Green Mama and The Angel of Fire

This morning I decided to put down my reading on Community Rights and pick up a book on The Soul. I Pulled Thomas Moore's "Original Self" off from the shelf and wasn't disappointed.

"What would it be like, I wonder, if we were born in some dramatic spiritual way. Say the soul like a sheet of silky gauze fell down from the heavens in a soft flutter? Would that be preferable to the birth of a human being at the fork in the legs amid blood, excrement, and waters? I don't think so, because we are given life by the green mama as well as the angel of fire, and the green mama doesn't think much about what she does. She loves and gives birth and then takes back to herself everything she has birthed." (Pg. 82)

I think it's interesting that me mentioned the green mama and the angel of fire in the same sentence.

One Big Yawn

"Every action flick depicts the destruction of civilization as some kind of crash-boom-bang, a nuclear war or hurtling comet or a self-aware-cyborg uprising, but the true cataclysm may already be creeping up right under our eyes: because of rampant obesity, one in three children born in the United States is at risk of diabetes--meaning, we could be the first generation of Americans to outlive our children. Maybe the ancient Hindus were better crystal-ball-gazers than Hollywood when they predicted the world would end not with a bang but with a old yawn. Shiva the Destroyer would snuff us out by doing...nothing. Lazing out. Withdrawing his hot-blooded force from our bodies. Letting us become slugs."--Christopher McDougall, pg.99, Born to Run

George Washington God King

I was following my nose this morning and doing some reading on Wikipedia about William Blake and Orc energy. I found this excerpt interesting:

"Blake had many expectations for the American revolution, which is described in a prophetic way within the poem. However, he was disappointed when the fallen state of existence returned and that slavery was not immediately ended. He was also disappointed when there was not a sensual liberation. After Napoleon declared himself emperor in 1804, Blake believed that the Americans would start treating George Washington as their god king in the manner that the French treated Bonaparte and the English George the III. He continued to believe in an apocalyptic state that would soon appear, but he no longer believed that Orc man, the leader of a revolution, would be the agent of the apocalypse. Instead, he believed that God could only exist in men, and he distrusted all hero worship."

I've heard more than a couple people refer to George Washington as a god king.

Sunday And No Church

It's Sunday morning. I just finished up listening to an hour long talk titled: The Educated Heart, by Robert Bly. I've been to church less than a handful of times in my life. As a child, whenever I asked mom about attending church, she always told me that as long as you kept God in your heart you'd be just fine. So, we didn't go. Anyway, Bly's talk is more valuable to me right now in my life than any church service will ever be.

Quinn Quote Saturday

“The people of your culture cling with fanatical tenacity to the specialness of man. They want desperately to perceive a vast gulf between man and the rest of creation. This mythology of human superiority justifies their doing whatever they please with the world, just the way Hitler's mythology of Aryan superiority justified his doing whatever he pleased with Europe. But in the end this mythology is not deeply satisfying. The Takers are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy territory, and they live in it like an army of occupation, alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness.”--Daniel Quinn

Guns and Penises

Quote from article: "A gun does not signify power, but the lack of power. Always.

"So, a gun is a symptom. But what is the cure for a gun? What would replace the gun and be real, have power? Why not a penis? Not the symbol of neurotic power but the means for being erotic, expressing love, incarnating desire, creating children, and offering pleasure. Maybe these qualities could be therapeutic for the gun. If everyone got serious about them, maybe they’d forget their guns.

"In these times when women are rightfully correcting an excess of the power-penis, it isn’t always easy to appreciate this aspect of the male body. Our imagination of its mythic properties has become too narrow, partly because of Freud himself. He was too narrow in his vision of myth and of Medusa, and he limited far too much the imaginal implications of the penis."--Thomas Moore

Moving Towards Mythology

I've mentioned before that I have an interest in Zen and I practice sitting zazen. I've also mentioned that I'm a substitute rural letter carrier. So on days when I have to work I end up sitting in the car for atleast five hours a day. That gives me a lot of time to listen to podcasts. I've had to work the last couple of days so I ended up listening to some of Brad Warner's from over at Hardcore Zen. Close to ten hours worth, actually.

I enjoyed the podcasts. They taught me a lot about Buddhism, Zen, and meditation. But ever since I've started sitting zazen and taking zen more seriously I often think of this quote by Robert Bly:

"So, for us, mythology is more helpful than enlightenment or to put it chronologically, years of mythology need to come, accustoming the soul to darkness, before the soul is ready for enlightenment."--Robert Bly in the November issue of The Sun Magazine back in 1983

I know almost nothing about the mythology in the Zen tradition, or Greek mythology for that matter. So I'm finding myself moving in the direction of learning mythology and understanding the psyche from a depth psychology perspective.

The Hades Perspective

"The richness of Hades-Pluto psychologically refers to the wealth that is discovered through recognizing the interior deeps of the imgagination. For the underworld was mythologically conceived as a place where there are only psychic images. From the Hades perspective we are our images. The imaginal perspective assumes priority over the natural organic perspective." [Pg. 207, Revisioning Psychology]

I'm coming to realize that James Hillman's work falls under the same tree as Daniel Quinn's work. Thats why I think quotes like this nourish my soul: "Myths that shape human lives become in humanism instruments which the mind invents to explain itself to itself. The inherent otherness of myth in an imaginal other realm, the creative spontaneity of these stories and the fact that they are tales of Gods and their doings with humans--all become something a man makes up. We lose the experience of their primary reality and of ourselves as passing through them, of being lived by them, and that 'myths communicate with each other through men without their being aware of this fact.' As the perceptive philosopher Charles Hartshorne has noted, the rise of humanism correlates with 'the downfall of primitive animism, which is the mythological form of man's fellowhip with nature.'"[Pg.190, Re-Visioning Psychology]

More Thoughts

This ties in with my last two posts. Our style of capitalsim is based on this idea: man was made to conquer and rule the world. In other words, human beings are the apex of evolution. Reality is showing us that this is not so. That's why it feels like the world is coming to an end.

Bunny Rabbits and Easter

The other day my 12 yr. old son asked: "Dad, why do we have the Easter bunny?" Of course, I didn't have the foggiest idea. But, lo and behold, while finishing up reading The Maiden King this morning, the answer appeared:

"The goddess of the spring equinox was Eastre, the hare was her ritual animal and the egg her fertility symbol. The image suggests the lasciviousness of the goddess, the sheer lusciousness of life, sexuality, and birth. And with the goddess, the moon, the luminous white of the moon that carries the imprint of the hare, shines."

"Moon goddess imagery carries the cyclic pattern; it is simply a law of life. The forest knows how to sacrifice parts of itself that have to give way to new growth. The grief in the dying gives place to the miracle of resurrection. The hare willingly sacrifices itself for the sake of spirit: unconscious matter sacrifices itself for conscious awareness.

"Farmers who know hares well think of them as sacrificial animals. When fields and hedges are burned off, they see hares who refuse to run before the fire reaches them, suddenly leap, their fur on fire, to run to their death aflame. The more we meditate on the hare, the more we love this animal that, like the moon, dies to be reborn." [Page 217, The Maiden King]

Perhaps it was moment of synchronicity.

Not In Control

Lately I've been reading up on mythology and fairy tales. I found this quote significant: "The movement to demonize the father gods, and to create a sentimentalized version of the Goddess makes women and men more infantile." [Robert Bly, Pg.88, The Maiden King]

Out of all this reading and thinking about this I can say one thing for sure: We're not in control!

Mythological Understanding

Slowly working my way through The Maiden King. I wrote this passage down yesterday:

"With the help of Freud, Western culture has moved from a literal to a psycholgical understanding of the world in only a hundred years. But now we are receiving a request to move on still further, from the psychological to the mythological stage. This is more difficult. We are at the moment, almost incapapable of a mytholgical understanding of the world. That understanding is not behind us, but ahead of us. It does not involve adversarial thinking, but the sort of double vision that develops in the Underworld." [Robert Bly, Pg. 40, The Maiden King]

Revisiting George Draffan Interview

Lately I've felt the need to go back and read some of the early Derrick Jensen interviews, and this morning I finally did it. The first one I had in mind was with George Draffan. This excerpt jumped out at me: "As civilization arose, power began to become centralized, as it is in the second face. The powerful created a discourse — later divided into disciplines such as religion, philosophy, science, and economics — that rationalized and institutionalized injustice. After ten thousand years, we all to some extent believe that these differentials in power are inevitable."--George Draffan

Going Against the Dragon

"Mythology is more helpful than enlightenment or to put it chronologically, years of mythology need to come, accustoming the soul to darkness, before the soul is ready for enlightenment."

I pulled this quote from this interview. I find myself returning to it once every couple of months.

Relationship?

Yesterday, while on the mail route, I was thinking about this statement by Robert Bly: "Among boys, one could say that if the son is released from the oedipal struggle with his father, he will find somewhere in his life areally big male energy that wants to kill him." (Of course, this is what Jack in the Beanstalk is all about.) A few minutes later The Greek Myth of The Iron Cage entered my thoughts.

"As the generations pass they grow worse. A time will come when they have grown so wicked that they will worship power, might will be right to them and reverence for the good will cease to be. At last, when no man is angry any more at wrong doing or feels shame in the presence of the miserable, Zues will destroy them too. And yet even then something might be done, if only the common people would rise and put down rulers that oppress them."--The Greek Myth of the Iron Cage


I'm wondering what the relationship is between the two is, if there is any. I'm thinking that if the oedipal struggle and male to male intiation is lacking in a culture it faces the threat of being destroyed by Zues.

Some Childhood God Questions

Growing up through the eighties and early nineties (I was born in 1974) I was always concerned about our impact on the environment. I mean it was twenty some odd years after Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring", so the message was out there for all those that wanted to see. Of course, being a typical kid, I wanted to see anything and everything I could lay my eyes on. And it was obvious that we were destroying the planet. So some of the questions that I asked on occasion were: Why are we destroying such a beautiful place? And why, if God created it all, is he allowing it to happen? And, also, why if he created us did he program us to do this? You'd think an all-seeing and all-knowing God would know better.

Stopped in My Tracks

I had half a post written out until I came across this quote looking for another quote that I wanted to use in this post. "We've lost our ability to believe that God is unequivocally on our side against the rest of creation." [Daniel Quinn, Pg. 284, The Story of B]

This post was going to be about what I think about most of the political letters written in to the editor of our local newspaper. But after reding that quote I don't have anything to say about those letters. I can't really name it, but there is something in that quote that cuts to the heart of the matter for me this morning.

Moving Forward

I ran across this bit of wisdom in Lewis Mumford's Interpretations and Forecasts: 1922-1972:

"When we reach the present and seek to move forward, we are in the realm of myth and projection." pg. 376

It's clear that our fate is not predestined. In other words, the plan isn't the plan.

The Curse of Mining

I'm reading Lewis Mumford's Myth of the Machine.

Here is a quote with a certain degree of chill and truth off from page 239.

"From the earliest times, as Mircea Eliade points out, blood sacrifice had been a ritual accompaniment of metallurgy. The curse of war and the curse of mining are almost interchangeable: united in death."