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To Apollo: The Averter of Evil, the Bringer of Harmony (part 1)

Posted on August 23, 2015 by Symbol Reader

Apollo of Mantua
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_of_Mantua

1.“I am the eye with which the Universe
Beholds itself, and knows it is divine;
All harmony of instrument or verse,
All prophecy, all medicine, is mine,
All light of art or nature; – to my song
Victory and praise in its own right belong.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Hymn of Apollo”

2.“In Classical times, music, poetry, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and science came under Apollo’s control. As the enemy of barbarism, he stood for moderation in all things, and the seven strings of his lyre were connected with the seven vowels of the later Greek alphabet, given mystical significance and used for therapeutic music. Finally, because of his identification with the Child Horus, a solar concept, he was worshipped as the sun, ….and his sister Artemis was, rightly, identified with the moon.”

Robert Graves, “Greek Myths”

Jacopo de’ Barbari, “Apollo and Diana,” engraving, via http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/360380

“Coronis was washing her feet in Lake Boebeis. Apollo saw her and desired her. Desire came as a sudden shock, it caught him by surprise, and immediately he wanted to have done with it. He descended on Coronis like the night. Their coupling was violent, exhilarating, and fast. In Apollo’s mind the clutch of a body and the shooting of an arrow were superimposed. The meeting of their bodies was not a mingling, as for Dionysus, but a collision.”

Roberto Calasso, “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”

As nothing can surpass the radiance of the Sun, so no other Olympian god was perceived as more radiant than the superior and grandiose Apollo. Liz Greene calls him “an image of loftiness of spirit,” Walter Otto “the manifestation of the divine amidst the desolation and confusion of the world.” He bestows grace and sublimity even on the most godforsaken places. It was exactly so with Delos, where he was born. Roberto Calasso wrote that it was “a hump of deserted Rock, drifting about the sea like a stalk of asphodel.” Yet, this barren piece of rock was surrounded by swans as if waiting for the miracle about to occur. Leto had been running from the wrath of Hera, who, jealous of Zeus, had forbidden her to give birth on stable earth. A floating poor island of Delos gained a lot from being the birthplace of Zeus’ favorite son. Calasso:

“Then Apollo emerged, and everything turned to gold, from top to bottom. Even the water in the river turned to gold and the leaves on the olive tree likewise. And the gold must have stretched downward into the depths, because it anchored Delos to the seabed. From that day on, the island drifted no more.”

Delos temple, white lions, via Wikipedia

Apollo, the Sun god, has been likened to no less than the Holy Grail by Liz Greene. He is the light of pure divinity of the Jungian Self that is possessed by each of us. He is the inner jewel of royalty that can shine on any desolate landscape and conquer the direst of circumstances. He is the spiritual centre of gravity; he is what sustains us when all the other modes of support have failed. Calasso calls him “unnatural,” “serene,” “abstracted,” looking down on the world, with his “eyes … elsewhere, as if gazing at an invisible mirror, where … (he finds his) own images detached from all else.”

Where there is so much blinding light, the shadow must be deep and equally enormous. Apollo’s dark side is his deadliness, his vicious competitiveness, and utter lack of forgiveness. His is the power that obliterates whatever came before it. As he is a master archer, death by his hand comes swiftly and unexpectedly. The Homeric hymn to Delian Apollo begins with a startling scene showing the gods frightened of Apollo:

“I will remember and not be unmindful of Apollo who shoots afar. As he goes through the house of Zeus, the gods tremble before him and all spring up from their seats when he draws near, as he bends his bright bow.”

Via http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0138%3Ahymn%3D3

Albrecht Dürer, “Poynter Apollo”, holding a bow and an orb, via http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/63.212

He was a conqueror in love, too, though with varied success. His first love was the aloof nymph Daphne. As Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses, “the smitten god went up in flames until his heart was utterly afire, and hope sustained his unrequited passion.” And in a further brilliant passage, “admonished by his own passion, he accelerates, and runs as swiftly as a Gallic hound chasing a rabbit through an open field.” According to Graves, the myth of Daphne metamorphosing into a laurel tree to escape the hot pursuit of Apollo refers to “the Hellenic capture of Tempe, where the goddess Daphoene (‘bloody one’) was worshiped by a college of orgiastic laurel-chewing Maenads.” Apollo and a new solar religion took over all major mother earth shrines with the most famous one at Delphi (a subject of my next post).

Bernini, “Apollo and Daphne”

I admire Roberto Calasso’s perspicacity when he observes that in fact Apollo did not want to possess Daphne. This aloof god was after the idea of Daphne, her divine essence, and to him her worth was embodied in a symbol she left behind – a laurel leaf that he made into a poet’s crown. The Greek word “nymphólēptos “- “possession” comes from the word Nymph. Apollo made extensive use of archetypally feminine trance and possession states in all of his major oracles. He took the wild young girls from Helicon to train and cultivate their skills. The Greeks believed that he imposed the laws of civilization, divine order and measure upon the wild chaos – thus the Muses and Art were born. In the Homeric hymn to Pythian Apollo, summarized by Graf, “As soon as he enters the assembly, ‘the minds of the immortals turn to lyre and song’, and the Muses sing a hymn about gods and men. ‘The fair-tressed Graces and joyful Seasons, with Harmony, Youth, and Aphrodite the daughter of Zeus, hold hands by the wrist and dance’, and Artemis, Ares, and Hermes join them. ‘But Phoibos Apollo plays on the lyre, stepping fine and high.’” Apollonian mousika was an ultimate expression of beauty and harmony; it could still the most turbulent and confused hearts.

