Cosmos & Logos

Journal of Myth, Religion, and Folklore

Volume I, August 2015

C&L Press Academic Publishing Pleasant Grove, UT August 2015

ISBN-13: 978-0692492307 (C&L Press) ISBN-10: 0692492305

The individual authors of each essay contained within this journal retain copyright ownership of their respective work. Authors may be contacted through the web site www.cosmosandlogos.com. Any reproduction or distribution of any essay or portion of any essay without prior written permission from its author is strictly prohibited.

Cover image by Lisa Brinkman Book design and Introduction by John K. Lundwall, PhD Editors: John Lundwall, Susan Paidhrin, Janet Bubar Rich

Table of Contents

Soul Bird ...... iv Cover Image by Lisa Brinkman

Introduction ...... vi

Resurrection and the Feminine Divine ...... 1 By John Knight Lundwall, PhD —This paper tracks the influence of the Mother Goddess from prehistoric times to the Christian era. Unlike other essays of the Goddess, this paper focuses on the heaven-earth relationships within the Goddess symbolism with special attention to the liturgical mysteries of Egypt, Greece, and early Christianity. The diminishment of the Goddess in modern religion is a product of complex, historical processes.

Mary and the Midwives ...... 30

A Mother’s Love ...... 31 By Lynde Mott—“Mary and the Midwives” and “A Mother’s Love” are two modern artistic portrayals of the divine feminine.

Mythic Threads: Art, Healing, and Magic in Bali ...... 33 By Pam Bjork, PhD — Pam weaves connections through her passion for global cultures, love of the arts, story, and image. A former award- winning restaurateur, she holds a BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas, and an MA and PhD in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She exhibits her photography and textile collection in tandem with invited lectures to accompany the exhibitions.

Poets Lie: Ovid as Bodhi-Trickster in The Metamorphosis ...... 49 By Anita Doyle—The Roman poet Ovid was a master of his craft and an incomparable storyteller. His role as a de-mythologizer and an entertaining slayer of sacred cows is also recognized and it is a role he exhibits nowhere more explicitly than in The Metamorphoses. The present essay examines the possibility that the narrative structure of that poem as a whole reveals a deep insight on Ovid’s part into the nature of mind and reality that may underlie the poet’s compulsion to topple the gods from their thrones. i

Tolkien and Buddhist Influences: Thoughts and Perspectives ...... 60 By Brad Eden, PhD—Dr. Eden explores the unusual connections between Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Buddhism. While Christian imagery is normally addressed in Tolkien’s work, Dr. Eden suggests that Tolkien himself was influenced by Eastern philosophy and imparted some of this wisdom within his famous text.

Anatomy of a Buddha ...... 75

Buddha Ganesh ...... 78 By Lisa Brinkman—Stylized portrayals of the Buddha in multi- medium art.

Music of the Gods and Noah and His Amazing Ark...... 80 By Rev. Lynn Hubbard—These short reflections are an attempt to demonstrate the poetic nature of religious propositions. They will briefly examine the relationship between religion and language and suggest an aesthetic alternative to the tyranny of religious fundamentalism.

Medusa Madness ...... 92 Janet Bubar Rich, PhD—This paper explores the ancient Greek gorgon Medusa and her impact on pop culture. In a quest to grasp who she is and her meaning for us today, it investigates how she weaves her way into the psyches of such luminaries as fashion-designer Versace and singer superstar Sir Elton John. A case is made that Medusa, the snake- haired gorgon from ancient Greece, lives on in our culture as she permeates our everyday lives.

Alchemy’s Lunar Light ...... 104 Susan Paidhrin, PhD—Since the eighteenth-century, the solar spotlight has taken the form of scientific materialism, while the more intuitive ways of knowing have fallen into the lunar light. Alchemy is one such lunar system of consciousness. This essay outlines some of Alchemy’s contours showing its differences from the dominant paradigm’s linear and abstract view with an eye towards creating a model that brings a new synthesis of both.

Woman Dreaming ...... 125

One Way to Ride ...... 126 ii

The Message ...... 127

Basket of Eggs ...... 129 By Libby Hoagland—Mythological paintings exploring themes of myth, self, and soul through modern art.

Flicker: Personal Reflections ...... 130 By Libby Hoagland—An autobiographical reflection of art and life.

Author Biographies ...... 136

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Soul Bird 30" X 30", Oil on Canvas By Lisa Brinkman

I have always felt that image making is fundamental to being human. Coming from a family that valued art and creativity, I have found the transformational nature of making art to be renewing and healing. To start, I am stimulated by whatever medium I am working with. There is a kind of alchemy in the creative process in which the materials and medium seem to dictate a response. Imagery then springs iv to my mind from a dream or perhaps symbolic themes I might observe in life. My art is inspired by a life-long fascination and study of archetypal images, symbols, and patterns. For example, ladders are a symbol I use often in my art to represent ascendency, a bridge between realms like the biblical Jacob’s ladder. “Soul Bird” is an oil painting that underwent many evolutions, morphing from red to blue, and involving much scraping and repainting. A supernatural world emerged representing the Venus-Sun occultation of 2012. Venus is shown as a mandala-like flower resonating into a garden witnessed by a central soul bird.

✥ Introduction

To start something new is one thing, but to start something worthy requires initiation into the mysterium tremendum. A revolution in thought is always the product of a revelation from mystery. There is absolutely no way to predict how such a revelation might come, for gnosis cannot be controlled, managed, or designed. One can only prepare an open mind and broken heart ready to receive. This takes moral courage and indomitable will, or, in other words, authentic discipleship. Here is the paradox of gnosis, for to be its disciple one’s courage and will cannot be oriented on the self. “Easy is the way” we are told in the Christian idiom, but only if one is willing to “take up one’s own cross.” In a world dominated by the ego, to take up one’s own cross is akin to cultural suicide. You might as well ask a person with no hands and feet to scale Mount Everest. An utterly impossible task, to be sure, unless this person is willing to be carried upon the hands and shoulders of a different kind of will. The ego will have none of it, and the history of the world has shown that instead of the transcendence inspired by the gnosis of individuation, those crippled of soul seek to scale a different mountain altogether, one they mount upon the backs of slaves, upon the profits of a connived commerce, or upon the taxes exacted from a grieved and wanton populace. In order to make this switch palatable, the ego must erase from the mind the very notion of an Everest to be climbed. Despite the towering mountain standing on the distant horizon, the ego-world seduces all

vi with the potholes of power, popularity, glory, and wealth as the design of existence. In such a world, rhetoric replaces truth, fundamentalism replaces faith, power replaces principle, as the ego replaces the true self. The more grandiose the world carnival becomes in this regard, the greater a nervousness resonates throughout consciousness. Everywhere a spiritual listlessness pervades a free-for-all culture that worships the self at the expense of the soul. A deep-seated anxiety is the result, and we live in a very anxious age. There are times when gnosis reveals itself without being called. Perhaps there are nodal points in our conscious continuum where the fiat lux of life arises independent from the time line of the ego. There is a story, for example, that describes the very beginnings of ancient Rome. Its beginning was a product of a revelation, hand-delivered, to the last provincial king of the land. Tom Holland, in his readable interpretation Rubicon, begins his narrative of Rome by recounting this very old myth:

In the beginning, before the Republic, Rome was ruled by kings. About one of these, a haughty tyrant by the name of Tarquin, an eerie tale was told. Once, in his palace, an old woman came calling on him. In her arms she carried nine books. When she offered these to Tarquin he laughed in her face, so fabulous was the price she was demanding. The old woman, making no attempt to bargain, turned and left without a word. She burned three of the books and then, reappearing before the king, offered him the remaining volumes, still at the same price as before. A second time, although with less self-assurance now, the king refused, and a second time the old woman turned and left. By now Tarquin had grown nervous of what he might be turning down, and so when the mysterious crone reappeared, this time holding only three books, he hurriedly bought them, even though he had to pay the price

vii originally demanded for all nine. Taking her money, the old woman then vanished, never to be seen again. (1)

It was said that the three remaining volumes contained such potent prophecies and powerful truths that they were a catalyst for the beginning of a new civilization. Whatever the truth of this claim, Tarquin was indeed the last king of Rome. His end saw the termination of the monarchy and the birth of a consulship, the precursor to a republican democracy. With no small irony then are similar tales told in many ancient civilizations of a mysterious prophetess or seer who comes to indigenous peoples with the most ancient and sacred texts from which each civilization grew. Enoch came with his tomes of science, prophecies, and the mysteries to the Ethiopians, as Oannes did to the Babylonians, Vyasa to the Hindus, Viracocha to the Peruvians, Orpheus to the Greeks, and Hermes Trismegistus to the Egyptians. Of the latter Christopher Bramford writes:

He is Hermes Trismegistus, Thrice Great, Master of the Three Worlds, and to him was ascribed all knowledge of the ancient world. As Archetypal Man he was the primordial culture-bringer, the instituter of all arts, crafts and sciences. He is healer, master architect, founder of agriculture, smelting and mining; his Temple was called the “House of the Net,” which may be taken to indicate cosmology or the weaving of the world fabric or garment, each knot of which represents a conjunction of life and death, impulse and resistance, contraction and expansion. From this point of view, Hermes-Thoth is one with Enoch, Idris, Quetzalcoatl, Odin–leaders of Humanity in the celestial world from which they guide and sustain terrestrial manifestation. (20)

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Ellen Russell Emerson recounts an old Ojibway Indian tradition where the most sacred records of the tribe were kept buried in a secret place by Lake Superior. Every fifteen years ten holy men would exhume the ancient text and read from it; by this act great wisdom was gained and instilled within the tribe. The records were said to “contain the transcript of what the Great Spirit gave the Indian after the flood. . . . There is a code of moral laws, which the Indian calls a Path made by the Great Spirit. . . . The records contain certain emblems, which transmit the ancient form of worship, and the rules for the dedication to the four spirits who alone are to expound them” (225). From these ancient records arise the shadows of the oldest stories of humankind. This great Wisdom was brought to the species by those who, according to the traditions, had ascertained authentic humanity— called Awakening, Enlightenment, Revelation, Salvation—the end result is the same: perfect harmony with nature, other, and soul. Here are the gnosis-bringers—those who have transcended the ego and have found true humanity in mediating between the rolling deep of the infinite self with the collective suffering of the immediate self. It is these culture-bearers that promote human-forms out of their mute wilderness and into the gateway of their own infinite potentials. Civilization is thus forged, at least according to the mythologic record, not from a biological leap of evolution, but from a metaphysical leap of consciousness. Such a concept does not fit well in our biological textbooks. History can often look linear, long, and plodding. This is the illusion of history. How quickly we forget that history is really the circular and lingering echoes of a singular thunderclap. Modern

ix historians want to quantify this thunderclap in scientific terms. This is impossible. To account for the creative genius that sparks a revolution in intellectual and moral thought is to embark on a purely aesthetic venture that sails somewhere between the realms of reason and faith. Consequently, comparative myth and religious studies face high obstacles. In our secular world of hyper-materialism, faith has become a luxury, or worse, a hobby. Instead of the coequal-pillar to human conscious evolution, the reason found in faith has been utterly subordinated to a blind faith in reason. History has something important to say about this state of affairs: “Such an approach has been tried innumerable times and the results are always the same—just ask Socrates.” We brush this warning aside, thinking to ourselves, “Surely, we have got it right this time—just ask Google™.” Time will tell, but eventually we shall learn that Google™ is no Socrates. The Humanities is the field of study in charge of exploring our own inner Socrates. Philosophy, ethics, the arts, the Western canon of literature, and comparative religious studies were tools employed for the daring and valiant discovery of one’s own soul. In many parts of the university system, however, the ego-world has taken control. After all, it is a very difficult task to explore the soul when so many professors no longer believe in it. Multiculturalism replaced the Western canon with the high hopes of broadening our cultural and spiritual awareness, and often with the low results of spreading relativism, tribalism, and complete apathy for Western traditions. Meanwhile, religious studies have been relegated to the closet. The Humanities once set a very high bar in an attempt to stretch ourselves, hoping to touch the aura of gnosis. It is now too often a checklist to be knocked off on our way

x towards business, marketing, and law—or worse, the sub-humanities of pop culture. With so much work to do, with so much discovery still to be seen, and with so much mystery yet to be confronted, it is a marvel, as Alan Dundes laments, that myth and folklore studies are on their deathbed. Numerous myth and folklore programs have been subsumed under cultural studies or eliminated altogether (385). Further, the subject matter at hand has been determined by other departments as soft and tangential (387, 393). Dundes gives four reasons why folklore (and with it myth studies) is declining: (1) a lack of innovation in “grand theory”; (2) an incursion in the field by amateurs who are disconnected from the Herculean will and scholarship required; (3) a fear to offend sources and an un-academic spirit of political correctness; (4) a loss of knowledge from experts who have done so much but who are read so little (387-393, 402-406). Each of these four reasons place serious challenges to the scholars, thinkers, artists, and writers involved in myth and religious studies. The real problem lies within the lasting attitude that the entire field of study is “soft and tangential.” This is the hubris of the secular ego. Scholars must address the four challenges as presented by Dundes with determination and will. Only history can confront the last challenge. And history always does. The problems facing scholars within this field of study is the sheer volume of the task. Walking within this subject matter one sees an endless expanse of possibility and material. Not only does every culture have a mythos, but these traditions, ancient and modern, have vast and complex geographic and historical connections. These connections in

xi turn interface with ritualistic, cultural, and cosmological matrixes. To tackle myth and religion, then, is to tackle history, biography, geography, geology, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, ritual, art, literature, and the list goes on. While this task seemingly attracts pop- culture enthusiasts as well as those involved in everything from new- age spiritualism to fundamental reductionism, the exploration into this aspect of the Humanities is critical enough for even the most serious intellects of ten generations to jump in, swim around, and emerge perhaps with some wisdom to share. Cosmos and Logos is a journal dedicated to taking on this task. It is a multi-disciplined approach to myth, religion, and culture. There are other journals and periodicals that also incorporate this material, but Cosmos and Logos has as its goals to be academic while not exclusively for academics, to address cultural issues from both ancient and modern perspectives, and to apply a host of interpretive theories on the material. We do not claim to be the gnosis behind the mystery. Our goal is simply to encourage, with every faculty, a grand curiosity that can lead readers on their own path towards enlightenment. We admit that there are others much better suited for this task. In the words of Tennyson, “that which we are, we are; . . . made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” (Hollander ed. 189). In this inaugural issue you will find articles on the Goddess and resurrection, mythic traditions underwriting Balinese culture, a playful yet historical study of Ovid, Buddhist themes in Tolkien, reflections on language and religious fundamentalism, an interesting examination of the Medusa motif through history, and a fascinating study of alchemy,

xii psychology, and the soul. There are also several original artworks contributed from talented artists exploring mythic and religious themes and symbols within their own work. We hope this journal will be a primer—a way to get people interested in searching out those lost revelations of the past. It is our way of invoking a whisper that reminds one to hear within the tumbled ruins of history that silent thunderclap of the ages. C&L Board

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Works Cited

Bramford, Christopher. “Foreword,” Nature Word. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International, 1990, pp. 11-42. Dundes, Alan. Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century (AFS Invited Presidential Plenary Address, 2004). U of California, Berkley: Journal of American Folklore 118 (470), 2005, pp. 385-408. Emerson, Ellen Russell. Indian Myths or Legends, Traditions and Symbols of the Aborigines of America. Minneapolis, Ross & Haines, Inc., 1965. Holland, Tom. RVBICON: The Last Years of the Roman Republic. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Hollander, John. Committed to Memory: 100 Best Poems to Memorize. New York: Books & Company, Turtle Point 1996.

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✥ Resurrection and the Feminine Divine by John Knight Lundwall, PhD

The Christian holiday of Easter is the archetypal summit of the year, where rebirth and resurrection are venerated in the mystery of Jesus Christ’s awakening from the tomb. In Christian orthodoxy, Easter is known as pascha, the Greek and Latin term referring to the Jewish Passover. The Apostle Paul uses this word as a title for Christ, “For Christ our Passover lamb [pascha], has been sacrificed” (1 Cor. 5.7). By the end of the first century CE early Christians had reinterpreted the Exodus story and the Passover ritual as a prototype for the sacrifice of Christ. The word “Easter” itself, however, is Old English, from Ēastre or Ēostre, a title derived from an old English month now known as April. Christian Easter is celebrated on the first Sabbath after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This holy-specific day most often occurs in April and is representative of the most fertile time of the year, when sun, moon, and earth are all in their phases of rebirth and awakening. Easter is therefore the day of resurrection, in heaven and on earth. And this heaven-earth relationship is only an archetypal symbol for the heaven-earth awakening that occurs in the soul of God, or in the spirit and breath of each mortal man and woman. In Christian rite and belief, every soul will arise like the sun, moon, and earth, to a new immortal dwelling.

Despite this traditional context, historically, Easter had feminine roots. Significantly, the old English month of Ēostre was itself named after a goddess whose rites of rebirth were celebrated at the same time among the early inhabitants of Britain and Northern Europe. Ēostre was a Germanic goddess whose name is cognate with the Proto-Germanic austrōn, meaning dawn or to shine. This deity belongs to a long line of female divinities who are goddesses of the dawn, and are found in various forms throughout Indo-European cultures as beings who bring light and life to the world. For thousands of years before Christianity the divine being who brought forth resurrection was represented as a goddess. Inanna, Isis, Rhea, Cybele, and Demeter are beings with the divine stewardship over rebirth. The Japanese Amaterasu is a goddess of the dawn who also brings light and life to the world. While these deities were seen as the powers behind the fertility of all things on earth, they also held stewardship over the mysterious cosmic principle of heavenly life. In the Greco-Roman mystery religions, the revitalization of the initiate was promised via the gifts and boons of the goddess. This should make sense as in fact it is only woman who can bring forth life from her womb. In many respects, the rites of rebirth analogized the tomb with the womb, so that those going into the beyond could be reborn by a Heavenly Mother whose womb was the cosmic precinct of immortality.

The Goddess in Prehistory “As far back as the Paleolithic Age,” writes Maarten J. Varmaseren, “one finds in the countries around the Mediterranean a goddess who is universally worshiped as the Mighty Mother”

(Vermaseren 13). From 30,000 to 10,000 BCE, adds Joseph Campbell, “the [Goddess] is represented in those now well-known little ‘Venus’ figurines” (Campbell xiv). A limestone relief found in southwestern France in the Pyrenees is illustrative in this regard. Dating to 25,000 BCE, an engraved Venus image is shown holding a bison horn inscribed with thirteen vertical strokes. This is the number of nights between the first crescent and the full moon (Campbell 9). The Goddess figure is holding her swollen belly with her other hand, suggesting that at this early date, the lunar and menstrual cycles were connected, and that the Goddess figure was symbolic of the whole archetypal complex of the feminine divine: life, birth, and death. According to Joseph Campbell, the goddess has three functions: “one, to give us life; two, to be the one who receives us in death; and three, to inspire our spiritual, poetic realization” (Campbell 36). All three of these functions can be seen in the prehistoric art of Çatal Hüyük. On a green schist stone dating to about 6000 BCE, the goddess is portrayed “back-to-back with herself, on the left embracing an adult male, and on the right holding a child in her arms” (Campbell 25). The powers of the Mighty Mother are the transformations of life: “She is the transforming medium that transforms semen into life. She receives the seed of the past and, through the miracle of her body, transmutes it into the life of the future” (Campbell 25). Her womb is the ultimate matrix of metamorphosis, a cosmic umbilicus whose power derives from the heavenly antipodes between which all material creation was forged: “The Goddess is the axis mundi, the world axis, the pillar of the universe. She represents the energy that supports the whole cycle of the universe” (Campbell 36). Perhaps for this reason the

Mother Goddess was most often worshiped in caves (Vermaseren 9). The subterranean chamber was the anagogical medium that connected the wombs of heaven and earth. This heaven-earth correspondence is a very important point to make. By the second millennium BCE the Mother Goddess was a nature deity represented as Mother Earth. Her womb was the land that produced the seed of bounty, and she was associated with the fertilization and growth of life from the dark soil. Her shrines were in groves and caves representative of this chthonic source of life. Yet the chthonic feature of the Goddess was only half of the symbolic heritage. The Goddess was, above all, the Heavenly Mother, the Queen of Heaven, and Cosmocrator of the World. Her chthonic womb was only the root of the heavenly tree. In Sumerian, the glyph for heaven, An, also meant “crown of tree” (White 118). The female date palm grew numerous branches holding massive clusters of dates. This image was analogous to the whole of creation, where the tree was symbolic of the universe, both in form and function. The roots, trunk, branches, and fruit were images of the underworld, material world, and heavenly world where life originated. The date laden branches of the palm tree were an image of the stars in the sky that produced light and life. The glyph An meant heaven and crown of tree because, analogically, they were the exact same thing. In religions and myths throughout the Near East and Mediterranean, the Goddess was analogized with the Heavenly Tree. While the roots of this cosmic tree were the chthonic womb of the Mother Goddess, the “crown of tree” represented her seat of power. It was her heavenly womb that was the lapis occultus, the heavenly vault

4 of the mysteries from which all life descended. So it is that “the date palm represents the celestial mother goddess nurturing her abundant harvest of children in the high heavens” (White 118), and that “the seed of mankind is the light of the stars. This is the seed that the mother of humanity gestates in her heavenly womb” (White 125). This heavenly aspect of the Goddess survives in many forms, including in her old role as a solar deity. One is reminded that among the Hurrians, Canaanites, and pre-Islamic Arabs the sun was female (White 90). In ancient Mesopotamia the earliest aspects of the Mother Goddess had solar connections, and the sun-goddesses of the Near East may prefigure their male counterparts: “even the Akkadian sun god Šamaš is meant to have mysterious feminine origins. The earliest hard evidence for Šamaš in Mesopotamia comes from the Early Dynastic period where his name occurs in personal names—and some such names like ‘Ummi-Šamaš literally meaning ‘My mother is Šamaš’, obviously imply a feminine solar deity” (White 90). In Uruk, the Queen of Heaven held stewardship over the 50 Me. The Me were the priesthood keys of authority that regulated all forms of civilization on earth but were only copies of divine, celestial powers residing in the heavens. The Goddess was an earth deity only inasmuch as her role as Mother Earth was a reflection of a celestial archetype: Queen of Heaven. Returning to the art of Çatal Hüyük, we find a terra cotta figurine also dating to at least 6000 BCE and depicting the Mother Goddess sitting on a throne between two lions (Vermaseren 15). Between her legs emerges a human head, and at first glance the symbolism appears to be that of birth. Some scholars believe that the emerging head

