Mythic Cycles of Initiation for Kingship

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The King and the Queen in the Quest
Presentation 3 of 12

Mythic Cycles of Initiation for Kingship
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, January 22, 1981

Transcript:

The date is January 22nd, 1981. This is the third lecture in the series of lectures by Roger Weir entitled The King and Queen in the Quest. Tonight's lecture is entitled mythic cycle of initiation for kingship.

…for plots and schemes. I'm working on the lecture series for next time and it will be entitled Primordial Image Bases. And the series ends right about the time of the summer solstice, which I have celebrated for many years now religiously. And I've been working on a possible joint lecture here on the summer solstice with one of my friends Theodore Sturgeon, the great science fiction writer. So, my mind is full of schemes and plots. Fortunately, it's not a devious mind. I think a person like myself a very real trouble causer were not for great discipline.

This lecture tonight is the third in the series, Mythic Cycles of Initiation for Kingship. And as usual at this stage in a presentation series I'm striving to fan out the information more caring to empty the cornucopia as it were on the table into your laps before you. Then to draw conclusions or to make certain serial connections clear. So, this is a potpourri and I hope to give you at least several basic images tonight which will be useful. And you might try to visualize during the week one basic image. Perhaps the primordial image that I know of for initiation is this Greek mystery bowl called the kylix. And I'll pass it around. And I think later on when I talk about the Eleusinian mysteries as much as one is permitted to talk of these things. I'm not the entire barbarian that I would reveal all. But the kylix is a monumental achievement. It is a development of human character to about as refined as it's gotten. And it is an image not so much of consciousness but of character. And in our time and among our peers there's a great deal of discussion about consciousness and so forth. But I will urge you to set your interest in consciousness off to one side in your studies. It will take care of itself. Consciousness rather than being a state of evolution is a structure that is always there. And it is an ingredient like zero in the number scheme. It's always implicit and its function is always constant. And is what it is. And does not evolve or change. but rather in the very precipice is discovered more or less and seem to be. what does change and what is extremely mobile and fluid and needs to be tutored is character. Character forever would drag its feet were it not for discipline and initiation and achievement. And so, it's more to character that I think we should address ourselves than to consciousness.

I'll pass this kylix around and later on…

[inaudible]

In our civilization there are four basic rituals on the plane of normal life. Average life, daily life. which involve four phases. Each one has an initiative right, series of rites, connected to it. They are of course in order of occurrence in our lives. Birth and puberty and marriage and death. And in the ritual year that we have come to become familiar with, Halloween is death. And Christmas for birth. Easter or May Day, puberty. And I suppose in our culture July 4th or the summer solstice for marriage. I can hope to get into a connection between them.

There's a wonderful presentation of the mysteries of the summer solstice and marriage and so forth in Shakespeare's wondrous Midsummer Night's Eve. We are told in school that Shakespeare was a rather parochial metaphysician and just happened to write 30 or 35 of the world's greatest plays but really didn't know what he was doing and supposedly naïve. I think you can question that in your own regard. A Midsummer Night's Eve was written the sources are difficult to discover because mostly they were rooted in his own development. And for those of you who are interested. I won't be able to get to it tonight, but Shakespeare is worth looking at. And A Midsummer Night's Eve of course, one of the great conscious mystery plays of all time.

Other than these four, there are two other initiatory phases or stages available to human beings. And a seventh which is better not to be referred to because it is what we call an achievement of ultimate transformation. And has no discursive terminology which is appropriate to even designate it in. But the other two have a possibility. And one of them, which is a descent into the underground. A development and transcendental mode down into the nature of the earth. Leaving the normal crosscut of life and descending down. This descent has its initiations designated I think most clearly in the mythologies of The Kore Persephone of Demeter and The Eleusinian Mysteries. And for my choice on this transcendent awkward mode, I think rather the American Indian sage Black Elk - his vision was the easiest for us to understand. That there of course many different examples for both of these achievements.

Now the literature on this has been great and profuse. There are just a few names that I think are worth recording and reading for yourselves at your own leisure. One of them of course is Joseph Campbell, whose works number about a dozen or so. His major series of works was called The Masks of God in four volumes - his first volume on Primitive Mythology, and the second volume is on Oriental Mythology, the third on Occidental Mythology, and the fourth simply entitled Creative Mythology. And those four volumes together under the aegis of the overshadowing title Masks of God is a wonderful landmark. Something worth addressing to. Incidentally Campbell, who is over 70 near to 75, will be in Los Angeles February 20th. He'll be at Pasadena City College all day on a Saturday. And I don't know if tickets are available. They had only about 300 tickets but one way or another if you get a chance to see Joseph Campbell over there, he's marvelous. I will procure a tape recorder around that time and those who don't get a chance to see him I will make available a two-hour tape. His first Sol Institute lecture years and years ago was entitled The Uses of Mythology. And I have a copy from that time. And I will play it and make it available. And it is excellent.

