Birth of Apollo

I cannot be born
on solid ground,
only where everything flows.
To enter my dawn
you must be unbound
from how the fixed world goes.

Leave behind

your maps and losses,

let  dreams be all your law.

Trust the wind

when the ocean tosses,

burn your boats on the farther shore.

Make new songs

and your floating island

will be rooted beneath the waves.

Drink my sun

and you dance on the high land

your heart, remembering, craves.

This poem is included in Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions. 

Island of Delos by Carl Anton Joseph Rottmann (1847). According to legend, Delos was a floating island until Apollo and his twin sister Artemis were born there.

The gods are recognizable

 

It's a recurring theme in world religions and mythology: it's perilous for humans to meet gods face-to-face, yet the gods may show up in manageable forms, including disguises that don't quite hide what is behind them. In his study of Greek mythology Mortals and Immortals Jean-Pierre Vernant puts it like this: “As well-camouflaged as a god may be in the skin of a mortal, there is something ‘off’, something in the otherness of the divine presence that remains strange and disconcerting even when the god is in disguise."

Thus, when Poseidon disguised himself as a man (Kalchas the diviner) to give support to the two Ajaxes, the son of Oileus recognized that he was dealing with a god by the “trace” Poseidon left as he moved away. In the Iliad, the mortal exclaims, “No, that is not Kalchas the seer. Without difficulty, I recognized from behind the trace of his feet and legs, while he was going away. The gods are recognizable.” Poseidon’s step was like that of “a quick winged falcon pursuing a bird across the plain” 

The body of a god concealed as a human can reveal itself to be both the heaviest and lightest of vehicles. When Athena gets into her chariot, it groans and buckles under her weight. Yet when she leaps from place to place her feet do not even touch the ground and she glides over water with the lightness and speed of a sea bird. 

One reason the gods veil themselves – in the semblance of mortal bodies, or in a concealing mist – is that it is dangerous and often fatal for humans to see gods as they really are. This is the inner meaning of the tales of heroes who suffered because they saw a goddess naked, as Actaeon paid with his life for seeing Artemis bathing nude. The seer Tiresias lost the use of his eyes as the penalty for seeing Athena as she is. 

In the Hometric Hymn to Demeter, we read that Metaneira was terrified when Demeter shed the disguise of an old woman and revealed herself in splendor, The immortal body of the goddess gave out a light that spread far; her shining hair streamed over her shoulders and the stronghold was illuminated as if by a bolt of lightning.

Herakles wanted to see Zeus, but found he was unable to look at the god’s face until Zeus covered it  with an animal skin.  

Vernant comments: “The paradox of the divine body consists in the fact that in order to appear to mortals, it must cease to be itself; it must clothe itself in a mist, disguise itself as a mortal, take the form of a bird, a star, a rainbow. Or if the god chooses to be seen in all its majesty, only the tiniest bit of the splendor of the god’s size, stature, beauty and radiance can be allowed to filter through, and even this is already enough to strike the spectator with thambos, stupefaction, to plunge him into a state of reverential fear. But to show themselves openly, as they truly are – enarges – is a terrible favor the gods accord to no one."

Phaeacian sightings

In the Odyssey, Alkinous claims that the Phaeacians saw the gods in their true forms – enargeis – hundreds of times in the past. The suggestion is that this was possible because the Phaeacians, in contrast to ordinary people, belonged to the family of the gods, who therefore do not need to guide their faces from them. No wonder that in the Mystery traditions, group journeying to the Phaeacian shore - the liminal territory where Odysseus washes up after his dramas with sea monsters and seductive goddesses - was a destination for group journeying. Worth remembering, also, that when Athena speaks to Nausicaa to prepare her for the stranger who she will find naked on the beach, the goddess does not appear in her true form but in the guide of a girl friend of the princess.  

Astride the worlds 

When Poseidon goes to feast with the Ethiopians in “the land of the rising and setting sun” he is described in the Odyssey as traveling, in a single motion, to both opposite extremities of the earth. he description of his movement suggests the nature of the gods as multidimensional beings. They project the semblance of physical form, and may use forms invented by humans, but their bodies are not subject to space and time and they are in no way bound by the rules of physical reality.

