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MYTHIC STUDIES
Mythology is the most archaic and profound record we have of mankind's essential spirit and nature. As far back as we are able to trace the origins of our species, we find myth and myth-making as the fundamental language through which man relates to life's mystery and fashions meaning from his experiences. The world of myth has its own laws and its own reality. Instead of concepts and facts that make logical sense, we find patterns of irrational imagery whose meaning must be discerned or experienced by the participant-observer. Discovering these patterns of meaning is what Jung meant by the symbolic approach to religion, myth, and dream.
The mythic image is not to be taken literally and concretely as it would be in the belief-system of a particular religion, nor is it to be dismissed as 'mere illusion,' as often happens in scientific circles. Instead, we must approach myth symbolically as revealed eternal 'truths' about mankind's psychic existence — about the reality of the psyche. 'Once upon a time' does not mean 'once' in history but refers to events that occur in eternal time, always and everywhere.
The term mythology can refer either to a collection of myths (a mythos) or to the study of myths (e.g., comparative mythology). A myth is a sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind assumed their present form, although, in a very broad sense, a mythic character can refer to any traditional story.
Myth is an "ideology in narrative form". Myths may arise as either truthful depictions or overelaborated accounts of historical events, as allegory for or personification of natural phenomena, or as an explanation of ritual. They are transmitted to convey religious or idealized experience, to establish behavioral models, and to teach.
Gods and goddesses are "Symbiotic Autonomous Systems", the patterns of
psychic perception. Such symbols move and awaken the mind. Carl Jung defines archetypes as
“primordial images—symbols which are older than historical man; which have been ingrained in
him from earliest times, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still making up the groundwork of the human psyche” (Jung, 1933, p. 113).
James Hillman (1975b) in Revisioning Psychology says, "Let us imagine archetypes as the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world...They are similar to other axiomatic first principles, the models or paradigms that we find in other fields" (p. xiii).
The patterns of archetypes are often viewed and explained as mythical metaphors from which entire cultures have been based. These myths represent the archetypes as a powerful image language that communicates traditional wisdom. As “living things", they are always transforming into something new, something potentially revelatory.
Kybele has been closely related with Attis, Dionysus, Rhea, Hekate, and Demeter,
as well as the Anatolian Artemis of Ephesus and the Roman Cybele.
The spirit is energy, quest, relationship, and life force. Truth changes sociologically, as well as historically; it often resides in useful fictions and the artistic language of mytho-poetics. We must avoid being impoverished in our self-understanding by stepping outside of conventional academic strictures in our interpretations of ancient Divinities, Myth, and Cult.
Post-postmodern animism is an excavation and revitalizing of the world. How the world is alive and imbued with spirit is re-visioned in Archetypal Psychology and phenomenology. We can't collapse the many streams of a myth into one, including its reception as received truth in today's world. Does prehistoric religion equates to indigenous religion and thus shamanism or have they erroneously become conjectural lenses for scholars looking into the distant human past?
We cannot excavate religion for a primordial source of human spirituality. We often don't know the ritual or mythological significance of an artifact or what sort of ideology it might have conveyed in its original context. When we try to imagine the archaic we know neither what we're looking for nor what ... we cannot appeal to the apologetic posturing of “development” routinized by history. It is a mistake to link myth with belief. Archetypal studies adds another layer to these mysteries of unbridled sensuality and socially uncontrolled behavior.
Kybele remains as much a moving target as she did in antiquity before she was personified or anthropomorphized. Both the concept of a universal goddess religion (Gimbutas) and universal shamanism (Eliade) have been 'seen through' as modern conceptual myths. But, here we are mainly concerned with the indigenous religion of Phrygian Kybele, despite controversies over her worship, names and forms, including rock-cut art.
Contemporary groups might give new meaning and projective interpretations to prehistoric sites and artifacts. Ruck’s “magical plants” included wild ivy, flowers such as opium, and fungi such as amanita mushrooms and LSD-producing ergot mold, all inhabit the space of Wild intoxicants, a celebration of both the divine and bestial dimensions that may relate to the protection of sacred game animals, the sacrifice of sacred animals, and symbolic, ritualistic metamorphosis of human to sacred animal.
Shamanism itself is now considered an academic myth, a fictionalization of 'the primitive other' in Ethnology, Archaeology, and Historiography, contradicting Eliade, Gimbutas, and Wasson, among others. And yet there is ample physical evidence of the use of entheogens in rituals by indigenous Paleo-shamans and their historical successors. 'Primitive mankind' remains an imaginal construction, overgeneralized and superficial, beyond contemporary descriptions of rites.