The songs performed by and for Apollo were paeans, which also connect with Apollo’s healing powers (the subject of my future article). Paeans, as Graf describes, were sung “before battle or after victory, at the beginning of a symposium, or before any risky undertaking, such as setting sail or, in comic parody, going to court.” They were also sung at weddings, “yet another uncertain beginning.” Apollo was seen as the Averter of Evil addressed by paeans in situations of danger and uncertainty. In a beautiful Orphic hymn to Apollo we read:

“You make everything bloom

with your versatile lyre,

you harmonize the poles.”

Gustave Moreau, “Apollo Receiving the Shepherds’ Offerings”

Sources:

Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Kindle edition

Fritz Graf, Apollo (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World), Kindle edition

Robert Graves, Greek Myths

Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate, Kindle edition

Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Charles Martin, Kindle edition

The Orphic Hymns, translated by Apostolos N Athanassakis, Kindle edition

Posted in Apollo | Tagged Ancient Greece, Apollo, archetypes, art, bow, civilization, Daphne, Delos, depth psychology, Greek myth, Greek mythology, Homeric hymn to Apollo, Leto, lyre, muses, music, nymphs, paean, possession, sun god, symbolism, symbols, the Self, Zeus | 21 Comments

The Attraction to the Divine Unknown

Posted on August 16, 2015 by Symbol Reader

“I find it relevant to quote here a formulation devised by Dio of Prusa (‘Dio Chrysostom’), a Greek thinker who lived in a period straddling the first and the second centuries CE. In what I am about to quote, taken from his Olympic Discourse (Oration 12), Dio is representing a hypothetical speech delivered by none other than the great sculptor Pheidias of Athens, who is speaking about his masterpiece, the colossal statue of Zeus that he sculpted for the temple of Zeus at Olympia in Elis. In the passage I will be quoting, Pheidias explains his idealizing of the human form in creating the spectacular statue of Olympian Zeus. To justify the idealized human form that he creates for Zeus, the sculptor speaks about a universal need felt by humans not only to imagine gods as existing in the sky or in the cosmos in general but also to have a feeling of divine immediacy by being physically near them, close to them – a feeling achieved by way of mental or even physical contact with statues and with paintings and with other images of the gods:

‘Because of their attraction to the divine unknown [daimonion], all humans have a powerful erotic desire [erōs] to worship … and to take care of [therapeuein] the divinity [theion] that they do know, by being up close to it and near to it, as they approach it and try to touch it in an act of persuasion, and they sacrifice to it and offer it garlands. Quite simply, they are like disconnected … children who have been torn away from their father or mother and who, feeling a terrific urge … and longing [pothos], often reach out their hands while they are dreaming, in the direction of their parents who are not there, so also are humans in their relationship with the gods, loving them as they do, and justifiably so, because the gods do good things for them and have an affinity with them. And, in their love for the gods, humans strive in all possible ways to be with them and in their company.’

(This word daimonion is derived from daimōn, which refers to an unspecified god, whereas theos refers to a specific god)”

Gregory Nagy, “Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours,” Kindle edition

Giorgio de Chirico, “Extase”

Posted in Quotations | Tagged daimon, daimonion, Dio of Prusa, divinity, gods, Greek myth, myth, mythology, theos | 13 Comments

Light and Matter: the Perseid Meteor Shower

Posted on August 12, 2015 by Symbol Reader

This year has been announced to be perfect to watch the Perseid meteor shower because the moon will be dark. This shooting star feast usually peaks around 10-13 August (http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/earthskys-meteor-shower-guide#perseids). I am reposting my own writing about the symbolism of Perseids from August 2013.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

“Epilogue” by D.H. Lawrence: Poetry for Hot, Sultry Dog Days of the Summer

Posted on August 9, 2015 by Symbol Reader

Walter Crane, “Then lilies turned to tiger blaze, amid the garden’s tangled maze”

“PATIENCE, little Heart.
One day a heavy, June-hot woman
Will enter and shut the door to stay.

And when your stifling heart would summon
Cool, lonely night, her roused breasts will keep the night at bay,
Sitting in your room like two tiger-lilies
Flaming on after sunset,
Destroying the cool, lonely night with the glow of their hot twilight;
There in the morning, still, while the fierce strange scent comes yet
Stronger, hot and red; till you thirst for the daffodillies
With an anguished, husky thirst that you cannot assuage,
When the daffodillies are dead, and a woman of the dog-days holds you in gage.
Patience, little Heart.”

Posted in Poetry | Tagged D.H. Lawrence, Epilogue, love poetry, poem, poetry | 9 Comments

Rusalki: the Slavic Nymphs

Posted on August 3, 2015 by Symbol Reader

Wilhelm Kotarbinski, “Water Nymph”

“She shook the bright drops from her hair

And gazed upon the anchorite;

To look upon her form so fair

The good monk trembled with affright.

And he beheld her from afar

With head and hand strange signals make,

Then swifter than a shooting star

Dive back into the silent lake.”