[inaudible]

There is a little paperback called Myths to Live By which Adrian Malone of BBC is using over at the American Film Institute in a course that he's having. So, these excellent materials penetrate around the world. And one of the little side lights of getting civilized is that you look up from your studies and your work one year and you find that your kin to the entire world. That everybody who has alerted to themselves and to development have a share in this wonderful feast. And so, this material of course, as I said before one sign that you are quote progressing is that all of the classical things of the world will light up and glow and become meaningful. And you can move into any expressive medium anytime and any realm. Any historical epic. And find yourself at home. They are all friends. And what they have to say is all of interest. This is a sign. There is of course a lot of phoniness in our time. And most of it highly publicized at this time. Pay no attention to it. These are [inaudible]

Along with Campbell I would suggest some time that you take a look at a very large book. It's in about 12 or 13 volumes condensed into one. By Sir James George Frazer The Golden Bough. And The Golden Bough is a wondrous work. it's a gold mine. Frazer himself who was a monumental individual and he addressed himself very early on to the problem of spiritual information. How do we know? And he lived out of time when the idea of the Renaissance, the recovery of the past, had penetrated and become universal enough so that questions began to be asked outside of the normal historical school text continuum of human development. And all of a sudden, so-called primitive peoples around the world. Or archaic peoples before recorded history. Or qualities of life which were not immediately available to everyday life became subject to investigation. And The Golden Bough is in that first generation of genius. Dozens of people participated in it, but Frazer was really the king of that entire movement.

And it is the first time ever in any culture that people went back and scoured the world to try to find traces of primordial man. Out of that development there were several insightful little books that very few people read. Occasionally are available. This is one of them it's called The Rites of Passage. Translated into English by [Arnold] van Gennep. You never see it around. I've never - I bought this copy years ago. I wrote to the University of Chicago Press. You could do likewise. The Rites of Passage. It's an investigation. It came out in 1906. It predates many of the Freudian or Jungian writings and so forth. And so, does not use a terminology which by now has tended to almost become cliched. It is a little stilted in certain ways. It was an academic work. But it has that wonderful unsheathing of the sword of insight from its scabbard of everyday habituation. And penetrates through to the basic vision that patterns reoccur time and time again. And if we will only bring them together into a bouquet, that all those patterns begin to resonate. And in the resonance, we see a cosmos, something available to us, a vision, a spectrum of human development. Which is true at all times. It has different variations as in red roses and white roses. Or purple irises or poppies or whatever. But they are all flowers that bloom from experience. And I think this is a, it's just a classic. And anthropology certainly lost a lot. And anybody who's spent any time like I have in the halls of academia, you know that after years and years and years it finally grinds everything down to a convenient pablum that can be tested for. And that of course is the reductio ad absurdum of all logical systems. It simply is a tail end.

[Question from the room] Who's the author on that?

Arnold Van Gennep. G-E-N-N-E-P. Arnold Van Gennep. He lived on until 1957.

After the anthropologists opened the door and it was a generation of genius. Malinowski and Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict et cetera. And people in this country played an enormous part. Alfred Kroeber, Franz Boas. Almost every other name that one would single out was an American. And their field of inquiry, just like our field of inquiry, became more and more centered around the personage of the American Indian who was available for investigation and study. And the constant journey back and forth between the universities and the reservations over many decades. Persons of high quality, high integrity and genius finally penetrated through to certain American Indian wise people that they indeed still have a treasured vision available to share.

And it was with the appearance of this book Black Elk Speaks that in 1932, right at the beginning of the Great Depression. That we have the first great testimony in the words of a native as it were instead of an anthropologist. And the way in which he chose to disclose it. And it is a monumental book. It belongs on the same shelf as all ethics making it books as just about any great thing that you could think of with The Odyssey and The Aeneid and so forth because it presents for all time, any, to any sympathetic reader coming in. A crystalline vision of a tradition that goes back to primordial nature. That is, it goes back intact to those basic experiences which anyone living on this particular planet, in view of the natural continuum is available to us here on this particular planet, could verify for themselves. And see for themselves, learn to see for themselves. And thus, veracity and proof, soundness all of these criteria of the mind coalesce into the instant of discovery for oneself. So that knowledge and wisdom coincide. And the experience of the person and the characterization of the mind are one. And this of course generally is known in English as an epiphany. And these epiphanies are available to us. And someone like Black Elk presents us with basic material towards this.

All of these writers and experiences have within them an assumption bill that we are appointed with initiations. That we have ourselves undergone certain initiations. I remember once in a film I think it was a man named Evans, a Houston psychiatrist, was interviewing Carl Jung on film. And he asked him what about the birth of trauma. And Jung sort of smiling at him, his eyes lighting up said, well there's nothing to say about the [inaudible] problem because we are not appointed with the psychology that hasn't been born. So, we have no comparison. We all have been born so we have no idea of what it is because we have nothing to compare it with. That birth is so omnipresent that it simply is and is not available as an object which could be separated. So that many of the initiations connected with birth are our supposed parallels with rebirth experiences.

