A. The War Between Saturn and the Mother
Since the beginning of man’s journey, our right and left brains have been at war with each other. This struggle has been retold over and over again throughout the world’s myths, but the secret tradition has a particular image. Our left hemisphere can be represented by the Greek titan, Kronos, the god of time, and the right by the feminine Mother. Saturn/Kronos, for his part, is the supreme masculine energy of order, representing numbers, math, words, and language. He and his army of giants are eternally waging war on the gods (represented by the mother in her various pieces) in the right hemisphere, sometimes winning out like in our modern age, and other times being stuck in Tartarus. In The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Leonard Shlain proposes “that the left hemisphere is actually a new sense organ designed by evolution to perceive time” (23). Time destroys everything. It causes us to perceive our lives as destined to end. This is a terrible dilemma of the human condition, being the only proven animal to know that someday he will die. It boxes us and begins the transformation into the new consciousness of pinpointing. However, the left also gives us “the ability to conceptualize […] abstract words crime, virtue, punishment, and justice” (Shlain 22). It allows the human mind to construct thought like children playing with Legos, according to Shlain, and is always linearly constructed. This is a necessary evil. In esoteric lore, figures like Satan and Set (notice the similarity to ‘Saturn’) are seen as being the representation of the animal consciousness. The left-brain pinpoints. It focuses energy; it makes plans, and is most helpful during the hunt. Again we see the mother as holistic and Saturn as boxing.
It is also clear that the right brain harbors the Mother. Walter Ong relates that sight isolates, but sound surrounds. Language, a creation of Saturn, does as well. Shlain says, “a conversation can be understood only when one person speaks at a time. In contrast, one’s right brain can listen to the sounds of a seventy-piece orchestra and hear them holistically” (22-3). This is the essence of the right brain. It is where intuition is felt, where uncontrollable emotions happen, where “states are under little volitional control and betray true feelings through fidgeting, blushing, or smirking” (19). The right “expresses being” and is authentic. These “feeling-states do not ordinarily progress in a linear fashion, but are experienced all-at-once. ‘Getting’ the punch line of a joke results in an explosion of laughter. An intuitive insight arrives in a flash. Newton and Einstein both reported examples of what the poet Rile called ‘conflagrations of clarity.’ Love at first sight, such as what Dante experienced when he encountered Beatrice, happens in an instant.” (19). The Mother controls the subconscious, the spiritual and invisible realms. She is the home of metaphors, the sublime, and the “altered state of consciousness” I discussed in the hypnosis section of this paper. When we read a book or watch a movie, we are communing with her by putting ourselves in a self-hypnotized state, and also when we dream—“there is compelling evidence that dreaming occurs primarily in the right brain” (20), which would make sense in that time is forgotten in this realm. The right brain’s “principal attributes concern being, images, holism, and music,” because music can be heard all at once, but speech has to be broken down linearly. Finally, according to Shlain, the right hemisphere develops in the fetus much earlier than the left because it is by far the older of the two. It is the mother we first see when we leave the womb, it is she who teaches us the ways of the world, and if you are a man, it is she you must deny to become masculine.
Alan Watts has the best image of the Mother in metaphor. He uses the explosion of the Big Bang to represent her, a colossal event, and the word ‘event’ is the most pertinent here. People forget that the Big Bang is not a distant thing which happened at the beginning of time, it is going on right now and we are part of it. Language is again tricky (a failure of Saturn’s logos in that it can run around in circles and never arrive anywhere) and I am having a hard time explaining this. The Mother is not just the ground under our feet, which we sometimes think of as Gaea, but she is also the air in our lungs, the flesh and bones which make us up. She is the stars in the sky, and the suns burning trillions of light years away. She is the worms under the earth, the lions on the prairie, the snakes crawling along the earth, and the scorpions on the sea floor. She is not only everything, but also every action. This is why the Big Bang is a brilliant metaphor for this—it is an event, a grand explosion spreading through space, forming suns, planets, and moons. She is the tree, treeing, the bird, birding, and the people, peopling. Imagine a person throwing a bucket of paint against a wall. It splatters and runs down the side, and all the paint, no matter how far away from the center or how intricate it becomes as it moves down the wall to the floor, is still part of the original event. Life can be seen as the increasingly complexity of the paint lines as they make their way downward. The center is chaotic but the further away you get from it the more detailed and beautiful the splash can become. Modern new age movements have shown the mother as being a peaceful old woman wearing an apron and a dress. The ancients saw her as not only loving maternal figure, for she gave birth to them, but also vicious, capable of handing out death as well as taking it away—“the earth is both womb and tomb” (Shlain 31). Events can be both violent and calm, just like emotions.
Throughout the Paleolithic period, Saturn the divider and the holistic Mother were held in balance, but as mankind moved to the Neolithic era about 10,000 years ago, the nurturing feminine energy became far more important. “The crop,” according to Karen Armstrong in A Short History of Myth, “was an epiphany, a revelation of divine energy, and when farmers cultivated the land and brought forth food for their community, they felt that they had entered a sacred realm and participated in this miraculous abundance. The earth seemed to sustain all creatures—plants, animals and humans—as in a living womb” (Armstrong 42). Shlain comments that this particular form of culture was geared toward the female mind because “caring for young plants and animals were nurturing tasks that they had been performing all along in their role as mothers” (Shlain 33). Female deities began to move to the forefront as male ones fell behind, diminishing in importance as only pawns to a greater mother goddess’ intentions, dying every year when she threw him away to renew herself. Agricultural was a logical task and required allotting, thus belonging to Saturn, but the Mother defeated him in importance because of the culture’s emphasis on nature. Armstrong explains that
In early Neolithic mythology, the harvest was seen as the fruit of a hierogamy, a sacred marriage: the soil was female; the seeds divine semen; and rain the sexual congress of heaven and earth. It was common for men and women to engage in ritual sex when they planted their crops. Their own intercourse, itself a sacred act, would activate the creative energies of the soil, just as the farmer's spade or plough was a sacred phallus that opened the womb of the earth and made it big with seed (Armstrong 44).Like the human woman gave birth to babies, the earth gave birth to plants. Some creation myths went as far to explain man’s origins as blossoming from the ground like a crop; and instead of a shaman traveling into the caves to commerce with animals and gods, worshipers went underground to commune with the origin of life, the womb.