Alexander Pushkin, “Rusalka”

We do not have any written records of Slavic mythology; sadly, we have to make do with second-hand accounts and archaeological findings. As much as I am fascinated by Greek and Egyptian mythology, my roots are Slavic, and consequently any exposure to the Slavic lore has a visceral effect on me, not comparable to anything else. Stories of water nymphs, mermaids and sirens are fascinating, but none of them bear quite the same imprint on my unconscious as the stories of the rusalki (Slavic water nymphs, plural of rusalka). Recently, I have come across a great book by Joanna Hubbs Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture. One of its section is dedicated to the rusalki lore. In the nineteenth century, these mythological creatures were vilified as death demons, but for ancient Slavs they were predominantly kind, though powerful and sometimes feared, nature spirits. They played a key role in pagan fertility rituals. Their predecessors were called bereginy (bereg means ‘shore’) and connected water and earth in their cult. Their sacred tree was the birch. The later rusalki or vily were believed to live in water and also on land and in trees; they were half women – half fish or half women – half birds. Hubbs refers to them as “spinners” who regulated “human and animal fertility, the cycle of the seasons, the moon, and the weather.” As it is in Rusalka, the famous opera by Antoni Dvorak, rusalki were usually part of a group of mysterious maidens – daughters of a sea or bird king. Their roots are very archaic, says Hubbs:

“Every incarnation of the water nymph suggests the archaic image of the bird-headed transformational goddess who accompanies humanity from the period of the hunt to that of horticulture, herding – and warfare. She is the goddess who creates parthenogenetically by bringing moisture to the earth from below and above, unaided by male consorts. She is one yet multiple, chooses her mate like the shamanic Mistress of Animals, and confers power (military or otherwise) on the male, whom, like the Great Goddess of the Neolithic, she then destroys. She is virginal like Artemis, and yet the giver of life and death.”

Walter Crane, “Swan Maidens”

The rusalka was portrayed as half-bird or half-fish (sirin), sometimes with a lion or a horse, sometimes as “a dragon or lion-tailed creature with the wings of a bird.” Other animals strongly connected with her were the deer and the snake. Her hair looked like entangled snakes – combing it produced rain, called “the milk from heaven.” She was the goddess of the sun, the moon and the rain, fertility, renewal and rebirth, which was symbolized by the snake shedding its skin and the deer shedding its antlers. As birds, rusalki rode on clouds to direct the rains. Floods were caused by too energetic combing of their long serpent tresses. They had under their dominion phases of the moon and the production of winds. Continues Hubbs:

“Artifacts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries found around Kiev show that the Slavic bereginy, like the Russian rusalki, were emulated in their moisture-making functions by young girls, whirling in long-sleeved blouses,… who played the part of rainmakers, bringers of fertility. The very name for ‘girl’ in Russian, deva, suggests linguistic ties with Indian and Persian religious and mythological figures of feminine divinity. … Div or deva in Sanskrit means ‘light’ and ‘pure.’”

Arthur Rackham, “The Rhine Maidens”

While reflecting on this etymology, a thought occurred to me. This lightness and purity of the archetypal feminine means that rusalki, as well as their mermaid and water nymph sisters, stand for the forces of the unconscious struggling to become conscious. In Dvorak’s opera, the title-character falls in love with a prince and decides to accept human form for him. The story does not end well, though the characters learn the value and power of true love. There seems to be a mortal danger present in crossing the line from the unconscious to consciousness. Paradigms are not shifted peacefully but rather in tumultuous birth pangs. This is beautifully expressed by Dane Rudhyar in his interpretation of the Sabian Symbol for 29 Leo (A MERMAID EMERGES FROM THE OCEAN WAVES READY FOR REBIRTH IN HUMAN FORM):

“KEYNOTE: The stage at which an intense feeling intuition rising from the unconscious is about to take form as a conscious thought.

The mermaid personifies a stage of awareness still partially enveloped by the ever moving and ever elusive ocean of the collective Unconscious, yet already half formulated by the conscious mind. Any creative thinker or artist knows well the peculiar mixture of elation and anxiety characterizing such a stage. Will the intuitive feeling fade away reabsorbed into the unconscious, or will the inexpressible realization acquire the concreteness and expressible form of a concept or a definite motif in an art form? This fourth symbol in the thirtieth fivefold sequence suggests that the fire of desire for concrete and steady form burns at the root of all techniques of self-expression. An unconscious energy archetype is reaching toward consciousness through the creator, as cosmic Love seeks tangible manifestation through human lovers. The whole prehuman universe reaches eagerly to the human stage of clear and steady consciousness. It is this great evolutionary urge, this elan vital, which is implied in this symbol of the mermaid seeking human incarnation — the YEARNING FOR CONSCIOUS FORM AND SOLIDITY.”

Odilon Redon, “Mermaid”

As our culture progressively divorced itself from its archetypal bedrock, so did the meaning of rusalki and their Greek mythological counterparts transition, stressing now their destructive powers, luring men into their deaths. Unwanted and ignored, they had to exercise their powers from the underworld (the unconscious). The denigration of unconscious powers always ends in a horrible backlash. What was suppressed is now rising with an upsurge. It looks like the magical powers of the feminine have been finding their way into the collective consciousness. We are culturally ready to be reinitiated into the deepest mysteries of Her nature.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged archetypes, Great Goddess, mermaid, rusalka, rusalki, Slavic myth, symbolism, symbols, the collective unconscious, water nymphs | 25 Comments

Two Shimmering Thoughts by Jung on His Birthday

Posted on July 26, 2015 by Symbol Reader

1.“The unconscious can be reached and expressed only by symbols, and for this reason the process of individuation can never do without the symbol.”

