Bronze medallion of Athena Promachos, wearing a helmet in the form of Medusa's head and the aegis over her left shoulder. A decoration from a formal chariot used for parades. Possibly from a workshop in Delos, 2nd century BC. Thessaloniki Archaeological Museum.
More about this figure below
Andromeda, by Perseus sav'd and wed, Hanker'd each day to see the Gorgon's head: Till o'er a fount he held it, bade her lean, And mirror'd in the wave was safely seen That death she liv'd by. Let not thine eyes know Any forbidden thing itself, although It once should save as well as kill: but be Its shadow upon life enough for thee.~DGRossetti's poem.
Which means, in the neo-platonic-speak of depth psychology: The Medusa, one of three sisters originally, beautiful, a priestess in the Temple of Athena; that is, a beautiful mortal in the sacred sphere (a temple being the eye of the polis) of Wisdom. And Beauty is the direct apprehension of the Good, the pure Being of the stillpoint (the exact center of a sphere, which is unmoved even as the whole turns); an aspect, or rather a reflection of the perfect, the divine, the One: Things that can "exist" only outside of time. Things Eternal, timeless as in without time -- and thus, dangerous to look at directly... Not something that can belong to the (time-bound) mortal. So of course the earth shaker comes to shake things up: Poseidon, a god who goes back before Homer. And he rapes the priestess right there in the temple. And the goddess of Wisdom punishes her for it. Was it her fault, being a carrier of things outside of time? She, a virgin priestess, servant of that wisdom? No, not her fault any more than it is ours to be vessels of consciousness who apprehend the immortal, a thing we cannot have (which in platonic-speak summons eros: desire, mover of "the sun and all the stars"). Medusa suffers the loss of her beauty as we must suffer death. She becomes a creature no mortal can look upon -- the mysteries as they truly are: eternal, belonging outside of time. To violate this is to be an abomination (calling down destruction, see similar fate in Actaeon Surprising Diana), and that is her face with the snakes for hair, snakes that crawl in and out of darkness, writhing and unnatural in the world of time and space, one end in the light and the other in the dark unconscious. Yet -- snakes also are healers, sacred to Asclepius.
She, Medusa, a symbol, terror itself, and creature of our most profound pity. She, our own self, each of us, forced to live with the knowledge that we will suffer death. And so Perseus comes as a resolution. Again, he is each of us, taught and armed by the psychopomp Hermes, slicing off Medusa's head (think chakras) without directly looking at her (fearless!), precipitating the higher birth of Pegasus -- imagination. Pegasus who soars, tended by muses, pawing the earth and setting the deep springs to flow: art itself. Pegasus, winged horse, beloved, an eros who moved it all from the beginning https://www.artrenewal.org/pages/artwork.php?artworkid=41471
The figure of the Gorgon Medusa, slain by the Greek hero Perseus, has lived in the Western imagination for more than 2500 years. Who is she, and how and when did she appear, and why was she decapitated? This complex image that spread throughout the
For Pallas is Sophia or Wisdom, who carries health in her right hand and riches in her left, providing at the same time both for man's ease and plenty. To Her Perseus brought the head of Medusa which turned all thinges into Stone, and was horrid in its appearance with serpents and vipers instead of Hairs; which she afterwards placed in her shield to use it against her Enemyes, that is to say Rude and Barbarous people who are therefore to be turned into Stones. And in truth Wisdom or Naturall Philosophye renders its incredulous and envious condemners quite stupid and void of sense and understanding by the means of that same thinge, from whence Chrysaor was borne who was the father of Geryon who had three bodyes. That is by the means of the Lapiditick Gorgonian blood, which is nothing else but the Tincture of the Philosophick Stone. ~ Atalantafugiens, emblem 23
Bronze medallion of Athena Promachos, wearing a helmet in
the form of Medusa's head and the aegis over her left shoulder.
A decoration from a formal chariot used for parades. Possibly
from a workshop in Delos, 2nd century BC.
Thessaloniki Archaeological Museum.
Those bees that look like the orchids they make love to: all they do is follow their heart... all they do is what Nature made them to do, and they do it without any knowledge but love. Nature is wise, wiser, wiser than any of us. The great scheme unfolds when we follow the heart. Do that, is all. It's why you were born. Symbiosis is the principle of what endures.
Those bees that look like the orchids they make love to: all they do is follow their heart... all they do is what Nature made them to do, and they do it without any knowledge but love. Nature is wise, wiser, wiser than any of us. The great scheme unfolds when we follow the heart. Do that, is all. It's why you were born.
Symbiosis is the principle of what endures.