This female deity was known by many names across the ancient world—Astarte/Asherah in Syria, Inanna in Sumer, Istar in Babylon, Isis in Egypt, and Hera/Demeter/Aphrodite in Greece. There is even some evidence to suggest that war was not as common during this time because excavated communities have been shown to have no defenses against outside invaders. However, the mother could also take away as much as she could give. Agriculture had the potential for disastrous results for a community if a bad season persisted. She could also kill a new mother during birth, a strange happening in the animal world, but which was common in humans because of their bipedal structure. Armstrong explains that the “Mother Goddess was not a gentle, consoling deity, because agriculture was not experienced as a peaceful, contemplative occupation. It was a constant battle, a desperate struggle, against sterility, drought, famine and the violent forces of nature, which were also manifestations of sacred power” (46-7). Hecate, for example, is both a goddess of death and fertility because in this age these two ideas were deeply linked (similar to the Apocryphal Lilith).
In fact, the time before agriculture’s invention was often perceived as a Golden Age by the ancients. It was a time before the great flood, which destroyed Atlantis, and was slowly cutting off mankind’s access to the gods. This metaphor is portrayed in the Garden of Eden story where man and women lived in coexistence with the animals, and in the Babylonian legend of Gilgamesh, when Enkidu is tamed by a prostitute. Instead of an honorable death in the pursuit of a manly goal, men and animals were often offered as sacrifices and their blood plowed into the fields as a metaphor for the dying gods. This was not a time of warrior heroes like Hercules. Death was instead seen holistically and not something a heroic warrior set out on adventures to destroy. The myth of Persephone was prevalent in Greece with the Eleusinian mysteries and reminded initiates that death was not the end. Just like plants need to be pruned to regrow, and crops needed to die in the winter be born again in the spring, so did the human conscious. Thus, the feminine right brain had become dominant over the masculine left.
B. Saturn, the Boxing God
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." - H.P. Lovecraft
You have just purchased a new house which is in an isolated area, surrounded by trees, and with neighbors miles away. You have never lived in the country before, and you leave excited, ready for a new adventure; however, as you turn to drive up the dirt road to your home for the first time, a man hails you over. He warns you that the house is haunted and all the people who have lived there before you have committed suicide during their first night stay. You disregard him as a crackpot as you pull into the driveway, but you have to admit the house puts you off kilter—there is something odd about the way the stairs creak, the strange smell from a source you cannot find. As you lay in bed that night, contemplating what the man said, you turn off the light. You are surrounded by a terrifying darkness. Your heart beats faster in your chest. Maybe he wasn’t lying? Maybe he wasn’t just trying to scare a foreigner off? Black—that is what is in your vision, black. You turn on the light and things get better. This is the force of Saturn, the cloud of darkness which wants to consume the universe. He is indifferent towards you, and that is what makes him truly terrifying.
According to secret tradition, the event which preceded the creation of the universe was God peering into a mirror. One could see this as the right and left hemispheres becoming aware of the others existence and causing consciousness to be born. Mark Booth in The Secret History of the World says that “putting yourself into God’s position involves imagining that you are staring at your reflection in a mirror. You are willing the image of yourself you see there to come alive and take on its own independent life” (Booth 32). By reflecting upon himself, God started the war between Saturn and the Mother. Walter Ong discusses how in illiterate cultures, abstract words for things have no place. To reflect on the self or to ask about impractical ideas such as the concept of a ‘tree’ would make no sense to them. Saturn is the masculine god of language, and some theorists speculate (Shlain being one of them) that the invention of the alphabet was the beginning of civilization’s paranoia and ultimate misogyny towards the female. Before the advent of such things as handwriting, Booth says, the ancients, “had less of a sense of physical objects. Objects were not as sharply defined and differentiated to them as they are to us. If you look at a depiction of a tree on the walls of an ancient temple, you will see that the artist has not really looked to see how its branches are joined to the trunk. In ancient times no one really looked at a tree in the way we do” (Booth 31).
At the time Walter Ong was writing Orality and Literacy in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, only 106 of the thousands of languages ever spoken had “been committed to writing, [...] and most have never been written at all. Of the some 3000 languages spoken that exist today only some 78 have a literature” (Ong 23). Written word is relatively rare across history and cultures, gaining the greatest dominance in the West and Near East. It is the basis of logos and rational thought, of law, math, and science. Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa were driven by this written culture, with their patriarchal God and hierarchy. Muslims, remember, refer to themselves as well as Jews and Christians, as “peoples of the book,” and Moses received the Ten Commandments in writing from a sky god. Jews are so greatly affiliated with their holy texts that Hebrew was instated as the national language when Israel was made a state, and across the world this holds true. People hold tightly to their languages, just ask a French person to tell you the time in English.
Language also remains the easiest way to identify a specific culture. According to World Politics Trend and Transformation, “different languages reflect different views of the world that predispose their speakers toward different ways of thought," and "provides an ethnic and cultural identity” (Kegley and Blanton 165). The language we speak affects how we think, and how we think affects how we act and the habits we form. An interesting question you can inquire from a bilingual person is what language they think in. One Saudi Arabian man I asked said he now primarily thinks in English and had had even started to dream in the language.
