Apparently, at the ecstatic height of the Eleusinian Mysteries rites of ancient Greece, a darkly robed and fearfully masked figure would walk quietly about whispering into the ears of the participants, ‘Death is coming.’
Such a ritual gesture is apotropaic, a turning away of the harm and evil influence of inflation, somewhat inevitable if the purpose of the evening is to become one with The Mystery.
The dark cloaked figure’s grounding reminder of death allows the experience of the rite to be integrated and lived out in the community as creative gratitude.
We do something rather different. We deflate with guilt. Major guilt.
Other than that the One System system encourages inflation at every turn.
What gets skipped over in all the stories of Yahweh’s Great Smiting, are all those he lets off the hook, namely anyone that would praise him. His commandments are trashed left, right and centre by his kings throughout history. The message is clear,
”You can do as you please so long as its in my name.”
Which is what Western Civilisation has subsequently done without restraint..
Bonzer,…sounds ideal!
Mistaking the heady raptures of an identification with a wrathful and plunderous god for the kind of wisdom that comes from a really rather different life is more easily done than should be allowed.
Nevertheless;
Wisdom is never violent: where wisdom reigns there is no conflict between thinking and feeling. ~Carl Jung,
And though it may suit us to mistake the one for the other there is a catch.
No, a consequence.
Thou shalt not do loads of stuff but chiefly thou shalt not become they full self for to do so is to have a relationship with Psyche which breaks the one rule we see Yahweh applying over and again whilst all the others are allowed to go flying.
No-one but Me.
Which gives rise to a wee problem.. Psyche and Sophia/Nature are the same thing..
DON’T SPEAK HER NAME.
No we weren’t, it’s just that for a person to truly become themselves they have to meet with Psyche and that has to happen outside the churchyard you grew up in.
There is a predominant body of opinion that says the Great Mother had to be defeated in order for ego consciousness to emerge at this, our shining pinnacle of evolutionery, er, progress.. The One System system is necessary, they say, to the emergence of Consciousness.
Bollocks.
What has actually emerged is not ego consciousness at all but a cult of persona, one-dimensional man, which is a very different animal. In fact ego consciousness is something of an endangered species. Mostly when people talk about their ego they mean some corner of themselves holding the rest to ransom.
In this scenario, most of ego is actually being tyrannised by the persona, a much more limited, single aspect of the personality which can gain the upper hand, or feels it has to take over for want of sufficient internal co-hesion.
So, martial law then, really.
We have no reason to believe that people of tens of thousands of years ago had less of a sense of themselves than do we moderns, in fact it seems as though some considerable collective regression might even have taken place.
The kind Darwin could never allow except by acknowledging that Ant and Dec are the best candidates for an inter species delegation should one ever arrive.
In fact its more than likely that some of the people of yesteryear had already got what being human is all about. Its just prejudice to think that the living must be more evolved than the dead.
we’ve not so much evolved as wandered off
We are the ones with the narrow veiw, the blinkers that go with Single System perspective. A multiplicity of divinities, as in many ancient times, would have meant a corresponding inner multiplicity, more elbow room inside, space to walk around.
Even the earliest of our ancestors pictograms, that of Geb and Nut, brother and sister protagonists of the Egyptian creation myth , depicted what would have already been in consciousness for millenia, a lived sense of self and other, of I and thou.
I can talk to Me much better with such inner spaciousness. Sense of self increases with the identity that comes from the particular, unique mix of observances that you might make and various altars to which you might leave offerings.
In the West our predominant model for interacting with the divine has conversly been pared away to the somewhat less evolved wish/demand to be given stuff.
Even mercy, faith or grace.
What does it mean to have been raised in a culture whose principle prayer, once the introductory pleasantries are out of the way goes straight for, ‘give us this day our daily bread.’ Its not far off a demand for pocket money. Compare it to the feeling in this ancient prayer of the high priest of Ra,
”let me lie with the heat of sun in my beard,
Eating figs and smelling the hay
Let me enter the temple of fire
Bake me into bread, smelt me into gold.”