Except for one culture and that is the Vajrayana, the diamond path, in Tibetan Buddhism which has the notion of the bardo. That in the continuum, life is also on a bardo plane. And that a motion, a spiritual motion, that continues on after death in the bardo plain still retains the best digital possibilities of memory and imagination and mental formation long enough to make use of the book The Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. And in their testimony, it is quite interesting that we are indeed masks that are filled with a possibility in motion. That seeks to use this mask costume to express its purpose. And we are forever unable to do this because we are constantly clouding the issue. We constantly bring into play your relevancies and we insist on them. And thus, there is a concept tendency in The Bardo Thodol to put the emphasis on a sense of presence. Which I think is best named, if we're going to name these sorts of things, using a term that a Romanian historian of religions, Mircea Eliade, used - the sacred. That there is any sense of presence available to human beings which we could, if you will, designate the sacred. This in lieu of any other divine term because it easily connotes for us an experiential center and presence. And not an objective other distinct from ourselves. So that the sacred, a very usable term.

Eliade, who is incidentally at the University of Chicago now - quite an interesting individual. He was born in Romania. He became a professor of philosophy. He went to teach in India. And came into contact with a very great spirit there named Surendranath Dasgupta. And Surendranath had achieved high honor at Cambridge University in England. He was a master of the English language - very frail individual physically, constantly having his health in jeopardy. But lived long enough to complete a dozen books. The most famous set is a five-volume set entitled A History of Indian Philosophy and it was completed in the early 1960's and was the first time ever that anyone took the huge jungle of Indian thought and arranged it into a history. And this man Surendranath Dasgupta was the guru of Mircea Eliade. And he took him on, long after Eliade was already a professor in his own right and showed him an exponential realm of the mind. So that when Eliade left India some years later he wrote two books. And their titles and subject matter give you an indication of where he was at - he was afraid. The first book was called Yoga. And the second book was called Shamanism. And after many experiences in Europe prior to the Second World War, he came over to, went to Switzerland for a while, ended up here in the United States. Still alive like a venerable being.

One of Eliade's little books I like is called The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion. He has about 20 or 25 books. His use of the term sacred is a good use. And it gives us a terminology, a word, of the beginnings of a language which we can use to talk about that sense of presence which is always present in any initiation. And in fact, any initiation is to engender a social physical form where man can manifest that sacred fire. That it can come into being and flame into [inaudible]. And in that inner flower of flaming vision, we can gather the [inaudible] that kind of thought. You'll see this image at, in play later on when I talk about the [inaudible]. Quite interesting.

But his use of the term sacred I think is very good. And he also writes - and I think this is interesting in connection with the distinction between power and meaning that I've been drawing for several weeks now - he says, "Perhaps it is", he writes,
"Perhaps it is too late to search for another word, and we may use the term 'religion' and it still may be a meaningful term provided we keep in mind that it does not necessarily imply belief and anything in particular but refers to the experience of the sacred. That it is possible; we may have it; we may share it. And that consequently, it is related to ideas that come out of that experience. And there are three basic ideas. Being, meaning and truth."

Being, meaning, and truth. the Greek term was eidos. That was what you saw in your mind. Your mind's eye understood it. Comprehended it. So that was like a visual image. You knew that it was so and accessible to you because you had seen it. One of the basic terms of initiation, the first experience is to be shown if it is so. To the shown. And to have the recognition, the recognition of being, meaning, truth as ideas - eidos. Come out of having had or having shared the sacred.

This is a primordial quality. It is experiential. And it makes available from its center a spectrum of expression which we refer to in our normal lives as feeling. The feeling here of life the nimbus around the sacred. And it expands and permeates and has an emanation from the experience of the sacred. So that feeling is not just something nebulous but is capable in its spectrum of expression of a very high presentation. It works in sound, as in music. It works in color, as in art. It works in form, as in sculpture, architecture, et cetera, et cetera.

And from feeling is engendered, finally, what we call normally in our colloquial language thought that thought is an elaboration of feeling. And that feeling has its rootedness in experiences of sacred. So that the more we make available to ourselves the living in, the confidentiality in the sacred, the more feeling and thus thought. And thus, the entire range of humanists become transparent as to purpose and being meaning and truth manifest themselves.

So that in any initiation, whatever stage it is, one of this structural design purposes is always to try to get us to look towards experience in, have a recognition or an epiphany of the sacred. And that the differing stages of life or the differing initiations are simply different perspectives toward some centered center wherein the sacred is available to us.

Now the, the initiations of birth and puberty, marriage, death are generally available to us. They could be had by you from many, many different sources including your own lives. The two polar experiences of initiation, of transcendent mode, are less accessible. And therefore, I would like to concentrate on them for just a little while.