So, it seems it is the characterization and generalization of shamans by Enlightenment colonial thinkers, ethnographic pioneers, and romantic New Age neo-shamanism that is questionable, rather than their existence as cross-cultural social shapers. Universal or not, Thracian and Anatolian shamans were oracular mystic practitioners knowledgeable in reading the stars, using advanced remedies from nature, divining and communing with nature, animals and spirits, alike.
Local legends suggest, like the goddess, they drew on the powers in the natural world, including those of earth and animals, and mediate non-ordinary states, between the world of the living, the spirits, and ancestral spirits of the dead.
We are enmeshed and entangled with invisible entitles. Pathological manifestations of alterations to the sense of self is dissociative. Awe is related to a diminished sense of self, flow, and peak-experience. Self-transcendence involves the expansion of personal boundaries,a larger dimension emerging from an innate religious instinct.
An ecstatic specialist, still known in academics as a ‘shaman’, confers initiation as one of humanity’s oldest, most widespread, and continuous experiences -- a sacramental means of grace and cathartic blessing. Self-transcendence is an innate desire to discover meaning. Spirituality is an innate human capacity to experience transcendence.
Much depends on whether we take a psychological, aesthetic, orthodox, or heterodox approach. A Mythologist studies and applies archetypes to reveal meaning and create change in perspectives and individuals. They use the power of archetypes for remembrance, to create amazing viewpoints, and change lives.
KYBELE - DISINTEGRATION & REBITH
https://ionamiller2020.weebly.com/kybele-attis.html
https://ionamiller2020.weebly.com/cybele.html
EXCERPTS
KYBELE: WILD AT HEART
Body of Images; Wilderness of Soul
by Iona Miller, (c)2019
https://ionamiller2020.weebly.com/cybele.html
KYBELE: THE WILD FEMININE
A Wilderness of Soul
Iona Miller, (c)2020
https://ionamiller2020.weebly.com/cybele.html
MOTHER MYCELIUM
Kybele, Attis, & the Fruit of the Gods
Iona Miller, 2020
https://ionamiller2020.weebly.com/kybele-attis.html
PRIMARY RELIGION
Where do you stand? What is around and beneath you?
Is it solid ground or pavement; is it earthen or synthetic?
Is there magic in the land there? Is it powerful, wild, or tame?
Is its energy flowing through you? Does it effect your magic?
Soil is more than mere matter; it contains spirit -- the place where you live.
Can we recover the wild sacred?
Both the name and the visual image of the Phrygian goddess first appear in central Anatolia (modern Turkey), during the early first millennium BCE and spread from there, first to the Greek cities on the west coast of Anatolia, and then to mainland Greece and to Greek cities in the western Mediterranean. The goddess's cult was imported into Rome at the end of the third century BCE, where she became an important figure in Roman religion.
Her chthonian character, myth, and ritual, had connections to the spiritual underworld. The imaginal activity of the ancients had a mythological dimension. Many of the supernatural figures and mythological events which appear in later religious traditions, were probably discoveries of the Stone Age. For millennia Mother Earth gave birth by herself, through parthenogenesis. Born from the Earth, humansn returned there at death.
Both Jung and Hillman agree that the soul's goal often has less to do with life than death which may be part of its aim. The death mother is nature's shadow. If we can understand this consciousness, as well as the forms of the world in their manifestation, then we have taken a step forward that allows us to restore consciousness by giving it back its true dimension.
Agrarian cultures developed notions of circular time and cosmic cycles, a new orientation to both inner and outer life. Settled life organizes the "world" differently from a nomadic life, according to the seed cycle of death rebirth, earth and sky, periodic renewal. The mystery of birth, death, and rebirth is the rhythm of vegetation and its mythological dramas, including mythical themes of gods who die and return to life, the cosmic cycle of chthonian fertility and life/death/postexistence.
Root metaphors of neolithic culture include: 1) Cults of the dead and of fertility, 2) the "mystery" of vegetation. 3) hope of a postexistence. 4) A cosmology, a "center of the world" and inhabited space as an imago mundi.