Writing and reading are abstract activities. By naming something, we gain a certain power over it. Adam began to do this before he was kicked out for bad behavior, and this need seems to be strictly human. In some cultures it was customary for a child to receive their final name when they entered into adulthood. Others hold a certain superstition about allowing just anybody to know their appellation, as the person may be hostile and curse them. In Monotheistic traditions, God’s true name is hidden from his believers, and even in today’s pop culture, we see superstitious wizards from the Harry Potter fictional universe unwilling to say ‘Voldemort’ because of the power it holds. By naming something we give it a new abstract life—or to be oxymoronic, a dead life cut from the Mother. Where before it was as if a mist, we materialize it by calling it something, by acknowledging it is different than everything else. This is an idea from the secret tradition because the initiates beleve that before the beginning of history, the universe was just that, a mist. Booth states that “this gas or mist was the Mother of All Things, carrying everything needed for the creation of life” (Booth 63). However, as the Bible states: “Darkness was upon the face of the earth.” This darkness was Saturn, “a searing dry wind that almost extinguished the potential for life altogether” (Booth 63). Here I will quote the entire passage from Booth’s book because he says it so much better than I can:
Saturn would trace the limits of the solar system. In fact he was the very principle of limitation. What Saturn’s intervention introduced into creation was the potential for individual objects to exist—and therefore the transition from formlessness to form. In other words, because of Saturn there is a law of identity in the universe by which something exists and is nothing else and nether is anything else it. Because of Saturn an object occupies a certain space at a certain time and no other object can occupy that space, and neither can that object be in more than one place at one time. In Egyptian mythology Saturn was Ptah who moulds the earth on a potter’s wheel, and in many mythologies Saturn's title is Rex Mundi, King of the World or ‘Prince of this world’, because of his control of our material lives. [...] Saturn’s tyranny over Mother Earth, his murderous attempt to squeeze all potential for life out of the cosmos, continued over vast periods immeasurable to the human mind. (65)In this story we can see the birth of the left hemisphere of the brain. Like I stated earlier, when the fetus is developing in the mother’s body, the first part of the brain to form is the right. It is by far the oldest section. “The old, wise, right side,” Shlain says, “more familiar with the needs and drives stemming from earlier stages of evolution, can be better relied upon to negotiate with them than the younger side [in the early maturation of the mind]. The right hemisphere integrates feelings, recognizes images, and appreciates music. It contributes a field-awareness to consciousness, synthesizing multiple converging determinants so that the mind can grasp the sense’ input all-at-once” (Shlain 18). Before the left side forms, it is the Mother, the right, who is in complete control of the processes of the body. It is not until ‘darkness falls’ that the ego begins to form.
Perhaps the most famous representation of Kronos is by Goya. Here we can see the terrible Titan feasting upon one of his children. It is a picture of madness and is the great evil of the left brain--destructive, yet necessary.
C. Delving Deeper
In another example of the power of Saturn, imagine you are walking through the woods in the evening, having a great time. You are enjoying the birds in the trees, and the chipmunks which scurry off before you arrive. There is so much to explore, so much to find and love. After an hour’s worth of fun, you decide to return to your car, but you soon realize you can’t find the trail. Beads of sweat start to form on your forehead. You begin to run. The night is quickly approaching, and when it arrives, you scream. This agent of darkness, of terror, of chaos, was written about in Genesis—Saturn, the great darkness swirling in space, eating up planets, solar systems, and galaxies. He is the black hole which rips matter to shreds, tear holes in the fabric of time and space itself. Someday, when we are in great ships traveling through star systems, we will come across him in all his horror. Hellish orbs will swirl around them like an eddy, caught in the Sarlac's pit, dragging down his prey. Saturn wants to destroy everything, because it is there—and the way he does this is by making everything the same. In “A Wrinkle in Time” he is IT. IT’s form of evil isn’t great explosions or massacres, it is stealing the soul from a person, making them like ants in a colony. They have no lights in their eyes. They do everything at the same time, creepily bouncing balls in their drive ways. In the end, this is Saturn's goal—it is to steal our spirit from us, make the universe into something like complete matter. This is the great danger of a society possessed by the spirit of him, stealing away a human’s individual rights to life, liberty, and property. Saturn makes men into meat, into senseless material with no rhyme or purpose. He is a god of this world, living amongst us, cutting up pieces of the great blanket and making a quilt.
Saturn is the spirit of duality, language, and logos, but at the same time opposed to all these things. He attacked the great mother earth. He wanted to shred her to pieces, but she was saved by the light of the sun. Booth describes the chaotic God who is found across ancient myth--Satan, Seth, Loki. “If an individual entity can exist through time, then by implication it can cease to exist too. This is why Saturn is the god of destruction. Saturn eats his own children. He is sometimes portrayed as Old Father Time and sometimes as Death himself. Because of Saturn’s influence everything that lives contains the seeds of its own end, and it is because of Saturn that what feeds us also destroys” (Booth 65). Saturn introduced to the world dualities and conflicts and death—this will later be exacerbated by Lucifer, the light bearer, but this was before higher states of consciousness, before the fall. “Death is in everything in the cosmos,” Booth writes, “woven into the bright blue sky, a blade of grass, the pulse of a baby’s fontanelle, the light in a lover’s eye. Because of Saturn our lives are hard. Because of Saturn every sword is double-edged and every crown a crown of thorns. If we sometimes feel our lives almost too hard to bear, if we bruise and if we do cry out to the stars in despair, it is because Saturn pushes us to our limits” (65).