Carl Gustav Jung, Collected Works Volume 13, “Alchemical Studies,” section 44

2.“What takes place between light and darkness, what unites the opposites, has a share in both sides and can be judged just as well from the left as from the right, without our becoming any the wiser: indeed, we can only open up the opposition again. Here only the symbol helps, for, in accordance with its paradoxical nature, it represents the “tertium” that in logic does not exist, but which in reality is the living truth. So we should not begrudge Paracelsus and the alchemists their secret language: deeper insight into the problems of psychic development soon teaches us how much better it is to reserve judgment instead of prematurely announcing to all and sundry what’s what. Of course we all have an understandable desire for crystal clarity, but we are apt to forget that in psychic matters we are dealing with processes of experience, that is, with transformations which should never be given hard and fast names if their living movement is not to petrify into something static. The protean mythologem and the shimmering symbol express the processes of the psyche far more trenchantly and, in the end, far more clearly than the clearest concept; for the symbol not only conveys a visualization of the process but—and this is perhaps just as important—it also brings a re-experiencing of it, of that twilight which we can learn to understand only through inoffensive empathy, but which too much clarity only dispels.”

Carl Gustav Jung, Collected Works Volume 13, “Alchemical Studies,” section 199

C.G.Jung Institute, Zurich, photo taken by me last month

Posted in The Symbol | Tagged C.G. Jung, depth psychology, symbol, symbolism, the unconscious | 16 Comments

On the Birth of Aphrodite

Posted on July 19, 2015 by Symbol Reader

Gustave Moreau, “The Birth of Venus”

If our exact time of place and birth is like a lodestar to interpreting our qualities and our destiny, it must make a lot of sense to look closely at the birth of Venus and relate what we find to her archetypal significance. She has a most extraordinary birth tale, after all. At the beginning of time, the sky god Uranus and the earth goddess Gaia were locked in never ending lovemaking. Yet there was no happiness, for she was groaning under the oppression of constant pregnancies as Uranus chased all the offspring back into her womb. In desperation, she gave a white sickle to her son Kronos, who castrated his father and threw his testicles into the sea:

“Earth took into herself the bloody drops that rained down. Within a year she gave birth to the powerful Erinyes, the Furies. … From the immortal flesh that fell into the surging sea there arose in time a white froth, or aphros. Inside the foam was nurtured a lovely girl. First she floated toward holy Kythera, and then to Cyprus pounded by the sea. Out she stepped from the waves, a queenly beautiful goddess, and around her slender feet fresh grass sprouted.” (Martin)

“Circles formed on the surface of the water, and one of them was edged with white foam. From the middle rose Aphrodite, together with her first serving maids, Apate and Zelos, Deceit and Rivalry.” (Calasso)

Dissecting the myth, which Liz Greene is particularly good at, it is worth pointing out that Kronos is “not an independent masculine principle, but rather the masculine side of the generative principle over which the Mother presides.” He is associated with the yearly ritual of king sacrifice, whose purpose was to “fertilise the earth and renew the crops.” Right at the beginning, as it appears, the principle of Aphrodite/Venus and the principle of fertility go hand in hand. Other Venusian principles in plain sight would be: conflict, strife, violence, which eventually beget breathtaking beauty and harmony. Furthermore, Aphrodite seems to combine celestial and terrestrial aspects in her archetypal make-up: she has the Uranian disembodied, abstract aestheticism and perfection coupled with an equally strong chthonic, carnal and sensual aspect. By standing up against the father, the titan Kronos made a necessary step in his individuation process. When the principle of Venus is activated, families may get shattered, which will awaken the Furies (Erinyes). There is blood and suffering at the core of Beauty, it seems.

Odilon Redon, “The Birth of Venus”

As progeny of a primordial god, Aphrodite is older than the Olympians. She has enormous generative power at her disposal, and is a solar (the Golden One) rather than lunar deity. As Venus she competes in her brightness with the sun. Sworder remarks:

“…the phallus of the sky god is the sun and the saw toothed stone which Cronus takes to it is the jagged ridge of the western horizon, and the very moment of excision is that lovely moment as the sun sinks slowly out of sight beneath the world’s edge. Then the western sky is reddened by bloody member till in the midst of it appears the Evening Star.

…

For as star she is seen to stand above the sun after he has sunk beneath the western horizon, as she stands above him before he rises in the east.”

By the same token, Friedrich, quoted by Greene talks of her “sunlit sexuality” – she unashamed, usually portrayed nude, as opposed to other more modest goddesses. Her incarnation is fully blownl: she openly chooses mortal men as lovers, and does not punish their desires as Artemis or Hera did. Liz Greene quotes Paul Friedrich:

“The drives of sexuality are natural; on the other hand, sophisticated love-making is highly cultural. Aphrodite mediates between the two, ‘puts them together’. Or, better, she does not make them identical but interrelates them and makes them overlap to a high degree. To put it yet another way, we can agree that she is a ‘goddess of rapture’ but ought to recognise that this rapture harmoniously blends natural and cultural ingredients.”