The first one, a descent into the underworld is very, very difficult to get a grasp on. I guess I'm going to use a classic mode. I'm going to use Homer's Hymn to Demeter because I think it presents everything in a nutshell, as it were. And there are hard translations of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter just about in any library. One corollary to it that might be presented and which I think in two weeks I'll be talking about it in a lecture in another place called Cosmic Images of the Shaman. One of the attempts in descent to the underworld is to reduce oneself to the skeleton, as I mentioned before. That the basic structural constituency of our being must be disclosed. That all things extraneous, all the so-called flesh, must be leached away. And therefore, any philosophies of initiation which still cling to any of the imageries that have to do with the normal, natural body in this particular initiation have no truth in them. Have no meaning and have no being. It's simply a guide word as you go along. Anything that has any reference whatsoever to the natural course of affairs. The Greek word for the natural order was themis from which we get the word theme. That there is a natural order. We are now penetrating through, falling through, the natural order into the so-called unnatural order. Unnatural only insofar as we no longer have this ordinary human life to refer back to. We still have metaphorical structural images but they very, very quickly dissolve.

In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter - basic story I guess you know - very succinctly is that Demeter's daughter Persephone is stolen by Hades, king of Hades, Pluto, and taken away. And the world was simply left desolate. And Demeter in her mourning demands that she have her daughter back. And after long suffering the daughter is returned to her part of the year. And thus, children are told this is why there is a winter and a spring, et cetera. There's more to it. It penetrates very much deeper than that.

In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, he begins of course, very much like the children's version would have it, that Persephone is out gathering with a lot of other young girls. And what they are gathering are flowers from a field, from a plain. And there is a particular flower that has, as Homer says, a hundred blooms from one root. And as Persephone reaches two hands together to pick that bloom the earth opens up and out comes the king of Hades driving his chariot and snatches her up and takes her away. This hundred-blooming blossom which the two hands, which also go to the kylix. And also, if you've been watching television, you know that you're in good hands with Allstate. This is the balance of nature. And the balance of nature is doing something eminently natural and the whole thing falls apart.

Well about this time that this experience happens to people, they say what did I do? What possibly have I have done wrong? What am I guilty of to have deserved this fate? To have been plunged out of my natural realm completely fall through things and end up completely in anxiety. What have I done? What am I guilty of? And the thing of course is that you're guilty only of having achieved that perfect equilibrium and pride of nature. And you are now ready to grow further. And we never stand still and so it's a blessing that the rug is yanked out. That you are snatched away. That your spring-like character is suddenly taken underground. It's part of the themis, the natural order of that. It's just that the natural order has to wave goodbye to you for a while. And you enter another realm.

On the surface Demeter, who is Persephone's mother, is extremely disturbed by this. And her reaction is to wander restlessly. She paces to and fro over the earth. That is to say the mother of our capacity to be spring life wanders aimlessly, anxiously, after that happens. It roams the earth so to speak. It roams our natural life. Cannot find the lost child. Cannot find the lost nature. And in the roaming dawns the characteristic Homeric epithet for Demeter, the dark robe. Demeter of the dark robe. When she has Demeter's, mother of Persephone, her epithet is long ankled Demeter. That is to say, yes, she's a graceful, beautiful woman but she is capable of those great firm strides. Which make her the master of the nourishment of nature. She makes fields grow. And she makes trees to fruit. And she provides that energy which creates life in an agricultural mode. She makes the plant realm and the animal realm and thus our realm happen. Long ankled Demeter. But in her vision of having lost her daughter, lost that spring-like capacity, she is dark-robed Demeter.

In her roving around the earth in the Homeric hymn, she has disguised herself somewhat as an aged old decrepit person. As our being tends to be, metaphorically. Having suspected that we've lost our inner light and in the Homeric hymn she comes to rest in her wanderings at a certain well called the [inaudible] which was located just outside of the little town of Eleusis. And I must say that even in times of Periclean Athens, Eleusis was always a little tiny hamlet, a little village, even though the great religious processions sometimes numbered thousands of people, they never had a population of over several hundred people. It's always little town.

But in the Homeric hymn, the king at that time, his name is Celeus, and he has four daughters who are very well-spoken - capable, as Homer writes, of winged words. That is people who have spiritual insight, can lift language from its mundane realm and give them flight - winged words. And they see this old woman with her dark robe and her hood seated by this well. They address her, talk with her, are kind to her. Tell her that she has a place here in their kingdom. That in fact their mother has given birth to a wondrous child long after she thought that she had outlived her childbearing age. And a nurse is needed, a nanny for this child. And Demeter in disguise is welcomed in. She approaches and the mother of the child, the queen, offers her the natural greeting - a glass of wine. And Demeter answers her in winged words and says that she cannot accept this gift. That what she requires in her stage, in her condition, is a different drink, a different beverage. And she instructs them how to mix this. And into a bowl much like this they are to pour water and sprinkle barley and put a little mint. And that beverage she will drink. And they offer her chair, she will not sit in a regular barren chair. She will only sit in a chair that is spread with a silver fleece. And when she sits, they all note her regal queenliness. And in this manner, they then begin to ask her about her past. And she relates them a story very, very, very similar to the story that Odysseus tells Penelope. That she has come from Crete. Pirates, shipwrecked, escaped, et cetera - very similar kind of a story.