Saturn and the other Titans are often pictured as giants in our mythos. Giants are the metaphorical need to destroy what’s beautiful and rend it into simple matter—they are agents of chaos and destruction. Kronos, the Greek appellation of Saturn, was the father of Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Hera, Hestia, and Demeter, and his name means ‘Time’. Kronos tells the heavens and the ground beneath him (his parents) that he is their ruler. They reply vociferously back, “[Your children] will bind you in a terrible prison, and one of them will rule instead of you!” (Green 10). Kronos knew the Earth could tell no lies, so every time his wife gave birth, he would eat the baby—“just as Time swallows up the years, one after another” (Green 10)—until one day his wife could take no more. She stole Zeus away and hid him in the mountains of Crete, instead giving the terrible Titan “a stone wrapped in baby-clothes” to eat. After he is grown, Zeus, with the help of the Cyclopes, defeats the Titans and throws them down to Tartarus. There they rest until they rise again and wage war upon the Olympians in a terrible battle reminiscent of Ragnorak and the Genesis story of Nimrod. The fear of the giant is also the fear of ourselves. He is both outside and inside us—a force that wishes to reunite with the surrounding world in “Otherness”, a lost paradise to which we can never return. The giant’s cannibalistic tendencies speak to his need to assimilate, retake what is his—an ordered and structured matter returning to chaos. He wants to see the sun go out in Ragnorak between Fenrir’s jaws. He wants to demolish Asgard and kill everything that is beautiful. He wants to make war on Heaven and Earth and consume it all with his terrible jaws. Kronos eats his children. This represents his need to render the representations of the cosmos into mere shit, material. Saturn is the will to dominate. He destroys things by controlling them, just like we destroy nature or relationship by trying to wield too much power over it.
He is represented by cultural and literary figures—Emperor Palpatine, IT, Lord Voldemort, Cthulhu, The White Queen—time after time, story after story. How can this be that a black force, that a solidifying agent, can create so much chaos but at the same time represent sterile, dead, transformation into geometry and block? The great swirling darkness is trying to destroy Mother Earth, the wholeness, and create another—one of dead space, of static separations, a universe of boring eternity. When we think of Saturn, we should think of Deleuze and Gattari’s "”Smooth Space.” Modern man has divided the world into countries, states, counties, kingdoms, species, genuses, departments—everything is its own special place. Borders are a thing of Patriarchal civilization. Where mother earth is the feminine force of nature, Saturn is the masculine one. In Shakespeare’s plays, characters run to the wood, a place without fences to conduct love affairs. In the forest, gender breaks down, animals and humans begin to mesh together. It is a place of magic and mystery. Theseus’ Thebes, Augustus’ Rome—these places are ruled by men. Civilization is man’s sphere of influence. Civilization is a place of increasingly striated space. By hacking at the wholeness, we create the perfect material universe, ruled by Saturn, the child eater, the boar who killed Adonis. Picture a square—it has a line drawn through the middle, making two objects—then another, then another, then another, until the box has so many lines that it’s just a square again. Mother Earth is a square, Saturn is a square, and we are caught in between—two great dualistic wholes—material and spiritual. It is only through the image of the rising and setting sun, of the seasons, do we see that both these conditions imply each other.
Death implies life. Life implies death. Our imperfections are what make us lovable. It is exactly because we have flaws that draw us to other forms of imperfect consciousness, and so many people have trouble relating to an omnipresent, omnipotent, perfect God. “Aren't children lovable because they're falling down all the time and have little bodies with the heads too big?" Joseph Campbell says in The Power of Myth. “Didn’t Walt Disney know all about this when he did the seven dwarfs? And these funny little dogs that people have—they’re lovable because they’re so imperfect" (4). Bill Moyers asks Campbell if perfection would be a bore. “It would have to be,” he replies. “It would be inhuman” (4). The history of Mother Earth/Saturn/Apollo is the history of consciousness. We can see how throughout the ages the wholeness of nature and life is always at tension with the chaos of material hell. Perhaps this war’s greatest theater was the West. Here is where man worshiped God as the great governor of the universe, and it was this line of thinking which made it easiest for Satan/Saturn to wage his greatest battles. If this great force was left to rule the universe, he would conquer the cosmos. What’s preventing him from doing this?
D. The Dying and Rising Gods, Apollo the God of Rationality
Just when the war against the Mother was looking its bleakest and it appeared life would be snuffed out forever, the sun burst forward and released its rays on the entirety of existence. The image we are meant to see in our minds is a great lion roaring, and the darkness dissipating to the edges. He is often portrayed as a beautiful young man with golden hair, riding a chariot and carrying a lyre, and was Apollo to the Greeks, Krishna to the Indians, and when he returned midway through the great story, Jesus to the Christians. With his rational insight glowing from his forehead, "he pushe[d] back the darkness until it becom[e] like a giant dragon or serpent encircling the cosmos" (Booth 72). By roaring from his leonine lungs, the Mother became impregnated in her ‘cosmic womb’ from his shout. Matter started to bead, to come together into planets, moons, asteroids, and slowly plant life. The massive spinning mists hardened. He literally sung the world into being.
This story, according the secret schools, is the transformation of the mineral to the plant consciousness. As green life began spreading over the face of the earth, death was nonexistent—plants thrive by being pruned, by receding each year and coming back the next. And this “vast vegetable being at the heart of the cosmos, whose soft and luminous limbs stretched to all four corners of it, was Adam. This was paradise” (73). When we commune with nature, as Montanans are often prone to do, we are returning to the state before animal consciousness and ego. It is a more peaceful world, or at least one where the cycles of life and death appear to be an illusion.
Because there was as yet no animal element to the cosmos, Adam was without desire and so without care of dissatisfaction. Needs were satisfied before they could even be felt. Adam lived in a world of endless springtime. Nature yielded an unending supply of food in the form of a milky sap, similar to that which we find in dandelions today. Memorials to this blissful satiation have come down to us in statures of the many-breasted Mother Goddess. (Booth 74)This plant consciousness continues to exist and is often referred to as the subconscious. If you were to see a diagram of the nervous system, it would look very much like a tree.
The ‘third eye’ is often understood to be the pineal gland in the front center of the brain behind the forehead. Many animals, including some lizards, frogs, and lampreys, maintain a small eye here, capable of detecting rays of light. Chakras are often thought of as New Age mumbo-jumbo but were depicted across the ancient world. The horns on Moses’ head, which many understand as a mistranslation, could “represent the two petals of the brow chakra” (Booth 77), and the pictures of Pharaohs with a snake on their helmets relate to the pineal gland as well. The pine-cones atop Dionysian wands and the staff of Aaron are sometimes interpreted as enlivening the forehead chakra. The third eye was man’s connection to the spiritual realms (sometimes described as a sphincter) and sits between both the left and right brains. It regulates the hormone, melatonin or DMT, a drug which can cause hallucinations, or experiences beyond the normal range of perceptions. This eye is one of the most important symbols as relating to the overcoming of the monstrous being of Saturn and the holistic, sometimes fickle Mother. It is here where you can utilize both sides of the warring parents and is the realm of the dying-gods, specifically Apollo/Dionysus, the twin deity—the first half is accepted by our modern world, but the second half is repressed. The eye is also the place where our mind makes sense of the universe. The swirling mist gains geometry only when we perceive it as such. Like Schrodinger’s Cat, there would be no one there to give mass shape or coherence. We create the universe by observing it.
I shall come back to this, but first I want to briefly explore the next stage of consciousness’ development: Adam’s temptation. This is the final part of the three-part act during ancient initiation rites. Lucifer, the morning star, is the animal consciousness, which gave birth to the ego. He is a necessary evil and quite separate from Saturn/Satan. His image is of the snake wrapped around the tree and represents the spinal cord forming, of plants becoming animals. Leonard Shlain describes how women became increasingly sexualized through homo sapiens’ development and could produce offspring anytime as a way of getting men to protect and help raise the children. Other mammals are fertile only a few times a year with males interested in procreation during this period alone. Chimp society is formed this way, but women overcame this. Sex for them became a continuous bargaining tool. Women, by becoming increasingly dependent on mans’ hunting, are what caused his domestication. Thus did Adam and Eve perceive themselves as being naked. Snakes are linked to women, as readers of Genesis will know. The snake appears to eternally renew itself by shedding its skin, it crawls along the earth on its belly, and its body has similarities to the umbilical cord. Shlain mentions that a woman appears serpentine during intercourse; opposite of the man’s awkward thrusting. In the esoteric tradition, Lucifer is Venus. One only needs to look at the morning star to confirm this.
These associations are an important aspect in the next few myths I will explore—the relationship between men and women. In these tales, the woman takes the forefront. This was the result of the agricultural societies. These myths are very different from the sky gods of the Paleolithic period. Death was seen as an illusion, and gods’ stories became increasingly more complex. However, these stories were rationality developed, and the images created during the time are still commonly represented across our modern cities.
E. Osiris, Horus, and Adonis
The dying gods are at the heart of many religions and esoteric ideas. The sun represents compassion, truth, and love. It shines its light upon on all our heads, brightening the Earth, saving the world from the darkness of night, breathing life into every tree, bush, and weed, every mouse, shark, and elephant, and every human. In the body, it is the heart organ, pulsing blood to the rest, saving the rest, just like Jesus shed his blood on the cross. One day, sages say, he will return, and the Goddess and the Sun will be reunited once again. In Syria, he was Baal and Tummuz. In Babylon, he was Dummuzi. In Greece, he was Adonis, Apollo, and Dionysus. In Iran, he was Mithras. In Rome, he was Attis. To the Masons, he is Hiram Abiff. And to the Christians, he is Jesus Christ, the savior of the world. In this essay, I will focus most of my attention on the Egyptian Osiris/Horus and Apollo/Dionysus.
The myth of Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis, and Nephtys is not a backwards myth, with deities worshiped by a backwards people, dead and incompatible with our modern reality. In fact, it is built into the Great Seal of the United States. The Great Eye of Horus is on all our dollar bills. It shines true, above all petty human concerns, above prejudices, hate, and discrimination. The founders saw themselves as being on top, where the capstone would be, observing the world from a purely rational mind-state. Many researchers have examined the esoteric lay out of the capital. With its grand obelisks drawing energy down to earth, enlivening the Washington Monument where the cock magically ejaculates, and the spiritual semen is jettisoned across the reflecting pool and impregnates the great Capital building dome—an ancient representation of the womb. Every day, the sun rises, and every day, Horus is conceived. Even the number 13 is magical. 12 is the number of disciples Jesus had, so Jesus was number 13—the God who resurrects. To explore these themes more deeply, we are going to have to examine the myth of Osiris.
The Egyptians believed that their kingdom was once led by Osiris during a golden age. Herodotus, the early Greek historian, claims that his grave was decorated with huge stone obelisks as well as a man-made lake. “It is on this lake” he says, “that the Egyptians act out the Mysteries, the Black Rite that celebrates the death and resurrection of a being whose name I dare not speak. I know what goes on but ... say no more.” If that is not intriguing, ala H.P. Lovecraft, I don’t know what is. I found a post on a website whose author believes that the god's tomb is 100 feet below the Sphinx. Of course this is quite speculative in a conspiratorial sort of way, but it does go to prove how serious people take this god in his corporeality. Osiris’ name is connected with reproduction, (‘ourien’ means semen), and some claim he is the same as the Greek Orion and biblical Nimrod (perhaps stretching even to Gilgamesh). His tale is one of betrayal, resurrection, and Mother Goddess worship. Like Baal and Dummuzi, he dies and is resurrected—like the sun dies every night and comes back in the morning, and like the winter kills life and spring brings it back. Like Dionysus, he also has a polar opposite in his brother Seth.