 

Birth of Athena

If you devour a mother goddess

make sure you have loyal friend nearby
armed with the ax of the crescent moon.
It’s like this: the feminine power
you thought you could master
is going to stir and swell in you
until your whole being is a trembling womb
that can only open at the top
like a volcano rising from the ocean floor.
It will blow out your brains
unless your head is opened.
So keep a helper with the right tool handy
and be ready for the bright fury
with owl eyes and blazing mind
who will burst from your head fully armed
and love you to death, setting her spear
at the throat of your certainties.

This poem is in my collection Here, Everything Is dreaming: Poems and Stories published  by State University of New York Press/Excelsior Editions.

Image: Attic black figure vase c.560 bce, in British Museum. Hephaestus splits the skull of Zeus with a two-headed mallet or ax to birth the goddess Athena from his head. Zeus is seated on a swan-backed chair and holds a lightning bolt in his hand. Athena springs from his head, shield in hand, ready for action. Hephaestus waves his hand in the style of an Eileithyia, a birth-goddess.

Ariadne and the Moon Bull that Came to My Town

 

A dream shows me how to craft a new group shamanic journey into mythic territory in quest of the Minotaur. Then the Minotaur turns up, thirty feet tall, on a building haf a mile from my house in a little rustbelt city in the Northeast United States.

Like the Great Goddess,a myth we can live by may turn any one of a thousand faces to us. Sometimes they shine on us in dreams, as in  a dream I recorded on May 13,2018. Here is my unedited journal report:

Ariadne's Magic Ball

Overnight I led a workshop in which I guided eager participants on a new group journey modeled on the story of Ariadne's thread. The assignment was to find your way through a confusing maze to confront your own version of the Minotaur: the shape of the fear that prevents you from claiming your full creative gifts. I instructed the journeyers to take with them a magic ball of luminous thread. They would tie one end of the thread to the lintel at the entrance to the maze and then let the ball roll before them, guiding them to the place of encounter with the Beast. They would then follow the thread back, like Theseus the Minotaur-slayer.

Feelings: I came out of this dream cheerful and satisfied, also curious about the variation from the familiar story of Ariadne's thread,

Reality check and research: Ariadne's thread is usually described as something that will get you out of a hairy situation, rather than into it. I was excited to find that Robert Graves reports (in The Greek Myths) that Daedalus, the builder of the Cretan Labyrinth (actually more like a maze) gave Ariadne "a magic ball of thread" that would roll along winding ways to the place of the Minotaur. This is what she loaned to Theseus to get him to the "innermost room" of the Minotaur and back.

Dreaming with a myth: What was actually going on here? Is it possible the original reason for braving the labyrinth was not that you had been condemned as a blood offering to a monster,or called to a hero's quest to slay the monster,but invited to a place of initiation and union with the sacred?

Revisiting old sources, I was reminded that Minoan culture was Goddess-centered and that the hieros gamos (sacred marriage) between the Goddess and her Moon Bull consort was an essential rite. It has been suggested that the Goddess, embodied by her priestess, wore a cow mask and horns and that the King wore a bull mask and horns.

Was the place of the Minotaur (literally "Bull of Minos"; Minos means "Moon-being") a place of enactment of the sacred rite? Or an ordeal that must be survived to earn the right to enter the divine embrace? Was passage through the labyrinth (not the neat unicursal labyrinth of later churches but a wilderness of wandering ways) initiation in the deep womb of the Great Mother?

Has the simplified and familiar story of the hero killing the monster been overlaid on the more ancient Goddess story, and the Goddess reduced to a crazy queen and a girl with a crush on a strapping Greek?

"Without the names, the meaning of things is lost," wrote the great lexicographer Isadore of Seville,and that is especially true in threading this myth. When you know that the name Ariadne may be related to a Greek title of the Queen of the Underworld and may originally derive from a Sumerian name (Ariande) meaning “High Fruitful Mother of the Barley" you'll be freed from the notion that she is just a romantic girl with a useful ball of thread. 

When you learn that the name of Queen Pasiphae, mother of the Minoteur and his half-sister Ariadne, means "Shines on All" you might doubt those versions in which she is a cracked tauromaniac who has a wooden frame constructed so she can have sex with a very special bull by tricking him into thinking she was a cow  You may then be able to visualize ancient Minoans and Hellenes chortling over the rubes who bought an exoteric, literalistic telling of the Goddess's relations with the bull.