William Blake Richmond, “Venus and Anchises”
“Yet in turn Aphrodite laughed at them and boasted of how she had driven gods to mate with women, but never herself had wanted a mortal’s bed. Zeus decided he’d change that. He filled Aphrodite with sweet longing for Anchises, who lived in the rugged uplands of Mt. Ida near Troy. He was a handsome young man with a common trade: herding cattle. One day she was sitting on Olympus, assured of her powers, smugly looking over the world, when she noticed him. That was all it took. Aphrodite instantly began to feel the pangs of desire for this unsuspecting youth. She hurried to Paphos and her temple there, filled with the scent of cypress. She gently closed the shining doors of the inner chamber and undressed, bathed luxuriantly, then clothed herself (with the help of the Graces) in a gown permeated with the most alluring perfumes. Then she rushed north toward Troy, striding high above the clouds, until she set herself down on Mt. Ida. The place was well known as “mother of beasts,” and as soon as she set foot there, they came out to greet her. Gray wolves that fawned at her feet, lions with glaring eyes, bears, leopards. Aphrodite was delighted seeing them, and by her very presence she infused them with the joyous urge to love. Two by two the animals went to lie and mate in the shadowy woods.”
Richard P. Martin

Uranian blood shedding finds its reflection in the two most typical Venusian symbols – the apple and the rose. They are united by the sensual symbolism of the color red. In this connection, Sworder offers his own take on the symbolism of the birth of Aphrodite:

“Red are our lips and nipples and our most private parts, reddest when closest to the consummation of love. Then they distend and bloom with the redness of blood. This is the blood shed by Cronus when he castrates his father Uranus and the phallus falls into the sea. The phallus is the sun which froths and colors the white cloud and the star of the goddess appear standing over its redness.”

Georgia O’Keeffe, “Red Hills with White Shell”

Among its many significations, an apple seems to bring to mind the infamous “apple of discord.” Love can bring harmony and satisfaction of desire, but just as often it causes misery, jealousy, rivalry and all sorts of destructive passions. Roberto Calasso ingeniously links Aphrodite with Ananke – the goddess of necessity. While Ananke, together with Kronos, symbolizes the precision of karmic laws, with their austerity and relentlessness, Aphrodite seems to embody “a rebellion of lightness.” To quote Calasso with his uncanny precision:

“Olympus is a rebellion of lightness against the precision of the law, which at that time was referred to as pondus et mensura, “weight and measure.” A vain rebellion, but divine. Kronos’s chains become Hephaestus’s golden web. The gods know that the two imprisoning nets are the same; what has changed is the aesthetic appearance. And it is on this that life on Olympus is based. Of the two, they prefer to submit to Eros rather than Ananke, even though they know that Eros is just a dazzling cover for Ananke. And cover in the literal sense: Ananke’s inflexible bond, which tightens in a great circle around the world, is covered by a speckled belt, which we see in the sky as the Milky Way. But we can also see it, in perfect miniature, on the body of Aphrodite when the goddess wears her ‘many-hued, embroidered girdle in which all charms and spells reside: tenderness and desire are there, and softly whispered words, the seduction that has stolen the intellect even from those of sound mind.’ Unraveled across the darkness of the sky, that belt denotes not deceit but the splendor of the world. Worn by Aphrodite, the girdle becomes both splendor and deceit. But perhaps this was precisely what the Olympians wanted: that a soft, deceiving sash should cover the inflexible bond of necessity.”

Our Venusian encounters are sealed with fatedness. Lightness quickly and imperceptibly becomes heaviness. Consequences weigh on lovers with Ananke’s unforgiveness.

The cycle of Venus, Detail from James Ferguson’s, Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, 1799 ed., plate III, opp. p. 67, via http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/anti-masonry/venus.html

In astrological symbolism, Venus relates to the golden ratio – the measurable aspect of beauty. Nobody has expressed the beauty of the birth of Venus in a more outstanding fashion than Rilke in his poem “The Birth of Venus,” in Edward Snow’s translation:

“In the morning after that night which fearfully

has passed in outcry, tumult, uproar,—

the sea split open once again and screamed.

And as the scream slowly closed again

and from the sky’s pale light and brightness fell back into the mute fishes’ chasm—:

the sea gave birth.

From first sun the hair-froth shimmered

on the wide curl of wave, on whose lip

the girl stood—white, wet, confused.

As a blade of new green leaf stirs,

stretches, uncoils itself and slowly opens,

her body unfolded into cool sea-air

and into untouched early morning breeze.

Like moons the knees rose brightly

and ducked into the cloud rims of the thighs;

the calves’ slender shadows retreated,

the feet flexed and grew luminous,

and the joints came alive like the throats

of drinkers.

And in the hips’ chalice lay the belly,

like a young fruit in a child’s hand.

Within its navel’s narrow cup was all

the darkness that this bright life contained.

Beneath it the small wave rose lightly

and lapped continuously toward the loins,

where now and then there was a silent ripple.

But translucent and yet without shadow,

like a birch stand in early April,

warm, empty, and unhidden, lay the sex.