5 belongs to the divine son of the Mother Goddess. In mystery cults throughout Classical Greece it is the Goddess and her divine counterpart—her son—that provide the pathway to everlasting life and resurrection. Yet other scholars have a completely different interpretation of the image. Rather than interpreting the emerging head as an act of birth, they believe it is a scene of the Goddess “taking the deceased back into her womb” (Vermaseren 16). In other words, the symbol is not of birth but of re-birth into the next world; “This idea is not without parallels in the Mediterranean area, and special attention is drawn to the fact that at Çatal Hüyük, both in the cult-rooms and in the houses, so much space was reserved for the dead” (Vermaseren 16). Either interpretation seems acceptable as birth and death are part of an eternal circuit of a cosmic cycle. One leads to the other, but neither takes precedence. The womb is the tomb. The tomb is the womb. Of even greater interest are the two lions which frame the throne upon which the Goddess is seated. Not only is the Mother Goddess associated with a Heavenly Tree, she is also depicted with lion wards throughout Near Eastern and Mediterranean art. The Cretan Mother Goddess is depicted standing on her holy mountain framed by two lions. Inanna and Ishtar are often shown standing on or by their two lions. The mystery goddess Cybele is always pulled in a lion chariot and is crowned on her lion throne. While this lion imagery is often taken as an earth-bound symbol and part of the repertoire of the “Lady of the Beasts,” the truth is this lion imagery, in its cultic context, always held celestial meanings. The Mother Goddess of Çatal Hüyük sitting on her lion throne is provocative in this regard. The lion throne is indicative of heavenly

6 powers. The Egyptian pharaoh always sat upon a lion throne whose symbolism established his right to rule on earth via a heavenly mandate. Zeus, too, is often depicted on his lion throne, and throughout Medieval times representatives of the Papacy distributed orders from their lion thrones. The lion upon the throne was more than a symbol of power or royalty. In its more ancient context, the lion was a symbol of the power and royalty of the heavenly world. It was the lion that always stood at the portal to the next world, and leonine sphinxes guarding the gates of temples have been found throughout all of ancient Eurasia. The guardian lion was heavenly ward and psychopomp par excellance in the Near East. Osiris could only arise from death upon his lion couch, and Gilgamesh could only descend into the underworld whilst wearing lion robes. It is the lion skin itself that is representative of the heavenly vault. Its striations or spots signified the starry realm, and wearing a lion skin was very often a necessary cultic endowment in the mystery religions. The priests of Pharaoh always wore lion skins as they performed their rituals for the afterlife. The lion garment proclaimed their authority to officiate in the arcane secrets. In the Ramesseum Dramatic Papyrus, Horus acknowledges Osiris and declares, “The panther skin unites thy limbs, [. . .] the eye [of Horus is] ssf-cloth” (Nibley 440). The term ssf- cloth is symbolized by a panther goddess and represents the mummy wrappings (Nibley 440). Thus, every Egyptian mummy symbolically wore a lion garment and was given the lion crown at the lion gate of the next world. Meanwhile, Heracles must defeat the Nemean Lion and wear its skin for his twelve labors. This episode only makes sense in the context of the celestial voyage of the dead. Jason and Theseus must

7 also wear lion skins as they perform their labors, whilst Attis must defeat a lion guardian and Bellerophon must slay the lion-headed chimera. In all these examples the lion is the symbol of the powers and secrets of the next world. Borrowing from Plato’s allegory of the cave, the lion sphinx, the lion throne, or the lion robe were all representations of the realm of true forms. The lion throne is the embodiment of the royal mandate; for example, it announces to its subjects that its occupant is the holder of the secrets and keys from the celestial realm. The lion skin or garment is the robe of rebirth and the ultimate ritualistic accouterment for dealing with archetypal powers. While in later eras it was the kings who wore the lion emblem, the terra cotta figurine from Çatal Hüyük shows that the Goddess possessed the celestial powers of birth and rebirth in the archaic age. She was the ultimate symbol of the antipodes of the universe: her chthonic and heavenly wombs were the source of all life.

Egyptian Mysteries The archetypal complex of the Mighty Mother was inherited by Egypt. It is often assumed that the process of resurrection in the Egyptian scheme was overseen by Osiris, the Lord of the Underworld. The mysteries of Osiris place this god center stage, for his death and rebirth are the main theme of the mystery play. The truth is, however, the entire drama of rebirth is not overseen by the god but by the goddess, whose womb is the deus ex machina which saves the climactic action from complete oblivion. Repeatedly in the funerary texts and vignettes the major characters of the liturgical pageant show

8 up performing all their prescribed duties: Osiris is killed and rises, Anubis guides, Thoth records, Horus aids and fights, Atum, Re, or some other version of the solar god breathes new life into the dead, etc. Never far away from all these scenes, however, is a representation of the Mother Goddess who oversees the entire operation from beginning to end and is the key to cosmic rebirth. It is actually Isis and Nephthys who always appear by the lion couch where Osiris lies, and it is their power which helps raise him from the state of death. In Egyptian myth, Isis and Nephthys are really dual personifications of the Mother Goddess, one representing the heavenly mother and the other the earthly one (Nibley 163). Isis and Nephthys are the celestial and chthonic wombs of life. Meanwhile, in the twelve divisions contained in the book That Which is in the Underworld the solar god is always accompanied by a figure called “lady of the boat” who is the true guide through the darkness leading the envoy past each obstacle and gate which inhibits progress (Budge 207). Each boat in the underworld is adorned with symbols of the various manifestations of the Mother Goddess, including symbols representing Hathor, Maat, and Isis, all who are absolutely essential for the journey’s success. Isis remains central to the resurrection drama. When the Egyptian boat is at its darkest, deepest, and most treacherous juncture in the netherworld only Isis can tow it across the dry sand and to safety (Nibley 416). It is Isis “whose mouth is the breath of life, whose sentence drives out evil, and whose very word revives him who no longer breathes” (de Lubicz 39). A papyrus dating from the time of Khufu speaks of Isis as the true ruler of the Pyramids (Adams 30). She

9 is the “Mother of God” who raises the dead to the celestial heights: “The Divine Sothis, the Star, the Queen of Heaven” (Adams 30). “To be reborn in resurrection, the king must enter again into his mother’s womb,” writes Hugh Nibley. “The sarcophagus in which he lay was called mw.t, which also means ‘mother,’ and was designed to represent the embracing arms and wings of the starry sky-mother [Nut]” (Nibley 119). As the deceased lies in his coffin he is swallowed by the mouth of Nut in the west and reborn from the womb of Nut in the east; the entire gestation cycle is celestial. The essential role of the Mother Goddess in the process of Egyptian rebirth explains the essential difference between her imagery as Nut, the Sky Mother, and the imagery found in other mythologies where the mother goddess is terrestrial, such as Gaia, the Earth Mother. In the latter example the mother goddess is analogized with the fertile ground which receives the solar semen and whose womb swells with the pregnant produce of nature. As all material forms, however, are only reflections of celestial archetypes, the true womb of the universe must remain heavenward. The chthonic womb of the Goddess was the heavenly underworld, while the celestial womb was the vault of the high heavens, variously named the aperion, realm of fixed stars, Islands of the Blessed, or the Garden of Eden. Like the Mother Goddess seated in her lion throne at Çatal Hüyük, Nut, or Isis, are symbols of the Queen of Heaven who holds ultimate stewardship over the cycles of rebirth in both worlds.

Greco-Roman Mysteries What is true of Egyptian myth and rite in this regard is also true for the later Greco-Roman mystery cults, as Jane Ellen Harrison makes clear: “The mysteries of Greece never center round Zeus the Father, but rather round the Mother and the subordinate son” (Harrison 49). While Olympian gods are approached with prayer, praise, and presents, the Mother Goddess “is approached by means that are magical and mysterious” because she possesses the mysteries (Harrison 49). One must remember that in ancient Greece the various female deities were all facets of the Mighty Mother. Hera, Demeter, Athena, Aphrodite, and Artemis represent different aspects of the one Mother Goddess (Harrison 49). In the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, the Mother Goddess is identified by many names, including: Mother of the Gods, Minerva, Venus, Diana, Proserpina, Ceres, Juno, Bellona, Hecate, and others (Vermaseren 10). Whatever her title, name, or station, she is always understood to be both queen of heaven and the underworld, of life and death and of the mystery of rebirth (Vermaseren 10). In Roman times “the performance of her rites remained in the charge of orientals, not Romans, a dispensation carefully maintained by the Roman Senate throughout the Republic; under the direct control of the State the cult of the Goddess was to be kept in the proper channels” (Vermaseren 11). The oracle at Delphi was dedicated to Apollo only in later times; the oracle center first belonged to the goddess Themis (Vermaseren 14) who was the steward of the gate of heaven. At Delphi there was a sacred rock known as the omphalos, or navel of the world, as well as a mysterious cleft descending into the earth which represented the nexus between worlds. Here the seekers of knowledge from the other world

11 descended into the cave of the Goddess, for she kept the ultimate secrets and possessed the navel and nexus of creation. The Oracle at Delphi has an interesting parallel to the school of Parmenides. Parmenides is the father of Greek philosophy. He declared his authority to teach via a vision he had in which he ascended to heaven and was met by aids and stewards of the heavenly word, all of whom were female. At the apex of heaven, Parmenides discovers the secrets of the world, and they are taught to him by the Goddess (Kingsley 49). All the mystery cults held the divine Mother as central to the mystery of rebirth. Cybele was the Heavenly Mother of the Attis cult. She was not only the Queen of Heaven but also the Queen of the Underworld and the wife of Hades (Vermaseren 129). Demeter and Persephone fulfill the same role at Eleusis, while Harmonia fills in at Samothrace. Mother-Goddess imagery is absent in Mithraism, an all- boys club, but the Attis Mysteries were utilized by priests of Mithraism for the initiation of women so they too might receive their afterlife rewards (Weston 159). Demonstrably, in the Greco-Roman mysteries, female priestesses were stewards of the matriarchal rites and always attended the mystai performing various roles as they aided the initiate on his quest. This fact also parallels the sister/daughters of Osiris who lift him out of the clutches of death and the sister/daughters of Oedipus who guide him to the mystery grove at Colonus. At the heart of the mystery religions were the secrets of rebirth. These secrets were sacrosanct, and initiates were forbidden to reveal them at the pain of death. The very word mystery is from the Greek mysterion, derived from the verbal root myein meaning to close, “referring to the closing of the lips or the eyes” (Meyer 4). As Marvin

Meyer observes, “an initiate, or mystes (plural, mystai) into the mysterion was required to keep his or her lips closed and not divulge the secret that was revealed at the private ceremony. [. . .] Most mystai observed their pledge of secrecy, and as a result we posses little information about the central features of the mysteries” (4). Additionally, the verb myein held special reference to the closing of the eyes. Kevin Clinton notes, “evidence from other mystery cults shows that it was the practice for an initiate to be blinded; the term [mystai] expresses the opposite of epoptes (έπόπτης, ‘viewer’): the first stage is characterized mainly by ritual blindness (when the initiate is led by a mystagogue), the second stage by sight” (Clinton 50). The darkness every initiate endured represented death. Each initiate was led through dark passages and blind wanderings by a guide; this was exemplary of the journey of the soul through the underworld. It was widely believed that the souls of all those who did not receive proper initiation would remain bound to the dark regions of the netherworld. Those who had received the proper, ritual instructions for the afterlife were given a “passport through the sky,” borrowing a phrase from Macrobius, whereby the soul would be led to the Islands of the Blessed. This ascent of the soul was reenacted during the ceremonies in a moment of blinding vision called epoptes. The initiate’s liturgical descent through darkness ended in the Telesterion. A hidden skylight was built in the Telesterion that was opened at the correct, ritual moment whereby sunlight would stream into the darkness at the moment of the initiate’s symbolic rebirth (Nibley 268). All this journeying through darkness into light meant that each initiate needed a guide. Plato assures us, “For after death, as they say,

13 the genius of each individual, to whom he belonged in life, leads him to a certain place in which the dead are gathered together for judgment, whence they go into the world below, following the guide, who is appointed to conduct them from this world to the other” (Phaedo 107d- e). It is a tradition that would find itself rooted in early Christianity, “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matt.7.14). In the Greco-Roman mysteries, however, the straight and narrow path belonged to the Goddess. The expedition of the soul is recorded in one tradition within the famed Orphic gold plates. These were tablets of gold found buried with Orphic initiates whereon instructions for the celestial afterlife journey were written. Many of the tablets were found on the mouths of the deceased, as if they were the oral passports through the netherworld. Others were found clutched in the hands of the dead as a token and passport through the underworld. On one tablet we read:

Blessed and most happy you will be god instead of mortal. [. . .] Go th the right [. . .] observe very carefully, [. . .] Once human you have become a god. A kid, you fell into milk. [. . .] Take the right-hand road to the sacred meadows and grove of [Persephone]. Now you died and now you were born, thrice blessed one, on this day. Tell [Persephone] that the Bacchic one himself has released you. Enter the sacred meadow! For the mystes is without punishment. (Cole 207)

On another tablet we read: “Thou art become god from man. A kid thou art fallen into milk. Hail, hail to thee journeying the right hand road,

By holy meadows and groves of Persephone” (Guthrie 173). Still another tablet adds to the details listed above, “And indeed you are going a long sacred way which also other mystai and bacchoi gloriously walk” (Burkert 293). This special road was reserved only for the initiated. “Thrice blessed one” refers to those who have performed three ordinances or have taken three sacraments essential for the journey of the dead. The special road is itself populated with key features that the dead must attend to, as another tablet makes clear:

Thou shalt find to the left of the House of Hades a spring, And by the side thereof standing a white cypress. To this spring approach not near. But thou shalt find another, from the Lake of Memory Cold water flowing forth, and there are guardians before it. Say, “I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven; But I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly The cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.” And of themselves they will give thee to drink of the holy spring, and thereafter among the other heroes thou shalt have lordship. (Guthrie 172-73)

As Susan Cole points out, the collection of Orphic gold tablets has grown so large that the categories of similarities have become as important as the categories of differences (Cole 201). The Orphic gold plates share repeated celestial themes: a journey, a path, an initiation, a spring of water, the crossing of water, a great tree, and a celestial garden. There are guardians that must be surpassed by the “secret password,” that just so happens to be a declaration of the true identity of the human soul, “I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven.” One’s true nature belongs in the divine realm, and one’s true destiny is

15 apotheosis, “Once human you have become a god.” Such a being is a “kid [. . .] fallen into milk,” which most likely represents the journey of the soul through the Milky Way, where the thrice-blessed dead sojourn to their heavenly realms. Of great interest is the fact that the underworld realm where the journey begins belongs to the Goddess. It is an agent of the feminine divine who often appears holding a torch to guide the dead through the dark recesses of the underworld. They are guided to a garden, and in the gold plates thus far found the Orphic dead start in the groves and gardens of Persephone. It is only in this archetypal precinct of the Goddess that the dead find hope. In the first tablet cited the dead are told to tell Persephone that the Bacchic one has released them. The “Bacchic one” is Dionysus, who here operates as a sort of judge and intercessor for the dead. Dionysus becomes a savior figure much like Jesus. Unlike the Christian mythos, however, those who are redeemed by Dionysus must be reborn by Persephone. The underworld garden is the chthonic womb that contains a great tree and the Spring of Memory from which the initiated dead must drink. The garden and tree is the form of the divine body of the Goddess, whilst the living waters are the function of her life giving milk. In this conception of the afterlife, the underworld remains the liminal stage of the Heavenly Mother who is birthing her children for the divine drama known as eternity. According to Plutarch, the contemplation of eternity was the object of philosophy, but it was the contemplation of the mysteries that was the object of religion (de Santillana 56). The mysteries presented the initiate with two main ideas: myein and epoptes. Dark and light.

And this dualistic aspect of nature was the fabric of life. All living processes were held together in opposites. Furthermore, the mortal soul was microcosmos, a reflection of heavenly powers and processes. According to Karl Kerényi, “[The mysteries were] to transform men into true sources of life in the service of that most fragile living thing, the embryo, ‘man in germ.’” (59). Man was an embryo, and he had to become through the process of a new birth—at inception, at death, and even during life in that awakening called “being born again.” It was the womb of the Goddess that gestated the embryo of being into its greatest potential. The chthonic womb preserved the human soul through myein, and the heavenly womb transformed it at epoptes. Yet it was the earthly womb of the Goddess, as revealed in the cycles of nature, that reminded the living that life was a constant act of becoming. As Joseph Campbell reminds us, the third aspect of the Goddess was “to inspire our spiritual, poetic realization.” Campbell continues:

She gives birth to us physically, but She is the mother too of our second birth—our birth as spiritual entities. This is the basic meaning of the motif of the virgin birth, that our bodies are born naturally, but at a certain time there awakens in us our spiritual nature, which is the higher human nature, not that which simply duplicates the world of the animal urges, of erotic and power drives and sleep. Instead there awakens in us the notion of a spiritual aim, a spiritual life: an essentially human, mystical life to be lived above the level of food, of sex, of economics, politics, and sociology. In this sphere of the mystery dimension the woman represents the awakener, the giver of birth in that sense. (6)

The rites of the Mother Goddess, traditionally recorded as so many fertility chants and nature props in many a textbook, often discounts the precious idea of her central role as renewer of the living. To be born again was to individuate one’s soul with the spirit of the Goddess; a most difficult task in every age, as Plato assures us: “‘many’ as they say in the mysteries, ‘are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics,’—meaning, as I interpret the words, the true philosophers” (Phaedo 69d). The true philosophers, according to the mysteries of the Goddess, were the ones who understood the origin, destiny, and living purpose of the human embryo.

Christian Mysteries Rebirth was also symbolized by the male principle. Human life requires both semen and an egg. Osiris, Dumuzi, Attis, Dionysus, and Orpheus are all male deities of rebirth. In the Christian mythos, the male principle dominated to the exclusion of the Goddess who was prominent in the role of salvation for millennia. This exclusion of the divine feminine took many centuries to complete, and as one digs into early Christianity one finds pieces of a grand mosaic that had at one time incorporated the feminine divine into Christian liturgy, but had transferred her role within a male dominated ethos. In the Didascalia, the third century Church Fathers prescribed three sacraments for the newly baptized Christian initiate. Like the Orhpic mystes, the Christian neophyte had to become “thrice-blessed.” The disciple first had to drink a cup of water that was analogous to the waters of baptism, but also represented the waters of life (Eisler 64). These sacramental waters were no different than the waters drunk by

18 the Orphic dead from the Spring of Memory in the garden of the Goddess. By Christian times, this spring of life had been turned into the waters pouring forth from the rock of Christ. The metaphor had changed, but the metamorphosis of that change had not fully eliminated the presence of the feminine. So it is that the second sacrament was a drink of milk. This holy milk was indicative of a “mystic rebirth” whereby the neophyte was remade into the newborn child of god (Eisler 64). Literally, the initiate was seen as a newly born infant of Christ, and the cup of milk was the true sacrament for the “born again” status; or the initiate as “man in germ.” Poignantly, a milk pail is repeatedly depicted in Christian funerary art, often next to a female ewe, such as is found at the Sepulcher of Lucina, or the Gallery of Flavians, and in the catacombs of Ad Duas Lauros. According to Robert Eisler, the milk pail “cannot but represent the first or milk-communion of the newly baptized ‘children’ of the mystic ‘Mother,’ into whose womb, the ‘gremium Matris Ecclesia,’ they have entered, to be ‘reborn into eternity’” (Eisler 65) . The Christian disciple has become a “kid fallen into milk” and has placed his feet upon the one true path, “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” Once again, however, the presence of the Mother Goddess has been transferred. Clement of Alexandria invokes the mystical title “heavenly milk” upon Jesus, identifying the milk as the Logos “which flows from the sweet breasts of the mystic bride” which has now become the Church (Eisler 66).

The third cup was of wine, and it was often taken with the sacramental bread. This sacrament represented the newborn infant of God as the fully formed christos, the anointed of God who has finally become the “true philosopher.” In the Eleusinian mysteries the paramount event was when the initiate was shown a token that represented the “revelation of man,” or his divine origin and destiny. This token was the symbol of Demeter, a newly cut stalk of blooming wheat. Clement of Alexandria made much ado about this pagan rite, insisting upon the absurdity of showing a man a ridiculous piece of grain offered as some form of higher teaching. Joseph Campbell points out, however, that at the height of the Christian Mass this same piece of grain, now made into a sacramental wafer, is offered as representative of the mystery of the rebirth of Christ. Meanwhile, in Greek art, the mystery initiate named Triptolemus is shown carrying a stalk of wheat in a chariot being pulled by Hermes, whilst next to him is another image of Dionysus in the same cart carrying his cup of wine. The bread and wine of Catholic Mass had its precursor in the wheat and wine of the feminine mysteries. The three sacraments of Christian baptism had an exact parallel with the three blessings of Orphic initiation where one was reborn in the groves of Persephone. In the emerging order of official Christianity, the Goddess was taking a back seat to the God, Christ Jesus. This stance was not the case in the “unofficial” order of Christianity, such as we find among the gnostics. According to the writings of Hippolytus, the Christian sect called the Naassenes “initiated [themselves] into the Mysteries of the Great Mother, because they found that the whole Mystery of rebirth was taught in these rites” (Freke and Gandy 93). In gnostic texts the

Goddess is identified as Wisdom. This wisdom was not intellectual smarts, but the essence of gnosis, the knowledge of the true way. Thus, Wisdom could only be found in heaven, and in one gnostic text we read of a traveler who finds himself at the gate of heaven, “And in that place I saw the fountain of righteousness which was inexhaustible: And around it were many fountains of wisdom; and all the thirsty drank of them and were filled with wisdom, and their dwellings were with the righteous and holy and elect” (Himmelfarb 82). This of course is the same scene we find in the Orphic plates at the gardens of Persephone. Wisdom, or gnosis, is really no different than the experience of epoptes in the mysteries. It is only to be had by those who have drunk the sacramental milk of the Mother. Gnostic texts include the Goddess by many names, “All Mother,” “Mother of the Living,” “Shining Mother,” “the Power Above,” and even “the Holy Spirit” (Freke and Gandy 93). Her essential role in these texts is as the giver of special knowledge, however, and as Wisdom she is the key to rebirth. In the Enoch tradition Wisdom is depicted as a tree (1 Enoch 32.3), as a fountain (1 Enoch 48.1), and is the assessor of God who holds heaven’s secrets (1 Enoch 84, 42-3, 69). In the Pistia Sophia, Wisdom is called the Virgin of Light, who, with her seven female attendants, baptize the worthy, anoint them, and lead them into the Treasury of Light (328-9). This celestial treasury is a heavenly domain under her particular stewardship, of which the Lord Christ proclaims, “For this cause, therefore, have I brought the keys of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven; otherwise no flesh in the world would be saved. For without mysteries no one will enter into the Light- kingdom, be he a righteous or a sinner” (351).