Brother battles reoccur in stories across history, notably Shakespeare—they show duality in pairs. Seth’s name links him to Saturn/Satan. His motives for wanting to kill his brother are hazy. Was he jealous? Did he catch Osiris cheating with Nephtys? At any rate, after a gala, Seth tricks his brother into a coffin. After discovering the perfect fit, he seals Osiris inside, covering it with molten lead and throws it in a river. Osiris’ sister/lover, Isis, is so distraught by his death that she searches for him across the ancient world, eventually finding him encased inside a tamarisk tree. She, being an amazing goddess, resurrects him, but Seth quickly discovers this miracle and chops the revived king into 14 pieces anew. Again, Isis finds all her husband’s parts in the Nile—except for his penis, which was eaten by a crocodile. However, she manages to impregnate herself with an ersatz recreation and gives birth to Horus, who swears revenge on his uncle. He flies to greet Seth on a flying saucer with the aid of Thoth and kills him. In the aftermath, Osiris continues to rule the underworld, weighing the dead’s deeds and granting them access to his kingdom if they weren’t found lacking, while Horus was the king of the living. “The myth of Osiris,” according to Mark Booth, “has many layers of meaning, but it is above all a myth about consciousness. It informs us that we must all die—but in order to be reborn. The key point in this story is that Osiris is reborn not into ordinary life, but into a higher state of consciousness” (131). Plato’s realm of sphere’s and imperfect shadow realities are reflected in what Booth says here. “‘I shall not decay,’ [Osiris] proclaims in the Book of the Dead, ‘I shall not rot, I shall not putrefy, I shall not turn into worms, I shall have my being, I shall live, I shall live’” (131).
The Greeks, I believe, saw their Osiris as a dual entity (Apollo and Dionysus), and I will relate this in more detail in the subsequent paragraphs. However, there was another archetype in the Hellenistic world which also fit this theme. Tales arrived from Syria in the story of Adonis, the place where he was conceived. Adonai, another dying god who symbolizes cycles, literally means ‘lord’. In some stories, after much bickering, Adonis spends one-third of the year with Persephone in Hades, and two-thirds with Aphrodite, as a metaphor for the seasons. However, the most famous account deals with Adonis’ death. Aphrodite, the mother god in this case, falls very much in love with the beautiful young man until he is gored and killed by a wild boar, sent by various goddesses in different accounts. Upon his death, Aphrodite sprinkles his blood with nectar and an anemone blossoms. In Shakespeare’s version, she places the flower between her breasts and weeps her loss. When Ted Hughes analyzed the bard’s choice of subject, he sees the boar as a destructive force which appears time after time in his works. I would argue that the creature is a force of Saturn, again trying to wreak havoc on the Mother Goddess.
F. Apollo/Dionysus
The Greeks knew that the Egyptian Osiris had parallels with their own gods, and some translated Dionysus and Osiris as being one and the same. In one tale, Dionysus flees from Greece and disguises himself in Egypt as Osiris.
But where does Apollo fit in? Apollo is the god of laws, construction, language, and wisdom, which seems somewhat opposed to the other solar deities. Zeus’ favorite son, he plays the lyre and his chosen weapon is the bow and arrow, because like logic, he analyses rationally from a distance. Jean Shinoda Bolen, in her book on male archetypes Gods in Everyman, explains that “Apollo personifies the aspect of the personality that wants clear definitions, is drawn to master a skill, values order and harmony, and prefers to look at the surface rather than at what underlies appearances.” She continues, saying that the “Apollo archetype favors thinking over feeling, distance over closeness, objective assessment over the subjective intuition” (135). Apollo, again, symbolizes law, order, and most importantly, logos and language. Intriguingly, it was this God who killed Python, a serpent monster. Logos killed mythos. The male zeitgeist killed the female one.
Opposed to the archetype of Apollo, but ultimately completing him, is Dionysus (Bacchus to the Romans or Iachos as an infant). Bolen says that the Dionysian archetype “has powerful positive and negative potentialities, stirring up the most ethereal and the basest of feelings, creating conflicts within the psyche and with society” (255). He represents madness, the extremes, and drunkenness. At one moment he can be in the throes of ecstasy and in the next a terrible depression. Where Apollo stands at a distance with his arrows raised, Dionysus knows the truth is only in the present. There is no planning. There is no figuring out the next step in preparation for a scheme. A representation of these two opposing figures in modern pop culture is Batman and the Joker, as anyone could have guessed by Heath Ledger's incredible performance in “The Dark Knight.”
Dionysus is also the persecuted god, the one who needs to be sacrificed, because the extremes exist within him—just like Jesus’ arms stretched over the cross. He wishes to save the woman who he loves and will eventually place her in the role of a wife/maternal figure like his great love, Ariadne. Dionysus can drive women mad. He is needy, haughty, dangerous, moody, and fickle. He tempts them with base desires which may be hidden away because of mans’ dominance over them. Women, under the spirit of Dionysus, would rampage into the hills, suckling young animals and ripping to shreds any that dared to flee from their procession. This was an expression of society’s pent-up aggression, an outlet for the rational god, and a need of the mad one. Dionysus’ maenads tore Orpheus and King Pentheus apart in the myths. Anyone familiar with the television program “True Blood” will know Dionysus’ characteristics. He is known as the “god who comes” in this exploitative HBO series, but Dionysus exists within us all. One myth tells of Dionysus being torn apart and eaten by the Titans. When Zeus discovers this, he kills the giants and makes man from their bodies. Thus, a little bit of this persecuted god is alive inside us all, whether you like it or not. Dionysus is also nomadic, having traveled east to India to study with the gurus there. In numerology he would be characterized by the number ‘5.’
It is my belief that Apollo and Dionysus are the same god. Both represent the sun (like Osiris), and without the other, something is lost in their respective images. Once every year, Apollo was known to fly away to the Hyperborean land and leave Dionysus in charge of Delphi. This act can signify the winter cycle or the daily sleep, but it also can represent something more. We cannot be purely rational all the time. William Blake talks about balance. By trying to destroy Dionysus, he will only come back stronger when he emerges within us again. Economists call these wild tendencies “animal spirits,” where unexplainable zeitgeists seem to overwhelm the minds of people and drive the markets crazy. I believe something was forgotten in our rational society: Dionysus, the need for madness which overtakes us one-fourth of every year, one-fourth of every day, and one-fourth of every hour. Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, emphasizes this trait in the works in the three great Greek play writes, saying that the ordering hero (of Apollo) is overwhelmed by chaotic fate (of Dionysus).
Dionysus is holistic like the mother. He is the god of masks, theater, and roles. As Apollo tries to construct something beautiful, the Dionysian (sublime) aspect will ultimately beg to tear it down. Apollo with his lyre would play something by Bach or Beethoven, Dionysus would be most happy at a rave, and as Apollo is the god of law and order, Dionysus is the god of the destruction of boundaries. According to the American scholar, Camille Paglia, “The quarrel between Apollo and Dionysus is the quarrel between the higher cortex and the older limbic and reptilian brains.” Apollo, the god of supreme rational wisdom portrayed on our dollar bills on top of the pyramid, is logos. In his ‘supreme wisdom,’ he was aware that he needed Dionysus’ unfettered emotion by fleeing to Hyperborea. In our modern culture, we have forgotten this. Dionysus is persecuted. Feminine characteristics are stomped out of boys in lieu of the cherished engineer Apollo, Zeus’ favorite son, the Ivy League hopeful, student body president, and captain of the swim team. Economists talk about rational individuals but forget that individuals are also ‘mad’ one-fourth of the time.
Dionysus, as an archetype, is also the remarriage of Christian and Satanic images, as discussed in this essay. In his myths, he is the god who died for man’s sin many times yet always resurrects. He is associated with the vine and honoring him by a “ritual meal of bread and wine” was common in his celebrations. His father was a sky god (Zeus) and his mother a lesser moon goddess (Semele)—something we will see has parallels in esoteric knowledge—and his name has the familiar ‘sus’ at the end. Similar themes of both Dionysus and Jesus traveling to India and learning ancient wisdom have also emerged in the esoteric tradition. Why are there so many similarities? Because good mythologies steal from each other and they are both in the tradition of the dying-and-rising gods which appeared across the ancient globe. Dionysus, as the god of women and irrationality, was of course the god who would ultimately be banished from the collective mind. Greece cherished Dionysus’ presence. But to establish hierarchy, Rome could not have the holistic, mad god on the loose. Dionysus was often cavorting with satyrs in his myths, being helped raised by Silenus in a cave. The devil is also seen as a goat-man in imagery, with is horns, hoofs, and billy-goat-tee. He has many of the features Christians associate with the devil. Both Satan and Dionysus are also grouped with women and snakes because he is the god of this world, and by attempting to extirpate him, we only make his allure greater. Modern culture’s hidden desire for darkness and death can be seen as our Dionysian energies exploding out in uncontrolled ways. Logos and mythos complete each other, they are not at odds. In Game Theory, we call this a relative sum game. Both can thrive as the other does.
Some have gone as far as to proclaim that Apollo will be returning in 2012, as was predicted by several different groups as a new golden age of the gods. Tom Horn describes in his book, Apollyon Rising 2012, that “the tomb of Osiris may actually have been discovered in Giza in recent years containing DNA related to the deity” (135). This may remind people of the Lovecraft mythos, especially when esoteric mystics like Manly P. Hall proclaim in their books, “The Dying God shall rise again! The secret room in the House of the Hidden Places shall be rediscovered. The Pyramid again shall stand as the ideal emblem of solidarity, inspiration, aspiration, resurrection, and regeneration.” A slightly terrifying prospect when Revelation mentions a being by the name of Abbadon, ‘Apollyon.’ The Cumaean Sibyl describes a new divine son, who “is to be spawned of ‘a new breed of men sent down from heaven’ [...] when he receives ‘the life of gods, and sees Heroes with gods commingling’” (137). Horn translates this as Apollo being the literal anti-Christ, son of Zeus, the pagan version of God. He describes how this spirit has reincarnated throughout the ages in different guises, most notably Napoleon, whose name translates as ‘the true Apollo.’ He also relates how the Pythian priestess’ prophecy powers and convulsions were similar to modern day demon possessions depicted in movies like “The Exorcist.” I am not sure what to make of this, though I do know that America was described as the New Atlantis by distinguished philosophers like Francis Bacon, and that the eagle on the dollar bills could very well be translated as a phoenix, an important occultic symbol. At the very least, it is interesting reading for a late night to scare yourself in the darkness. In the end, I think the dual Apollonion and Dionysian archetypes are the seat of rationality, but only when they are coupled together. It is where we need to arrive at and think through to defeat a history of wars and irrational sky father philosophy—at least in the way it is being interpreted today as sort of a death cult. In the next section, I will discuss the modern Father god, and how he came to prominence upon the invention of the alphabet.
G. The Masculine Sky God
Mark Booth, in The Secret History of the World, says that the Elohim described in the Old Testament is actually written in Hebrew as plural. That is, the gods created the universe. After Lucifer tricked man into discovering the ego, one of the seven original gods split off to fight him. This was the moon, and the same God from the Old and New Testament. Shlain has many things to say about He who so relied on words to gain power. He is an indisputably male God, with his appellations, “Lord, Host, King, Ruler, and Master” (Shlain 82). He establishes his law by using the written word which underlines his masculinity, for the First Commandment announces the Female Goddess’ departure completely, “I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:2-3). Shlain calls this the most radical sentence ever written because it cuts the female aspect of the godhead from the cosmic framework. The Second Commandment, probably equally as radical, banishes images of the Father—this is also the disdain of the Mother, for she is the queen of myth and images. By saying he cannot be depicted emphasizes the importance of the written word.
Every Jewish boy must prove he can read at the age of 13 at his Bar Mitzvah. Reading thus tied the clan together. Written words, in their abstraction and linearity, gave rise to the ultimate abstract God, who cannot be depicted at all. “One explanation,” according to Shlain, “[... is] they considered iconic information to be a threat to their newfound skill. Learning to think without resorting to images is indispensable to alphabet literacy” (Shlain 83). Yahweh is always emphasizing words. He commands Adam to name the animals in the garden, to gain power over them using his voice. He also emphasizes time in the Fourth Commandment, by demanding of his followers to rest on the seventh day. Perhaps, the most fascinating of Shlain’s incites is that “the Time Commandment lays the groundwork for the idea of justice, since a well-developed sense of linear time is necessary to conceive of punishment delayed and reward postponed. Non-literate people [...] do not conceive of time only as linear” (85), and instead see death as a “passage into another world.” The Jews, in fact, do not even have a mythological afterlife.
Yahweh was thus the collision of the Paleolithic Sky God with the Linear, Literate God of Laws. The Sky God was indeed a Paleolithic invention. Katherine Armstrong writes in A Short History of Myth,
Some of the earliest myths [...] were associated with the sky, which seems to have given people their first notion of the divine. When they gazed at the sky--infinite, remote, and existing quite apart from their puny lives -- people had a religious experience. The sky towered above them, inconceivably immense, inaccessible and eternal. It was the very essence of transcendence and otherness. Human beings could do nothing to affect it. The endless drama of its thunderbolts, eclipses, storms, sunsets, rainbows and meteors spoke of another endlessly active dimension, which had a dynamic life of its own. (Armstrong 18).This sky god eternally exists above us and only comes down to examine us like children or subjects in his court. He is not of this Earth, not like the Great Mother or Saturn/Satan. Armstrong continues “When they watched the waxing and waning of the moon, people saw yet another instance of sacred powers of regeneration, evidence of a law that was harsh and merciful, and frightening as well as consoling” (17). The seven day week is based on the quarter moon and the Muslim counter is still build around its cycles. However, this god is an absent God. He is the God people want to turn to for advice, for comfort, for guidance, for a wholeness which was lost long ago, which will free them from their own confused ‘experiencing’ mind, caught between dualities. Each of us wishes to return to the “Golden Age”, often symbolized by being inside the mother, then less so into childhood—the history of consciousness is not only the history of the world, but also the history of a single human life. The childhood stage is symbolized with Eden and in Esoteric wisdom Adam’s vegetable arms stretch across space like a cross, where God’s desire for humans, and humans’ desire God met again on the Cross—a “Golden Age” when our minds were one with the gods, before we were trapped in a world of death and consequences.
This kingly God which the West so firmly believes (or disbelieves) originated with the gods in the Middle East, passed down from the Paleolithic tribe people’s sky gods. It was here where a state or king was said to be ruled over by a great supernatural force. These gods existed to give the ruler divine right. We see the city of Babylon being ruled over by Marduk, who slew the great mother, Tiamat, and made humans from her lover’s blood. It is a tyrannical male fantasy, and one from the lawful, literate culture of the Babylonians. Monarchy gave rise to King-Gods. The Egyptians, the Romans, and the Muslims did this—the right to be king guaranteed through deification. Because religion fomented in this region was wielded by such authority, the God we received today is a Monarchical God. Our churches are built like court rooms, you pay homage to him, you worship him, you pray for his guidance, you are his subject, and in the end, his slave. Along with this myth comes the World as an Artifact. It was made a long time ago by the potter god, the carpenter god (Jesus is the son of a carpenter) and handed to us as our own. This interpretation of the bible is undynamic—it’s a diluted, dead thing; is it no wonder it is in the West where atheism grew the most? Alan Watts calls this the myth of the Ceramic Universe. We feel separated from it—as objects, as nouns—not part of the greater whole. This idea is extrapolated in our own bodies, where we believe that the brain governs the rest of the organs. But couldn’t one as easily say that the stomach evolved the brain to feed itself? Westerners live out of harmony with their own bodies. The ancients believed that each organ was controlled by a different deity reflected in the heavens.
Western minds are raw, full of stress that they don’t have enough money or a loved one is going to come down with a sickness and die. This absent father, a father we need because our universe is a universe of laws, should be filled with a myth about the proper way to live offered by a comforting society. Instead, we have a God who exists above us, rules us, and we have to obey his laws. No one really believes in him—they feel they ought to, and people who actually do are on the sides of the streets with blow horns, even good Christians calling them crazy. Material America is God’s system, but God is extirpated from it. We still live by his rules, but don’t accept his existence. God is dead, and we are looking for someone to follow in his stead, but in America, you are in a vacuum. There are no grand mystery religions for the average person to turn. There are no stories recited by a shaman or a bard. All we have is the amphitheater of corporate produced movies and bought-out mega-churches. The American Dream is a personal dream. We know the end goal, to be rich, to be famous, to be respected, but we don’t know how to arrive there.
Americans are craving real experiences. Our culture fetishizes war and death because it is only in these states do we know we are alive. Violence permeates our movies—explosions, war, arms and legs getting hacked off, and people screaming as they get shot. This fetishization is similar to prohibition. We fear death so much that it becomes sexy. We no longer realize it is an illusion even when one of our greatest American poets, Walt Whitman, tried so hard to tell us. The founding fathers would have been horrified by the state we have created. They believed in the infallibility of the truly enlightened man who stood outside partisanship. They trusted that the citizens of the United States would have enough power to look after themselves and not rely on government. But America is not enlightened anymore. We have bought too much into the universe of laws, with the Religious and the Scientific Academics waging war on one another, trying to prove or disprove whether God exists in a material sense. This is the result of literacy, of Saturn’s laws, and complete and utter Statism will be the result. Secular liberals are likewise trying to turn to government to fulfill the need of a guiding father. Christians turn to their hegemonic Church, and in today’s Islam, Muslims turn to their spiritual leaders like the Ayatollah in Iran or fundamentalist heroes like Osama bin Laden. These leaders and apparatuses are always corrupted because of human imperfection—a perfect state would be, like Joseph Campbell said, inhuman. It is also surprisingly based on Utopianism, a very Christian idea of a New Jerusalem. However, there have been new technological breakthroughs which may change halt the rising tide of Saturn. This technology is what I will discuss in the next section.