You'll find that boughs heavy with fruit were carried in rituals in her honor. She was worshipped as a goddess of the fertile earth, as well as the Underworld and the Moon, and was attributed the power to bring men inside the experience of women. In Cypriot rituals devoted to her, men simulated the pain of childbirth.

A ball of yarn is also called a clew. This, from Middle English, is the origin of our word "clue". Ariadne's clue can take you to a place of creative discovery,where you step beyond fear and blockage into the embrace of a greater power.

Let's hear from Joseph Campbell. Still writing in hero more than Goddess mode in The Power of Myth, he gives us further valid perspective:

“The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we thought to find an abomination we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another we shall shay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence."

If we find that we have to face a monster at the heart of the labyrinth, we may discover that the monster is no stranger, but a shadow self that must be recognized and integrated or overcome.

Men and women may have differing experiences of the Minotaur. A man man may be more inclined to fight,a woman more poised to gentle and heal and embrace. In his extraordinary short story "The House of Asterion", Jorge Luis Borges speaks in the voice of the Minotaur (one of whose Cretain names is Asterion) expressing his longing to be released from self-imposed isolation by the bronze sword of the hero.

Whatever we find at the heart of the labyrinth, let's be ready to recognize that what we feared as a monster may prove to be a teacher, as promised in the derivation of the word. Our word "monster" comes from the Latin monstrum, which means "portent" or "oracle" and is related to monstrator,or "teacher" and demonstrator, one who shows what we need to see. Threading the maze brings us to the center of the self, to what we need to confromt in order to release our full creative and erotic power, marry separated aspects of our energies, and embody the god/goddess of our greater nature.

Last week in my current online course Dreaming Your Mythic Life I invited participants to go on a group shamanic journey to thread the Labyrinth and meet the Minotaur. This went very deep and the journey reports shared later were amazing, turning the face of the myth in hundreds of fresh and original ways.

Then the Minotaur appeared, 30 feet tall, on the wall of a building half a mile from my home. We learned from a local news report that a downtown meadery called The Bull and Bee commissioned an artist to paint him. Unknown to me, this was accomplished in the dark the night before my class. The message, for me, is clear: when a mythic power comes after you, invoked or uninvoked, be ready for it to show up in the street.

Top image

The National Archaeological Museum of Spain in Madrid houses an Attic black-figure cup from around 515 bc with this painting ofthe Minotaur iniside. There are letters around the edge. start just before the Minotaur’s left foot and ead in a counter-clockwise direction and you will the Greek phrase, χω παις καλώς ho pais kalos, which translates as “I play well”. Maybe not would expect and a clue tyhat a sacred game is afoot. It may be a sexual come-on. Such cups were used in symposia where older and younger men and boys partied together.

To carry the water of death you must open the spring of the muses

Different elements in myths call to us at different points in our lives; different archetypes turn us on or turn us off. Revisiting the trials set for Psyche by Venus, I am thrilled and chilled by a feature of her assignment to fetch water from the River Styx that I had not dreamed on deeply enough until now. Anyone who knows the Greek myths remembers that even the gods are terrified of the waters of Styx, who is a dark and merciless goddess, older than the Olympians and closely associated with Nemesis. The gods swear oaths on the Styx, whose waters destroy any sentient being and cannot be contained in any normal vessel. If a god breaks a Stygian oath, he will lie dead for one year and be exiled from Olympus for another nine.
     Of course the girl Psyche has no chance of fetching the water of death without the intercession of a greater power. Zeus sends his eagle and the bird catches water from the falls in carved crystal bottle that Psyche was given, so now she can go on to an even more dangerous trial.
    Our source for the story of Psyche and Eros is a comic novel by Apuleius that veers from bawdy farce to astonishing spiritual depth. Rereading Marie-Louise von Franz' excellent monograph The Golden Ass of Apuleius I am thrilled by a story about the waters of Styx that goes to the heart of the creative project.

"The only way to keep some of it, according to myth, is in the hoof of a horse,or the horn of a mythological (in reality nonexisiting) , one-horned Scythian ass. The horn, a phallic symbol, symbolizes the creative force of the Self, and the horse hoof has also, in a simpler form, the same meaning, because it was believed that horses could stamp springs out of the earth and that the kick of a horse fertilized the earth. So it shows that only the principle of creativeness in the human soul can hold its own against the destructiveness of the water of Styx....Creative achievement is the only 'vessel' which can hold the water of Styx." [1]

I am reminded of Pegasus, the magic flying horse born of the blood of nightmares, opens the spring of the muses. I wrote these lines in celebration:

Harder. The hooves drive sparks from the rock.

The great wings beat the air, driving a warm wind

Across the snowy slopes of the mountain.

Again, the hooves come down. And again.

The rock groans and yields, releasing the jets

Of the secret spring. I am down on my knees,

Catching the water in my open mouth. [2]

Dream on this, and you may find yourself approaching the site of your own creative source, your inner spring of the muses. Be prepared to stamp hard.

1. Marie-Louise von Franz, The Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man (Boston & London: Shambhala, 1992) 124-5.

2. Robert Moss, "Becoming Caduceus" in Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Stories and Poems (Albany NY: Excelsior Editions, 2013) 76.

Photo of a Styx in the Araonian mountains of the Peloponnese by Artemis Katsadoura

Swinging with Hermes on the Hinge of Fate

He is always in motion; he belongs to the journey (hodios); his home is the road itself. He is the angel of the Odyssey, the angelos, the messenger of the gods. He is “the quick one”, especially as angel of death. He is dios eriounios huios, the “swift as death son of Zeus.” He was born in a cave, through the mating of Zeus and a primordial goddess, Maia, who was shrunk in the later phallocentric theology to a mere nymph.
    He is ruler of dreams (hegetor oneiron) and guide of souls (psychopompos). The dream people of Phaeacia – who rescue Odysseus and send him safe to the harbor of the soul – make offerings to Hermes before going to sleep. (Odyssey Book VII, 138).
    He is the embodiment of synchronicity, and his oracles speak through natural events that convey supernatural meaning. The oracle of Hermes at Pharai, in the Peloponnese, was located at the center of a walled market, where there was a simple rough-hewn statue of the god. Consulting this oracle was as simple as this: 

You enter the market through the gate in the wall towards the close of business, as the vendors are packing up their stalls. You bring your question for the oracle with you. You walk to the statue of the god and whisper that question in his ear. Then you plug your ears, or press your hands over them, shutting out external sounds as you walk back to the gate. At the exact moment you reach the gate, you unplug your ears. The first sounds you hear – a snatch of conversation, the cry of a bird, the creak of an overloaded wagon – will be the response of the oracle. The god will speak to you directly through the everyday noise of the world, once you have set a clear intention and put yourself in a frame of mind to receive the message.

Hermes is “the friendliest of gods to men” but his actions are unpredictable, and he begins his career as a thief. He bestows on humans the gift of fruitfulness. The stroke of good luck, the windfall, is named after him in Greek; it is a hermaion. He can be roguish, and shameless in singing bawdy, teasing songs over his lyre, strung on a tortoise shell. He sings of love and riches. He tells the tale of his own begetting, the lusty embrace of his parents in their secret union in the cave. He carries memory. He has great appetites – for meat, for sex, for song, for improv. He is of the night. 
    According to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Zeus fathered Hermes by making love to Maia, then oldest of the Pleaides, under cover of dark in a cave. When she delivered Hermes, Maia bundled him up in warm fleeces and fell asleep. Hermes is quick. Within hours, the newborn baby had crawled to Thessaly. Before nightfall the next day,now fully grown, he had stolen some of his half-brother Apollo's cattle and invented the lyre by stringing a tortoise shell. Hermes' theft of the cattle caused a dispute among the gods that was resolved only when Apollo agreed to receive the lyre as payment for his cattle.   
    In the older strata of the myths, preserved by Cicero in De Natura Deorum ("On the Nature of the Gods"), Hermes is the son of Heaven (Ouranos) and Bright Day (Hemera); Aphrodite is their daughter. He is the escort of the goddesses – on the reliefs he is always leading three of them. He is the lover and ally of the feminine world of springs and caves, trees and streams. He is the primal lover, seminal in every sense. He has associations with water; at Pharai he has a sacred fishpond. He is one of the consorts of Hecate, who also presides at crossroads and is a keeper of gates.