Even so, from the earliest days of Catholicism the form of the Mother Goddess was kept alive within the cult of the Virgin Mary. Jesus was God and was to be worshiped. Mary was the Mother of God and was to be venerated. As Joseph Campbell makes clear: "The Virgin Mary has been called a co-savior in her anguish and suffering, which was as great as the suffering of her son. She also brought him into the world, and her submission to the Annunciation amounts to an act of salvation, because she acquiesced to this saviorhood" (Campbell 187). The centrality of the Virgin Mary in Catholic Christianity was not a Catholic invention. This was a hold over from many centuries of worshiping a goddess who was key to the cycle of rebirth. As one pair of writers observe, “Mary takes on many of the roles of the Great Mother goddess of the Pagan Mysteries. Indeed, the Christian festival of the Assumption of the Virgin in August has ousted an ancient Pagan festival of the goddess. Statues of the Egyptian goddess Isis holding the divine child have been the models for many Christian representations of Mary and the baby Jesus” (Freke and Gandy 57). It is easy to see how the veneration of the Virgin Mary was a natural byproduct of the religiosity from the public at large. For numerous generations, oral peoples recognized the essential presence of the feminine divine in the birth of both deity and dignity. Christians often forget the close affinity the early Church had with the feminine principle. While the Virgin Mary was never to be worshiped, she was absolutely necessary for the growth of the new faith. The religious impulse of early Christian converts was deeply entrenched towards the Goddess as the primary metaphor for the principle of rebirth.

Modern Christians have forgotten this connection not without reason. As again Joseph Campbell reminds us, “Orphic imagery is the foreground to Christian imagery, and the mythology of Christianity is far more firmly rooted in this classical [Greco-Roman] mystery religion than it is in the Old Testament" (Campbell 185). This statement comes as a shock to most Christians, simply because they know nothing about the Greco-Roman mysteries. Christianity was supposed to have been born from Old Testament Judaism. Indeed, if Christianity were solely a product of Judaism, than the veneration of Mary must be viewed as idolatrous. Protestants certainly see it that way. While the earliest Christians were all Jews, the expansion of Christianity was due to the converts from the Greco-Roman world at large. In the Greco-Roman mysteries the initiate was given a ritual endowment learning the secrets for the next world. He was often accompanied by female priestesses who would guide him to a garden reprieve after his terrible initiatory ordeal. The whole process was indicative of death and rebirth as overseen by the goddess. We do not find any of this imagery in the Old Testament. Indeed, the Old Testament is empty of any reference to resurrection or rebirth until perhaps the very late book of Daniel, where the dead turn into stars: “Those who are wise [sakal; the knowledgeable ones] will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, [will be] like the stars for ever and ever” (Dan. 12.3). Hardly orthodox Judaism; however, this is the exact teaching of the Greco-Roman mysteries. While the divine feminine is absent from Old Testament Judaism, (and there is much evidence to suggest that it once was all there), we do

23 find it cryptically embedded in New Testament Christianity. One would suspect that if the Goddess were going to show up with the divine son, it would be either at his death or resurrection. Curiously, at the crucifixion and resurrection, as recorded in the Gospels, Jesus is only attended by females. It is only Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James (Matthew 27.56) who, after his crucifixion, anoint him on the day of his resurrection (Mark 16.1) and are thus the first to see him rise from the sepulcher, which also happens to be in a garden (John 19.41). In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, moreover, there is a peculiar band of women who always stand witness of the crucifixion, while in the Gospel of John this band of female attendants is replaced by three Marys: Mary Magdalene; Mary, the Mother of Jesus; and her sister, also named Mary (John 19.25); a unique picture as the Mother Goddess is not only represented by two sisters but also by three women who represent youth, motherhood, and old age. At Eleusis, the Mother Goddess was represented by Persephone, Demeter, and Hecate (Freke and Gandy 58). Dionysus was also represented by three female attendants; when a new sanctuary of Dionysus was founded “three priestesses called maenads would go there to establish the cult. Each one of them would assemble one of the three women choirs that helped celebrate the Mysteries” (Freke and Gandy 58). It is a supreme curiosity that at the crucifixion of the Savior none of the twelve apostles are present, and the whole affair is overseen by a retinue of female attendants. There is one obscure reference in John 19.26 where the mother of Jesus is at the cross, attended by a "disciple, standing by, whom [Jesus] loved." Christian tradition believes this "beloved disciple" to be John the apostle, but this conclusion is

24 circumstantial. This unidentified disciple remains unspecified, and belongs in the background with the soldiers and priests. It is only Mary and the women who attend to the crucified Jesus. Even so, at the resurrection none of the apostles are present, and the first to witness the true day of Easter was a woman or group of women to whom the knowledge of life after death was first given. The Gospels are a far cry away from modern Protestantism, who would crowd these scenes with popes, priests, apostles, and kings. Protestantism lost something essential when it exiled Mary from all of its iconography and symbolism. This male dominated ethos was never part of the original revelation that is Christ, and in the Gospels we are poignantly reminded that it is the Mother who stands as the central image around the dying and resurrecting Jesus.

The Death and Rebirth of the Goddess In most textbooks addressing the subject, the subordination of the Mother Goddess begins with the Aryan invasions into the fertile crescent and beyond, where war gods conquered peaceful goddesses, either by execution or marriage. While no doubt there is much truth to this, there are additional factors that are no longer seen from our viewpoint. How did the introduction of writing, for example, influence male and female mythologies? If the divine feminine resided in the secret, oral rites of the cave, and if the new possessors of writing were the male priests of the temple, what would be the consequences of the expansion of writing? Would not this new technology subordinate the oral traditions underneath reed and quill?

It is normally asserted that the male gods of the nomads conquered the female goddesses of the fields; but the expansion of civilization depended entirely upon agriculture to support the newly burgeoning populations of the city-states. One would suspect that the necessary increase in agricultural production would establish the goddess as the ruler of the city? Yet, the opposite seems to occur, and one guesses that it is not the war gods that conquer the goddesses, but the literate pantheon of bureaucrats who take charge, with a stylus in one hand and a mace in the other. Monotheism is the real death-nail to the Goddess. The Bible certainly makes it clear that the introduction of Yahweh, the one true god, was a long and hard fought process. In later centuries, however, the conversion to monotheism is swift and absolute. Egypt had thousands of gods and goddesses, yet its people converted to Christianity in just over a century. This was not due to a “forceful takeover.” Polytheism seems to have become so complex, burdensome, and exhausted, that the new faith of one savior-god appears to have been more than enticing. In other words, the diminishment of the Goddess is a varied and complex historical process. Even so, the human psyche always demands balance. Centuries of culture centered around a male, monotheistic god will produce, by human nature alone, a resurgence of the feminine divine. Like the diminishment of the Goddess, the process of her rebirth will probably take centuries to unfold, with many uneven turns in the road. Nor will her reestablishment mean a peaceful and harmonious era. One thing is certain, however, in the age of ego-centric, hyper-materialism, her presence is sorely missed. Ironically, until she is reborn, the male,

26 monotheistic gods must carry her torch for her. When she reappears, it will be at their pleading.

Works Cited. Adams, Walter Marsham. Book of the Master of the Hidden Places. London: The Search, 1933. Budge, E. A. Wallis. The Gods of the Egyptians. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1969. Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1985. Campbell, Joseph. Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. Safron Rossi, ed. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2013. Charles, R. H. ed. The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch. Oxford: Clarendon, 1912. Clinton, Kevin. “Stages of Initiation in the Eleusinian and Samothracian Mysteries.” Cosmopoulos 50-78. Cole, Susan. “Landscapes of Dionysus and Elysian Fields.” Cosmopoulos 193-217. Cosmopoulos, Michael B., ed. Greek Mysteries: The Archaeology and Ritual of Ancient Greek Secret Cults. New York: Routledge, 2003. De Lubicz, R. A. Schwaller. The Temples of Karnak. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1982. De Santillana, Giorgio. The Origins of Scientific Thought: From Anaximander to Proclus, 600 B.C. to A.D. 500. New York: Mentor, 1961. Eisler, Robert. Orpheus the Fisher: Comparative Studies in Orphic and Early Christian Cult Symbolism. 1921. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2007. Freke, Timothy, and Peter Gandy. The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God? New York: Three Rivers, 1999.

Guthrie, W. K. C. Orpheus and Greek Religion. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1952. Harrison, Jane Ellen. Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Himmelfarb, Martha. Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Holy Bible, KJV. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret, 2002. Kerényi, Carl. “The Mysteries of the Kabeiroi.” The Mysteries. Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks. Joseph Campbell, ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. 32-63. Kingsley, Peter. In the Dark Places of Wisdom. Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 1999. Mead, G. R. S. Pistis Sophia. The Gnostic Tradition of Mary Magdalene, Jesus, and His Disciples. Meneola, NY: Dover, 2005. Meyer, Marvin W., ed. The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook of Sacred Texts. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1987. Nibley, Hugh. The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, an Egyptian Endowment. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret, 2005. Plato. The Complete Works. John M. Cooper, ed. Indianapolis: IN, Hackett Publishing, 1997. Vermaseren, Maarten J. Cybele and Attis, the Myth and the Cult. London: Thames and Hudson, 1977. Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1920. White, Gavin. The Queen of Heaven: A New Interpretation of the Goddess in Ancient Near Eastern Art. London: Solaria Publications, 2013.

Mary and the Midwives 36" X 58" Oil on Canvas By Lynde Mott

This is a modern re-visioning of the Virgin Mary and of divine creation. The metaphor of a woman in childbirth is apt for many of the trials of life. We symbolically give birth to new ways of being through tremendous effort and oftentimes pain. The other women represent assistants, both seen and unseen, that help us through life's processes. As unseen stewards, they represent the divine daemon of womanhood. This inner, feminine presence supports us in our travails (left figure) and guides us confidently forward (right figure.) The organic leaves and flowers floating around the women represent verdant and fertile opportunities for growth that exist around and through us as we submit to this ancient pattern of learning and advancement in our humanity.

A Mother’s Love 48" X 48" Mixed Media By Lynde Mott

This painting symbolically portrays several aspects of our Heavenly Mother’s nature. Her figure appears through and transcends the visually noisy background that shows several images of ideal womanhood through time, as well as subjects appreciating her unique intellect. Rather than wearing a gaudy, worldly, bejeweled crown, she is coronated with an ancient symbol for pure feminine love: pink roses. The color pink literally drips around her, showing the radiant, all- encompassing nature of her nurturing presence. The figure appears half-opaque and half-translucent, and even half-flesh and half-stone statue. This represents my continuing journey in trying to come to

31 know and experience the reality of our Mother in Heaven. She is solid and real—yet elusive as well.

✥ MYTHIC THREADS: Art, Healing, and Magic in Bali By Pam Bjork, PhD

I dreamed there was an enormous web of beautiful fabric stretched out…covered all over with embroidered pictures. The pictures were illustrations of the myths of mankind but they were not just pictures, they were the myths themselves, so that the soft glittering web was alive. —Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

The allure of Bali, a tiny diamond-shaped island located in the middle of the Indonesian archipelago, has captured the public imagination as an exotic paradise since the 1930s. Known as Island of the Gods, indigenous beliefs and ancestor worship are interwoven with Balinese Hinduism in the midst of vast Islamic Indonesia. Vibrant cultural traditions are so entwined with notions of the sacred, that the Balinese have no word for religion. Gods descend to Earth, honored guests that inhabit deity statues, reside in threads of sacred textiles and participate in temple ceremonies and elaborate rituals. The gap between myth and reality is porous in Bali. An unexplainable and palpable magic resides in Bali’s terraced landscape of ethereal greens. Thousands of temples, drums and metallophones of gamelan orchestras, scents of incense, offerings of flowers, and sprinklings of holy water vivified by ritual, create a highly sensory society that facilitates connections between gods and humans. Art and beauty infuse daily life. Offerings of flowers and grains of white rice in plaited palm leaf baskets are placed on the ground upon

33 arising to attract positive aspects of the gods. Every ritual and ceremonial performance is an offering to the gods. Woven into the very fabric of Balinese culture is the concept of visible and invisible, for a real world of dangerous, invisible beings and forces lies under the surface of things. Hidden underneath visible reality is the source of life, the foundation of magic. Sekala—the tangible material world of matter—is animated by niskala: invisible, ambivalent, potent, ever-present “wild-spangled” energy. Niskala lurks everywhere, in trees, rocks, and temples. Vast hordes of demons, witches, evil spirits, revered ancestors and deities people the invisible niskala world. Sacred cloth and priests’ paraphernalia is charged with niskala. Niskala is the world of shamans and healers, where stones talk and statues walk. Cosmic balance is maintained through the interplay of sekala and niskala, the holy made visible in matter.

BARONG and RANGDA Maintain Cosmic Balance BARONG and RANGDA Performance at the Arma Museum, Ubud, Bali, 2008. Photography © Pamela Bjork

Bali is located about eight degrees south of the equator, thus day and night are of almost equal measure. This geographical phenomenon is played out by two masked mythic figures—Barong and Rangda— personified forces of an ambivalent/paradoxical cosmos. White-faced Rangda wears a mask with large fangs and embodies forces of darkness. Red-faced Barong is known for his protective powers. The sacred dance drama of Barong and Rangda symbolizes the complex relationship between humans and the supernatural. Their presence and performance intertwines forces of light and dark to invoke the human capacity for awareness. Majestic masked creatures emerge from the inner courtyard to the middle realm where gods and humans meet. In the foreground of the above photograph entranced Rangda with flowing white hair dances demons of the dark while the magnificent lion-like Barong, who demonstrates the radiance of the Gods, approaches. Agents of wonder, their encounter bridge the gap between chaos and clarity, darkness and light in a dance never resolved. Rangda’s sacred cepuk and Barong’s checked polèng possess and mitigate supernatural and healing powers to transform human experience and maintain cosmic balance. Both Barong and Rangda have huge bulging eyes in their masks. Mantras recited by priests to consecrate a new Barong or Rangda mask say their eyes emit “the radiance of the gods.” Cared for by village priests with reverential hospitality, masks and costumes are not allowed to touch the ground. Stored in baskets in the inner portion of the temple, white cloths protect Barong and Rangda masks from harmful energies when not in use. They are niskala beings that, like the descending gods, are animated in ceremony.

A man dances Rangda, her power so potent no one would dare incarnate her without the protection of a cepuk to contain and bind dangerous invisible energies that keep the community free from harm. With this magical and curative cepuk, destructive forces are honored yet confined. Danced by two entranced males, the Barong performs in rhythmic gesture with movements that suggest the disease process at the heart of the Barong and Rangda performance. Balinese healing magic is often mimetic, imitative of diseases symptoms and movements. For example, if Barong smiles and snaps his teeth it is said to mean recovery for the ailing. Images offered in dream are often of a medicinal nature. A nobleman dreamt of a Barong dancing playfully in front of him, smiling from behind the kitchen door. The dream meant he would recover from his illness of typhoid.

Balinese Man with Tattoos of BARONG and RANGDA Tenganan Pageringsingan, Bali, 2008. White-faced Rangda on the right. Red-faced Barong on the left. He wears a geringsing cloth around his neck and sacred textiles around his waist. Photography © Pamela Bjork

The body is an image of both depth and surface, of deep mysterious interiors and often codified exteriors; what effects it in either region becomes the ground for constructing those meanings that haunt the body visible and invisible. —Dennis Patrick Slattery, The Wounded Body

Inner and outer worlds meet the moment skin is pierced. Ritually penetrated and colored to display what Slattery calls a “codified exterior,” the Balinese man in this photograph wears both textiles and textual images, his body a canvas of Balinese mythology. Tattoos are often used for therapeutic purposes. From inscribed bodies we find that rituals do much more than enact myth. Rituals engage the body to reveal and invoke some invisible reality to effect change.

RANGDA chant of priests: “Rangda incarnates the Light of the Lord of the World, [the Goddess of Power, Batara Sakti] . . . Witches/sorcerers from the five directions will not challenge her power. She dispels illnesses and vanquishes destructive weapons. These are burnt to ashes.” —Angela Hobart, Healing Performances of Bali

The word “Rangda” means widow, yet she’s known by many names. Witch, Queen Sorceress, Goddess of Power, the old prostitute, the evil mother who eats her children. She is often associated with Durga, the fierce and ferocious Hindu warrior goddess whose 37 mythological function combats demons that threaten stability of the cosmos. Rangda embodies the wilderness and darkness beyond the grasp of humans. Her power is paradoxical. One pendulous breast carries poison associated with the destructive power of sorcery, the small breast honey, a traditional medicine that revitalizes.

BARONG chant of priests: “The world quakes when he appears. Humans who do not follow the path of virtue, . . . all tremble with fear. They seek to run away when he claps his jaws. They dare not look at him.” -- Angela Hobart, Healing Performances of Bali

Barong’s mask is usually red, the color usually associated with Brahma, the creator god who “weaves the universe on a web of eternity” (Kruger, Weaving the Word 24). Gilded and mirrored ornaments on his shaggy white coat of pandanus leaves shimmer and tingle in midnight rituals. His power is said to reside in his beard made of human hair. Barong’s gaze emits healing powers of the gods as he moves towards the people in all directions, a performance of affecting presence. The Balinese are born with four spirit-siblings, invisible personified beings related to aspects of physical birth: the amniotic fluid, blood, vernix caseosa, and the placenta. Each spirit-sibling resides in and affects specific places in the body and accompanies a person throughout his or her lifetime and after death. These invisible spirit-siblings have protective power, routinely fed with sprinklings of water on the ground before prayers. If ignored or treated badly, they become agents of black magic. As one of the spirit-siblings, the healing

38 powers of the Barong arise in the body at the time of conception at both individual and collective levels. The spirit who enters the Barong is communal in nature; his protective powers guard the entire village.

CEPUK: ceremonial cloth for humans, ancestors, gods, and demons The name cepuk means: “to be brought face to face with the powers of divinity.” These magic cloths evoke magic, protection, exorcism, purification, healing, and ancestral powers. For divine efficacy, cepuk cloths are blessed and consecrated by the highest priests. Supernatural forces emanate from their colors: white, red, yellow and blue, black or green that correlate with the divinities of Balinese cosmology.

Cepuk Tabanan, Bali, Coarse hand-spun cotton, natural dyes, weft ikat Mid 20th-century Collection of Pamela Bjork

Cepuk are designed to reflect a human presence with head, eyebrows, lips and white arrow-shaped patterns woven into the longitudinal bands along the edges. These white triangles are known as “gigi barong,” the teeth of the spirit of the protective Barong. These borders also reflect the magical protective walls erected around family compounds, inner courtyards and temples. Whatever cepuk covers is granted immunity from harm. Gods, humans and animals are dressed with the magical cepuk in order to “‘lay down a path’ in love and in death between worlds.” Before a large sacrifice to appease demonic forces, the sacred water buffalo is draped with a cepuk across his back. Afterwards, the cepuk is carefully and ritually placed atop the dismembered body to honor its gift of life. The Balinese believe that water buffalo willingly give their life and by wearing the cepuk they are reborn into the next higher chain of being. Cepuk appear to be beings, material objects with soul. A story is told of an insect-ravaged old temple cepuk that was ritually burned to ashes to ensure its passage to the next world. Entranced adepts wear cepuk to enable mystical powers to speak through them. Magic potions of the ashes of cepuk and holy water can help the lovesick attain the object of their desire. When gods are taken for their ritual baths at sea, cepuk join the procession folded neatly on trays, treated as honored guests. These sacred woven fibers of the gods act as a second skin, a psychic lining to safeguard against perilous supernatural forces.

POLÈNG: Dualism of Black and White Image Kecak Fire and Trance Dance, Ubud, Bali, 2010 Men and boys dressed in polèng cloth enact a battle from the Ramayana, percussively chanting "cak" and waving their hands and arms. Photography © Pamela Bjork

As a symbolic image of cosmic duality and wholeness, the magically powerful polèng cloth is pervasive throughout the island. Each square is a world of perfection, white for healing and luminosity, black for depth and the underworld. Polèng is used to wrap shrines, rocks, sacred trees, auspicious objects and demons. Those who deal with the deities of the underworld, like the Barong, wear polèng for protection. The ever-present cloth drapes statues of stone guardians at entryways to temples of origin, village temples and underworld temples. The cloths impart healing powers. Opposites, from a depth psychological vantage, are modes of perception—not necessarily contradictory concepts. Similar to the 41

Yin/Yang philosophy of Taoism, the two so-called opposites depend upon each other to exist. In the intersections where black and white meet, two differing shades of grey emerge, neither one nor the other, but both at the same time—ambiguous and ambivalent with powers to heal and powers to harm. Like life, nothing is simply black or white.

Geringsing: Communal Identity, Magical Protection, and Myth of Origin One evening long ago, Indra sat on a medicinal shrub, Sida rhombifolia, a weed native to India whose leaves are heart-shaped and flowers are yellow. He gazed towards the heavens, enchanted with the beauty of twinkling stars and found delight in the radiance of the moonlight. In his state of reverie, these sparks of light became patterns and images fated to become the sacred clothing of the first Balinese. Bhatara Indra then taught the girls and women in the small village of Tenganan the complicated art of weaving double ikat cloths that fell in accord with his divine plan, an imago mundi, microcosm of the world. Woven only in the small village of Tengenan in East Bali, geringsing are one of the most important and spectacular ceremonial textiles in all of Southeast Asia. These double-ikat fabrics are imbued with qualities of niskala, due in part to the arduous process of binding, dying and weaving mythological figures and symbols into the cloth. This demanding process is known in only three places in the world: India, Japan, and Tengenan, Bali.

Geringsing Wayang Kebo, detail Tengenan, Bali Hand-woven cotton, double-ikat technique, late 20th-century. Wayang (shadow puppet) figures appear in the semicircular segments beside small house temples with containers of holy water. Stars, crosses, and Wisnu’s circular power symbol, the cakra, reside in the field. Collection of Pamela Bjork

Vertical warp threads, long yarns that string the loom, create the structure and represent the eternal. Horizontal weft threads, yarns that interlace, represent the day-to-day. “Ikat,” a word of Indonesian origin, means “to bind or tie.” If both the warp and weft threads are wrapped with bindings that resist dye colors, the cloth is called “double-ikat,” or geringsing in Bali. The process of weaving geringsing is complex and ritually laden. An auspicious day is chosen to begin. Yarns are soaked in oil and water, stored in an earthenware jar, and covered with a special cloth for protection against spirits. The strands are then hung to dry for 42 days 43 and covered with hibiscus blossoms as protection against witches (léyak). Only postmenopausal women can tie the final bindings. The now patterned threads are woven together to produce intricate designs. To maintain clarity, the markings on the weft threads must align with the markings on the warp threads when they cross. Floral and geometric forms and mythological figures appear upon completion. Larger sacred geringsing often take up to six years to complete. The word geringsing means “sickness not” and indicates the powers ascribed to the cloth: healing, protection, and magical potency. The intention in the weave is transmission of supernatural sway. A Healing Presence is created—a terrain where mysticism and intrinsic magic dwell. Fragments are used in curing rituals. 1 square cm is cut out of old geringsing with the lubeng or star motif in order to heal mental illness. The priest ritually burns the small square and smoke from the fire heals. Sometimes the priest teases out a fiber or thread from a geringsing, soaks it in holy water, prays over it and then uses it as medicine. Prized by collectors and museums is geringsing of the wayang style, detail above. Two human figures kneeling with hands raised in prayer resemble shadow puppets or characters of the Hindu epic Mahabharata. A geometric temple design, abode of the gods, dwells in the center of the star mandala. Encoded in the fibers are attitudes of reverence and prayer. Woven inside the star and surrounding the square temple structure are four stylized scorpions, their stinger pointed outward. An image laden with power, scorpion acts as a temple guardian. Scorpion mythically slays and stings, yet its toxin revivifies, like psyche transforming its primal matter—poison and panacea.

Geringsing Wayang Putri, detail Hand-woven cotton, double-ikat, four-pointed star with geometric temple configuration. Scorpions surround the temple, Mid 20th-Century. Collection of Pamela Bjork

Geringsing mark communal belonging. The people of Tengenan understand themselves to be divine descendants of Indra, King of the Hindu gods; legend says he created the first humans by means of concentrated yoga exercises. Worn as protection during rites of passage, dress for men and women in life-cycle rituals, and shrouding for the dead, the magical qualities of geringsing offer protection during the many ceremonies. The pantheon of Hindu gods visits the people of Tengenan during cyclic rituals of renewal. Temple ceremonies, offerings, and initiations invite the gods to eat, drink and celebrate with the villagers who dress in their finest geringsing. Young girls dress in geringsing to please

Girls Dressed in GERINGSING, Five-Month Ritual Celebration Tenganan, Bali, 2008 Photography © Pamela Bjork visiting gods and ancestors. Their dance is a form of communion with the gods where the dance and dancer become one. Their movements bless the community.

Both dreams and myth draw their vocabularies from certain intense moments in actual human experience, but it is art that transforms those moments, bringing them from the private realms of dreams to the public realm of myth. —Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams, Illusions and Other Realities

Mythology provides entrée to invisible realms, a locus between humanity and their imagined gods. Archetypal psychology states that

46 gods are powers, their potency our experience. The living mythos of Bali honors invisible forces; gods create chaos, heal illness and bestow entrancing speech. Wrapped in threads of the gods, their world remains enchanted, replete with demons, witches, sorcerers, alongside priests and healers who mitigate such forces. The Balinese mythos holds the world as one indivisible whole: magic, medicine and mysticism intimately intertwined. Underlying contradictions are balanced through performance, ritual, offerings to the gods, acts of beauty and continual prayer. Tensions in momentary agreement create harmony, albeit transitory and fleeting. The macrocosm manifests in the microcosm and vice versa, a world of interdependence in continual flux and interaction. Threads of destiny, magic spells and fibers of protection are woven together to create these fabrics of myth and the mythic fabric of life.

Works Cited

Hobart, Angela. Healing Performances of Bali: Between Darkness and Light. New York. Bergham Books, 2003. Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1994. O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. Dreams, Illusions and Other Realities. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Slattery, Dennis Patrick. “Introduction”. The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh. Albany: SUNY P, 2000. 1- 20.

✥ Poets Lie: Ovid as Bodhi-Trickster in The Metamorphoses By Anita Doyle

Our way has no end and no beginning, and from this we cannot escape. ~Shunryu Suzuki

A number of years ago, I sat with an acquaintance, a woman in her early forties who was actively dying. Knowing of my work with dreams, she had asked me help her with a nightmare that had been plaguing her. The brief, terrifying dream had recurred periodically throughout her life, but now, within weeks of her death, it hounded her nearly every time she fell asleep. In the dream, set in some earlier century, she is a man who has just committed a horrific crime: the violent murder of a stranger. Covered in blood, s/he is running through woods, eluding authorities she believes are in pursuit, until finally she stumbles upon a cave and ducks into it. Inside she collapses, panting, catching her breath, knees pulled up to her chest, when suddenly the walls of the cave begin to close in on her. There’s no escape; she knows she will be squeezed to death. And then, just as suddenly, the scene shifts: she’s in her current life, a Buddhist-eco-feminist walking down the sidewalk, looking anxiously over her shoulder. She wakes up, heart pounding like crazy. The old butterfly-dreaming-sage, Chuang Tzu, would, of course, pose the question: Who is waking up? Is she a Buddhist dreaming she’s a murderer, or is it the other way around? Chuang knew there’s no way of knowing! The illusion of elusion. The cave we duck into to escape our fate becomes the contracting womb of our reincarnation, as we are ineluctably pulled to continue

49 working out that fate. Ovid performs such sleights of hand again and again and again in The Metamorphoses. And while it’s tempting to dive into one or several of his narrative inventions for the intellectual plunder that might be brought back [What does the counter-Delphic pronouncement of Teiresias regarding Narcissus suggest about the different ways by which we might come to “know ourselves?” How are we to understand Ovid’s decision to knock Orpheus off his pedestal by coloring him in such vacuous, self-regarding tones?], I find that what I’m really drawn to do is not dive in, but to hang out for a bit in the bardo instead, seeing what the poem looks like from there. I love the stories as stories. Yet Ovid’s “playful deflation of the credibility not only of myth but of his own art” (Downing 33), and, therefore, his ironic role as a de-mythologizer, have persuaded me, at least for now, that it would be a mistake to look to the stories, individually, as serving a purpose much more serious than serious entertainment. The history of Rome with which the work ends, constitutes not so much entertainment, perhaps, as self-serving flattery by the artist of his high patron, Augustus—but it’s hardly more credible (and all the more ironic) for that. And so, what interests me is this fact that Ovid knows it’s all play; that it is not his intention to deliver mythic truths with unambiguous moral lessons or satisfying archetypal meaning. His were sophisticated readers, as we know—the educated, liberal glitterati of the day. Was Ovid merely offering them the enrapturing entertainment of a virtuoso playing his instrument? That’s quite possible, a likelihood underscored by the fact that the themes of the remainder of his extant works suggest an interest in exercising that virtuosity across a broad rhetorical range that does not overtly

50 include...well, an inquiry into the nature of mind, for example. Yet, that’s exactly where The Metamorphoses takes me as a reader, and it could be argued that the structure of the poem reveals such an interest on Ovid’s part as well. It’s as if he is inviting us, all in good fun, to enter what is going on with one foot planted in the passionate unfolding of outrageous events, and the other in that condition of alert dispassion that characterizes a meditating mind. What? Ovid dispassionate? It’s easy to think the poet a tad too irreverent and lacking in humility to be wearing the mantle of the philosopher in this sense. But Johan Huizinga, in his book, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, gives us reason to consider otherwise. Speaking broadly, not of Ovid per se, Huizinga addresses the role of competitive play in early cultures for the transmission of sacred knowledge. He cites the Vedic rishis, “poet-priest (s) knocking at the door of the Unknowable” (107), who at sacred feasts and festivals would assertively challenge one another with riddle-like questions of a cosmogonic nature. As such, the game made no distinction between seriousness and play, a quality much in evidence in this work of Ovid’s, as well. By way of example, Huizinga quotes this verse about cosmic origins from the Rig-Veda:

Being then was not, nor non-being. The air was not, nor the sky above it. . . . Death was not, nor non-death, and there was no distinction between day and night. . . .What kept closing in? Where? And whose the enclosure? (106)

Compare this with the way Ovid begins his Metamorphoses:

Before the sea began to be, before the sky had mantled every thing, then all of nature’s face was featureless what men called chaos. . . . No thing maintained its shape. (Mandelbaum 3)

We recognize the specific nod to Hesiod’s Theogony in this opening, of course; a way, perhaps, of letting us know that it is that ancient forebear in his own lineage of “poet-priests” with whom he is in specific, playful competition. But more than that, this opening allows Ovid to set the stage for what will be the grandest of sweeps, from the very origin of the universe to the historical moment in which he, Ovid, stands, and in which literally the last word will be his brazenly self- glorifying prediction that with this poem his “name, indelible and eternal will remain” (549). As always with Ovid, there is the sense of the trickster at work. He’s winking at us in his brazenness: “Isn’t this deliciously subversive fun?” It is indeed. And it’s just that sort of conspiratorial wink that encourages me to pay attention not so much to the stories, as to the epistemological subtext to The Metamorphoses as I read it. There’s no intent here to “erase any [of the poem’s] delirium and replace it with a more unitary, centripetal view of Ovid as a cool-eyed, objective analyst,” as Mandelbaum gently accuses an influential semiotician of doing (557). The point I want to make is simply that Ovid’s opening of his poem in the unordered formlessness of pre-creation has relevance beyond the requirement of the literary form. It invites the question: What is in back of the confused frenzy of human life that “creation” sets into motion? The Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Chögyam Trungpa, lays out a masterful response to that question in his classic work, Cutting

Through Spiritual Materialism. He addresses the confusion and distress that characterizes so much of human experience (and which we see played out in most of the stories that Ovid weaves), as stemming from the misperception that “self” is solid and continuous, when it might more accurately be understood as a transitory, discontinuous event:

Since we take our confused view as being real, we struggle to maintain and enhance this solid self. We try to feed it pleasures and shield it from pain. Experience continually threatens to reveal our transitoriness to us, so we continually struggle to cover up any possibility of discovering our real condition... We have become so absorbed in our confused view of the world, that we consider it real, the only possible world. The struggle to maintain the sense of solid, continuous self is the action of ego. (5)

Trungpa goes on say that one of the ways to metaphorically describe the functioning of the ego in this regard is as the “Lord of Form,” which preoccupies itself with:

Manipulating physical surroundings so as to shield [us] from the irritations of the raw, rugged, unpredictable aspects of life. . . . The Lord of Form does not signify the . . . secure life situations we create per se. Rather, it refers to the neurotic preoccupation that drives us to create them, to try to control nature. It is ego’s ambition to secure itself. So we cling to our pleasures and possessions, we fear change or force change. (6)

It strikes me that this Lord of Form could be thought of as the unnamed god of Ovid’s creation story, who looks upon the original chaos and is determined to do something about it. It is significant that the Greek word khaos does not, in fact, refer to what Ovid says “men call chaos: an undigested mass of crude, confused and scrumbled 53 elements” (Mandelbaum 3). Rather, it means a gap. A gap in what? If we stand outside of ego’s “neurotic preoccupation” to create a comforting illusion of solidity and continuity, we can see that chaos may simply refer to the gaps in that illusion, a seeing through to the reality that All is eternally in flux. From ego’s perspective this is hugely threatening. The god, the Lord of Form (i.e., ego), must create beginnings and ends, must stop uncontrollable change, must insist that “things maintain their shape,” must create predictable order, must at all costs close the gap. But ultimately Ovid outfoxes him: unstoppable metamorphoses abound. And as the demi-urge in this virtual universe of his own creation, the Poet no doubt gets a chuckle of competitive satisfaction out of that! Moving from the creation story of the first book of The Metamophoses and leaping over the individual stories of transformation as I indicated I would for the purposes of this inquiry, we arrive at the final book and its lengthy discourse delivered by “Pythagoras.” This is the longest single speech in the fifteen books which comprise the opus, nearly the longest episode altogether, and there is no question that it affords Ovid the opportunity for putting his virtuosity on display in a genre he has not yet tackled. Some scholars have suggested that the poet is wanting to bore the reader in this discourse through going on in relatively dry philosophical language that contrasts starkly with the wildly imaginative and engaging storytelling he has woven up to this point. Others, notably the English poet John Dryden, “singled it out for praise” (Galinsky 1.6). It is all the more to Ovid’s credit as a poet, naturally, that he should be able to have it both ways. In any event, the primary aim of this episode seems to be a philosophical explication of

54 what the stories have really been about, with Pythagoras here standing in not for himself, but for the archetypal Philosopher. According to classics scholar Karl Galinsky:

By Ovid's time, "Pythagoreanism" stood for a syncretistic collection of the teachings of various philosophical schools, mysticism, pseudo- scientific speculation, and religious and spiritual dispensations. Accordingly, Ovid's Pythagoras offers an eclectic farrago indebted to all kinds of philosophical teachings: his own, Heracleitus', Empedocles', and the Stoics, along with frequent allusions, mostly for the sake of counterargument, to Lucretius and the Epicureans... (H)ard science never had any appeal in Rome and serious philosophy had a limited audience... What was in demand was the popular, the watered down, and the coarsened. (1.2)

How much this has in common with the spiritual-cum-scientific syncretism popular within the liberal mainstream of our current empire, in which a sort of Asian-fusion stew of Buddh-Taoism with quantum- physics-lite underlies the ubiquitous catch-phrase: “Go with the flow.” But we digress. What most interests here is the framing function that the cosmogony laid out in the first roughly eighty lines of the poem and this philosophical disquisition in the last book provide. All of the stories, all of the transformations -- with the exception of Julius Caesars’ rebirth as a star in the heavens -- take place between them. If in the cosmogony of the first book we find the workings of that aspect of consciousness (“ego”) for which the instability of flux is anxiety-provoking and which therefore seeks a solid ground upon which to extend itself, in the Pythagorean speech of the last book we find a praising of the natural and all-pervasive flux that is simply the indisputable given of reality. The cosmogony sets the stage for all the

55 subsequent hair-raising adventures that the poet will unfurl. Then at the end, along comes Ovid-Pythagoras like a parent responding to a child’s nightmare by turning on the light and having the child look under the bed. “Why do you dread the Shades and empty names that poets fabricate?” he asks, in comforting tones. “The Styx is nothing but a counterfeit whose perils don’t exist” (519). He’s the Wizard of Oz outing himself: See? I made it all up! Poets lie! But what is true about the transformations in his stories, he tells us, is that:

In all this world, no thing can keep its form. For all things flow; all things are born to change their shapes. . . . There’s no thing that keeps its shape; for nature, the innovator, would forever draw forms out of other forms . . . one thing shifts here, another there; and yet the total of all things is permanent. (521-23)

“And yet the total of all things is permanent.” That is the reality the ego fails to see as it sets its vastly more limited notions of permanence into play - with typically catastrophic results, not only for itself. So how do we live -- sanely, cheerfully, humanely -- in a permanent reality in which impermanence is the rule? What does the synthesis of this dialectic look like? Once again, we may turn to that wise old Taoist, Chuang Tzu, who tells us:

If the universe is hidden in the universe itself, there can be no escape from it. The sage roams freely in this realm in which nothing can escape and all endures. To regard life as good is to regard death as good. Those who regard dying a premature death, getting old, poverty and wealth, and the beginning and the end of life as equally good are in harmony with the Way. (Majka 2)

Understanding that everything changes and that we are not separate from the totality that is permanent, all of our actions may become as free and spontaneous as those of the natural world. At the center of The Metamorphoses, which is to say literally at the very center of the work by line count, Ovid has placed the sole example in his poem of beings, human or divine, who are living embodiments of this liberated synthesis. I am speaking of the married couple, Baucis and Philemon, who lived “in a modest place, its roof . . . thatched with simple straw and reeds”:

[They] were wed when young within that hut, and there they had grown old, serene in poverty, not seeing it as taint or tarnish, something to be hid. You need not ask who was the master, who the servant in that house, for only two lived there—and the pair commanded and they served. (273)

There are other devoted couples in the poem, but the wealth of detail that Ovid provides about the nature of the simple life and amiable compatibility of Baucis and Philemon is noteworthy in this tale. When strangers arrive seeking hospitality, strangers who are gods in disguise - - and not just any gods! -- Baucis and Philemon serenely, immediately, move to do what needs to be done to provide them with comfort, food and drink. Despite their advanced years and extremely humble means, the couple is unselfconsciously giving. With each of them working at separate tasks, in utter harmony of purpose and effect, they create a gracious, nourishing and convivial meal. After describing the colorful spread with sharp particularity, Ovid adds: “And to all these are added liveliness, good cheer, kind faces - willing, generous” (275).

The fact that Baucis and Philemon were alone among a thousand of their neighbors to offer hospitality or a kind word to the strangers is meant, no doubt, to convey how rare the qualities of being are that they possess. Their spontaneous goodwill and flexible strength of character, their ability to adapt to what life presents -- hut or palace -- mark them as people “in harmony with the Way,” as Chuang Tzu puts it. Ovid goes so far as to indirectly reveal that their behavior surpasses that of the gods, who smite the thousand inhospitable villagers wholesale without a backwards glance, while Baucis and Philemon quietly “weep for their neighbor’s fate” (276). By placing these two people of such great and unassuming heart at the heart of his great work, is Ovid telling us what he himself values above all else, what is worth cherishing about human existence? The goals of the inherently aggressive ego reaching for a sense of solidity and continuity, desperate to “close the gap” that might reveal the eternal flux . . . what does Ovid really feel about these? He at once plays to those egos—his own included—and mocks them. How are we meant to take it when he in one breath places Julius Caesar, after death, as a star in the firmament, and in the next tells us that he, Ovid, “will gain a place that’s higher than the stars” (549)? I think we’re meant to laugh at his unbelievable chutzpah, be drop- jawed at his virtuosity, and above all, be thoroughly entertained. If somewhere in the midst of that we catch a glimpse of what those rarest of creatures, non-neurotic human beings, look like, so much the better. Maybe we will have learned something about how to go with the flow.

Works Cited

Chadwick, David. Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Downing, Christine. “Ovid’s Metamorphoses: A Carmen Perpetuum.” Unpublished lecture notes, Greek-Roman Mythologies II, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Fall 2010. Galinsky, Karl. “The Speech of Pythagoras in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.” Paper delivered at the Leeds International Seminar, 1997. ttp://www.utexas.edu /depts/classics/faculty/Galinsky/pythag.html Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Majka, Christopher. “Chaung Tzu: The Next Voice.” Web article, on http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Philosophy/Taichi/chuang.html Mandelbaum, Allen, trans. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1993. Trungpa, Chögyam. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Berkeley: Shambhala, 1973.

✥ Tolkien and Buddhist Influences: Thoughts and Perspectives By Brad Eden, PhD

In his essay “A Buddhist reading of J.R.R. Tolkien: Middle Path and Middle Earth,” Punnadhammo Bhikkhu states early on “We can be certain the great man had no Buddhist influences (at least in the lifetime in question).”11 Given that this writer is more knowledgeable concerning Buddhism than Tolkien’s life, it is understandable that he would not know that Tolkien would have been exposed early on in his life and career to Buddhist doctrine and precepts. Before going further, let me state that I am in no way indicating that Tolkien was a Buddhist; we all know that he was a devout Catholic in his religious beliefs; however, in his philosophical and mythological writings, it is apparent that he wanders well outside the norms of traditional Catholicism. Why is this, and what are some of the influences that may have caused Tolkien to harbor and indeed challenge conventional Catholic theology? In addition, both Christian and Buddhist philosophies and themes are more closely related than is apparent on the surface. On many occasions, Tolkien’s writings and his comments related to his writings, indicate that he not only changed his opinions on certain philosophical thoughts and themes raised in his mythology throughout his life, but that many of these conflicts are probably related to his educational studies and the beliefs of his acquaintances and those in his social circles.

1 Available at http://www.arrowriver.ca/dhamma/tolkien.html 60

Oxford was, in fact, the hot bed for the two most prevalent and heavily-debated theories related to the concept and origins of mythology in the nineteenth century, and this debate extended up through Tolkien’s formative years. In 1856, while a professor at Oxford, Max Muller published his seminal essay “Comparative Mythology,” which became a rallying point for those who believed, supported by philological research, that European mythologies were influenced by the Sanskrit language. Muller studied Sanskrit at the University of Leipzig, and was impressed with the Vedic and other sacred books of India. The East India Company in London supported his endeavors to translate these books into English. Muller was a professor at Oxford until his death in 1900, and he published consistently on the Aryan peoples as the source for the Greek and Roman pantheon of gods, and how Western civilization owed its roots to the Indic peoples and their mythology. The second school of thought was influenced by the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, and was based on the theory of biological evolution and the science of anthropology and cultural evolution. Also known as the anthropological school of folklore or the “savage folklorists,” it was based on the evolutionary theories of Edward Burnet Taylor and vigorously supported by Andrew Lang, both of whom lived to 1917. Although there was some overlap between the two contending theories, it was the mythological school that was the most popular and most widely supported in the folklore community, mainly because Lang’s attacks on Muller were shaky, given that he had never learned Sanskrit and therefore never sufficiently researched or studied the original sources.