Saw this video on Maddow's blog. Touches a nerve, the core of what is so frightening and blinding as we make our way through a changing world. Simply, all that stuff about human behavior Sapolsky has us explore, and a depth psychology that understands that humans live an interstitial existence between the physical body / world and the inner dialogue of dreams, wishes, imagination: the psyche. Both are what we are, the forces and complications of our most measured thinking and our knee-jerk behavior reflexes. Robertson's thinking, lacking all humility as it interprets each moment through his own demonic filter, is truly psychotic:
Think. Think metaphorically. All those dismemberment myths from Dionysus to Christ had deity falling into Time and shattering into shards, pieces, the scintilla of soul scattered to make the world, life, etc. These are myths of our own falling out of the unconscious world into the conscious (especially with the creation of language, our tool of thought). "Splitting off from nature," we framed it. Long, long ago it was sensed that we also bring that shattered Oneness back together. The cup of remembrance (Er, Mnemosyne ) from Plato, the rituals of ecstasy, the re-collection of the Mass (where priest and congregation are all part of the process... "do this in memory *with* me") -- all are symbolic rituals that draw their meaning from the process of individuation, "acting the process out" in varying degrees of consciousness. A movement, a process.
All of which gets lost in fundamentalism. In "pinning down" the ineffable, fleshing out the symbolic into "flesh".
When I speak of djinns and angels here, it's in reference to the inner dialogue, projections and transformation of the peace and drama we create from things floating around in us, both known and unknown, and the nets we cast as we draw the world inside us. Not literal, but -- like mythos and religion -- literary, poetic, sometimes deliberately psychologically protective and searching. It's playful, metaphorical, the voice of the psyche. It even hopes to be aligned with what we know about history. But I'm aware of all that. As aware as I can be. (Extra credit: McGilchrist.)
Often it's the Pat Robertsons I'm trying to speak to, because their psychosis and all it shapes is foisted on children. On adults who vote. Presently, it holds a whole nation hostage. I don't know how to make them better. I only know to try, because we live in a world that belongs and depends on the work of all of us. That it's only as whole and well as we are. What beats my heart, beats your heart. Beats everyone's heart. That's the heart I speak from, the only faith I know.
"The devil is a symptom of consciousness," Jung said. What in the hell did he mean by that? Jung, a doctor, Jung also an ancient historian.
As a species, we see ourselves as the "eyes and ears of a planet." That phrase comes from Joseph Campbell, and it's a metaphor for simple human consciousness, that thing that scripture, read poetically, which is how it was originally written, claims makes us in (an equally poetic) god's image. It speaks of the psyche of creatures who use language, beings split off from unconscious nature into consciousness. In the lysis of current Western culture, the awareness of this split goes back to a mysticism perhaps expressed best perhaps by Philo -- the deep meaning of the logos. As Jung points out, a literal consciousness distorts that meaning, thinking itself the whole shebang. We thus have that business of a mutable and evolving relationship with the unconscious, seen as the daimon in all his guises -- be it simply as the benign voice of the unconscious, or Robertson's evil tempter, or the connection back to Self -- to wholeness. These thousand names for deity project our attitude towards the unconscious, an attitude that defines an individual's conscious orientation.
Some notes on concept demon:
In the floods of life, in the storm of work, In Ebb and flow, In warp and weft, Cradle and grave, An eternal sea, A changing patchwork, A glowing life, At the whirring loom of Time I weave The living clothes of the Deity. ~Goethe, the Earth Spirit to Faust
Diabolos: "Separating coinunctios." (Coinunctio: union/conjunction) Dividing into opposite pairs -- conjugates. This is the condition of being in the field of time space, which is necessarily the field of opposites.