We dissolve in the mysterious ground of being, the sublime wellspring of creativity. Enduring psychospiritual transformation needs to be grounded in “somatic transfiguration.” In humanity's emerging consciousness somewhere between the darkness of imagination and physical mazes, deep caverns seem like uterine spaces or living, breathing internal cavities that snake for miles. Caves -- the original temples -- were worshiped and feared as the center of the earth with miles of crumbling tunnels and steep precipitous drop offs multiple-stories deep.
The lunar 'ground' is a fathomless depth. Humankind has journeyed deep into them and used these dark and treacherous labyrinths of tortured and twisting passages with seemingly bottomless pits, to live, to hide, to explore, and to worship with pilgrimage, art, and rituals.
With its flickering fires, smoky caverns, and hidden dangers the cave gave rise to mythic and archetypal recollections and dreams of ancestral spirits. But all who descend into the underworld do so at their own risk. Initiatory passageways and vertical shafts have dangerous hand and footholds etched in lava and ice, and studded with magical curtains, spires, crystals and inscriptions.
Caves represent the deep impenetrable strata of the "maternal unconscious", re-entry into the containing womb of the Mother, an ancient motif of death and rebirth. This grave is a subterranean temple and nocturnal rites of passage, the flow of underground waters,, and all the ferocious beasts and treasures the caverns of the psychic underworld conceal.
"A meaningful katabasis into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge is for the restoration of the whole person. The dead become an imaginal presence, "the growing understood as descent in the world, becoming useful to it and contributing to form, requires that it is descend in the world that is under the world. To be an ancestor, a benefactor, a conservative and a mentor you must have knowledge of the shadows, being trained "from the dead" (from past things, which have become invisible and however continue to vivify our life with their influence). The "Dead" return as ancestors, especially in moments of crisis, when we feel lost. Then the dead "yes", offering a deeper knowledge and support. Having already fallen, they know the chasms; there their extraordinary resources. They don't need to come back literally in the form of voices and visions, because they are already palpable in anything tends to jump down, on any occasion we are not up to. They are the gravity force of the psyche." (James Hillman)
The Greek word for 'revealed' actually means 'reappear,' like rivers and streams that flow underground and spring forth again. The course remains invisible until it reappears to sight. Creative environmental function includes experiencing a sense of beauty and compassion, supporting and serving life and nature with nature-assisted expressions.
The mind goes still as primal awareness expands into wholeness. Something without physical form shines forth from the hidden world in that very moment. These luminous experiences, true works of art, drive us onward in the Quest. We are struck with divine inspiration and the passion to see it through to completion. Sensuous cognition of beauty is a revelation, an astonishment.
Who is Kybele in our consciousness today? We are fundamentally tied to and grounded in nature. We learn to "stand our ground" in the deep interiority of the psychological field with new vigor.
She is the universal veil which encloses and incorporates the Mysteries. It is a membrane that ruptures as the fruiting body grows. The image says everything and dictates all that follows. You just stay true to the image.
Indigenous mind is at the root of nonconscious understanding, accurate knowledge of the universe, including Precession. Ancient time is related to distance. The ancients tapped the information field underlying the material structures of the universe and read the living heart of the cosmos, subquantal, subliminal, subconscious, autonomic, reflexive, amorphous cognition, the nonrepresentational activity of the psyche (Arieti, 1976).
They ask, “What does the land want? What does the river want? What does the wolf want? What does the forest want?" The sky, the sun, the moon, the wind, the trees, beasts, and ancestors are holy beings. They are always watching, and have needs and interests entangled with our own. Kybele is the wisdom of the ancient forest, mysteries hidden deep within the earth, and clouded peaks.
Wild At Heart
The essential feminine, this wild darkness, the virgin forest -- the sensuous fantastic -- lights our way in the imaginal perspective of an ensouled world. Kybele is the autonomous fantasy maker that animates imagination of visible and invisible worlds and the seething excitation of instincts. We can tend and attend to the inner wilds, the symbolic language of nature, wandering through the imagery-infused world.
Kybele is the sole and original parent and our wild creativity. The throbbing heart of creation acts through its own center. The darkness of the depths, suffused with self-generated light, is also called spiritual Nature, Anima Mundi, or soul that exists in an invisible state as Primary Imagination, infused throughout the cosmos animated by collective soul.
Campbell said, “The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” (A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living)
Ritualized movement and silence speaks volumes, reverberating with future frequencies, opening interiority and ecstatic communion -- a kaleidoscopic fusion of the senses, the inverted articulation of attunement to reverberating echos. In active sensing we actively coordinate movement with the information we want to sense and find, integration of sensory and motor information, learning in a concrete way.
We return in mystery to the embrace of the goddess, the wild feminine, committed to the wildness within. The Virgin of Conception was the original sacrificial virgin, psychoactive buds of cannabis, burned as a sacred offering to the Goddess. She doesn't enter us, but emerges from deep within perception as action, something elemental.
The secret is inside the creation and based in nature and our own intrinsic nature, bringing more of the unconscious and mythic into consciousness through the mothering path of awakening. Life pours forth from itself.
Interconnectivity manifests in our deep psychic bond with the earth, its creatures and plants, and the cosmos as a whole. Evidence of this interrelationship arises in our personal lives in dream images and synchronicities, and in the powerful and visceral sense of engagement we feel with the natural world.
Wild Darkness
Kybele gives voices to mute places, a marriage of trees, rocks, and starry sky. Narrative gives a grounded sense of self. The margins are the center of the imagination. Reflecting her own cavernous interiority, she transforms inhospitable, harsh terrains into inviting primordial parks and riverbeds flowing with the imaginal. We yearn to float downstream; reverie moves us forward. Landscape is a provocateur.
To see the beauty we must stop, breathe and absorb into the moment, the only reality we all really have. Some cultures create zoomorphic figures and geometric patterns to transform the vast land into a highly symbolic, ritual and social-cultural landscape. She speaks for their unspeakable immensity that reminds us we are truly small.
Liminal places connect outside with inside across all experiential domains. Wandering off the path of hypermodernity, we are arrested, trapped in her magically woven web of poetic resonance. There is a synergetic relation between landscape, instinct and imagination that rekindles all as a unified field that is the mycelial root of sacred places of heart and mind.
Relationships are the poetry of life and connecting with the land. Kybele is the earth from which we grow, our connection to dreams, the animal realm, our ancestors, and deep unconscious. She is the dust under our feet beyond those areas of origin that can be mapped, giving place a face in the present.
What is this invisible ground whose image we carry in our souls where spiritual ideals merge with worldly realities? Isn’t it always right here, right now everywhere always, forever? The contextual background, the invisible environment, is the fundamental ground from which both mind and matter emerge, the luminous absolute space of reality beyond the mere absence of energy/matter. The radiant ground is the fundamental source.
Mother Mycelium
We all come from one genus -- consciousness, sentience. Mycorrhizae are symbiotic relationships that form between fungi and plants. The fungi colonize the root system of a host plant and shares information. The closer we come to the deep core of any archetypal experience the more the numinous effect increases, as a confrontation with a power not of this world but the more-than-human world.
"The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth. . . For the root matter is the mother of all things." (C.G. Jung, CW 18, Page xxv).
The field becomes the focus. We learn to lean into the field and feel its chaos without imposing premature order. The field is a paradox of fusion and distance, an impossible simultaneity. We need to practice seeing the field, as well as seeing into and through it with full-bodied feeling. It is known only by experiential perception, not interpretation.
The everyday processes of living in the conscious mind usually succeed in compartmentalizing off the preconscious from our awareness. Psychic gifts can come under the service of self-destructive impulses. But occasionally, the upwelling of the preconscious area, unconditioned belonging in the world, erupts like molten magma from the mantle of the earth.
Knowing By Feeling
The unconscious is the "wilderness" of body and world. Nature is an environmental trigger igniting altered states of consciousness, like nature-mystic merging, "oceanic," or "peak-experience." They give us the exaltation, a primordial grace, of standing on a high mountain and gaining for a minute the awesome glory of a grand vista.
Mountain peaks express the shared connection of supernatural power, fertility and protection between the sacred mountain, the gods, and the dead. Our wild embodied nature is lured not only by others but by landscapes, trees, forests, and seascapes, fecund wonders as well as ideas, poetry, art, and music. Non-ordinary perception evolves through kinesthetic perception. We are somatically aroused, seduced and captivated by the animate world.
Our wild self knows what is being said by nonhuman flora and fauna. We see the sacred in nature through the radiant consciousness of the "otherness" of natural things. This is the simplest, most common form of illumination -- overpowering apprehension of the Infinite, life imminent in all living things.
Walls between the visible and the invisible grow thin, and the Eternal seemed to break through into the world with a higher order of reality. This awareness: is so intangible, it strikes like a thunderclap.