Tolkien spent his formative years at Oxford immediately following Muller’s death, and thus it would have been almost impossible for him not to have been influenced by Muller’s theories, given that they were the most prevalent and accepted at the time regarding the origins of mythology, and also so strongly based on philology. We also know Tolkien’s affiliation for the works of Lang, and thus he probably would have also explored and studied the work and theories of the “savage folklorists.” As a result, Tolkien would have become quite familiar with the sacred books and texts of Buddhism and Hinduism during his studies on mythology and folklore at Oxford. But beyond Tolkien’s early theological and religious influences related to his higher education studies, some comment must be made regarding the themes that broadly relate to Buddhist doctrine. Many of these intersect, crisscross, and are even directly shared with Christian doctrine and values, but I wish to briefly mention the ones that specifically related to Buddhist topics. The first is the concept of suffering, a key theme in Buddhism. This concept runs throughout all of Tolkien’s writings, and indeed most major mythologies. Without suffering or the knowledge/realization of suffering as a basis for our current lives, it is difficult to move forward not only in this life, but in subsequent lives. In fact, much of Tolkien’s mythology relates quite well to the Buddhist perspective of karma. Frodo’s journey, for instance, is not one of obtaining, or striving for, or becoming a better or richer person; his journey is one of letting go, not only of a physical object, but of self, of power, and of hope. What is interesting about much of Tolkien’s mythology is the fact that, overall, it is either about

62 trying to gain or regain something (like the Silmarillion), or it is about trying to let go or lose something, as in The Lord of the Rings. For Frodo, he is both on a journey to save the world as he knows it, and, in the end, it becomes a spiritual quest, one in which he himself is radically transformed in the process. This radical transformation results in small steps, but comprises a number of key Buddhist concepts, the chief of which are compassion and nonviolence. While these themes have been dealt with extensively already, and in a Christian context, there are subtle differences in these concepts from a Buddhist perspective. In terms of Frodo’s journey, one where he is radically transformed, the process of gradual compassion towards the fate and condition of Gollum happens due to Frodo’s journey, not only because of the sacrifice of all that he knows, but also the knowledge that others deserve to be treated with respect and compassion, not only because of what they have or are going through in life, but because we are transformed by our own journey through life to grow beyond our own selfish desires and help others on their life journeys as well. For Frodo, his compassion towards Gollum, which Gandalf early on tries to instill in him, eventually determines the success or failure of the journey itself. And also because Frodo understands, the longer he carries the Ring, the effect it has on one’s spirit and body, and thus he can understand Gollum’s predicament. And in terms of his own experiences, Frodo is so radically transformed by his journey that he cannot nor will he allow himself to harm or hurt others. This gradual process is seen throughout his journey, but especially when he returns to the Shire and must deal with Sharky’s bullies. He essentially relinquishes any participation in violence,

63 giving up authority to Merry and Pippin, whose military experience assists them in vanquishing the threat to the Shire. In Buddhism, these two concepts, compassion and nonviolence, comprise a major philosophical tenet known as social engagement. Our life’s journey is not about gaining things, whether that means knowledge, material goods, or peace of mind; it is about letting go. Letting go of ourselves, our attachments, our fears, and seeing that, in the end, these things do not exist, except in our minds. When we learn to let go of ourselves, and learn just to be, to live in the moment, right here, right now, rather than yesterday or tomorrow, then we become what in Buddhism is known as bodhisattvas. A bodhisattva is someone who lives only in the moment, who focuses on using compassion and nonviolence in their life, and who is socially engaged with the world. As Deepak Chopra states, in relation to this topic:

In the end there’s nothing other than your personal self, your collective self, and your universal self. And they’re all you. Just like a drop of water or a wave in the ocean. They’re all the same water. Water doesn’t lose its wateriness before it arises as a wave or subsides as a wave. Nor does water lose its wateriness as a raindrop or as a cloud or as part of a rainbow or as the rain or as a stream. It’s all still water.2

But I want to leave the biggest issue that Tolkien raises in his mythology related to the Buddhist philosophy until last, because it is an issue that he struggled mightily with throughout his life, and never fully came to closure on. That issue is the topic of reincarnation, and specifically the major difference between the races of Men and Elves. One can almost follow Tolkien’s theological justifications, changes of

64 mind, and eventually confusion with how to resolve the entire issue of reincarnation. Besides changing syntax and vocabulary when discussing reincarnation throughout his life, playing with terms such as resurrection, transcarnation without loss of memory, incarnation, ancestral memory, and collective unconscious, to name but a few, Tolkien’s literary circle also provided an interesting sidenote related to the topic of reincarnation. As Verlyn Flieger has noted in A Question of Time, “For a practicing Catholic like Tolkien, the idea of reincarnation would have been theologically problematic, although on a purely intellectual basis he seems to have had no trouble with the concept.”3 Indeed, it is in the oft-quoted Letter #153 to Peter Hastings that Tolkien states his views on reincarnation, at that time.4 As such, it is fascinating to see Tolkien try to grapple with his philosophical, theological, and practical beliefs in regards to the idea of Elvish reincarnation, and how his social and literary circle may have had a profound influence on him, along with his own “fork in the road” which took place sometime in 1945-46 as detailed by Verlyn Flieger in the essay “Do the Atlantic story and abandon Eriol-Saga.”5 Flieger expounds on Tolkien’s only explicit

2 Deepak Chopra, “Your first kiss lives on.” Available at http://www.beliefnet.com/story/202/story_20289_3.html. 3 Verlyn Flieger, A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faerie. Kent State University Press, 2001. 4 J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Christopher Tolkien and Humphrey Carpenter. George Allen and Unwin, 1981. pp. 187-196. 5 Verlyn Flieger, “Do the Atlantic Story and Abandon Eriol-Saga.” Available at http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/tolkien_ studies/v001/1.1flieger.pdf. 65 reincarnation scene in The Lord of the Rings in a 2007 essay in Tolkien Studies.6 First, let’s look at the influences of his social and literary circle. Both Charles Williams and Owen Barfield brought an interesting mix of parapsychology, mysticism, and spiritualism to the Inklings group. Barfield in particular was a strong believer in the writings of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy. Barfield had been raised in an agnostic family, and only later in life became a member of the Church of England. We know that he maintained a strong friendship with C.S. Lewis, and on several occasions Barfield professed a strong belief in reincarnation and the evolution of consciousness. Verlyn Flieger discusses some of these influences on Tolkien in A Question of Time, showing a much darker and shadowed side of Tolkien that puts him much closer to the belief systems of Owen Barfield and Charles Williams than to C.S. Lewis’ beliefs. Especially in his writings in the 1940’s, when Tolkien was wrestling with the concept of reincarnation in The Notion Club Papers, we see that the theosophic notions of mysticism and consciousness are very present. And in The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf and Saruman and the other wizards match very closely the theosophical occult concept, as well as the Buddhist belief, I might add, of ascended masters, devas, evolved angelic beings, or bodhisattvas, beings that are meant to guide and assist people in their spiritual journeys. Indeed, in Tolkien’s writing endeavors that one would consider outside of his more well-known works, i.e. The Eriol-Saga and the two

6 Verlyn Flieger, “The curious incident of the dream at the barrow: memory and reincarnation in Middle-earth.” Available at https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tolkien_studies/v004/4.1flieger.html. 66 time travel Atlantis stories left unfinished at his death, it is apparent that Tolkien enjoyed exploring unexplained phenomenon, even parapsychology and psycho-historical drama. As Flieger shows in her “Do the Atlantic Story” article, Tolkien’s Letters have many explicit and implicit references to the concepts of reincarnation, genetic memory, and inherited memory in his own case, making one wonder whether he truly believed that he was a man out of his own time, or whether he saw himself with this inherited/genetic memory, and perhaps dare we say, a reincarnated medieval English bard. His writing preference for these concepts as a viable means of time travel is again indicated by Flieger.7 This reincarnation motif is most apparent in Tolkien’s lifelong attempt to understand his own concepts related to immortality and mortality with the races in his mythology. The chief of these conundrums is the elf Glorfindel. While Tolkien stated that the reuse of names in his mythology was random, and that this was the case with the Glorfindel of Gondolin of the First Age, who died at the hands of a Balrog during the escape from the Fall of Gondolin, and the Glorfindel of Rivendell of the Third Age, who appears in early versions of The Lord of the Rings, Christopher Tolkien states in The Return of the Shadow that his father did indeed believe that they were one and the same person. That Glorfindel was reincarnated, or resurrected, was something that Tolkien seemed to vacillate on considerably. Glorfindel first appears in Tolkien’s earliest work, The Fall of Gondolin, in 1916- 17, where already it is established that he dies in a battle with a Balrog. It was in 1938, when Tolkien was writing down some of his thoughts

7 Ibid. 67 on the early Lord of the Rings drama, that he stated on a scrap of paper that Glorfindel would tell the story of his background and life in Gondolin. The reincarnated Glorfindel of the Third Age was assigned as one of the original members of the Fellowship, and there must have been some meaning for Tolkien to include a character of such power and background in the drama. Eventually, Tolkien for some reason moves Glorfindel into the shadows of later drafts, having him still in the House of Elrond, powerful enough to confront the Nazgul and hold the Bridge against them, yet no longer a member of the Fellowship, replaced by Legolas. Why did he do this? Because the use of power wasn’t what the Fellowship was going to need to succeed, or perhaps because he felt that Glorfindel’s background was too fuzzy and theologically dangerous ground that he didn’t want this character to be so obvious in the drama? (By the way, notice that with the two major reincarnations in Tolkien’s mythology, Glorfindel and Gandalf, that they both died defending companions and friends from a Balrog. The movie definitely portrays Gandalf’s return as a reincarnated being, through the words (not literal) “Gandalf the Grey… yes, I was him, once. Now I am Gandalf the White…”). Tolkien, who always hated loose ends and pieces in his writings, took up the Glorfindel issue in his last papers, which Christopher discusses in The People of Middle Earth.8 The two manuscripts in question were written in November 1972, in the last year of Tolkien’s life. Tolkien goes to great lengths to explain, not only why Glorfindel is the only elf allowed by Mandos and Manwe to be reincarnated in

Middle-Earth as an elf , but goes into an extensive discussion of how the reincarnated Glorfindel might have found his way back into Middle Earth during the Second Age, and hence into the Third Age and Elrond’s household. What is even more interesting is Tolkien’s short discussion following the two Glorfindel documents, here at the end of his life, on the topic of reincarnation itself. Two manuscripts survive, that lead into a discussion, of all things, Dwarven reincarnation, specifically related to the forefather of all dwarves, Durin, who seems to reappear throughout Middle Earth history to aid his race. Tolkien hypothesizes that there may have been several emanations of the original Durin in Middle Earth’s history. And here is an interesting sidenote: one of these reincarnated Durins, Durin VI of the Third Age, was slain by a Balrog as well. Does anyone see a theme developing here? Finally, just to truly indicate how fascinated Tolkien was by the topic of death, immortality, and reincarnation theologically and foundationally in his mythology, it is interesting that, almost immediately after finishing The Lord of the Rings in 1954, he wrote a major essay on these topics, and used a very medieval rhetorical device in which to frame the discussion: a debate. In Morgoth’s Ring, Christopher brings out for the first time “The Debate of Finrod and Andreth,”9 supposedly documenting a historical meeting/discussion/conversation between Finrod Felagund, considered the wisest of the exiled Noldor, and the Wise-woman Andreth, the

8 J.R.R. Tolkien, Peoples of Middle Earth. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. (History of Middle Earth series ; 12). Houghton Mifflin, 1996. pp. 378-82. 9 J.R.R. Tolkien, Morgoth’s ring. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. (History of Middle Earth Series ; 10). Houghton Mifflin, 1993. pp. 303-29. 69 sister of Bregor father of Barahir, hence the great aunt of Beren. Tolkien indicated that these two had a great friendship, in part because Andreth in her younger days was in love with Finrod’s kinsman Aegnor, and for whom Aegnor had feelings as well. In this particular conversation, Finrod and Andreth discuss the varying fates of the Elves and Men, and it is interesting to read the interplay of intellect and emotion as these topics are discussed by probably the two greatest minds of the First Age of Middle Earth. The concepts of the mind and body, whether conceived of as whole or separate, bring to mind the differing viewpoints of the Jewish, Greek, Christian, and even Buddhist philosophies. And against this great theological debate about the origins of the “fates” of both races, the love of Andreth and Aegnor as two separate races destined never to be mixed is brought to a climax by Tolkien, indicating that there must have been many love affairs and maybe even unknown mixings of the two Races that are unrecorded. In the case of Andreth and Aegnor, Aegnor choose to stop the relationship, not because he did not love Andreth, nor because of the eventual decline of her body and her death, but because of his love and loyalty to his race in a time of military stalemate that he does not believe will last long, i.e. the siege of Angband. As usual, there is another version of this debate, as well as a tale by another wise woman, Adanel of the House of Hador, who relates the rumor that is spreading among Men that the curse of Death to Men is given to them by Manwe because of their “sin” of worshipping Melkor when he first appeared among them. And again, there is a very interesting conversation between Manwe and Eru, set again in the very

70 medieval construct of rhetorical discussion, about the reincarnation of Elves, and how the body and spirit relate to each other on Middle Earth, and Manwe’s power related to this area, and Eru’s thoughts on Manwe’s power. Just to show how the concept of reincarnation in Middle-Earth is different from that of Buddhism, here are the major differences: an Elf in Middle-Earth can only be reincarnated once; s/he does not returned to Middle-Earth but stays in Aman, with some exceptions; the issue of identity is crucial, so that the reincarnated Elf maintains his/her former identity with more substance and power; and it is the issue of reincarnating as the same species. For Buddhism, reincarnation is a continual cycle known as karma, broken only by learning lessons that lead to nirvana, which breaks the cycle; one returns to Earth continuously; and the reincarnated person can return into one of six realms (a deva, an asura, a human being, an animal, a hungry ghost, or a being in Naraka (hell)), based on its learning of compassion from its previous existence What I have tried to provide here is just a glimpse of the complex theological and spiritual background of Tolkien, as exemplified by his writings in relation to the development of his mythology. These shadowy and dare I say unconventional concepts that Tolkien incorporates in his writings, indicates that he was drawing not only on his Christian background, but also on his educational studies related to Indic and Vedic folklore and spirituality, as well as discussions and conversations with those in his literary and social circle who held strong beliefs in topics such as parapsychology, para-history, mysticism, reincarnation, and collective unconscious. Tolkien himself

71 seems to indicate in his Letters that he believes himself to have a collective unconscious of his past, and he strongly indicates that reincarnation cannot be theologically or intellectually reasoned away as an option for human beings. As Flieger states throughout A Question of Time, Tolkien’s manuscripts, social circles, and religious musings indicate a very different type of man than the strict, faithful, theologically-based Catholic that we have assumed Tolkien to be. Throughout his life, Tolkien grappled with the Atlantis dream (which his son Michael shared), his belief that he somehow through collective unconscious was a part of the history and culture of England, and the intellectual and theological banter with his colleagues and friends whose upbringings and beliefs were much more eccentric than his own, but in the end he may have felt quite an affinity with. This complex Tolkien does not interface well with the casual and easy-going Oxford don that has been portrayed in past scholarship. This Tolkien has doubts, has confusion, has theological differences with the religion that he strongly espouses; his writings indicate that he explored these differences and doubts in his mythology and tried to come to grips in some ways with their implications and consequences in his Secondary Worlds, using the medieval rhetorical device of debate and conversation between and among his characters. Many of the themes and concepts that appear in Tolkien’s mythology can and are broadly shared by a number of different religions and philosophies; however, the concept of reincarnation does not fit well into the Western Euro-Christian viewpoint, coming as it does from the Eastern/Asian/Hindic/Buddhist world. Many have

72 assumed or determined that, just because there are no explicit references to theology or religion in Middle-Earth, that this makes Tolkien’s mythology more broadly palpable or less controversial; I think that we need to see that, underneath it all, Tolkien’s mythology IS about theology and religion. It is his broad and multi-faceted attempt to provide a forum for all that is confusing, not understandable, and gray in the Primary World; Middle Earth is no less complex than our own. As those who are Buddhists will often say, “lean into your discomfort, for this is where you truly find yourself.” As we can see from the huge volume of Tolkien’s writings, while it is apparent that he was not comfortable with his “discomfort” on a number of interesting concepts, he was certainly not afraid of leaning into them and exploring and expressing his viewpoints throughout his life in these areas; not in an explicit way, but implicitly in his secondary worlds. It was in these worlds that he was able to openly and honestly explore his changing intellectual and religious viewpoints on these topics, never coming to closure but ultimately providing us a glimpse of the man that is more gray in his beliefs than the simple black and white version often portrayed in his biographies.

Works Cited

Bhikkhu, Punnadhammo. “A Buddhist reading of J.R.R. Tolkien: middle path and Middle Earth.” Available at http://www.arrowriver.ca/dhamma/ tolkien.html. Chopra, Deepak. “Your first kiss lives on.” Available at http://www.beliefnet.com/story/202/story_20289_3.html. Flieger, Verlyn. “Do the Atlantic story and abandon Eriol-Saga.” Available at http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/tolkien_studies/ v001/1.1flieger.pdf. Flieger, Verlyn. A question of time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s road to faerie. Kent State University Press, 2001. “Six Realms.” From Wikipedia. Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_realms Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter with assistance from Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981. Tolkien, J.R.R. Morgoth’s ring. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. (History of Middle Earth series ; 10). Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Tolkien, J.R.R. Peoples of Middle Earth. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. (History of Middle Earth series ; 12). Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Anatomy of a Buddha (12”X12”) Oil transfer on gessoed Indian motif fabric, with oil paint By Lisa Brinkman

I have often found solace in times of chaos within Buddhist contemplative philosophy. The Tibetan Dzogchen tradition especially has been a great source of comfort and inspiration when navigating crisis situations that require keeping my heart open. “Anatomy of a Buddha” and “Buddha and Ganesh” were partially inspired from a beginning Thangka painting class I attended. I previously had read in Sogyal Ripoche’s book, “The Tibetan Book of the Living And Dead”, 75 about the method of using an inspirational image like the Buddha as a form of meditation. It occurred to me that using Buddha protypes in an oil transfer painting series, something good might rub off. I enjoy experimenting with materials. In this Buddha series, I began first by gluing fabric with a Hindu design motif onto birch boards with gesso. I then rendered the Buddha images using an oil transfer technique with sepia colored ink. Oil paint was applied to further develop the paintings. I was especially interested in having the images look old, as if relics from antiquity. The ideal proportions of any image of the Buddha follow a canonic prototype passed down in Buddhist iconography. I purposely left many of the guidelines to emphasize the sacred geometry in the Buddha prototypes. In “The Anatomy of a Buddha” the facial expression of the Buddha is intended to be serene with half-closed almond shaped eyes in contemplative meditation, with a gentle sweet smile on the lips. The large cranial bump on his head is an ushnisha, which represents extraordinary wisdom. On his forehead between his eyes, the Buddha bears an urna, a whorl of hair or jewel-like circle. As one of the characteristics of an exalted being, this indicates he is enlightened. His bizarrely long ears signify the wealth he had during his earlier life as a prince adorned with heavy ear jewelry. In the Buddha’s renunciation of his princely life, his large ears are open to compassionately hearing the suffering of the world. Within painting “The Anatomy of a Buddha” I emphasize the Hindu symbols in the underlying fabric with red vermillion colored

76 paint. I like that the mysterious symbols read as some kind of ancient text, open to interpretation.

Buddha and Ganesh (12”X12”) Oil transfer on gessoed Indian motif fabric, with oil paint By Lisa Brinkman

“Buddha and Ganesh” is the second in the oil transfer Buddha series. The sacred hand gestures reveal a story. The Buddha’s right hand is outstretched touching the Earth in “the earth is my witness gesture’” or Bhumi-sparsha mudra, and his left hand is open in the “gesture of leisure” or avakasha mudra, assuming his stance of non- attachment. 78

The scene depicts the historic story under the Bodhi tree, of the Buddha’s triumphant wrestling with Mara, an embodiment of delusion and uncontrolled passion. The Buddha calls out to the Earth to bear witness and confirms the Buddha’ unshakable steadfastness as a Bodhisattva. To further complete the painting’s composition I allowed the Hindu fabric underneath to surface in various areas. The circular solar shape to the right of Buddha’s head has an obscured image of the Hindu elephant-headed god, Ganesh, within it. Taking poetic licence with the painting’s symbols, Ganesh, the Lord of Success and remover of obstacles, seemed a kindred deity to Buddha, and quite suitable to preside over this scene. The origin of Ganesh’s birth, created with the dirt from his mother, the Goddess Paravati, as she bathed, seems quite fitting to the painting’s theme ‘the earth is my witness’.

✥ Music of the Gods By Reverend Lynn Hubbard

There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical. —Ludwig Wittgenstein

Religion and Language Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies. —Joseph Campbell

Religion and language share many fundamental characteristics. Like languages, religions can understand one another, and meaningful translations and understandings can occur between religions because they share a common function and purpose. Religions are attempts to articulate experiences of the sacred by extending a creator/creation metaphor, within a particular cultural context. As with languages, religions can be classified by their places of origin. We speak for example, of Romance languages, and by that we mean a family of languages that share a linguistic “stock.” In other words, they share common origins of place - a cultural milieu. Religions sharing the same cultural milieu also share a common religious stock of metaphors and myths. They share a similar religious vocabulary, religious grammar and syntax.

Like languages, religions, also develop in accordance with the natural progression of cultural evolution. Cultural evolution is the result of intrinsic dynamics within a culture (cultural growth), and external dynamics (cultural assimilation) resulting from contacts with other cultures. These cultural dynamics provide the creative matrix in which cosmologies emerge and evolve. Religions are always thought out within the framework of a cosmology and are articulated within the boundaries and limitations of these understandings and beliefs. Imagine the world to be a creation, the ingression of a preexisting eternal ordering providing a formal structuring of the cosmos. The structure of the cosmos is understood as being derived from the “mind” of the creator, hence the reasonability of the cosmos, the real being able to be articulated through the forms of rationality. Not all spiritualities are religions. The Judeo-Christian religion is a prime example of a religion which has undergone many exposures to a variety of cosmologies over time, which has had a profound effect upon its own historical and religious development (Egyptian, Persian, Greek, and Roman). It is clear that the cosmology of the Old Testament, when Gods would walk on the earth, fornicate with earthly women, live on tops of mountains, and drop in for a quick meal, is significantly different from the Jewish Apocalyptic and Gnostic Redemptive thought forms of the New Testament. Compare for example, Mediterranean Christianity to Northern European Christianity; compare American Christianity to African or Latin American Christianity. Obviously, a religion which does not adapt itself to the natural progression of cultural evolution

81 becomes obsolete, and like a language which fewer and fewer people speak over time, it will eventually become extinct.