Jungy bits:
The unconscious is not a demonical monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. ~C.G.Jung The Practical Use Of Dream Analysis, Collected Works Vol. 16
The psychic depths are nature, and nature is creative life. Whatever values in the visible world are destroyed by modern relativism, the psyche will produce their equivalents. ~C.G.Jung, Modern Man in Search Of a Soul
In addition to technical processes of personality transformation, a natural individuation process is described as involving a spontaneous maturing of the personality. Natural transformation is evidenced in dreams symbolizing rebirth and in the intercourse between consciousness and some inner voice; this latter phenomenon, commonly described as talking to oneself, is seen as meditation in the alchemical sense. The inner voice is generally regarded as nonsense or as the voice of God; its real nature considered to be an unconscious counterpart to the ego. It is felt that if this psychic partner is recognized by the ego consciousness, the conflict between the two can have a positive effect. In alchemy, in ancient cults and in religion this inner presence is found personified as an external being such as Mercurius or Christ. ~CGJUNG, in CW v.9.1: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (abstract, p. 130-134). ***
Late Classical:
Macrobius (b. A.D. 360) explains the role of the Greek daemon (analogue to the Roman genius) in the process of the individual’s conception, birth, and destiny in the Saturnalia, a valuable source of information concerning pagan beliefs. Each human being, according to the Egyptians, is the product of the conjunction of Eros, Necessity or Fate, a daemon (related to the zodiacal position of the sun at the individual’s birth), and a tyche (related to the position of the moon at the individual’s birth). Macrobius etymologizes “daemon” as either “knowing of the future” or “burning, sharing”; the latter etymology links it with the sun, mens mundi, the regulator of the planets and pivot of the other eleven zodiacal signs (as it always occupies the remaining twelfth sign). When the sun passes through a particular sign of the zodiac at the time of an individual’s birth, it designates a temperament or daemon for him, and establishes, through its position in relation to the moon, his fortune or tyche. Contingent upon the season in which a man is born, i.e., a warm or cold one, indicating the extent of the sun’s warming power and its relationship to other planets and signs, his daemon or genius will be warm or cold, good or bad, jovial or saturnine. ~from The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Jane Chance Nitzsche
Late Antique thought stressed their (the demonic) ambiguous and anomalous nature. To Plutarch, writing at the beginning of our period, it was benign ambiguity: the demons were an "elegant solution" for the incongruities that arose from joining heaven and earth. In later centuries their role changed. From intermediate beings, they became an active source of falsehood and illusion in the human race. They gave dramatic intensity to doubts about how heaven and earth could be joined and made such doubts a permanent ingredient in the late Antique universe. The demons were an order far from perfect, one might even say "anomalous," beings. Their presence in the "earthly" regions introduced a constant element of indeterminacy and confusion into the clear structure that linked the rightful agents of the supernatural to their heavenly source. A few men were linked directly to the higher, stable regions of the universe; most men, however, partook of the incomplete, ambiguous quality of the demonic. Thus, with demons, Late Antique men found themselves flanked by an invisible society that shared with them all the incongruities and the tensions of their own visible world." ~Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity.
Plato: Symposium (my favorite)
And now, she said, haven't I proved that you're one of the people who don't believe in the divinity of Love?
Yes, but what can he be, then? I asked her. A mortal?
Not by any means.
Well, what then?
What I told you before—halfway between mortal and immortal.
A very powerful daimon, Socrates, and daimons, you know, are halfway between god and man.
What powers have they, then? I asked
They are the envoys and interpreters that ply between heaven and earth, flying upward with our worship and our prayers, and descending with the heavenly answers and commandments, and since they are between the two estates they weld both sides together and merge them into one great whole. They form the medium of the prophetic arts, of the priestly rites of sacrifice, initiation, and incantation, of divination and of sorcery, for the divine will not mingle directly with the human, and it is only through the mediation of the spirit world that man can have any intercourse, whether waking or sleeping, with the gods. And the man who is versed in such matters is said to have spiritual powers, as opposed to the mechanical powers of the man who is expert in the more mundane arts. There are many daimons, and many kinds of daimons, too, and Love is one of them. (I assume the trans is Ben Jowett, same one Osacr Wilde would have read)
Saw this video on Maddow's blog. Touches a nerve, the core of what is so frightening and blinding as we make our way through a changing world. Simply, all that stuff about human behavior Sapolsky has us explore, and a depth psychology that understands that humans live an interstitial existence between the physical body / world and the inner dialogue of dreams, wishes, imagination: the psyche. Both are what we are, the forces and complications of our most measured thinking and our knee-jerk behavior reflexes. Robertson's thinking, lacking all humility as it interprets each moment through his own demonic filter, is truly psychotic:
Think. Think metaphorically. All those dismemberment myths from Dionysus to Christ had deity falling into Time and shattering into shards, pieces, the scintilla of soul scattered to make the world, life, etc. These are myths of our own falling out of the unconscious world into the conscious (especially with the creation of language, our tool of thought). "Splitting off from nature," we framed it. Long, long ago it was sensed that we also bring that shattered Oneness back together. The cup of remembrance (Er, Mnemosyne ) from Plato, the rituals of ecstasy, the re-collection of the Mass (where priest and congregation are all part of the process... "do this in memory *with* me") -- all are symbolic rituals that draw their meaning from the process of individuation, "acting the process out" in varying degrees of consciousness. A movement, a process.
All of which gets lost in fundamentalism. In "pinning down" the ineffable, fleshing out the symbolic into "flesh".