Now the shoulders’ quick scales stood already

in perfect balance on the upright body,

which rose from the pelvis like a fountain

and fell hesitantly in the long arms

and more swiftly in the hairs’ cascades.

Then very slowly the face went past:

out of downtilted darkness

into clear, horizontal upliftedness.

And behind it the sharp closing of the chin.

Now, with the neck stretched like a ray of light,

and like flower-stalks in which the sap rises,

the arms too stretched out like necks

of swans, when they are searching for the shore.

Then into this body’s dark dawning

came the first breath like morning wind.

In the vein-trees’ tenderest branches

a whispering arose, and the blood began

rushing louder over its deep places.

And this wind increased; now it plunged

with all its might into the newborn breasts

and filled them and crowded into them,-

so that like sails full of distance

they drove the light girl toward the shore.

And thus the goddess landed.

Behind her,

as she strode swiftly on through the young shores,

all morning the flowers and the grasses

sprang up, warm, confused,

as from embracing. And she walked and ran.

But at noon, in the heaviest hour,

the sea rose up once more and threw

a dolphin on that selfsame spot.

Dead, red, and open.”

Sandro Botticelli, “The Birth of Venus”

References:

Roberto Calasso, Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Kindle edition

Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate, Kindle edition

Richard P. Martin, Myths of the Ancient Greeks, Kindle edition

Reiner Maria Rilke, New Poems, Kindle edition

Roger Sworder, Science and Religion in Archaic Greece: Homer on Immortality and Parmenides at Delphi, Kindle edition

Posted in Aphrodite/Venus | Tagged Ananke, Aphrodite, apple, archetypes, beauty, birth of Venus, blood, castration, Furies, Gaia, goddess, Greek myth, Greek mythology, harmony, Kronos, love, Ouranos, red, Rilke, rose, sexuality, symbolism, symbols, Titans, Uranus, Venus | 17 Comments

The Wild Abandon of the Vine Month

Posted on July 12, 2015 by Symbol Reader

“Summer,” terracotta via http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/207350?utm_source=Pinterest&utm_medium=pin&utm_campaign=summer

1.“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk roses and with eglantine.

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.

And there the snake throws her enameled skin,

Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.”

William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

2.“…he drank a bottle of the scent of a summer evening, imbued with perfume and heavy with blossoms, gleaned from the edge of a park in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, dated 1753.”

Patrick Süskind, “The Perfume”

All color flowers in full bloom, canopy of leaves, carpet of grass, bees swarming, the sun oozing heat lavishly – wherever I look, I see bountifulness, I feel how life peaks in me, but how also summer weariness and sweet sensual confusion descend upon me. I am all smell. That reminds me of Christopher Moltisanti, a character from “The Sopranos,” who said he “got high off the smell of popcorn at Blockbuster.” Well, I do find all the collective aromas of the summer intoxicating; I keep catching myself wanting to smell everything around me, whilst imbibing on the hot air. I pick up The Healing Power of Trees: Spiritual Journeys through the Celtic Tree Calendar by Sharlyn Hidalgo, which is one of those effortless reads that keep me nodding and smiling lightly all the time. “I want to be able to understand the novel half-drunk on rosé,” wrote a critic from The New Yorker in an article recommending perfect summer reads. This is it but without losing the depth. Hidalgo’s book is not a scholarly work, but it does have enormous spiritual scope, lots of intuitive wisdom and was written with a true passion for the subject. I appreciate her ability to weave together various cultural traditions such as Celtic, Greek and Egyptian myths, astrology and the runes. Recently, the most exciting plant I have been checking upon in my immediate neighborhood has been the vine (below is a low-quality amateur snapshot I took of it). According to Hidalgo, on 11 July Celtic month of the vine started and will last until August 7. The guides and totems of this month are Lion, Dionysus, the Green Man, Pan, sylphs, nymphs, elves and fairies, the sun god Lugh, Strength card of the tarot, Sekhmet, Kuan Yin, and all mother aspects of the goddess (mother earth offering her bounty for the harvest).

Martin Schongauer (German, c, 1435/50-1491), Shield with Stag Held by Wild Man. Engraving. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A few glasses of wine bring a feeling of warm gregariousness, loosen ego boundaries, open the heart and endow with a feeling of expansiveness. In a further stage, imbibing on wine may result in ecstatic frenzy, in the likelihood of the female followers and priestesses of Dionysus – the Maenads, whose name signified “the raving ones.”

Wine brings forward the deepest emotions by dissolving the boundaries that hold us back from full self-expression. Hans Biedermann writes this on the symbolism of wine in his Dictionary of Symbolism:

“The custom of intemperate drinking, in various cultures that revered Dionysus, was part of a religious tradition and was believed to join mortals with the god of ecstasy. Wine supposedly could break any magic spell, unmask liars (“in vino veritas”), and slake the thirst even of the dead when it was poured out as a libation and allowed to seep into the ground. Called ‘the blood of the grape, wine was often closely linked symbolically with blood, and not only in the Christian Eucharist. Poured out as a libation, it could replace blood sacrifices for the dead.”