      He manifests a world, a world of spontaneous creation and fluctuation. The great mythographer Karl Kerenyi, colleague of Jung, struggled to explain this in his elegant little monograph Hermes, Guide of Souls:

The sum total of pathways as Hermes’ playground; the accidental “falling into your lap” as the Hermetic material; its transformation through finding – thieving – the Hermetic event – into an Hermetic work of art, which is always something of a tricky optical illusion, into wealth, poetry and every sort of evasion from the restriction and confinement imposed by laws, circumstances, destinies – how could these be merely psychic realities? They are the world and they are one world, namely, that world which Hermes opens to us. 

Hermes, Kerenyi declares, is “the source of his own world”.    

     He is the masculine aspect of the life force, represented as the herm, the phallus.

     His phallus is a pivot between the worlds. We begin to grasp this sexy mystery when we find a carved phallus used as grave marker. There is a stone phallus three feet high inscribed with the name and portrait of an ancient Greek woman named Lysandra of Alexandros. Priapus, the god of the permanent hard-on, according to some a son of Hermes, is a guardian of graves and gardens. Seed is also soul. On an Attic black-figured vase, an ithyphallic man blows on a double flute as he ejects four drops of semen towards a large fluttering butterfly – which appears to be emerging from the first of the drops. 

    Hermes embodies the phallic and active principle, reigning over the rebirthing of souls. Hermes steps through the door with a hard-on, as men often transit from the dream world to the waking world, and hanged men, universally, enter the afterlife. Hermes is penetrating, and this is the effect of synchronicity. It pushes through, it opens up, and it inseminates.
    He is depicted wearing winged sandals, and a winged traveler's hat, and bearing a caduceus.
    Hermes is one of the great mythic Gatekeepers. Through him, every house opens into the Otherworld. One of his names, sotheos, means The Socket, as in the socket of a hinge that enables the pin to turn and the door to open and close. So we can think of him as a Hinge guy – as in “hinge of fate” – or a Pivot. As he swings, so do our fortunes.

Image: Hermes watches Hypnos and Thanatos prepare to carry the fallen hero Sarpedon back to his homeland in Lycia. Painting from the Euphronios krater (c.515 bce), now in the Archaeological Museum of Cerveteri. 

Birth of Athena

If you devour a mother goddess
make sure you have a loyal friend nearby
armed with the ax of the crescent moon.

It’s like this: the feminine power
you thought you could master
is going to stir and swell in you
until your whole being is a trembling womb
that can only open at the top
like a volcano rising from the ocean floor.
It will blow out your brains
unless your head is opened.

So keep a helper with the right tool handy
and be ready for the bright fury
with owl eyes and blazing mind
who will burst from your head fully armed
and love you to death, setting her spear
at the throat of your certainties. 

image: Athena fountain by Karl Donndorf, 1911. Stuttgart.

The Orpheus who does not look back

Call me Orpheus.
The one who charms the wild beasts
and becomes what he sings.
The one who goes down
to the Netherworld
to rescue a lost soul
and braves Death  on his dark throne
and sings so sweet and strong
that mercy flowers from stone.
I am not the one in your stories
who lost her again by looking back.

When those who can't have me
try to kill me, their weapons won't obey them.
When the jealousy demons
turn their fingers into claws
my body yields, but I go on singing
until my severed parts come together again.

I speak to you in golden leaves
I give you the best directions
for the journey all must take.
Go right at the fountain by the white cypress.
When the Gatekeeper challenges you
remember to say:
I am born of earth and of starry sky
my race is of heaven alone.


-Big Sur, California, November 13, 2013

Photo (c) Robert Moss. Orpheus mosaic in Archaeological Museum, Istanbul.

Birth of Athena

If you devour a mother goddess
make sure you have a loyal friend nearby
armed with the ax of the crescent moon.
It’s like this: the feminine power
you thought you could master
is going to stir and swell in you
until your whole being is a trembling womb
that can only open at the top
like a volcano rising from the ocean floor.
It will blow out your brains
unless your head is opened.
So keep a helper with the right tool handy
and be ready for the bright fury
with owl eyes and blazing mind
who will burst from your head fully armed
and love you to death, setting her spear
at the throat of your certainties. 

Image: Birth of Athena from the head of Zeus. Archaic, c 550 bce. That's Hephaistos with the ax. According to Hesiod's Theogony, Zeus swallowed his first wife, the oceanic Metis (of "wise counsel") because of a prophecy that his children by her would usurp his throne. This only hints at a more primal creation story, from a time before the Greeks confined the gods to statuesque humanoid forms. Go dream on it.