And later on, in the lecture series we'll go into some of these image sequences.

But sufficient to say they discover that this is indeed a goddess and not a normal being, except that as this is occurring to them, she is all the while raising this child. And the child is wondrous. The child is in fact almost a super being, godlike in itself because Demeter is taking care to during the daytime to nurse the child herself. And in the evening time she puts the child in a fire. And a child constantly is blooming well and glowing. And of course, the mother curious cannot stand not to know. Must look in. And peering in to see how her child is being cared for and evening for these Demeter is putting this child into the fire and screams because to her natural eyes this is the death of the child. And Demeter curses her and tells her that it's all over, that this child was becoming godlike and will not now but will become a normal good person but no longer would have that capacity to be Godlike.

Demeter then is given back her daughter after many emissaries from Zeus come to Demeter. Iris et cetera, et cetera - none of them succeed, except that finally Hermes convinces Zeus that he could go to the underworld and bring up Persephone and bring her to Demeter. And Zeus says yes this is possible. except that if she has accepted any food, any nourishment from the underworld she must return there. As Hermes goes down and makes off on negotiations to release this hostage, the King of Hell slips one beautiful, sweet pomegranate seed to Persephone. Which she eats and it seals her capacity to have to resume coming back down. Just a little pomegranate seed. She comes back to Demeter. And Demeter is so overjoyed to have her daughter back, that she will have her two thirds of the year that she decides that since all of this happened at this particular place that she will have the Eleusinian's build her a temple. And she will consecrate that temple by showing them secret rites of initiation. Whereby people may for ever after come into possession of the capacity for themselves to relive this entire methos. The descent into the other underworld and the capacity to return again. And to be free to constantly make up a passage of [inaudible] so that that this entire realm becomes available to them.

She gives them several rights and the two preparatory rights to viewing the mysteries are one fasting and two drinking the sacred brew from the kylix. After these two initial phases they may participate in the mysteries. And of course, as you may have heard no one in classical antiquity ever revealed the Eleusinian mysteries. As great an eagle of the spirit as he was, Aeschylus was almost publicly condemned for having broached the subject almost too close. And even in late Roman days when Pausanias was writing his great travel logs. And he went to Eleusis, and it was in ruins for hundreds of years. He still left out of his description most of the sacred things like the stone were Demeter sat. And the exact location of the well et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So even several thousand years after the original giving of this series of rituals it was still taboo enough or a pagan Roman to still respect it. Quite interesting and quite amazing.

We have one real good book on Eleusis and the Eleusinian mysteries. Oddly enough my copy was, as I took it off the library shelves, was completely ruined by water. I have no idea of how that happened. I just take it that it's 1981 in action. It's a book called Eleusis by Carl Kerenyi. K-E-R-E-N-Y-I. Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter. And it is the initial, the initiatory structure of the Sacred Feminine. Demeter and Persephone together, mother and daughter together, are a complex image like a double star. Around which the planets of meaning and being, truth in this story revolve and have their universe. And have their order.

So that this realm which was initially off limits and even terrified and chaotic were incorporated and brought into the expanded natural order. That ever after that someone has made that descent and understood those experiences and those purposes. And brought this meaning up. Has brought this meaning to the sense of the sacred. Has had also the idea of truth expanded so that now instead of this birth and puberty and marriage and death we have rebirth. And in that initiatory capacity he or she who would be the king or queen in the natural order and the structuring of aspiration and inspiration, must include in the larger realm this whole meethos. This whole cosmos of meaning. So that the range of human possibilities becomes increased dimensionally by several fold.

How are we doing on time? Are we, are we running out?

[inaudible]

Two minutes of 9? 10 minutes. Verbose. Too verbose.

Am I straining you? Do you want to take a break? Wanna break? No?

We're going slow because I used to be a very flashy lecturer. A pacing Tiger. With all the wonderful accoutrements of dramatic voice and everything. And I gave it all up because it's, none of it's true. And none of it is necessary. And I try to just put it there. Sliced bread and cheese and you can get nourished from that. You can grow however you are gonna grow with that. You don't need to have my Bearnaise sauce of gestures and all that stuff - it's just not necessary. We can do that on the summer solstice, and I'll show you how it can be done. And we can forget it for another year.

Okay, we've enlarged the scope and the dimension by including an initiation which was at first not discernible in the natural order. And I imagine that very, very early man some sixty to seventy thousand years ago was astonished at their capacity to envision themselves after their own physical death. I imagine that that was really quite an extraordinary, unbelievable condition. And in order to express that, in order to, to give utterance to this most fantastic thing, they often resorted to portray animals as if animals had somehow been excerpted from the natural order. And they identified themselves with, with those animals in a spiritual mode. So that the very earliest art available to us, some twenty-eight thirty thousand years ago, deep in the secret caves. the underworld of the Pyrenees, southern France, northern Spain and so forth. We find presented their wonderful portrayals of these animals.

And I suppose to European raised individuals it was quite primitive and probably a very pagan thing. But to those who have had the experience that Black Elk makes available to us we can see that this is a very sophisticated way of expressing a spiritual vision. To take the kernel of one's nourishing life source and portray it deep underground where it never occurs naturally was the easiest way to say something else is at play here. And I have descended to these depths, and I have carried the handful of imagery which my life depends on. And I've brought it down here in the darkness and the eternalness of the bowels of the Earth. And I have made it again through my creativity from my hand and my color scheme of vision. And in the blood reds and flower yellows and ember blacks and earth browns, I have taken the kernel of my nourishment and put it down here as, as a secret. And through the secret I have incorporated this dimension initially, initiatorily into my world, into my kin.

Black Elk also makes available to us in his book, both this one and The Sacred Pipe, the vision of the other pole. The upper loop, the sky realms, the cloud castle. And he presents it honestly, as a spiritual person would, that it was not the achievement of years of asceticism. Not the achievement on a mature, sophisticated adult. But it was a gift disclosed to a nine-year old boy. Because it is an eternal vision and has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that you earned it or were ready for it or any of those other things. that its vision, like the nature of consciousness itself, simply is what it is. and when it occurs it, it occurs in total ineffably and is forever accessible just as that was. And you can return to a time and time again and it is as if no time has ever gone by. Nothing that you have done in your pride has made any difference to it. And one can only in all humility accept the fact that the realm of the ego is large. And all of it irrelevant to the experience of a celestial vision of the sacred because by now you can see that this is like a continuum that runs through like the polar axis that runs through the whole scheme of life. And by the circulation of the natural ritual circle and year creates around this whole of the sacred a magnetism and gravity that creates reality. And without the magnetic lines of this dynamic it simply wouldn't, nothing would be. nothing whatsoever. And this is of course a sacred geometry that occur is very clearly in Black Elk's vision - he has in his vision at age nine. He becomes ill. He is lying in his teepee. And through the door of the teepee, he sees thunder clouds. And descending from these thunder clouds come two warriors on horses whose lances are lifted down. And lightning expand out on the lances to the earth. That is, they are energies which are highly charged, and they discharged to the earth, to the realm where Black Elk has always lived. their energy and that realm grounds their capacity to direct themselves. I tend to want to launch into the metaphors of physics and math, mathematics. That they're vector mode in a natural matrix creates form by their motion. That's a tough language but I had to say it.

This vision of Black Elk looking out of his natural teepee to these thunder beings who he then rises from his physical form, goes out of the teepee, and when he is out there the to come to his side. There's always two in this particular thing. The guide in literary initiations is always a single guy. Dante has Virgil et cetera, et cetera. But in the natural visionary mode it's always two. They are, they are companions. They are there.

He was then enveloped by cloud and is taken up. And he is taken up so fast that…see if I can find out his…he looks back and he sees the earth just, just flying from him. I like his words. Let me see if I can find it.

"'Hurry! Come! Your grandfathers are calling you!' Then they turned and left the ground like arrows slanting upward from the bow. When I got up to follow, my legs did not hurt me any more and I was very light. I went outside the tepee, and yonder where the men with flaming spears were going, a little cloud was coming very fast. It came and stooped and took me and turned back to where it came from, flying fast. And when I looked down I could see my mother and my father yonder, and I felt sorry to be leaving them. Then there was nothing but the air and the swiftness of the little cloud that bore me and those two men still leading up to where white clouds were piled like mountains on a wide blue plain, and in them thunder beings lived and leaped and flashed. Now suddenly there was nothing but a world of cloud, and we three were there alone in the middle of a great white plain with snowy hills and mountains staring at us; and it was very still; but there were whispers."

I always thought one of the great moments in world cinema years and years ago, [Federico] Fellini made Juliet of the Spirits, and at the end when she had had that reconciliation and there were all the whispers and they said can we stay? Can we stay? And she smiled. Said yes. That's this.

"It was very still; but there was whispers. Then the two men spoke together and they said: 'Behold him, the being with four legs!' I looked and saw a bay horse." And this big bay horse becomes the magus to [inaudible]. A master of his ceremonies and conducts Black Elk's vision. He is looking. He is being shown in this celestial initiation. Conducts his vision to look to the order that will make sense to him. Because in the actuality all this happens like on mini montages it's all together. And there has to be some differentiation. There has to be some temporizing of it. And that's what a spirit guide does. Simply portrays it as if it were in some meaningful time sequence. So that later on when it happens that once and is seen all at once as it is, it's not just a cosmic light flare but is comprehensible as form that is as being, meaning or truth. So, the bay horse differentiates.

And what he sees when he looks to the west are twelve black horses. And they array themselves. They come plunging. They are celestial spirit vision horses. They're not old nags. They are, they're gorgeous. Their nostrils breathing flames and their eyes glancing with wild carrying intelligence. And Black Elk sees all this. And they array themselves in triads of four and from the north come white horses doing the same. From the east kind of, I believe sorrow horses. And then from the South come buckskin horses. And they then come together, and they begin to circumambulate around center.

"Suddenly the dancing horses without number changed into animals of every kind and into all the fowls that are and these fled back to the four quarters of the world from once the horses came, and vanished. Then as we walked, there was a heaped up cloud ahead that changed into a tepee, and a rainbow was the open door of it; and through the door I saw six old man sitting in a row. The two men with the spears now stood beside me, one on either end, and the horses took their places in their quarters, looking inward, four by four. And the oldest of the Grandfathers spoke with the kind voice and said: 'Come right in and do not fear.' And as he spoke, all the horses of the four quarters neighed to cheer me. So, I went in and stood before the six, and they looked older than men can ever be - old like hills, like stars."

See to the American Indian there's no such thing as an unconscious. There is nature. Where our consciousness leaves off and we posit unconscious nature is there. And so, they see the stars as being the farthest archetypes of the spirit. Just like Dionysius the Areopagite or any other great religious mystic would have seen. And it's very graphic to them that when you think of an archetypal father you think of the Sun - it's related to you. They don't think of an image, they think of that.

So, they looked "old like hills, like stars." And he is given then sacramental objects by each of the grandfather's, to command. The first grandfather gives him a bow and arrow, and this wonderful bowl, this cup. Only Black Elk's cup without handles but still should be held like this. Just like the begging bowl that the Buddha gave to the disciples. And said, well what shall we do now that we have understood. He said here you take a begging bowl and go into town. And take whatever is there. In Black Elk's bowl is the sky reflected. He has a bowl of sky because not the nature of this vision here he is he's being initiated into infinite space. And it is blue because it has our sun's light filtered through our planet's atmosphere. And that's as it should be here. If there was another kind of another star it might be a different color. But that bowl, that celestial bowl always contains the sky. Whatever planet it is. And that is given to him by the first grandfather along with a bow and an arrow. And this is life and death. And he has those powers.

And the second grandfather gives him an herb. And this herb just like the herb of all the old Eleusinian mysteries, instead of having a hundred blossoms, four will do because the American Indian thought in terms of four. This herb has four blossoms. And this is a healing herb. This is the power to heal. And it is related into nourishment because healing is related to nourishment. and with herb he became forever after what we would call a medicine man, or a doctor, or magician. That is, he can reconstitute the order once it has been skewed or someone is at [inaudible] can be restored to fullness. So, he may heal because the fullness may be brought back into play through this herb.

The third grandfather, "he of where the sun shines continually" is how Black Elk called him. He of where the sun shines continuously. "'Take courage, younger brother', he said, 'for across the earth they shall take you!'" Very telling. The third grandfather is referring to him as a younger brother, not as a son or as a grandson. Black Elk referred to him as a grandfather. And they call him younger brother because he is a brother. He is of this celestial order, becoming of it. He's being initiated into it so that he is going to be family. And he prophesized to him, "'for across the earth they shall take you!'" And of course, much later in Black Elk's life, some 30 years later he toured Europe with Buffalo Bill, but the vision was given to him at age nine.

"Then he pointed to where the daybreak star was shining, and beneath the star two men were flying. 'From them you shall have power,' he said, 'from them who have awakened all the beings of the earth with roots and lights and wings.' And as he said this, he held in his hand a peace pipe which had a spotted eagle outstretched upon the stem; and this eagle seemed alive, for it was poised there fluttering, and its eyes were looking at me. 'With this pipe,' the Grandfather said, 'you shall walk upon the earth, and whatever sickens there you shall make well.' Then he pointed to a man who was bright red all over, the color of good and of plenty, and as he pointed, the red man lay down and rolled and changed into a bison that got up and galloped toward the sorrel horses of the east, and they too turned to bison, fat and many."

So, right at the very apex of his initiation in the spiritual vision what comes into play for Black Elk is a very healthy bison. Exactly what we see painted on the walls 30,000 years ago in Alta Mira or Alaska. And the early discoveries of that and the 1940's thought they were primitive people. They just simply didn't understand. They didn't see that that was exactly the image that such people would use. I would use it too.

