Would you like a major touchstone, a spiritual pebble, to turn over and over again in the hands of your meditation on the tragic aspects of the Modern World?
Well..here you have it:
Though the West is still nominally Christian, we have come to be governed, in practice, by the unholy triumdivate (triumvirate of deities) of Pluto, god of wealth, Apollo, god of science, and Mercury, god of thieves.
To make matters worse, dissension and jealousy rage openly between these three, with Mercury and Pluto black-guarding each other, while Apollo wields the atomic bomb as if it were a thunderbolt; for since the Age of Reason was heralded by his eighteenth century philosophers, he has seated himself on the vacant throne of Zeus (temporarily indisposed) as Triumdival Regent. -page 476, The White Goddess.
What does that mean?
Well, too much to put down in one simple blog entry, but I will try. First, a little back story on Robert Graves.
It was in Colin Wilson's book, The Occult. Wilson recounts an amazing tale of how Graves solved some major mystery regarding Celtic rhyme and alphabet (the "tree alphabet") regarding the "White Goddess"..the moon goddess, the original highest power in the pantheon of human worship, back in the time of "true matriarchy", when the Unconscious ruled the psyche, not man's pathetic but tough little ego...
It's a book for lovers of the Divine Feminine...
I further came to know Robert Graves and his work because of the broadcast of "I, Claudius", a fictional back-story, remarkably well done, of the intrigue behind the actual facts of the first Roman emperors from Augustus, nephew of Julius Caesar, through Tiberius, to Caligula, and onto Claudius, the emperor seized by the Praetorian Guard to sit on the throne after the assassination of the psychopath Caligula...
Now, back to that quote:
Essentially, Graves is saying that the missing element of the modern world is an overall integrator, a principle of mediation capable of limiting essential activities such as commerce and science to what serves life and not simply its self at the expense, detriment, and possible undoing, of life overall.
You see it well demonstrated in the story of Persephone.
Hades needs a wife. He was a loser in the original assignment of areas of power, as his more powerful brother Zeus got the Heavens, while his brother Neptune got the Seas.
His place, under the ground, the source of gold and other valuable material, is the reason Hades' other name is "Pluto", "the rich one", but, being a Land of the Dead, hardly entices any female to be his consort.
So, he emerges from the ground with his black stallions and abducts Persephone, taking her underground to be the Queen of the Dead. Ceres, her mother, the Goddess of grain and plant life, in her grief, loses the will to live. Without her love plants do not grow and animals die, and there are no sacrifices by thankful humans to help keep the Gods alive. (Check out "Clash of the Titans" for this as well.)
For the ancient pagans, the gods needed our love to sustain them. For the nuns who taught me in elementary school, God "liked" hearing that we loved him, but he wasn't in any particular need, especially an existential need, to experience our love.
Zeus intervenes at the behest of his sister Ceres/Demeter realizing the situation will destroy them all. He demands his brother return Persephone. Hades concedes.
While Hades allows Persephone to return to the upper world, he doesn't give up. Instead, he plans a feast to help her celebrate her return to her mother. Having been told not to eat or drink anything while below the ground, Persephone eschews the drink and food, but, forgetting (?) she eats a few pomegranate seeds.
Her return is a joyful event for Ceres. Hades, however, isn't done yet and reappears, reclaiming Persephone based on her having eaten the seeds. The idea is that, having consumed the food of the dead, her spirit is now part of the "Land of the Dead", ie, Hades, and she has to return.
This would mean, once again, the end of life on Earth, and, once again, the end of the Gods who thrive on the appreciation in the sacrifices offered to them for the food that kept people alive.
Zeus, the mediator, resolves that Persephone must be shared. She will have to return to Hades every Fall, as the sun goes lower in the sky, before the Winter Solstice, and spend one month under the ground for ever seed eaten. But, she will return at the Equinox, beginning of Spring, in "April", the month named for the opening of the ground..."aprire", in Latin, to open.
In the Fall, as the night lengthens, a trend that, if continued, would mean doom, Persephone returns to the Land of the Dead, and denizens of that Land come out into the world, hence, the celebration of Halloween, a celebration of the Dead that got subsumed under Christianity as "All Saints Day" and, especially, as "All Souls Day".
Zeus has saved the day, literally. His job as mediator: well done. Zeus' position is that all claims that are legitimate are to be honored but...and it's a very important "BUT"...without being inimical to the very existence of the system that they seek to exploit.
Now try applying that insight to our present-day world, looking for the necessary and beneficial compromise on any issue, you will experience attacks often enough by both sides because, if anything defines today's world, the "activist" mentality is totally devoted to the deification of whatever principle he eschews.
Capitalism, that is, Big Business in general, personal freedom as it becomes radical libertarianism (more properly, "libertinism"), science, especially when it comes to experimentation on the fetus, or even our agricultural practices, all of these and many more constitute areas where a "Zeus" is needed to put those three gods in their place as SERVANTS of life, not as life's OWNERS.
More to come....
No comments:
Post a Comment