When I speak of djinns and angels here, it's in reference to the inner dialogue, projections and transformation of the peace and drama we create from things floating around in us, both known and unknown, and the nets we cast as we draw the world inside us. Not literal, but -- like mythos and religion -- literary, poetic, sometimes deliberately psychologically protective and searching. It's playful, metaphorical, the voice of the psyche. It even hopes to be aligned with what we know about history. But I'm aware of all that. As aware as I can be. (Extra credit: McGilchrist.)
Often it's the Pat Robertsons I'm trying to speak to, because their psychosis and all it shapes is foisted on children. On adults who vote. Presently, it holds a whole nation hostage. I don't know how to make them better. I only know to try, because we live in a world that belongs and depends on the work of all of us. That it's only as whole and well as we are. What beats my heart, beats your heart. Beats everyone's heart. That's the heart I speak from, the only faith I know.
"The devil is a symptom of consciousness," Jung said. What in the hell did he mean by that? Jung, a doctor, Jung also an ancient historian.
As a species, we see ourselves as the "eyes and ears of a planet." That phrase comes from Joseph Campbell, and it's a metaphor for simple human consciousness, that thing that scripture, read poetically, which is how it was originally written, claims makes us in (an equally poetic) god's image. It speaks of the psyche of creatures who use language, beings split off from unconscious nature into consciousness. In the lysis of current Western culture, the awareness of this split goes back to a mysticism perhaps expressed best perhaps by Philo -- the deep meaning of the logos. As Jung points out, a literal consciousness distorts that meaning, thinking itself the whole shebang. We thus have that business of a mutable and evolving relationship with the unconscious, seen as the daimon in all his guises -- be it simply as the benign voice of the unconscious, or Robertson's evil tempter, or the connection back to Self -- to wholeness. These thousand names for deity project our attitude towards the unconscious, an attitude that defines an individual's conscious orientation.
"...It is not man as such who has to be regenerated or born again as a renewed whole, but, according to the statements of mythology, it is the hero or god who rejuvenates himself. These figures are generally expressed or characterized by libido-symbols (light, fire, sun, etc.), so that it looks as if they represented psychic energy. They are, in fact, personifications of the libido.
Now it is a fact amply confirmed by psychiatric experience that all parts of the psyche, inasmuch as they possess a certain autonomy, exhibit a personal character, like the split-off products of hysteria and schizophrenia, mediumistic 'spirits'; figures seen in dreams, etc. Every split-off portion of libido, every complex, has or is a (fragmentary) personality. At any rate, that is how it looks from the purely observational standpoint. But when we go into the matter more deeply, we find that they are really archetypal formations. There are no conclusive arguments against the hypothesis that these archetypal figures are endowed with personality at the outset and are not just secondary personalizations. In so far as the archetypes do not represent mere functional relationships, they manifest themselves as daimones, as personal agencies. In this form they are felt as actual experiences and are not "figments of the imagination," as rationalism would have us believe. Consequently, man derives his human personality only secondarily from what the myths call his descent from the gods and heroes; or, to put it in psychological terms, his consciousness of himself as a personality derives primarily from the influence of quasi-personal archetypes. Numerous mythological proofs could be advanced in support of this view. .... It is, then, in the first place the god who transforms himself, and only through him does man take part in the transformation. ..." ~CGJUNG, in CW5, SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION
"...It is not man as such who has to be regenerated or born again as a renewed whole, but, according to the statements of mythology, it is the hero or god who rejuvenates himself. These figures are generally expressed or characterized by libido-symbols (light, fire, sun, etc.), so that it looks as if they represented psychic energy. They are, in fact, personifications of the libido.
Now it is a fact amply confirmed by psychiatric experience that all parts of the psyche, inasmuch as they possess a certain autonomy, exhibit a personal character, like the split-off products of hysteria and schizophrenia, mediumistic 'spirits'; figures seen in dreams, etc. Every split-off portion of libido, every complex, has or is a (fragmentary) personality. At any rate, that is how it looks from the purely observational standpoint.
But when we go into the matter more deeply, we find that they are really archetypal formations. There are no conclusive arguments against the hypothesis that these archetypal figures are endowed with personality at the outset and are not just secondary personalizations. In so far as the archetypes do not represent mere functional relationships, they manifest themselves as daimones, as personal agencies. In this form they are felt as actual experiences and are not "figments of the imagination," as rationalism would have us believe. Consequently, man derives his human personality only secondarily from what the myths call his descent from the gods and heroes; or, to put it in psychological terms, his consciousness of himself as a personality derives primarily from the influence of quasi-personal archetypes.
Numerous mythological proofs could be advanced in support of this view. .... It is, then, in the first place the god who transforms himself, and only through him does man take part in the transformation. ..." ~CGJUNG, in CW5, SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION
