Bebo

Heather Emelin Graham <golightlymuse>

"Modern Day Muse: Part Fairy Godmother, Part Greek Goddess"

	Who is the Muse?	601 dni temu
	The Aeneid of the Latin poet Virgil [b 70 BCE] begins with such an evocation of the Muse: "Oh Muse, retell to me now the causes of what happened then." (My translation.) Here Virgil asks for two things at once: for the Muse to retell what she knows, and for her to inform him of causes, explaining how it was that certain things came about in a certain way in the past. If Virgil is to be believed, his capacity to tell the story of Aeneas, the mythical hero who founded Rome, came neither exclusively from his own poetic talents nor from his personal memory. He relied on the Muse not only to supply the myth but to enlighten him concerning its plot-structure. What manner of fabulous ally is this? Who is the Muse? Divine Memory In the classical art and myth of the West, the Muse is a version of a primal deity called "the goddess of memory." By invoking her, Virgil and other poets in antiquity acknowledged their reliance on a primal memory source for their feats of mythic recitation. They did not author myths, although they did craft the language for them. They were mythmakers in the sense that they provided language for the mythos, but they did not make up the mythos all by themselves. They repeated what the Muse told them, and they relied on her version of events to indicate causality, moral order, purposefulness. Benefiting from her transpersonal input, ancient poets were able to fathom the causes of things past, decisive events in prehistory that led to known historical events. Thus Virgil relates how the mythical adventures of Aeneas led to the historical founding of Rome in 747 BCE. Another famous invocation of the Muse occurs in the Works and Days, a cosmological poem attributed to Hesiod c. 800 BCE: "Muses who from Pieria give glory through song, come to me and tell of Zeus, your own father." (Translation by Richmond Lattimore) Here the poet refers to a tradition that describes nine Muses, the daughters of Mnemosyne. This rather daunting name, pronounced Nuh-MOZ-uh-KNEE, is one of the most precious clues in our Western mythological heritage. This strange name persists as a mere trace in the modern word mnemonic (nuh-MON-ik), referring to devices or techniques used to assist memory. The plural, mnemonics, refers to any system for improving the memory. The name given to the goddess of memory relates to the Greek word mnemonikos, "mindfulness, remembering", based on the Indo-European root, *mna-, "to remember". The root of the word "remember" is the name of a mythical woman! If this association looks fantastic to us today, the ancient experience behind it is even more fantastic. If the antique poets are to be believed, the source of the act of remembering is a "goddess", some kind of superhuman power, conceived as feminine, capable of loading direct input into the human psyche. The Muse is a divine, supernatural entity who dictates to the receptive human instrument. According to the ancient poets of Europa, we can remember in a special way when the Muse remembers for us, and retells what she knows through us. Such is also the testimony of poets, bards and shamanic storytellers from many cultures around the world. (On the terms Europa, Europan and pan-Europan, see the Lexicon.) The origin of "muse" is uncertain but it may derive from same root as mont, meaning mountain. Partridge suggests the Indo-European base, *mendh-, found in meditation and menthol, hence "breathed, inspired" (Origins). It is equally likely that muse relates to the Greek verb muein, "to murmur or speak in undertones", as when imparting a secret. Muein is the source of such words as mystery, mystic, mystify. With the insertion of the "s" this root permutes to form amuse, bemuse, music, musician, museum. Hence evidence of the Muse occurs in many common words connected with acts of leisure and pleasure, but also with instruction. "The archaic Muses themselves were at first only three aspects of the goddess Mnemosyne, later multiplied again by three" and the triple goddess confers memory which is "the most essential gift" because no poet could repeat his verses without it (Barbara Walker, The Women’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects). In one version of Greek myth the sisterhood of Muses lived on Mount Helicon where they guarded a fountain of inspiration called the Pierian spring (hence the allusion in Hesiod). Their mother Mnemosyne produced her ninefold offspring by consorting with Zeus, the paramount sky deity of Europa who was probably a rowdy migrant from the Ural Mountains. This coupling occurred on a misty mountain crest. In the psychic life of our ancestors a special contact was made by ascending mountains where high peaks and precipitous ridges merged into the clouds. They intuited a hieros gamos or sacred marriage between earth and sky, and from that union various offspring were born. The tradition of invoking the Muse is not entirely confined to antiquity. Some modern poets have also been graced by her gifts. Poet and mythologist Robert Graves was an historical novelist who experienced trancelike states in which he recalled past events recounted in novels such as I, Claudius. Graves celebrated the Muse in a famous book entitled The White Goddess. This staggeringly rich and complex masterpiece on "the historical grammar of poetic myth" opens with a poem dedicated to the Mnemosyne, whom he calls the Mountain Mother: All saints revile her, and all sober men Ruled by God Apollo’s golden mean — In scorn of which I sailed to find her In distant regions likeliest to hold her Whom I desired above all things to know, Sister of the mirage and echo. It was a virtue not to stay, To go my headstrong and heroic way Seeking her out at the volcano’s head, Among pack ice, and where the track had faded Beyond the cavern of the seven sleepers: Whose broad high brow was white as any leper’s, Whose eyes were blue, with rowan-berry lips, With hair curled honey-colored to white hips. Green sap of Spring in the young wood a-stir Will celebrate the Mountain Mother, And every song-bird shout a while for her; But I am gifted, even in November Rawest of seasons, with so great a sense Of her nakedly worn magnificence I forget cruelty and past betrayal, Careless of where the next bright bolt may fall. The mix of mystical and erotic elements is typical of poetry that celebrates the Muse, and the allusions to whiteness indicate a mysterious effect known to mystics and psychonauts of all ages. No Human Author So, according to the ancient poets who produced mythological works the source of their genius was a feminine power, a goddess called Memory. It is reasonable to assume that other myths were produced in the same manner, from the same source. In Celtic tradition tribal bards like Gwion and Taliesin acquired poetic inspiration from the sow-goddess Caridwen, guardian of a magical cauldron in the Underworld. When three drops of the potion brewing in the cauldron fell on his tongue, Gwion acquired the power of ecstatic recitation. As an ollave, a master poet in the Welsh tradition, Gwion was required to discipline himself and learn how to articulate the divine flow of inspiration. Something more than mere channeling was involved. A parallel figure to the Celtic Caridwen occurs in Tibetan Buddhist practices derived from Bon Po, the indigenous shamanism of the Himalayan plateau. Vajravarahi, the Adamantine Sow, is a supernatural ally who teaches secret rites and recitations to lamas and tertons, spiritual treasure-finders. (Vajravahari is Dorje Phagmo in Tibet, but this yidam or tutelary deity seems to have originated in India.) She belongs to a class of feminine entities called dakinis, "sky dancers", who appear in popular guise as the red, green and white variants of Tara, goddess of infinite compassion. Scholars call these ravishing apparitions tutelary deities, "teaching gods." The special insight (gnosis) they bestow is "the knowledge of great bliss, mahasukha (Alex Wayman, The Buddhist Tantras, p. 6 ." It takes extraordinary powers of attention to receive and retain the complex instruction bestowed by such resplendent phantoms. In Asian tradition the inspirations of the Tantric Muse are translated into magical and metaphysical treatises of great lucidity and precision, rather than long poetic narratives comparable to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but in both cases the act of composition demands the same advanced faculties of retention. Classical authors like Virgil were masters of language or, like Homer, participants in a long tradition of oral recitation that demanded immense discipline, and so their names are rightfully attached to the masterpieces they produced, but ultimately no myth can be traced to a specific author. The pan-Europan tradition of invoking the Muse supports the theory of transpersonal memory, technically known as phylogenetic memory, or species memory. Although the modern exponents of this theory, known as evolutionary psychologists, never refer to the antique convention of invoking the Muse, their speculations on the operation of species-memory run directly into the Muse’s territory. The species memory, and no single human author, is the source of genuine, truth-bearing myth. I propose the term shamanic recall for the action of accessing species-memory in order to tell the story of human evolution in Gaian perspective. Developing the Gaia Mythos is the highest calling of poet-shamans in our time but it cannot proceed precisely as it did in the past. Mythopoesis may be eternal in our species, and it is certainly as eternal as anything in human-made culture can be, but its function changes over the long term. In the distant past the poets channeled the Muse, but to invoke the Muse today we must consciously call upon Gaia, the central character in the Mythos, to be the divine witness of our shared process of mythmaking. Until we communicate directly with Gaia (however that may come about) we must rely on trained powers of imagination to produce a story grounded in the evidence of the life-sciences in a way that approximates a true remembering. What then is the relation of Gaia, the Earth Goddess, to Mnemosyne, the Goddess of Memory? This question may hold the initial clue to the role of humanity in Gaia’s purposes. In Remembrance of Gaia Since the Occult Revival toward the close of the 19th Century, almost a century before the Gaia Hypothesis was proposed, various theories have attempted to explain the role of the human species from a Gaian perspective. In the latter half of the 20th century those theories took on a sophisticated glaze by their association with trendy notions in physics, biology and neuropsychology. The most widely accepted view of this kind (by no means a mainstream view, but a proposition current with the avant-garde of Euro-American intellectuals) assumes that humanity is the nervous system of the biosphere and that the biosphere itself is evolving toward a focal point of awakening. This proposition is a rough paraphrase of Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the "noosphere", i.e., the biosphere self-awakened to its cognitive potential, focused in the Omega Point. Similar ideas have been developed by social visionaries such as Oliver Reiser and Barbara Marx Hubbard, to mention just two from a tentative dozen that flit to mind on this stormy February night in Flanders. The implicit tendency of these scenarios is to assign a lofty evolutionary function to the human species. Teilhard’s views were overtly Christocentric, consistent with his Catholic conditioning although professionally he was trained as a paleontologist. In Judeo-Christian doctrine Christ, the Messiah, is the representative of humanity, the single perfect human being who is actually a hybrid, human in appearance but divine in essence. According to Teilhard’s theory, Christ holds the Omega Point until humanity achieves it, thence becoming "Christened" at the planetary level. In this scenario we, the human species, attain the divinized condition of the Logos Incarnate, superior to all other life-forms by the fact that we are conscious of being conscious and, so being, are also cognizant of the ideal Humanity prefigured in Jesus Christ. "New Age" versions of our evolutionary role also associate humanity’s mission on earth with the attainment of "Christ Consciousness" in some form or fashion. This is a glorious prospect, no doubt, but it excludes any explicit description of our relation to Gaia, the Goddess, and to the natural world that may be imagined as Her embodiment. (The romance of Christos and Gaia may yet be celebrated by the modern imagination. Gnostic texts such as the apocryphal Acts of John and the Gospel of Philip in the Nag Hammadi codices are little known to the mainstream, but Mary Magdalene has become something of a modern heroine through through books such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code (reviewed in Reading). Some episodes of the Gaia Mythos present the coupling of two divine principles, Christos and Sophia, although Christos in this context must not be identified with Jesus Christ. The identity of Christos in the Gaia Mythos is unique to Gnostic sources.) In a grand scheme that recalls Teilhard’s vision, Barbara Marx Hubbard places humanity at the tip of a vast evolutionary spiral dating back 15 billion years. In this view we are not merely a self-directing species (again, due to the power of imagination that enables us to be goal-oriented), we are the singular glowing node of the self-directing intelligence of nature. Maverick occultist G. I. Gurdjieff, a key figure in the Euro-American Occult Revival, stated something very close to this when he said that humanity is the self-evolving project of organic life on earth. Apart from Teilhard the earliest systematic expression of this view in the 20th century is probably found in the works of Oliver Reiser, whose name is hardly known today. Veterans of the 1960s may recall the ironic allusion to the Omega Point in the lyrics of Jefferson Airplane, with Grace Slick belting out the taunting line: "You are the crown of creation, and you’ve got nowhere to go". The Gaia Mythos is an opportunity to move ahead to a newfound rapport with Sacred Nature without placing the human species at the Omega Point of evolution. Decentering humanity and deflating homocentric religiosity is essential to the poetics of the Mythos. The story to be developed in this site does not assume that humanity is the glowing node of "higher evolution" on the blue planet, but it leaves open the possibility that we might, due to our unique capacity for goal-orientation, play a particular and delicate role in Gaia’s larger purposes. Our understanding of this role must emerge as the Mythos unfolds, but the initial clue to it can be found in the name of the mother Muse: Mnemosyne. This is truly a name to conjure with. The derivation of Mnemosyne has been treated above, but there is one more soft nugget of insight to be mined in this regard. Looking back to the time when poets ceased to invoke the Muse, we can detect a huge shift in the course of human experience. The first centuries of the Common Era saw the suppression and co-optation of the ecstatic rites of Pagan religions by early proponents of Christianity. As the new faith gained in numbers, doctrinarian fanatics (called the Church Fathers) conspired with the legal and military authorities of the Roman Empire. The Roman Catholic alliance effectuated by Constantine in 321 established the fascist agenda that persists today in "Euro-American industrial theocracy", as Dan Russell calls it. The global dominator program relies heavily on disempowering those whom it would enslave, and does so by systematically alienating humans from their bond with Sacred Nature. Russell suggests that "sensitivity to the ineffable ecosphere must be our teacher if we are to survive the effects of our own technology, [and] so must sensibility to our own ineffable logosphere, our collective unconscious, be our teacher if we are to survive the politics that technology has generated". (Shamanism, Patriarchy and the Drug War, p. 120-1). This comment goes a way toward correcting the human-centered vision of the Omega Point. This correction, and the consequent rebalancing of the human species in symbiosis with its habitat, can be accomplished by reconnecting with the Muse through "archaic techniques of ecstasy", including temporary egoloss and enhanced communion with nature. Russell describes how rites of participation affected by ingestion of psychoactive plant potions, such as the kykeon of the Eleusinian Mytseries, enabled Pagans to preserve the true ecology of culture, as reflected to them from the order and beauty of nature. This rapturous visionary experience, the Gaian birthright of humanity, reaches out to the distant code-banks of the circling stars and down into the molecular structure of matter. Russell’s argument reflects the Wasson Thesis on the central role of psychoactive plants in religion, and supports it with a massive array of literary, enthnographic, archeological and anthropological evidence. Quoting renowned Greek scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, Russell evokes "the Mnemosyne of initiation rites, the remembering again of things seen in ecstasy." (Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion; Russell, p. 163). Before the Christian mass was celebrated with the words, "Do this in remembrance of me", Gaia was invoked in sacramental feasting, dance, trance and storytelling in which our bond to Sacred Nature was recalled and reaffirmed. Russell says that in these nature-based tribal rituals "the mythology, the words of the Mother, called up memories (mnemosyne-realization) of the evolutionary ecology, the roots of the mind-body" (p. 120). In other words, Mnemosyne represents the resurgence in human memory of our empathic bond to Gaia. For the prepared participant this resurgence can build into shamanic recall. By accessing Gaian memory-circuits the shaman-bards of old were able to recall and recount a story to guide their community, the racial-regional culture to which they belonged. The challenge of our time is to recount a story to guide the entire human species. Now, if the Muse is the faculty of species memory that allows us to remember our bond to Gaia, may this same faculty not also allow Gaia to remember what ends we serve in Her purposes? I propose that the consciousness of the human species may occupy a special feedback loop in the Gaian memory system. This idea is tentative and subject to testing, of course. If this formula is anywhere near correct, the human species ought not to be regarded as the supreme expression of planetary consciousness, or the best potential candidate for directing evolution. We are instead a fragile circuit in the memory of the unique Divinity who sustains the living planet and informs the biosphere. Gaia, like all living organisms, must rely on memory to be self-guiding. Any creature that cannot remember what it does cannot guide its actions in an intelligent or purposeful way. Likewise for Gaia: She also must be able to remember Her experience, including the experience of the species She carries in Her womb, the biosphere. The adventure of the Gaia Mythos is our way to discover our share in the mystery of Her larger purposes, even as we come to remember, in Her behalf, what those purposes might be. Story Synopsis This story is about who Gaia was before She united with the Earth, and how She came to be the indwelling intelligence of the planet and the mother of terrestrial species. The story is told in four Parts, each consisting of brief Episodes: One, Fallen Goddess Two, Gaia Awakening Three, The Gender Rift Four, In Tomorrow's Light Part One, Fallen Goddess (Episodes 1 through 16), opens with a company of gods called Aeons, divinities who dwell in the core of our home galaxy. It tells how one of these immortal powers, the Aeon Sophia as she was known to Gnostics, departed in a reckless way from the core, producing havoc in the outer region of the galaxy, then falling into a swoon. It recounts how Sophia, in Her shock and disorientation, gradually realizes that She has precipitated an anomaly in the cosmos, giving rise to the planetary system in which the Earth She embodies is captured. Complications involving an inorganic species called the Archons put Her in a rather tricky situation with the human species. Part Two, Gaia Awakening, recounts the long sequence of moments in which the Fallen Goddess awakens to her new identity as "Mother Earth." It describes the geological epochs of the Earth and the emergence of the kingdoms of nature in terms of Gaian "morphic feels." Part Three, The Gender Rift, describes a curious affliction of humanity, manifested in malice between the sexes, that arises due to Sophia's plunge, and explains how humans are involved with Gaia in healing this condition. Part Four, In Tomorrow's Light describes the future of the Earth and the possible role of humanity in view of Gaia's own purposes. The myth of Sophia's Fall was taught for centuries in the Pagan Mysteries and recounted in Gnostic writings that survive in fragmentary form. It is distinct from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic story of the Fall (the Genesis narrative), and, in fact, reverses the values and beliefs encoded in that well-known scenario. The Gaia Mythos is a close reconstruction of sacred teachings lost to humanity for almost two thousand years. Commentaries (in development) on the Episodes are accessed via links in the right-hand column, level with each Episode. No ay que juzcar los escritores por sus fracasos si por la brillentez de sus errores en la realization de lo imposible. Do not judge writers for their failures but for the brilliance of their errors in the realization of the impossible. - Graffiti on the sea wall, Marbella, Spain, March 17, 2004
	opublikowane przez Heather Emelin Graham