Mythos and Logos There are many other fascinating and enlightening relationships between language and religion but I would like to make just one more comparison, which I believe to be the most theologically provocative. Like language, religion has boundaries and the transgression of these boundaries leads not only to spiritual confusion but often spiritual tyranny. I would suggest that the original human language was poetry (mythopoetics), and that religious propositions are sourced and referenced within the context of a poetic consciousness. The function of mythopoetic language is to attempt to express or give meaning to that which is beyond both meaning and expression -- that to which language can only point, the inexpressible, the mystical. The very forms of poetic expression (meter, rhyme, cadence, etc.) are indications of the inability of discursive language to express the ineffable. That is, when language reaches its conceptual boundaries, its “speed of light,” the physical forms of language begin to change just like forms of matter change as they approach their physical limits. Words begin to bend, they elongate or shrink, they morph or transform into meter, rhyme, cadence, and they resemble notes of a musical score more than propositions of history and science. They begin to be part of the song of earth, the music of the spheres; they begin to share in the aesthetic structures of what they are trying to express. They become

82 true religious symbols, not only pointing to but actually participating in the reality which they seek to express. The truth of mythos cannot be expressed through the language of logos. The logical structures of language lack the revelatory power of poetry and song. This is one of the reasons why historic religions, what we call religions of the book, will inevitable fall short of their ability to mediate the beauty of God. Logic is the language of time, history, objectivity and knowledge-the language of a book. Poetry is the language of place, immediate experience, subjectivity and wisdom -- the language of a community. Confusing mythos and logos leads to the reification of religious myths and symbols, which inevitably results in spiritual tyranny; the tyranny of a people who have lost their poetic nature, who have reduced metaphor to fact, connotation to denotation; a people who have lost their sense of the Sacred. When religious metaphors are mistaken for facts, religion becomes merely assent to dogmatic beliefs, beliefs which are easily co-opted for political purposes. The birth of heresy is the death of religion!

Recovering a Sense of the Sacred The work of Jesus was not a new set of ideals or principles for reforming or even revolutionizing society, but the establishment of a new community, a people that embodied forgiveness, sharing and self- sacrificing love in its rituals and discipline. In that sense, the visible church is not to be the bearer of Christ’s message but to be the message. The purpose of the church is not to prove that Christianity is true, but to demonstrate what the world is like if it is true.

The well-known Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said so pointedly, “That which we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence.” Yet, within that silence, that space beyond language and meaning, that space beyond religion and understanding, that space which T.S. Elliot called the “shadow,” there dwells the intonation of the Spirit. For those who seek to hear, for those who need to hear, or those who are simply graced to hear, in the silence there is a song, sung by the earth herself. I know this because, as a child, she would sing her song to me. She would sing her song through me. I lost myself in her song. I became her song. My thoughts would come always in meter and rhyme for hours on end; in the woods hearing the song, feeling the song, becoming the song. Sad to say, I have lost this ability to hear nature’s song so clearly but I still recognize something of the tune as it is expressed in the countless stories of the Native American community. These are stories, peopled by a multitude of animals. In them, animals speak a language and human beings understand them. They not only communicate to humans via language, they often save human beings from their own follies, and some even invite humans to live with them in their dens and burrows and adopt them as their own. Humans transform into animals, and animals into humans. Animal species are called nations, and people take on animal names. In some stories of origin, the humans are actually descended from the animal nations and so, are indeed relations in both a biological and spiritual sense. Humans have a treaty, an understanding with the animal nations, a mutual and reciprocal relationship of respect and honor.

This sharing of a language, these intimate bonds between animals and humans. The ease with which humans and animals can transform and morph into one another are symbols of the elemental harmony between the human being, and all forms of life. In other words, these storytellers understood themselves as being part of that animal nature and that animal realm, and they understand this common nature was shared by all beings. I would suggest, this elemental, poetic reality, this unity of all being - is, has been, and will continue to be, the true and proper referent. The meaning of what we intend to express when we say, “God.” God is a song. Nature sings that song, and as our brother Jesus once said, “Let those who have ears to hear, hear.”

✥ Noah and His Amazing Ark: Hollywood and the Religious Right By Reverend Lynn Hubbard

At last, Hollywood has made a movie about Noah’s Ark. Can a movie on Jonah and the Whale be far behind? I suppose, it is inevitable that good old Noah would be memorialized on film by, no less then, Russell Crow. Not only is the Flood story fascinating to children, it has indeed captured the mythic imagination of people for over three thousand years. Don’t we all wonder, how did Noah fit all those animals on the Ark? How did he and his passengers repopulate the earth, especially, since they were all related? Weren’t there rainbows before the great flood? How could a good God destroy the world? Yet, in spite of such rational and moral quandaries, the story has achieved religious archetypal status, even to the point where Hollywood thinks it can make a buck or two in its contemporary reenactment. And of course therein lies the problem. For many people, especially Americans, the film will be seen as a movie about an historical event, much like the movie, “The Passion of Christ.” One can only imagine many thousands of Sunday school children being taken by their churches to see the “reenactment” of Noah’s success. The story about how once upon a time God hated everyone on earth, destroyed the whole world accept for sparing the ancient forefather of our faith, along with some skunks, snakes, badgers and gerbils.

Once successfully portrayed on film, there will be little doubt in the children’s mind that the story actually happened because, after all, it just did right before their own eyes. This is one of the ways religious fundamentalism is perpetuated in the modern. There is something about seeing a myth reenacted on the big screen that lends itself to a prosaic reification of mythic symbols and stories. I remember quite vividly having my faith in the Bible confirmed, when as a child my mother took me to see Charlton Heston (Moses) part the red sea and kick Pharaoh’s ass. What we didn’t know at the time was that Moses would later join the NRA, and advocate for Christian marksmanship for the next generation of saints and martyrs of the church. I too, would later, not only become a Lutheran minister but would also become a certified professional marksman (NRA) by the time I was twelve. Art can, in fact, imitate life - or is it the other way around? And, that is precisely why Hollywood perpetuates (reenacts) Christian myths, not because they are interested in the moral teachings of the stories, the transcendent spiritual truths of the symbols, or the spiritual power of the metaphors but rather because they know only too well, how many millions of Americans are afflicted by the disease of religious fundamentalism. For thousands of years human beings have been reenacting their religious myths through ritual and dramatic performance. There is nothing new about that. We also enact stories, plays, fables, as well as historical events. The problem is that film lends itself to a literal belief in myth. Film makes the stories that Hollywood tells us seem real. They make us believe these things really happened once upon a time; or

87 yesterday in New York. We suspend our disbelief and loose ourselves in the magic of cinema. Movies are powerful and they can be both deceptive and emotionally manipulative. “Don’t cry; it’s only a movie.” Have you ever had the unfortunate experience of going to the movies with someone (usually a man) who is constantly criticizing the movie for its historical inaccuracies; it’s quite annoying and indicative of a lack of imagination, on behalf of the critic. After all, most people understand that, “it’s not supposed to be real, it’s supposed to be a movie, and not a documentary - relax and enjoy it. Use your imagination.” The cinema encourages us to suspend our disbeliefs, and to lose ourselves in the imagination of “as if.” And that is precisely the problem with fundamentalists. They have no imagination. They have lost their ability for, “as if.” They have forgotten how to suspend their literal belief, and so have lost the ability to play and have fun; and with that loss, also comes the loss of a true religious consciousness.

It is inevitable that children should be taught in purely concrete terms. But then, the child grows up and realizes who Santa Claus is. He is really Daddy. So, too, we must grow in the same way in learning about God, and the institutional churches must grow in presenting the message of the symbols to adults. —Joseph Campbell

For many viewers, instead of Noah being a really cool movie, full of visual effects and weird animals, they will experience the film as an historical reenactment of a real event in ancient times. However, they will receive little help from their churches in trying to get to the real truth of this powerful myth.

An Alternative Interpretation of the Story

Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies. —Joseph Campbell

I remember as a child and even into my early adulthood, hearing of various mountaineering expeditions whose goal was to try to find remnants of the ark itself. Like mounting an expedition to discover a pot of gold at the end of rainbow, or searching for unicorns in the forest, the ark, an obvious mythic symbol, has been reified into a fact. And so, once again, with Hollywood’s help, we are in the process of once again relegating religious consciousness into the realm of the infantile nursery. Let me suggest another, interesting, and historically probable interpretation of the story of Noah’s Ark. This interpretation comes from a book by the name of The White Goddess- A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth written in 1948 by the poet, novelist, and perhaps greatest mythologist of the 20th century, Robert Graves. At the end of this esoteric and massive work, Graves is speaking of the distinction between what he calls, “the ancient intuitive language of poetry,” and the more “modern rational language of prose, universally current.” He speaks of a friend of his who is Bishop in the Anglican Church who is “complaining that a majority of reactionary bishops

89 would like to insist on a literal belief of even in the stories of Noah’s Ark and Jonah’s whale.” Graves writes:

The Bishop is right to deplore the way in which these venerable religious symbols have been misinterpreted for didactic reasons; and to deplore still more the church’s perpetuation of fables as literal truths. . . . The story of the ark is probably derived from an Asiatic icon in which the solar spirit of the solar year is shown in a moon-ship, going through his habitual New year changes- bull, lion, snake and so on; and the story of the Whale from a similar icon showing the same Spirit being swallowed at the end of the year by the Moon-and-Sea goddess, represents as a sea-monster.

In other words, the story of the Ark is a story coming to us from the realm of astral-theology. A story that ancient people would tell one another sitting around campfires looking at the night sky and imaging the stars, the planets, the moon and sun as actors in a great cosmic play. A drama that each year renewed itself with the coming of the winter solstice. A drama not only about the God’s but also providing clues how you and I can live in harmony with this cosmic order, which mystifies, beautifies, unifies, and guides our life on earth. Now doesn’t this interpretation make more sense, and doesn’t it make the story much more interesting than literally believing in the historic truth of religious metaphors?

A Final Thought

Mona Lisa’s and Mad Hatters, sons of bankers, sons of lawyers; turn around and say good morning to the night; for they cannot see the sky; they can’t and that is why; they know not if it’s dark outside or light. —Elton John

We might not be able to find the ark on the top of Mount Ararat; however, we may still discover its reality by seeking its eternal voyage in the beauty of the night sky. But of course, one must be able to see the night sky, in order to understand the true meaning of these mythic voyages. Perhaps that is why a country of such advanced weaponry, technology and communication systems, as ours, can still perpetuate the absurdities of a literal belief in religious metaphors; not because we are particularly foolish but rather because we have simply lost our way among the stars.

✥ Medusa Madness By Janet Bubar Rich, PhD

Medusa Is Alive A pop culture icon that has snaked her way into the world of contemporary fashion, with her hairy hats and emblematic belt buckles, as well as a plethora of hero tales, YouTubes, video games, movies, and visual arts, the mythic Medusa is broadcasted and revered as both a monster and a hero. The gorgon lives on in our psyche and culture, not because Athena transformed her lovely curls into hissing serpents making her so frightful that those who look upon her are turned to stone, nor because Perseus decapitates her. She is hailed not for her hideousness, but rather her triumph. Medusa’s image has emerged as a shield for women to wear for protection, as a symbol of power, fearlessness, and rage. From images of the serpent-haired Medusa as the serpent-goddess of the Libyan Amazons, representing female wisdom, to an ugly bulging-eyed Greek gorgon, to a beautiful young maiden with magnificent long hair that she flaunts in front of Athena, to Poseidon’s lover, to the mother of the winged-horse Pegasus and warrior Chrysaor, Medusa’s image is multifaceted and prismatic. Much like cutting images from dark material and mounting each on a window glass to see the form that defines itself against the daylight, this paper investigates the many versions of Medusa’s myth in a quest to grasp who she is and her meaning for us today.

Medusa’s Imprint Images of Medusa, the guardian or protector, are easily found in museums all over the world, in such wide-ranging art forms as mosaics from ancient Greek and Roman sites to paintings by such notable artists as Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens, Pablo Picasso, and Auguste Rodin. In Boston, for example, in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with its luscious garden adorned with tropical plants and flowers, there is a 16-square foot Roman mosaic of Medusa’s head. Notably, near Medusa’s head are such mythic figures as Persephone and Artemis who appear to have been frozen by her gaze. Boston is also the home of Boston College which has The Laughing Medusa, a women's literary and arts journal filled with essays intended to promote dialogue. Additionally, the Boston “Medusa” Fern, a popular house plant with short curved fronds, looks much like Medusa’s snake hair. Weaving her way through our psyche, the original Dungeons & Dragons game series includes the character of Medusa as a hateful creature who tries to trick humans into looking in her eyes, causing them to turn to stone. Also, in the 2012 Grammy Awards, Medusa made quite a splash as Ms. Minaj turned up dressed as Little Red Riding Hood in a red Versace cape, emblazoned with Versace’s Medusa logo. Variously portrayed as a monster and a protective symbol, Medusa is very much alive in our time and place. Since myths change with each teller and listener, Medusa has many variants, some of which follow.

The Many Faces of Medusa In the Greek myth as told by Michael Grant and John Hazel in Who’s Who in Classical Mythology (146-147), Medusa (ruler or queen) and her sisters, Stheno (strength) and Euryale (wide leaping) are daughters of the sea dwellers, Phorcys and Ceto. The Gorgons, or three creatures of the frightening aspect, live by the ocean’s shore; all but Medusa are immortal. Stories differ regarding the appearance of the Gorgons. Some say they were beautiful and that Athena gave Perseus the power to kill Medusa for her boasting that her beauty surpassed that of her own. Some depict them as so hideous, with serpentine hair, beards, and boar tusks, that a glimpse of them, at least of Medusa, would turn anyone to stone. Medusa is taken by Poseidon to Athena’s temple where she is impregnated by him and then slaughtered by Perseus. From her dripping blood or corpse, Pegasus and Chrysaor are born. Following her decapitation, her head is given to Athena by Perseus to use as a breastplate; however, there is also a story that Athena buries the head in the city marketplace to protect the city in case of war. In a version by Thomas Bulfinch in Bulfinch’s Mythology (115- 118), the Graeae, or gray-maids, and the Gorgons, or monstrous females with huge swine-like teeth, brazen claws, and snaky hair, are personifications of sea terrors with billows and white-crested waves. In this version, Perseus, son of Zeus and Danae, has a grandfather, Acrisius, who is forewarned that his daughter's child will kill him. Therefore, Acrisius causes Perseus and his mother to be shut inside a chest and sent out to sea. A fisherman finds them and takes them to King Polydectes to live. When Perseus grows up, Polydectes sends him

94 to conquer Medusa, a terrible monster who had caused destruction to his country. According to this story, Medusa is originally a beautiful young woman whose crowning glory is her magnificent long hair, but because she flaunts it in front of Athena, the goddess steals her charms and transforms her lovely ringlets into hissing serpents. As a result, Medusa becomes a monster and frightful aspect so cruel that no living thing can look at her without being turned into stone. Perseus, favored by Athena and Hermes, the former of whom lent him her shield and the latter, his winged shoes, approaches Medusa while she sleeps and, being careful not to look directly at her, but guided by her image reflected in the bright shield which he carries, cuts off her head and gives it to Athena, who centers it on her shield. After beheading Medusa, Perseus takes Medusa’s head to the distant realm of King Atlas from whom he requests food and shelter. When his requests are denied, Perseus holds up the Gorgon's head turning Atlas’ bulk into stone which grows into a mountain and, to the gods’ delight, heaven with all its stars comes to rest upon his shoulders. Perseus then uses Medusa's head to win other battles, which include the rescue of Andromeda. When Medusa is decapitated, the magical horse Pegasus emerges from the blood and, caught and tamed by Athena, is taken to Mount Helicon to be raised by the Muses. There, muses’ songs fill the mountain with ecstasy, causing it to rise to the heavens until Poseidon commands Pegasus to kick his hoof, stopping the mountain's upward progress and causing Fountain of Hippocrene to spring forth, unleashing the Muses’ sacred Spring.

In a version by Pierre Grimal in The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology (342-343), Perseus’ mother, Danae, bears him in secret, but his grandfather, hearing his cry, throws the mother and son into a chest that is sent out to sea to be found by a fisherman who comes to take care of them. When the fisherman’s brother, King Polydectes, demonstrates a passion for Danae, Persues seeks to protect his mother from him. At a king’s party, when asked what gift he will bring to the king, Perseus responds that he will bring him Medusa’s head, to which the king asserts that if he does not come through, he will take Danae by force. With the help of Athena and Hermes who send him to the Graeaes and the Nympths, Perseus, with winged sandals, a pouch, and the helmet of Hades to make him invisible, sets out to behead Medusa. Perseus approaches the Gorgons and, while Athena holds up a mirror-like shield through which he can view Medusa, he beheads her. From Medusa’s neck springs forth the winged-horse Pegasus and giant Chrysaor. Then, Perseus heads for home. The Gorgons chase him but are unable to catch him, for his magic cap makes him invisible. Eventually King Polydectes tries to rape Danae, and Perseus holds up Medusa’s head, turning the king to stone. At that point, Athena sets the head in the middle of her shield. In Robert Graves’ variant of the myth as told in his book, The Greek Myths (17, 124), Perseus, described as the destroyer, flies through the air and decapitates Medusa, mother of Pegasus. Pegasus, with wings that are symbolic of a celestial nature rather than speed, had been sacred to the Gorgon for his moon-shaped hooves that played a role in rain-making ceremonies and the installment of sacred kings.

This story offers that Medusa was once a goddess who hid behind a hideous Gorgon mask to protect her mysteriousness. When Perseus beheads Medusa, he strips her of her Gorgon mask and steals her sacred steeds. Additionally, there is the variation that all the Gorgons were once beautiful. Lying with Poseidon one night in the temple of Athena, Medusa is changed by the goddess into a serpent-haired winged monster whose gaze turns people to stone. When Perseus decapitates the monster, Pegasus and Chrysaor pour out, and Athena attaches the head to her own shield that some say had been made of Medusa’s skin. In a reflection or commentary by Jane Cahill in her book entitled, Her Kind: Stories of Women from Greek Mythology (69), Medusa and her sisters, Stheno and Euryale are Gorgons born to Phorcys and Ceto, a sea god and sea monster. Though they are said to have had swines’ tusks, bulging eyes, snakes for hair, and lolling tongues, Medusa is so beautiful that Poseidon falls in love with her. When Medusa lays with Poseidon in Athena’s sacred grove, Athena becomes enraged and, as revenge, makes Medusa so vile that anyone who sees her is turned to stone. Medusa’s immortal sisters are so distraught that the serpents of their hair are to forever hiss in lamentation. In this version, Medusa is famous not in life, but in death: (1) as the object of Perseus’ quest to decapitate her, (2) with the winged-horse Pegasus and warrior Chrysaor emerging from her mutilated body, and (3) her head becoming a weapon first for Perseus and then Athena, as it is put on her shield for her protection, to turn its onlookers to stone. In her book entitled, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (620), Barbara G. Walker’s Medusa with serpent-hair is “the

97 serpent-goddess of the Libyan Amazons, representing ‘female wisdom’ [Sanskrit medha, Greek metis, Egyptian met or Maat].” She is the Destroyer aspect of the Triple Goddess called Athene in North Africa and is revered as the “mother of all the gods, whom she bore before childbirth existed.” She is Death and to see her face is to “be turned to stone” or to die. Another way to understand her face as a taboo is to appreciate that she represents the dreaded and widely misconstrued menstrual blood. Medusa’s serpent-hair and wise blood are symbols of divine wisdom and power. From Medusa’s many myths, observers would be led to believe that she was either a beautiful maiden with thick luscious curls, or a serpent-haired, bulging-eyed witch-like creature so hideous in appearance that a mere glance at her could petrify them. Yet many people, particularly women, see in Medusa’s image a unique strength (Paris 199) and wear her face as a shield for protection, hoping to bear the courage of her hair-serpents’ wisdom to move toward the fulfillment of their own unique dreams. All the versions seem to agree that any living being that looks at Medusa’s gaze is turned into stone. In considering the power and meaning of Medusa’s myths and images today, the question might be asked: What does it mean for onlookers to be turned into stone? Is it a transformation into a dead figurine or statue, or something else? What do stones represent in mythology and depth psychology?

Reflecting on Stones From a Jungian perspective, a stone represents the eternal, inalterable, and, perhaps, the deepest and simplest experience a person

98 can have, removed from emotions, feelings, fantasies, and ego- consciousness. A polished stone, like a mirror, can symbolize the power of the unconscious to reflect the individual objectively, presenting a view that the individual may never have seen before. For it is only through the unconscious that such a view, that often shocks and awakens the conscious mind, can be obtained (Jung and von Franz, Man 217). A living philosophical stone is an integrated and centered state of being that occurs when one stops running away, a state of happiness and contentment accomplished by removing symbolic snakes that run in opposite directions (like Medusa’s hair) to form instead symmetry (Jung, Dreams 220-222). In the Greek myth, the Gorgon can be seen only in a mirror which, from a Jungian perspective, is a tool for providing the intellect with reflections or insights that inspire or provoke the individuation process (188-189).

Medusa in Pop Culture The snake-haired Medusa’s petrifying image is instantly recognizable in popular culture. She has been featured in several works of fiction, videogames, movies, and books. In particular, the world of the Italian designer Gianni Versace is reflected in the Medusa-head symbol that is ornamented in typically Greek fashion. Versace chose Medusa not only because she epitomizes the beauty found in Greek art and philosophy, but a kind of beauty with a wild side that is captivating. Born in South Italy, Gianni Versace was aware of the Greek heritage of the area, where classical tradition mixes with the unique and the simple. Versace found inspiration for trend-setting designs from

99 this classical heritage. So, Versace’s Medusa remains endlessly fascinating. In the summer of 1993, with Gianni Versace's reputation as a designer and his overall influence on pop culture near their all-time high, his domestic life was in shambles. That year, flush with new money, Miami became a multicultural center of style, hedonism, and danger. Into this atmosphere Gianni Versace settled, buying a mansion that he restored lavishly at great expense. His home, which had been named “Casa Casuarina” by its original owners after a Somerset Maugham story, had as its emblem Medusa, who Gianni Versace saw as a misunderstood “bad girl” with a wild serpent hairdo. In 1997, however, Gianni Versace was murdered on the steps of Casa Casuarina. His sister, Donatella Versace, who became the fashion company’s chief designer, revived the Medusa image, showcasing it above a runway in Milan at a show of men's wear. For nearly a decade, Donatella Versace became the Italian fashion world's misunderstood “bad girl” as she struggled to save both the troubled company after her brother’s death, and her own life while wrestling with drug addiction, making the Medusa-logo—with the wild hair pointing in many directions—a perfect fit. Versace attracted many fans. Among them was Elton John, a long- time wearer of Versace fashions. Elton wore a black Versace suit with the Versace-medusa symbol on the back of his jacket during his 1999- 2000 Solo Tour. The late 1990s was a time of personal tragedy for Elton, with the loss of his good friends: both the fashion designer Gianni Versace and Diana, Princess of Wales. In honor of his murdered friend, he began wearing Versace's Medusa logo on his back as he launched his renowned Medusa tour.