Bacchantes (Maenads) dancing

In John’s gospel, the very first miracle Christ performs was turning water into wine. This miracle underscored the ambivalent significance of wine, as Juan Eduardo Cirlot in his Dictionary of Symbols aptly noted, wine pertains both to fecundity and sacrifice. It is a symbol of life in its fullness, and life in its fullness must encompass death and suffering. The vine will not produce good quality wine without ample sun: almost no other plant channels the vigor of the sun in such a marked way. But the height of the summer carries the seeds of death within, symbolized by the harvesting scythe. Sharlyn Hidalgo writes:

“The idea of the sacrament of the last supper of Christ was originally a Dionysian ritual wherein women ate a piece of bread shaped like him (representing his body) and drank wine (his blood). Through this ritualized consumption, the women took in and absorbed the wild, potent power of nature. The ancient Greeks used tools resembling T-squares to cultivate grapevines. Later, these Tau crosses morphed into the structure adopted by the Romans for crucifixion.”

Celtic cross (Celtic art is said to have imitated vine)

Quite a free leap in associations, but I appreciate it. Christ said of himself that he was the vine, while his disciples were the branches. He was the one who gave life to his followers. He poured his divine substance into them. In medieval art, the cross and the tree of life were both represented as grapevines. Saint Hildegard von Bingen said that wine was endowed with the mysterious and secret vital force (viriditas). The poet Dylan Thomas understood viriditas perfectly, because he knew that life force and death force are essentially the same; in one of his most wonderful poems he wrote: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age;/ that blasts the roots of trees/ Is my destroyer.”

From the point of view of the soul, the miracle work of wine endows us with wings of fertile creativity. This creativity sometimes seeks to destroy, for example by dissolving any boundaries or barriers in order to claim a wider territory on grounds of the psyche. The creative spirit of the season was best captured by the genius of Shakespeare in his Midsummer Night’s Dream:

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”

Paul Gervais, “Folie de Titania”

I remember seeing it many years ago in the theater and being completely overpowered by its Dionysian message of loosening of boundaries, and an invitation to unbridled revelry. I remember being struck by the impression that I was being exposed to an unlimited geyser of creative force. Summer is often the time taken off from our everyday, constraining social roles. As the character in Shakespeare’s play, we are invited to frolic around in the woods governed by freedom giving divine laws of the fairies.

Jozef Mehoffer, “Strange Garden”

Posted in Summer, The Vine | Tagged blood, Celtic calendar, Christ, communion, Dionysus, fairies, Maenads, Midsummer Night's Dream, sacrifice, Shakespeare, symbolism, symbols, vine, vine month, vineard, wine | 12 Comments

“The Starry Night” by Anne Sexton

Posted on July 5, 2015 by Symbol Reader

Anselm Kiefer, “The Renowned Orders of the Night”

“The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry”

Posted in Poetry | Tagged Anne Sexton, literature, poem, poetry, Starry Night | 6 Comments

Rose Red: Symbolism of Blood

Posted on June 28, 2015 by Symbol Reader

A woodcut etching by Sogra Khurasani, via http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/my-name-is-red/article6630020.ece

1.“White and red combined are the colour of the mysterious rose, the whiteness of milk and the redness of blood, the white of light and the redness of fire.”

Eliphas Levi, “The Book of Splendors”

2.“Blood is the first incarnation of the universal fluid; it is the materialized vital light. Its birth is the most marvellous of all nature’s marvels; it lives only by perpetually transforming itself, for it is the universal Proteus. The blood issues from principles where there was none of it before, and it becomes flesh, bones, hair, nails . . . tears, and perspiration. It can be allied neither to corruption nor death; when life is gone, it begins decomposing; if you know how to reanimate it, to infuse into it life by a new magnetization of its globules, life will return to it again. The universal substance, with its double motion, is the great arcanum of being; blood is the great arcanum of life.”

Eliphas Levi, quoted by Madame Blavatsky in “Isis Unveiled”

Many years ago, at the time when I studied alchemy for hours every day, I had a vivid dream whose climax involved blood gushing forward in jets from a man’s liver. The vividly red blood flew through the air in tiny red droplets and landed on my books. Black flies started feasting on it. Gruesome as it may sound, the dream was a revelation. To me it felt like it meant that all my learning would be infused with life and energy carried by blood.

Blood of life flows through our veins. The tissues of our bodies form the substance of our heredity. Our blood ties are our fate. Blood is also symbolically linked with death, often a violent one. Its colour is the result of the high content of iron, a metal associated with Mars, the fiery god of war. Blood is fiery water. It is not surprising that Mars is associated with blood since he represents “the masculinity of the body, rather than the masculinity of the spirit,” as Liz Greene puts it in Astrology of Fate. And the body belongs to the Goddess. Ares emerged from the world of instinct and “the old matriarchal realm of flesh.”

In the old times, blood was people’s constant companion: women felt the pungent smell of blood on their newborns, there were no tampons to diffuse and absorb the menstrual blood before it can be seen or smelled, when warriors died in combat or when people sustained mortal wounds, nobody was sanitized and rushed to hospital. Nowadays we experience blood shedding vicariously through fiction, movies and TV shows. But the memory of history’s violent bloodbaths still runs through the veins of our unconsciousness. When the advent of Christianity ushered in the Age of Pisces, forgiveness and mercy teachings of Jesus were not subsequently adopted by many of his followers. The ritual of Holy Communion was meant to be an atonement for the atrocities committed during the Age of Aries, and a symbolic transference of the teachings of Christ to his disciples:

“When Jesus says, ‘Drink … this is my blood,’ what else was meant, it was simply a metaphorical assimilation of himself to the vine, which bears the grape, whose juice is its blood – wine. It was a hint that as he had himself been initiated by the ‘Father,’ so he desired to initiate others. His father was the husbandman, himself the vine, his disciples the branches.”