Then "the fourth grandfather spoke, he of the place where you are always facing." That is the south. Why the south? Because the Sun in its course up for the Blackfoot people who looked from 52 to about 50 North, the Sun is always in the South. So that it's course across the sky, its path, their zodiac so to speak of information was always in the south. So, you're always facing south because you're forever keeping your rootedness by keeping yourself coordinate. So, the South is in the direction referred to the almost Homeric style. Homer very related to this. One is always facing. And that is the direction from "whence comes the power to grow. 'Younger brother,' he said, 'with the powers of the four quarters you shall walk, a relative. Behold, the living center of a nation I shall give you, and with it many you shall save.'"

And he gives him a hoop. And Black Elk calls it the hoop of a nation. And when he was young, he thought that the hoop of the nation referred to his people, the Blackfoot nation. And it wasn't until way later in life that he realized that it was a much larger nation than he thought. That it wasn't just the Blackfoot nation but was that expanded spiritual dimension that has come to be. So that all people participate within this realm, as it is, come within the hoop of that nation. And along with the hoop was a stake which was painted red. Which when thrust into the ground in the center of the hoop would be a sacred center around which on that meaning and being and truth could regenerate a form of civilization that had sacredness at its center. And had all these initiations intact. So that it was like the key, the arch stone, to building the palace of man in a sacred mode. And he was given this by the fourth grandfather.

"Now the fifth grandfather spoke, the oldest of them all, the Spirit of the Sky. 'My boy,' he said, 'I have sent for you and you have come. My power you shall see!' He stretched his arms and turned into a spotted eagle hovering." So that this fifth grandfather that the great Spirit of the Sky it is implicitly on the stem of the sacred pipe. And is also at the same time in and of himself as an image of the spotted eagle hovering. "'Behold,' he said, 'all the wings of the air shall come to you, and they and the winds and the stars shall be like relatives. You shall go across the earth with my power.' Then the eagle soared above my head and fluttered there; and suddenly the sky was full of friendly wings all coming toward me."

So that, remember before, he went to teepee, all were around, all gathered around. And it was as if the natural realm had suddenly turned into birds of the air. And they all went back to their four corners and vanished. That is to say they vanished around the curvature of nature. Inside the teepee they reappeared after the fifth grandfather hovers and shows Black Elk the key vision to regenerating the world once he's had the power for nourishment: the bowl of sky and the bow and arrow. Once he's had that herb of healing; once he's had the Sacred Pipe, once he's had the hoop of the nations. And the fifth grandfather shows him how, with this guide hovering, all of these birds of the air, all of his brethren, the stars et cetera. that is the cosmos. Comes back to him because he by this point is personifying the sacred. He has become the center. The experience itself of the sacred.

And to disclose this to an initiation, show this to Black Elk, the divine makes the sixth grandfather kind of puzzlingly recognizable to him. And as Black Elk looks at him - he's only 9 you see - he looks at him.

"Now I knew the sixth grandfather was about to speak, he who was the Spirit of the Earth, and I saw that he was very old. but more as men are old. His hair was long and white, his face was all in wrinkles and his eyes were deep and dim. I stared at him, for it seemed I knew him somehow; and as I stared, he slowly changed, for he was growing backwards into youth, and when he'd become a boy, I knew that he was myself with all the years that would be mine at last."

Proof - a resonance of suchness as D. T. Suzuki would say. Suchness. "'My boy, have courage, for my power shall be yours, and you shall need it, for your nation on the earth will have great troubles.'" And I think I'll stop there. But the essence of this initiation is that one is shown that in and of ourselves as we are, transcendently, precipitated out of the themis, the natural realm, we ourselves become that sacred, we manifest it. And we have this sense, and we participate to such a close degree that we merge with it so that this then is carried back and it is dropped back into the center. So that unknown to most human beings, or sentient beings I should say, this initiatory cycle of the natural realm of birth, puberty, marriage, death, rebirth and so forth. That the central focus invisible which holds it together by its magnetic lines, and its gravitational pull, is disclosed to them by these two sacred initiations and [inaudible] temporarily from the natural order to show us the two poles of this axis mundi, this axis of the world, so that we can see for ourselves through initiation that now the realm of the king and the queen is a full realm. It has six directions instead of four. It has the kind of dimensions which include the unseen, the divine powers, as well as the natural. And so that the idea then of order becomes very much more larger than anyone would have supposed before. And in fact, the differentiation between the sacred and the profane - that is the bad king or the bad queen, who would for themselves garner power to control and what they were control is this natural realm. This ground, these people are seemed to be very shallow, not only shallow but infinitesimally pickier because they have no idea of the fullness of the true realm. And that word for the true king and the true queen outdistance them in their introducing into an ordering of life aspiration instead of power. Because they know that the fullness can only be disclosed through these transcendental modes. And that the true dimension of the kingdom is enormous. Exponentially larger than some two-bit profane imitator would suppose, and all of the machinations of the mind of the narrowly profane simply are seen as so much bickering of ignorant children. They have no place for us.

Well let's stop there. I think we all need tea or something. Let's stop there for the day.

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