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Medusa’s Meaning Today Medusa, who has been threaded into our culture in books, paintings, films, fashion, gaming, mosaics, and more, remains strong in our psyche. Like many images, whether from the past or imagined, Medusa has energy that mythic references can awaken. The snake- haired goddess from Greek mythology, a beautiful woman who turns monstrous, has become associated with serpent wisdom. Serpents and snakes symbolize power. As they slither through myths, they often represent the forces of darkness associated with the earth and the sea. Able to curl themselves into circles, they symbolize the cyclic character of the universe. With their venom, they symbolize death and destruction, while their ability to shed their skins represents renewal and resurrection (Andrews 176). Male phallic symbols, serpents and snakes are associated with female pregnancies. A life- giving force that enables sap to run from the roots to the crowns of trees, serpents are associated with mother-goddesses, such as Isis who wears a cobra on her forehead indicating her identification with the divine. Today, Versace has made it easy for women to simply wear a Medusa-logo belt or cap, so popular in today’s fashion scene, to petrify those who might violate them, as women continue to strive to achieve safe and satisfying lives for themselves and their loved ones. Finally, facing their Medusa or monster within themselves and their culture, not with a focus on their external beauty or ugliness but on their inner strengths with serpent wisdom, perhaps women will be able to help restore Medusa to the enchanting maiden she once was in ancient Greece, according to some tellers and listeners. Wearing a Medusa

101 shield, or earring, and harnessing Medusa power within themselves, they may be able to live with dignity and help restore and sustain harmony among humans.

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Works Cited

Andrews, Tamra. Dictionary of Nature Myths. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Bulfinch, Thomas. Bulfinch’s Mythology Including the Complete Texts of The Age of Fable, The Age of Chivalry, The Legends of Charlemagne. New Jersey: Gramercy, 1979. Print. Cahill, Jane. Her Kind: Stories of Women from Greek Mythology. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1987. Print. Grant, Michael, and John Hazel. Who’s Who in Classical Mythology. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths, Complete Edition. London: Penguin, 1955. Print. Grimal, Pierre. The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology. Trans. A.R. Maxwell-Hyslop. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1991. Print. Hillman, James. Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Print. Jung, Carl G. Dreams. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. Bollingen Series XX. Princeton: UP, 1974. Print. Jung, Carl G., and Marie-Louise von Franz, eds. Man and His Symbols. New York: Random House, 1964. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale, England: Penguin, 1961. Print. Paris, Genette. Pagan Meditations. Trans. G. Moore. Dallas, Texas: Spring, 1986. Print. Walker, Barbara G. The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. New York: HarperCollins, 1983. Print.

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✥ Alchemy’s Lunar Light By Susan Paidhrin, PhD

The tides of human history pendulum back and forth down through the long millennia, moving slowly from one locus to another, at each extreme evolving certain human capacities while inevitably suppressing others. The strengths and abilities that are valorized at one pole throw their seeming opposites into shadow, never lost, but hovering nearby just below the horizon. Much of the narrative of our current epoch centers around exploring and advancing human consciousness with a focus on reason, the development of the individual and the slow and conflicted rise of democracy and universal human rights. Mythologically, we can call those things that form this conscious hub solar, and those things that slip into the shadow lunar. Since the eighteenth century, the solar spotlight has taken the form of scientific materialism, while the more intuitive, poetic, feeling and body-oriented ways of knowing have fallen into the lunar light. Alchemy is one such lunar system of consciousness. Alchemy had fallen into shadow and disrepute, although it is again rising into daylight thanks in large measure to C. G. Jung who made it the foundation stone of his psychology. Once including the science that has since occulted it, alchemy’s buried treasures are slowly being revived and re-imagined, bringing the current dominant worldview into more balance and wholeness. This essay will outline some of alchemy’s contours showing its differences from the dominant paradigm’s linear

104 and abstract view with an eye towards creating a model that brings a new synthesis of both. A full history of psyche in the Western world differs from the exoteric historical record. All along, a quiet esoteric stream, beautifully articulated in the various Western mystery schools, and here specifically in alchemy, has compensated the mainstream view. The outer history of Western civilization has largely been the story of the heroic ego claiming dominion over the forces of nature. This view idealizes humanity’s passage from a savage simian past into a glorious bionic future, with man conquering nature, perhaps even death, through science and rationality. This narrative is the product of Cartesian positivism and is tacitly upheld by the majority monotheistic traditions. When the ego seeks to conquer nature, however, and props itself up with an illusory sense of immortality—however hounded by a strong unconscious awareness of its inevitable annihilation—the ego grows dangerous and titanic. It operates like the unfiltered sun at noontime, one-sided, blinding the eye with rationalized spirit and discursive reason. On the other hand, when the hero journeys courageously into the darkness and chaos of nature and aligns with the larger forces of psyche and spirit, the ego becomes proportionate and balanced. Alchemy is one system presenting this second view. Clues to alchemy’s core reside in its etymology. In Jung and the Alchemical Imagination Jeffrey Raff explains that “The term alchemy itself comes from two roots: al, which is Arabic for ‘the’, and ‘chemeia’” (xii). The Greek language has two terms potentially relating to alchemy, “chemeia and chymia” (xii). Raff amplifies: “The former refers to the process of extracting juice, while the later has to do with

105 deriving metals from ore” (xii). Both of these definitions suggest processes of extracting essences. Alchemy describes the transformation of minerals originating in the earth. Additionally, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, alchemy is an art derived from the Egyptian word for Egypt (khem or khmi) meaning “black earth” in contrast to red earth and the color of the surrounding desert (53). Resonate with Egypt’s black earth, alchemical processes often start in the nigredo or blackness. Alchemy emerges in the imaginations of people from all parts of the earth and from all times of history. One could argue that processes of alchemy surface from deep archetypes that undergird all indigenous, Eastern and Western cultures. Stanislas Klossowski de Rola reports in Alchemy: The Secret Art, “at one time or another, sometimes in turn and sometimes simultaneously, Chinese, Indians, Egyptians, Greeks and Arabs have practiced the art” (10). Alchemy is an art and science that originates in the imagination rather than reason and expresses its truths in poetic images. Although polar to the solar Western perspective, alchemy has within itself both exoteric and esoteric poles. Science initially inhered within alchemy and many early scientists and physicians, such as Roger Bacon, Paracelsus, Isaac Newton, John Dee, Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galileo, and Johannes Kepler, to name a few, were alchemists and astrologers. De Rola suggests that medieval alchemists intuitively grasped many of the properties of matter that contemporary scientists are only beginning to theorize: “the old alchemists possessed a knowledge of the structure of matter and its properties far exceeding in refinement that of today's atom-smashers” (19). Through its

106 investigations, modern science is demonstrating and harvesting insights that were intuited earlier with alchemy’s imaginative eye. On its surface, alchemy deals with the transmutation of base elements into gold. The material side of this science sought to turn the prima materia – often the element lead – through chemical processes into the most prized and valuable element, gold. Psychologically, this transmutation centers around bringing the hidden core self and the common personality into union. Raff describes this as the process of awakening and developing the “latent self” into the “manifest self” (212). When the self is manifest, an individual becomes what in alchemy is called the stone, “confident and self-contained,” stabilized, “as if nothing could shake it or move it off its moorings” (227). Raff likens this transformation to Jung’s concept of individuation (7), a process or journey that ultimately brings the small individual “I” into conscious realization and incarnation of the “All”. Edinger concurs with Raff’s view, writing: "Taken as a whole, alchemy provides a kind of anatomy of individuation" (2). James Hillman iterates how thoroughly alchemy has penetrated Jung's psychology, reporting that “A good third of Jung's writings are directly or tangentially concerned with alchemy” (“Silver and the White Earth, Part I” 30). Alchemy was a revelation to Jung, a multivalent expression of psyche that circumscribed psyche’s complexity and magnificence. Raff explains that in alchemy Jung found “the psyche's description of itself and of its own transformation. Moreover, he discovered a Western path towards enlightenment” (210). Like Jung’s psychology, alchemy is as much an art as a science, primarily speaking of psyche’s extraordinary wealth in poetic

107 metaphors and images. In his article “Alchemy” Stanton Marlon illustrates:

Jung's imagination was captured by the ideas and metaphors of alchemy, with its dragons, suffering matter, peacock's tail, alembics and athanors, its red and green lions, kings and queens, fishes' eyes and inverted philosophical trees, salamanders and hermaphrodites; its black suns and white earth, and its metals—lead, silver and gold; its colours—black, white, yellow and red; and its distillations and coagulations and rich array of Latin terms. (271)

Alchemy is called the opus contra naturam. Although alchemy is rooted in nature’s very messy and visceral processes, it is a science and art that seeks to alter the flow and timing of the outcomes of nature through the addition of human consciousness. As Edinger writes, it is “a process begun by nature but requiring the conscious art and effort of a human being to complete” (Anatomy of the Psyche 9). Jung shares this view in Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

There the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to me. “What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects,” say the alchemists. Man, I, in an invisible act of creation put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence. (255-256)

Christian theology has often posed this human intervention as a monstrous violation and inflation. De Rola describes the opus contra naturam of human consciousness as an act of hubris and “a crime against Nature, an act of violence against the instinctual realms, an assault on primordial chaos” (40).

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Consciousness, however, can also be seen as a pinnacle of nature’s evolution, and, as Titus Burckhardt clarifies, “‘nature’ develops all the capacities hidden in the soul, against or in keeping with the desires or the ego” (Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul 118). Unlike the metaphysics which have dominated Western theology, alchemy begins in nature; it's movements begin from down and in, rather than from up and out. Burckhardt writes, “The model for the alchemical work is nature” (115). Yet, even in this, nature is not idealized: Burckhardt also acknowledges her dark side, writing, “Nature is also in her terrible aspect as the Great Dragon which roams through all things” (118). Alchemy's broad body is hospitable to the shadowy, the dark, the unconscious—all perspectives Jung championed. Alchemy works within the totality of nature. One alchemical symbol for the larger circle of life is the uroboros, the serpent with “stars on its head and a black body” (von Franz, Alchemy: An Introduction 116), biting its own tail and framing an unending circle. Raff explains that the uroboros “represents the unity of all life as it manifests in time. It was thus eternal movement and development” (121). Jung writes that “the uroboros” also symbolizing the “divine water” represents “nothing less than the deus absconditus, the god hidden in matter” (“The Visions of Zosimos,” CW 13: 138). Alchemy wraps the feminine, serpentine and recursive patterns of nature around a telos or aim that can only find its end in the conscious realization of its beginning. However, even in this eternally returning cycle, alchemy’s goal is salvific. In his article “Alchemy” Stanton Marlon writes that alchemy has two aims, “the rescue of the human

109 soul and the salvation of the cosmos” (270). The vision is of the unus mundus, the cosmos realized. Yet, inevitably this completion is partial, relative, forever a dream that fuels the work, the opus. As Jung writes, “Complete redemption from the sufferings of this world is and must remain an illusion” (“The Psychology of the Transference,” CW 16: 400). The uroboros represents the wholeness of life, whereas the dragon, arising in dual form, represents latent or unregenerate life on the one hand, and purified and transformed life on the other. Raff explains, “As Jung indicated, the dragon is both the beginning and end of the work” (99). The dragon represents the original “material that, through successive changes and transmutations, becomes the stone” (99). Depending on its development and consciousness, the dragon’s blood can be either the poisonous brew or the elixir of immortality. Nature is not simply dark, opaque, material, but rather carries its own light, the lumen naturae, which Jung, quoting from the Astronomia magna, explains in this way: “‘Nothing can be in man unless it has been given to him by the Light of Nature, and what is in the Light of Nature has been brought by the stars’” (“Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon,” CW 13: 148). In this view, the lumen naturae is star-stuff; the vault of the heavens extends into the natural cosmos. Jung continues, “The light of nature is the quinta essentia, extracted by God himself from the four elements” and provides a gnosis that is “an intuitive apprehension of the facts, a kind of illumination” (148). Noetic understanding inheres in nature. Our rational minds need not conquer nature, but rather must realize her. When imagined and

110 experienced this way, nature becomes spiritualized and the spirit embodied; nature is no longer an object for humankind’s domination. The lumen naturae is imagined as flowing oceans of sparkling lights, an inner firmament aglow like the stars in the sky. Edinger describes Jung's use of the word scintillae to designate “the sparks shining in the darkness” (The Mysterium Lectures 58). He writes:

All these little sparks of divine fiery ether that were scattered about in the earth were thought of as expressions of the anima mundi, the world- soul, which permeated not only organic beings but also inorganic matter. (61)

All the things of the world, both living and inorganic, are the soul of the earth here imaged as the light contained in and animating them. Jung writes that these scintillae are the “fiery centre of the earth” (“The Paradoxa,” CW 14: 43). In alchemy, fire is a “spiritual force of hidden or occult power” (Raff 139), the soul-force or libido that, as Hillman writes in “Concerning the Stone” acts as “a cosmic erotic dynamics that permeates the world because it loves the world of matter” (260). The alchemist cultivates this inner fire, increasing it with the fire applied through the athanor or furnace. The goal of alchemy is the production of the lapis, the transformation of the common stone into the lapis philosophorum or philosopher’s stone. Edinger writes that this sacred work is called the opus, the “central image of alchemy” (Anatomy of the Psyche 4), and requires “a religious attitude” (5). The alchemist cannot be just the rational scientist, but must also be the devotional priest. Raff’s latent self is a seed that is watered and nurtured by the alchemist into the

111 manifest self or lapis. As Hillman writes, “The alchemical lapis was considered a ripened metal, a seed that had been brought to maturity by the opus; it was the made soul” (251). The philosopher's stone is also the “elixir of life, or universal medicine” (Edinger 9), either synonymous with or able to create “the body of resurrection, the eternal subtle body through which the power of death is broken forever” (Raff 234). This transformation illuminates what Jung calls a Western path of enlightenment (Jung, “The Conjunction” CW 14: 771). Eliade likens the goal of the alchemist to that of the yogi in The Forge and the Crucible:

Indeed the hatha-yogis and the Tantrists aim to transmute their bodies into incorruptible ones, which they call “divine body” (divya-deha), “body of gnosis” (jñãna-deha), “perfect body” (siddha-deha) or, in other contexts, the body of “the one delivered in life” (jĩvan-mukta). (129)

The opus is a circular process that is never finished, horizontally cycling around and around an axis without vertical limits. A bit of the philosopher's stone is already present in the prima materia, as a seed, guiding its development. Burckhardt writes, “the prima materia of the alchemists is thus both the origin and the fruit of the work” (105). Wherever an alchemist starts, that beginning place is the prima materia, or original matter. And just as alchemy can start anywhere and with anything, so can anyone be an alchemist. Alchemy is democratic, equally accessible to the mighty or lowly: As Johannes Fabricius writes, “The alchemical work is offered to king and beggar alike since its ‘material’ is present in everybody” (Alchemy 16).

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Every process in alchemy has many names and descriptors because each appearance is singular, particular, and carries its own nuance. The prima materia is alternately called the aqua permanens, “the unformed water of life” (von Franz, Alchemy 174), and the massa confusa, “a composite, a confused mixture of undifferentiated and contrary components requiring a process of separation” (Edinger, The Anatomy of the Psyche 184). Dirt, filth, feces, and rotting matter are all images of the prima materia. Edinger writes: “Although of great inward value, the prima materia is vile in outer appearance and therefore despised, rejected, and thrown on the dung heap” (12). No part of life or nature is without worth, and all ends can be beginnings, or new prima materia. Modern solar consciousness prioritizes the charismatic, the wealthy, the beautiful; in alchemy, even the most wretched is valued. What is there in the beginning as the prima materia transforms in the end into the lapis, transmuted through vision and love. In The Myth of Analysis Hillman explains that “Love blinds only the usual outlook; it opens a new way of perceiving, because one can be fully revealed only to the sight of love” (90). The alchemical opus transforms the perceiver, so that the disgusting prima materia is illumined from within and is seen in a wholly new light. Robin van Löben Sels expresses this transformation in A Dream in the World:

In such a transformed consciousness, while nothing may change, everything is different. The dream-in-the-world has happened. Enlightenment or awakening becomes understood not as the creation of a new state of affairs but as the recognition and acceptance of what already is. (206)

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Transformation happens in alchemy through successive applications of separation and union, in the Latin called separatio and coniunctio. These lunar processes are much different from the solar application of analysis, logic and measurement. They are not rational, but parallel the chemical processes in nature and are cyclic rather than linear. Separatio is the first essential step in creation. Through separation the alchemist encounters the four elements: water, fire, air and earth, each with their own operations and elaborated symbol systems. The original massa confusa of the prima materia, which can be anything from the poisonous aqua permanens to simply a confused emotional state, must be differentiated and broken down before it can be transformed and shaped by creativity. Raff explains that separatio and coniunctio are the two basic operations in alchemy and are also called solve et coagule, or dissolve and coagulate: “Alchemy proceeded by separation and reunification, solve et coagule, a procedure that might be repeated many times” (xxi). These operations serve the alchemical opus by transforming churning chaos into successively more refined forms. Burckhardt writes: “[the alchemist] dissolves the imperfect coagulations of the soul, reduces the latter to its materia, and crystallizes it a new in a nobler form” (123). The prima materia can be dissolved either through liquification, called solutio or liquifactio, or by burning, called calcinatio. Solutio is a water operation where a solid is turned into a liquid; calcinatio is a fire operation where a solid is turned into ash (Raff xxi). In “Concerning the Stone” Hillman explains the aim of solutio: “The solutio [ . . . ] affects the stone by reducing all of its parts into consistent and equalized homogeneity” (252). Edinger amplifies that

114 calcinatio, likewise, reduces the prima materia into a homogenous purified substance: “The fire of calcinatio is a purging, whitening fire. It acts on the black stuff, the nigredo, and turns it white” (Anatomy of the Psyche 20). The prima materia that has been dissolved is then either vaporized as liquid into a volatile gas, or taken as ash up into the air by winds. Either as vapor or ash, it rises up through the air operation called sublimatio. Sublimatio is a purifying and elevating process, as Edinger illumines, “whereby a low substance is translated into a higher form by an ascending movement” (117). Sublimatio has a reciprocal effect on matter and spirit. Jung writes, “By sublimating matter he [the alchemist] concretized spirit” (“The Conjunction,” CW 14: 764). Coagulatio is the second half of the alchemical maxim solve et coagule: that which has been dissolved must then be reunited, or re- coagulated. Further, that which has been differentiated and then spiritualized, must then be given body or form. Coagulatio is the earth operation, and as Edinger explains, “is often equated with creation” (84). Coagulatio is alternately called fixatio, which Jung writes is an essential quality of the stone and stabilized consciousness:

The “fixation” refers alchemically to the lapis but psychologically to the consolidation of feeling. The distillae must be fixed and held fast, must become a firm conviction and a permanent content. (“Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon,” CW 13: 222)

The processes of alchemy must be contained, and successive coagulations provide temporary containers, while the alchemist him or herself intensifies the process in the alchemical vessel, alternately

115 called the alembic or vas hermeticum which prevents leakage and allows the processes to go forward with concentration. These four elemental operations happen over and over again, in the long opus towards the perfection or completion of creation. Titus Burckhardt explains the successive processes:

In the world of forms Nature's “mode of operation” consists of a continuous rhythm of “dissolutions” and “coagulations”, or of disintegrations and formations, so that dissolution of any formal entity is but the preparation for a new conjunction between a forma and its materia. (123)

They are called “lesser” and “greater”; the former is more temporary and conditional, the latter more final and completing. Edinger explains “lesser” and “greater” in the context of sublimatio:

The lesser sublimatio must always be followed by a descent, whereas the greater sublimatio is a culminating process, the final translation into eternity that which has been created in time. (140)

Burckhardt calls these cyclic rounds the “‘unrollings’ and ‘rollings’ of Nature” and states that they are represented by the image of “the double spiral” (130). In psychological terms, these successive rounds all serve to unite unconscious and conscious contents, and “Through the process of circulation,” order the many differing aspects of the psyche “around a common center” (Raff, Jung and the Alchemical Imagination 125). All of the alchemical operations fit within three basic movements or developments: the blackening or nigredo; the whitening or albedo; and the reddening or rubedo. There are dozens of operations in 116 alchemy with the seven most basic being “calcinatio, solutio, coagulatio, sublimatio, mortifactio, separatio, and coniunctio” (Edinger, The Anatomy of the Psyche 14). All of these operations relate to one or more movements of the black, the white or the red. Although these movements and operations are presented as a progression, in truth, they can occur in any order, combination, or even happen simultaneously. Hillman writes of this in Anima:

There is not merely a coincidentia oppositorum but a coincidence of processes. All phases at once: no first and last, better and worse, progression and regression. Instead, soul history as a series of images, superimposed. (25)

The blackening or nigredo correlates most commonly with the operations of separatio and the solutio. The nigredo is filled with imagery of the black earth, the prima materia, death and dissolution. In The Myth of Analysis Hillman calls the blackening “soul-destroying”: “Alchemy gives a series of images for the soul-destroying parts of the opus: mortification, sacrifice, putrefaction, fermentation, torture, and dismemberment” (37). The nigredo includes the two darkest operations: mortificatio and putrefactio, both of which are part of separatio. Mortificatio “literally means ‘killing’” and therefore corresponds directly with death (Edinger 147). Putrefactio means “‘rotting,’” and has to do with the dissolving or solutio that occurs through decay and “the decomposition that breaks down dead organic matter” (148). The blackening corresponds to the Christian “dark night of the soul, and during its stage something important dies, hopefully to be reborn at a new level.