Blavatsky, “Isis Unveiled”

Moving away from symbolism to the realm of literal meaning, the Inquisition spilled torrents of blood in the whole of Europe. This infamous torch has been taken over by religious terrorists in our times.

Blood is synonymous with life itself, always in motion, ceaseless in its circulation. It is the opposite of “stagnation, absorption, calcification from old age, and death,” says Madame Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled. When we feel most alive, when we experience passion, jealousy, or other overpowering emotions, blood rushes through our veins, we breathe faster, our cheeks redden. As Cirlot noticed in his Dictionary of Symbols:

“In cases of relationships as close as that between blood and the colour red, it is evident that both are reciprocally expressive: the passionate quality characteristic of red pervades the symbolism of blood, and the vital character of blood informs the significance of the colour red.”

Color red is the theme of one of my favorite novels – My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk. In one of the chapters it is actually the color red which speaks to us:

“I hear the question upon your lips: What is it to be a color?

Color is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness. …

I am so fortunate to be red! I’m fiery. I’m strong. I know men take notice of me and that I cannot be resisted.

I do not conceal myself: For me, delicacy manifests itself neither in weakness nor in subtlety, but through determination and will. So, I draw attention to myself. I’m not afraid of other colors, shadows, crowds, or even of loneliness. How wonderful it is to cover a surface that awaits me with my own victorious being! Whenever I’m spread, I see eyes shine, passions increase, eyebrows rise and heartbeats quicken. Behold how wonderful it is to live! Behold how wonderful to see. Behold: Living is seeing. I am everywhere. Life begins with me and returns to me.”

In Mysteries of the Dark Moon, Demetra George devotes considerable space to the significance of the menstrual time for a woman, and equates this time with the symbolism of the dark moon. Menstrual blood was sacred for many ancient cultures. Demetra George writes that menstruation time is “a woman’s most powerful time of month, a time when her psychic and spiritual energies are most highly sensitized.” Because men feared the women’s psychic powers during that time, they created laws to isolate women while they were bleeding. A menstruating woman withdraws from others because she needs to nurture herself and draw from her psychic power within. What is more, “because a woman’s greatest sexual desire occurs around her period, men became terrified of what they perceived to be her assertive, voracious sexuality that would devour them.” Apparently, if we want to distill the wisdom of the ancients we may say that the flow of blood changes women into powerful sorceresses full of erotic fury, channeling the dark goddess. Of course in the West we call it PMS.

Image from Aurora Consurgens, a woman bleeds within a zodiac circle

The Egyptian goddess Sekhmet wore red garments. In one of the myths associated with her, Sun god Ra sent her to punish humanity, but she fell into frenzy doing it and got inebriated on the blood she was drinking. That put the whole humanity in danger of extinction. Ra made Sekhmet drink beer colored by red dye to deceive her and thus subside her frenzy. In India, the dark goddess Kali was a counterpart of the Egyptian Sekhment. She was the one who drank blood. The blood of Kali was believed to have had regenerative qualities. As Barbara Walkers wrote in Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets:

By Susan Seddon Boulet

“In Kali’ s cave-temple, her image spouted the blood of sacrifices from its vaginal orifice to bathe Shiva’ s holy phallus while the two deities formed the lingam-yoni, and worshippers followed suit, in an orgy designed to support the cosmic life-force generated by union of male and female, white and red.”

Frida Kahlo, “Just a Few Nips”

As usual, Jung’s reflections on the color red and the feminine strike me as the deepest and most appealing:

“The relation of the love-goddess to red dates back to ancient times. Scarlet is the colour of the Great Whore of Babylon and her beast. Red is the colour of sin. The rose is also an attribute of Dionysus. Red and rose-red are the colour of blood, a synonym for the aqua permanens and the soul, which are extracted from the prima material and bring ‘dead’ bodies to life. … The stone … is the son of this whore. …

Certain of the ecclesiastical symbols prove to be acutely dualistic, and this is also true of the rose. Above all it is an allegory of Mary and of various virtues. Its perfume is the odour of sanctity… At the same time it symbolizes human beauty (venustas), indeed the lust of the world (voluptas mundi).

Like the rose, the figure of the mother-beloved shines in all the hues of heavenly and earthly love. She is the chaste bride and whore who symbolizes the prima materia, which ‘nature left imperfected.’”

C.G. Jung, “Mysterium Coniunctionis,” CW vol. XIV, pars. 420-422

Lust, XI Arcanum of the Thoth deck

In alchemy rubedo (reddening) is the crowning stage of the opus. Having achieved illumination outside the body in the Albedo (whiteness) stage, during Rubedo the adept returns to the earth in order to fully incarnate his new enlightened consciousness into the body’s flesh and blood. The alchemical gold, claimed Greek alchemists, was “the red blood of silver.” The Red Sea had to be crossed in order to reach the Promised Land. We all have to cross our own sea “bloodied with wounds and sacrifice” (Cirlot, Dictionary of Symbols).