods, her modes, not the modes of the priests or the published professors at places like Harvard. It's her work which set the tone that if you cannot live in their experience and do the ritual comportment of what they do, you will misunderstand and never not know it. So that he quality of civilised life must first found itself on the old American Indian saying, 'Do not criticise someone until you have walked a mile in their moccasins.' If you cannot empathise with them, you cannot sympathise with the universe. And without that your experience will be day dreaming.
More next week.