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The whitening or albedo corresponds to the operation of sublimatio, but is prefigured already in the white ash of the calcinatio. Edinger explains that the whitening is “an elevating process whereby a low substance is translated into a higher form by an ascending movement” (117). All symbols or images of ascent such as rising air, clouds, mountains, birds (Raff 122), as well as images of the soul and spirit are representative of the whitening. Hillman writes that the albedo is an act against nature: “To make white the heart is an opus contra naturam” (Thought of the Heart 69). What is a loss for the instincts, however, is a gain for the soul. In the albedo, the soul and spirit rise out of the dead body to refine and purify before re-entering the body at a different stage of development. The realms of mind and spirit are developed in the albedo; reason, morality, virtue and discipleship rule. The final movement corresponding to the three colors is the reddening or the rubedo. The rubedo relates to the operation of coagulatio and represents the stage when the refined and developed soul and spirit return to the body, revivifying and changing it into a wholly new form. In the rubedo the soul and spirit join and come to earth. The rubedo brings renewing blood to the body and personality. Psychologically, the rubedo corresponds to the process of individuation, where the personality is directed not by the ego but by the self, and is nourished by the self's connection to the collective unconscious. In alchemy this final movement is one of merging back into the earth and down into the body, rather than one of ascent and escape into spirit.

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Transformation occurs through the successive dissolutions and unions of matter and spirit, an oscillation that creates the third factor of soul that allows them to synthesize at more refined levels. The dissolutions are the separtio and the solutio, the unions are the coniunctio or coagulatio. Raff explains that often “The coniunctio is very frequently associated with death, and the death of the two partners is often required for the true mingling of their essences” (115). The coniunctio is a mystery because it always involves the creation of soul and is an erotic or libidinal process of love, hence it has also been called the heiros gamos or holy marriage. A dissolution is always followed by a coniunctio; what has been torn asunder is re-joined. As in all operations, there are “lesser” and “greater” coniunctios. Edinger describes them as follows:

[They come in] two phases: a lesser coniunctio and a greater. The lesser coniunctio is a union or fusion of substances that are not yet thoroughly separated or discriminated. It is always followed by death or moritfactio. The greater coniunctio, on the other hand, is the goal of the opus, the supreme accomplishment. (212)

The whitening and the reddening themselves encompass three coniunctios. Raff explains that Gerhard Dorn presented an idea of these three, further developed by Jung during his studies in alchemy. Raff explains the them as follows:

In Dorn's theory, there are three levels of the conjunction. They are the unio mentalis, or mental union; the unio corporalis, or union of the body; and the union with the unus mundus, the one divine world that stands behind the world of phenomenal existence. (224)

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The first of the coniunctios is the unio mentalis. When separated from the body at the end of the blackening or at death, the soul and spirit effect the first coniunctio in the albedo by forming a mental union. After the soul and the spirit have stabilized and deepened their union, they drop back into the body for the second coniunctio, the unio corporalis, which corresponds to the reddening, and achieving the incarnation of the whole human being. The third and final culminating coniunctio, beyond the reddening, is that of the unus mundus, the union with the one world, the underlying unity of all life and the cosmos. This third and final coniunctio reflects the interpenetration of the complete human being with the one world, or unus mundus. Jung found the fullest flowering of the idea of the unus mundus in Dorn's alchemical writings (“The Conjunction,” CW 14: 760). De Rola describes the unus mundus as having “an ontological reality in its own terms” (77), presenting a new and transformed reality. Recognition of synchronicity accompanies and intensifies in the realization of the unus mundus (Edinger, Mysterium Lectures 286). The unus mundus is not separate from this world, but lies within it as both source and potential, always available to loving and mystical perception. The unus mundus is often experienced in moments of heightened numinosity, but remains mythic for most people rather than a stable field of realization. Von Franz describes it as “a purely spiritual existence that has not yet become an image in anybody's mind, save that of God” (Alchemy 185). Awakening to this already present reality is the work of the recovery or redemption of the soul of the world. De Rola writes:

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What burns through in mystical or visionary imaginal perception is the conscious recovery of the a priori unified world, the unus mundus, a subtle world behind and infusing this one, held together by the numinous energies of love. (75-76)

As grand as the idea of the unus mundus can appear, it finds its humble roots in alchemy, an art that valorizes the small, the vile, the simple, and sees within the mundane the infinite expanses of the sacred. In his Introduction to Jung and the Jungians on Myth, Robert Segal explains this as the “Jungian emphasis on the mythological nature of ordinary, daily experience and not just of extraordinary, ‘peak’ experience” (x). Hillman calls this awareness attention to the soul in its unique specificity: “the soul is precisely the eachness of everywhere at any instant in anything in its display as a phenomenon. And only in this eachness does soul exist and cosmos show” (“Cosmology for the Soul” 30). With a poet’s eye, William Blake writes of this very humble, close-to-the-ground, yet rare mystical perception in “Jerusalem”: “So he who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole/ Must see it in its Minute Particulars” (The Complete Poetry and Prose of Blake 251). The realization of the unus mundus is similar to the unio mystica imaged in all traditions, both East and West where personal subjectivity and objective psyche meet and interpenetrate. In “The Conjunction” Jung writes:

We could compare this only with the ineffable mystery of the unio mystica, or tao, or the content of samadhi, or the experience of satori in Zen, which would bring us to the realm of the ineffable extreme subjectivity where all the criteria of reason fail. (CW 14: 771)

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A quality of consciousness so simple yet paradoxically so difficult is essential to the realization of the unus mundus. This awareness is the transforming fire, the catalyst of transformation from the suffering and hell of division and ignorance to the embracing gnosis and heaven of inclusion—the activity and realm of love. De Rola writes:

Love brings life, reimagines life beyond transience to a glowing unus mundus where spirit and matter are one, united in the anima mundi, where mere mortals become the microcosm of the universal, and stars dance in the fabric of our form. (44)

In the unus mundus we see the lunar light of alchemy displaying itself as the full moon of consciousness on a lush summer’s eve. Different from a rationally created and artificial bionic future—or its solar alternate in a Christian bodily resurrection—the unus mundus is right here, embodied as the realized lumen naturae. In this view both sun and moon are present, both solar and lunar, yet appearing in poetic guise and with a full heart in love with the world. What was left behind when the rational mind cast off its lunar moisture and strode into the burning desert of solar scientific positivism? What holy marriage might occur if this Cartesian mind dove back into alchemy’s turquoise seas, dissolving in solutio, and swam out into the deeper waters beyond sunset? Can we dissolve the hard edges and the linear trajectory of this sterile sun in the moony dew of imagination and let them rise up together in exultant freedom, a sublimatio, before diving once more in coagulatio, fertilizing this life of ours with renewed vision and heart.

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Works Cited

“Alchemy.” Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. I. Glasgow: Oxford UP, 1971: 53. Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. New York: Anchor Books, 1988. Burckhardt, Titus. Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos. Science of the Soul. Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 1997. De Rola, Stanislas K. Alchemy: The Secret Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986. Edinger, Edward. The Anatomy of the Psyche. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1990. —. The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey through C. G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1995. Eliade, Mircea. The Forge and the Crucible. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Fabricus, Johannes. Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemist and their Royal Art. London: Diamond, 1994. Hillman, James. “Cosmology for the Soul: From Universe to Cosmos.” London: Sphinx 2: Journal for Archetypal Psychology and the Arts, 1989: 17-33. —. “Concerning the Stone: Alchemical Images of the Goal.” Sphinx 5: Journal for Archetypal Psychology and the Arts, 1993: 234-265. —. The Myth of Analysis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1972. —. “The Practice of Beauty.” Sphinx 4: Journal for Archetypal Psychology and the Arts (1992): 13-28. —. “Silver and the White Earth, Part I.” Spring 1980. 21-48.

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—. Thought of the Heart & the Soul of the World. Dallas: Spring, 1993. Jung, C. G. “The Conjunction.” The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Trans. R. Hull. Vol. 14. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967. 457-553. —. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage, 1989. —. “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon.” The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Vol. 13. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967. 109-188. —. “The Paradoxa.” The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Vol. 14. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967. 42-88. —. “The Psychic Nature of the Alchemical Work.” The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Vol. 12. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967. 242-287. —. “The Psychology of the Transference.” The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Vol. 16. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967. 163-201. —. “The Visions of Zosimos.” The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Trans. R. Hull. Vol. 13. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967. 57-108. Marlon, Stanton. “Alchemy.” The Handbook of Jungian Psychology. Ed. Renos K. Papadopoulos. London: Routledge, 2006.264-295. Raff, Jeffrey. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination. York Beach, ME: Nicolas-Hays, 2000. Segal, Robert A. Introduction. Jung and the Jungians on Myth. By Steven F. Walker. New York: Routledge, 2002. xi-xiv. van Löben Sels, Robin. A Dream in the World. East Sussex: Brunner- Routledge, 2003. von Franz, Marie-Louise. Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980.

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Woman Dreaming By Libby Hoagland

As a girl I read all the horse stories I could find. Many featured a male protagonist and his horse, but as I read them, I would imagine placing myself in the lead human role. My pre-adolescent dreams of myself in the future always included a horse, my horse, who possessed great animal wisdom and was able to share it wordlessly with me. This painting is inspired by that conjunctio of Horse and the Feminine.

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One Way to Ride By Libby Hoagland

I fell in love with horses early. When I was eight years old my father finally arranged for me to have riding lessons with Señor Martinez. Unlike other riding instructors I knew about, he had us practice various balancing acts as our horses walked around the ring. Most impressive to me was the day he asked us to do shoulder stands on the saddle as the horses walked. We could do it! Only then did he allow us to sit astride our mounts and begin teaching us how to ride. Riding is a metaphor for living—and there are many ways to ride.

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The Message By Libby Hoagland

The woman devotes herself to holding a space for life in a world that has become unaware of what she is doing. She could represent all the fundamental laws that allow our molecular and chemical material world to give rise to and sustain complex life. She could represent a notion of God or Creator. She is sending a message to those who can receive it: Human culture must change. 127

Basket of Eggs By Libby Hoagland

The woman summons the mother-bear energy to give her ferocious patience as she watches over and guards the new life forming in the eggs in her basket. She enters a meditative state to encourage the new life to continue to develop at its own pace, becoming whatever it is destined to be. This painting emerged from a vision I received and then worked with to give it form in this world. When a vision comes, I do

128 not understand it—and may not understand it for years to come. But I try to remain true to what I receive and work with paint to give it permanent form.

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✥ Flicker: Personal Reflections By Libby Hoagland

After we got married my husband and I moved into a Victorian duplex with an old marble fountain and fishpond in the back yard. Right away I rushed out and bought some goldfish and water lilies. Each morning before work Tom and I drank our coffee beneath the branches of an apricot tree and watched orange fish glide through the dark waters beneath the lily pads. By day I taught creative writing and drama in an inner-city high school in Oakland. On the weekends we worked long afternoons restoring the garden and re-building rock terraces. We planted flowers. We baked pies. We sang songs. One morning in February I awoke too dizzy and weak to get out of bed, my mind confused and my body wracked with pain. It was weird to be so sick, but I figured it was the flu. I'd be fine in a few days. No big deal. Days passed as I lay crumpled in bed, trembling with chills and fevers, unable to shuffle more than a few steps to the bathroom, my mind too addled to read. After long sleepless nights I remained in bed exhausted, squinting out the window as the color of the sky changed from morning pink, to mid-day cobalt, to orange and violet at dusk. Months passed. After many lab tests and doctor appointments, my condition remained unnamed. I accepted the fact that experts could not diagnose me, but I clung to the hope that one of them would give me some key that would lead to my recovery. Nine months later another infectious disease expert flipped through the pages of my lab results. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he

130 said, looking at Tom as he shook his head. “We've seen a lot of this lately and always in young healthy people. I wish I had something to tell you. Sometimes people recover. Sometimes they don’t. We can’t help you. My advice—rest.” When he finally looked at me, he wished me good luck, but his brown eyes said what a shame. I was thirty-one. Hopeless, we retreated to the mountain wilderness and bought a little house up a canyon. I rested. That autumn Tom drove to town each day for work while I lay in bed, watching the yellow leaves of the big-leaf maples drift to the ground to die. By late November it was raining day and night. Through the darkest months, I lay on the couch in the dim winter light listening to the rain’s steady drone and fed logs into the wood-burning stove. I marveled that the body of a tree could yield such radiant light and heat as it turned to ash. By March I was beginning to sleep through the nights and wake up feeling refreshed. Each day I went for little walks in the forest. I got stronger. As spring progressed I saw the first green shoots emerge from the cold black earth and marveled as sap rose up the bare limbs of trees, unfurling itself in the shape of fresh new leaves. Life was returning to the dormant earth. It was time to make a garden. Using pine saplings to form the beds, Tom terraced a garden into the south-facing slope below our house. I grew a little stronger. I planted seedlings, kept them moist, and waited. Despite my efforts, by mid-summer all I had were pale, scrawny plants. I asked a neighbor from down the road who was known for conjuring succulent tomatoes each summer for advice. She fingered my dusty soil. I needed compost, she said. A few days later when I drove by her house, she flagged me down. “This has everything you need to

131 know,” she said, patting a well-worn book with tattered pages. Later, at home, I saw she’d circled this: Soil is a living community of organisms. We’re talking dirt here--the plain old brown stuff--and it blew my mind. I imagined the kingdoms of life beneath my feet—all the insects, bacteria, and microorganisms that dismantle dead plants and animals, releasing their elements to be used again to create new life. These lovely unsung creatures— the worms and potato bugs, the centipedes and millipedes, the termites and ants and all the creepy crawlies that every five-year-old knows—they all knew the trick of transformation. What elegance and economy of design, this elemental recycling system. And, of course, I wanted to join in. After reading my neighbor's book on bio-dynamic composting I realized that the act of layering and tending organic debris was a sacred art. What else accomplishes this alchemical feat, transforming dead and decaying matter into juicy, luscious, colorful vegetables and fruits? I started with kitchen scraps, some manure, and dried grasses. I scooped up decaying leaves from the forest floor and added them to the pile. I had plenty of straw. I still needed blood or bone meal—some kind of nitrogen. I’d heard that every year tons of human hair is swept up off the floors of beauty salons only to be squandered in sealed plastic trash bags, its final destination, landfills. What a waste. When I called a hair dresser I knew and explained my mission, there was silence on the line. Finally Louise said, “I dunno. People are real funny about their hair.” After assurances that this was not some kind of weird joke or voodoo practice, she agreed to collect hair all week if I’d bring her a nice-looking bin with a tight-fitting lid. “Pick it up early on

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Saturday, before my first clients,” she said, and I promised to be discreet. All week I kept imagining all that hair no longer wasted, but collected now in my bin to be returned to the unending flow of life. This seemed somehow heroic—in a tiny, ridiculous way—this gathering of wayward hair. Early Saturday I began my journey down our rutted, one-track road that followed the creek through the twisting canyon. At one place the trees grew tall and arched over the road making a canopy. Bright dots of sunlight flickered over the dark shadows of the road and creek, and I gazed upon the perfect dappled beauty of the morning. But at the sharp turn by our neighbor Denise’s shack I saw a dead raccoon lying in the road. This ended my reverie. I knew that raccoon. Tom and I had seen her early last spring while walking the road one twilit evening with our dog Ariel. The raccoon had hissed and charged at her, and Ariel had bared her teeth and stood her ground. It was clear that this encounter would end in bloodshed so we had called the dog and left. A few weeks later, I'd seen the raccoon with her four small kits down by the creek. Now her kits would be older, probably old enough to survive. But still, what a shame. “I’m sorry, raccoon. I’ll miss you,” I said as I drove on. In town Louise pointed to the bin, now full of her clients’ hair, with the lid tightly on. I put my fingers to my mouth, zipped my lips, and winked. I drove home, excited to have this rescued ingredient to add to the pile. But when I’d lugged the bin down the hill to the compost pile and removed the lid, I saw all manner of chemically- treated hair—fried and colored, bleached and frizzed—all with a toxic reek of ammonia and bleach. “No way I’m putting that on my pile—

133 this poison would kill the worms,” I thought and dumped it in the trash. A shadow darkened my face for a moment, and I looked up to see two turkey vultures gliding on updrafts overhead. I remembered the dead raccoon. I put the bin in my car along with a shovel and drove down the hill. She was still there, lying on the road, a faint breeze riffling her fur. A few black flies buzzed around her, but there was no smell of rot yet, just the strong gamey smell of wild raccoon. She could have been sleeping, her eyes closed, dreaming raccoon dreams. But her mouth hung open and her tongue fell out onto the grit of the road and I knew she was dead. I looked around for her kits but didn’t see them. The vultures were still up there circling, hoping to dine on this casualty of the road—and by rights, they should have. I grabbed my shovel and with a loud rasping noise of metal on pavement, slid it under her. She was heavier than I’d thought, and had stiffened into her final earthly shape. She fell into my bin with a thud. On the drive back up the road I thought about the raccoon, how the molecules that made up her bones and fur and cunning striped tail would be reassembled into other bodies— the worms and voles and squawky stellar jays, next year’s Ponderosa seedlings, and even my tomatoes. In my quest for rich soil, I had stumbled upon the good news that there are no absolute endings in this world, only shape-shifting as the impulse of life flickers from one live being to another, a flame each of us carries in our own way for a time and then passes on to another or returns to the soil. I lifted the bin out of the car and skidding on pine duff, I hurried down the slope to deliver my offering. A hawk’s cry pierced the

134 silence. And for one short moment I understood that the deer nibbling on coyote brush and the rattlesnakes sunning themselves on warm rocks, the fish swimming wordlessly through their watery worlds and the dragonflies mating mid-air, the tall pines and the despised poison oak, the slime molds and bacteria—we were all just different faces of the same vital impulse adorning itself in a multiplicity of forms. For one penetrating moment, I really knew that through and through. But then I forgot. I put the raccoon on my fledgling pile and turned her under. I sprinkled it with water, picked up the bin and trudged up the hill.

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✥ Author’s Biographies

Pam Bjork: Pam weaves connections through her passion for global cultures, love of the arts, story and image. A former award-winning restaurateur, she holds a BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas, and an MA and PhD in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She exhibits her photography and textile collection in tandem with invited lectures to accompany the exhibitions.

Lisa Brinkman: Lisa Brinkman is an artist who resides in West Linn, Oregon. She has earned a BFA in painting from Pacific Northwest College of Art and a MA in Art Therapy from Marylhurst University. Throughout her life her love of art and symbol systems has led her to in depth studies in art history, astrology, tarot, Jungian psychology, and Archetypal Pattern Analysis.

Lisa’s artwork displays a joyful expression through her innovative experiments with a diverse array of art mediums including, painting, papermaking, fibers, and many more. For more information please go to: www.ArtYouCanWear.com or www.lisabrinkman.com.

Anita Doyle: Anita Doyle has been a counselor and educator since 1983. Her writing has appeared in Tricycle:The Buddhist Review, Parabola:The Magazine of Myth & Tradition, The Dream Network Journal, Northern Lights, The Mythological Studies Journal and other publications. She holds two masters level degrees, one in clinical medicine from the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and the other in mythological studies from Paciﬁca Graduate Institute of Depth Psychology in California.

Brad Eden: Bradford Lee Eden is Dean of Library Services at Valparaiso University. He has a masters and Ph.D. degrees in musicology, as well as an MS in library science. His recent books include Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien (McFarland, 2010); The Associate University Librarian Handbook: A Resource Guide (Scarecrow Press, 2012); Leadership in Academic Libraries: Connecting Theory to Practice (Scarecrow Press, 2014), and The Hobbit and Tolkien's Mythology: Essays on Revisions and Influences (McFarland, 2014).

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Libby Hoagland: Libby Hoagland is an artist and writer who lives in Portland, Oregon. She graduated with a degree in Anthropology from UC Berkeley. After discovering Waldorf Education and Goethean Science, she studied at Rudolf Steiner College in Fair Oaks, California. Libby taught English and Drama in Oakland before moving to the Trinity Mountains of northern California. Visit her website at www.libbyhoaglandstudio.com.

Reverend Lynn Hubbard: Rev. Hubbard graduated from Valparaiso University and holds advanced degrees from the Lutheran School of Theology and Chicago Theological Seminary. For many years he also worked as the Associate Dean of Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago.

Lynn served as the Director of Development for the Parliament of the World’s Religions, bringing 6,000 spiritual leaders from around the world together in Chicago in 1993. He also initiated and coordinated conferences for the third Parliament which convened in Cape Town, South Africa in 1999.

Currently he does work at the Lakota Sioux reservations in South Dakota, helping prepare graduate theological students in cross-cultural ministerial training. He also is the present pastor for Grace Good Shepherd Church (Luther and Presbyterian) in McKinleyville, California and the founder of the Center for Compassionate Christianity.

John Knight Lundwall: John received his undergraduate degree in English Literature from Brigham Young University and is masters and doctorate in comparative myth and religion from Pacifica Graduate Institute. He has served as editor and contributor for several publications, including the Emily Dickinson Lexicon, 7 Habits Magazine, and currently is Editor in Chief for Cosmos and Logos: Journal of Myth, Religion, and Folklore. He served on the selection board for the International Symposium of Myth and has presented his academic material at several conferences and gatherings. He has optioned one screenplay and written several independent screenplays.

Lundwall’s first major book, Mythos and Cosmos: Mind and Meaning in the Oral Age, is being published this year. Lundwall’s work is a new 137 and probative approach to ancient myth, reexamining ancient myth and religion through the structures of oral thinking and oral cosmology.

Lynde Mott: Lynde Ann Mott traveled extensively in her youth as her father was in the Air Force. She graduated from Brigham Young University with a BFA in Design and Illustration in 1997. Her work largely focuses on historical and feminine subjects, and has been displayed in museums, magazines, and prestigious art galleries. Her art is a beautiful outlet for her ideas about humanity. She lives in Pleasant Grove, Utah, with her husband, Randy, their three teenage boys, six chickens, and a canary. She can be contacted at [email protected].

Susan Paidhrin: Susan Paidhrin is a practicing astrologer, psychological consultant and spiritual director working in Portland, Oregon. Her undergraduate studies were in Art and Literature. She has taught and tutored English and served as an editor on several books and publications. Susan holds a Masters Degree in Counseling Psychology and a Ph.D. in Mythology and Religion, both from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her areas of interest are in spiritual phenomenology and the development of human virtue.

Janet Bubar Rich: With a B.A. in English from UC Berkeley and Ph.D. in Mythology with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, Dr. Rich explores mythic figures with a focus on the contemporary concerns of our world. She is the author of Exploring Guinevere’s Search for Authenticity in the Arthurian Romances (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2012) and Hestia—The Goddess of the Hearth (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2014).

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