Wild Mind
Does a wild mind call for a field guide to the psyche, a grove full if ancient trees, the circuits of the stars, or deep crumbling cave arched beneath a mighty mountain? The Chaldean Oracles suggested nature "commands fate", referring to its ensoulment.
How can we fully embody our multifaceted wild minds, commit ourselves to the largest, soul-infused story we’re capable of living, and serve the greater Earth community -- the relationship between our human psyche and the rest of nature? Kybele has meant different things in different epochs.
Psyche is in the world, not just in ourselves. It's in our loves, in our personal and collective lives, just as much as our culture and nature. The gods and ourselves, in interstitial space (tissue space), are in the world, also present as in-scapes of our imaginations.
Divesting enculturation we learn to see in the dark through her eyes, through imaginal sight, through inner and outer wilderness vision quests or trance journeys that revitalize and re-enchant us. Arguably, soul is an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person's fate.
Planetary poetics reveal what it means to be in an undisturbed place. True listening to the earth equalizes each sound's value. Every place has a sound that connects us back to the land. Silence is the Presence of everything in the natural acoustic system, undisturbed. Acoustic space nurtures our nature, says Gordon Hempton.
“...there is a fundamental frequency for each habitat” — a tonal quality that shapes the sense of place and the quality of presence. What emerges is the embodied awareness that silence, like the art of sculpture, is the removal of excess material so that the true form — of one’s consciousness, of the world, of life itself — can be revealed."
Archaic Roots
Imagine yourself waking through untrammeled forest in ancient times, when thoughts receded into the direct experience of a world enlivened by direct experience of an utterly wild living landscape. By pale moonlight the ancient woods were shadowy and indistinct with multifaceted nature.
Pine trees were sacred to Attis. Clay images, fragments of tree or black fir-idols and phallic votives have been found at the important sacred groves, suggesting the severed members of Kybele and Attis. Their mushroom analogs flourish under those pines, a co-evolution of psyche and place.
Entheogens, namely wild mushrooms, probably pla yed an important role in the Mysteries in ritual intoxication and ASC. Wild amanitas or other psychoactive wild fungi were included in the mysteries. (Ruck) In the 'Corpus Cybelae Attidisque" we discover many other icons of Attis formed like mushrooms. Unfettered and wild, she is the forest -- nature’s expressive powers of vegetative growth.
"The root is the mysterious tree, it is the subterranean, inverted tree. For the root, the darkest earth—like the pond, but without the pond—is also a mirror, a strange opaque mirror which doubles every aerial reality with a subterranean image." (Gaston Bachelard)
A complex knot of feelings and impulses arises including nostalgia for union with the mother, the way things were before. They are echoed in the enchanted landscape and incidents that arise through it, confirming that felt-sense of an ancient state of consciousness. The connection is renewed with oneself, primordial nature, the ecosphere and constellations of ancestral memories. Every place is a different energetic setting.
Walking toward a sacred grove, the elemental wood, everything in it is alive and watching and whispering with the movement of the trees and the breezes all around, and geomagnetic currents. All are gestures of a god -- a mote of sunlight, the flight of a bee or butterfly, the scurry of a deer, murmur of water, the flash of lightning, and crack of thunder.
Our perspective becomes an imaginative relationship to the world. We tune our animal senses to the sensible terrain. Even invisible electromagnetism and an unidentified substratum through which all the forms of the world appear and disappear. Electromagnetism is the life breath of matter, the appearance in consciousness of the universe.
Such affinities with forces and forms of nature were not symbols, but were the goddess. Whole dimensions of images lie glistening in the dark unknown, refined by millennia, all meant to happen and speaking volumes -- each a portent of punishment or reward, warning or premonition that entered consciousness.
"Images are primary psychic realities. In experience, itself, everything begins with images." (On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, trans. with preface and introduction by Colette Gaudin. Spring Publications: Dallas, 1987, p. 84 [Original in French, 1960].)
The face of the myth was a meteorite. Even stones embodied the most absolute and deep experience - the experience of the eternal, which we realize in moments when we feel immortal. Kybele's oldest image was black meteoric stone, a venerated stone from the heavens, full of life and the unrestrained exploding forces of nature and creativity.
Such evocative images and sonic references became the basis of the unfolding Mysteries, sought in the shelter of caves that automatically internalized consciousness, returning it from the far horizons of complex rhythms and cycles. The heart-cave is the chambers of the heart. The initiate marries the goddess with a sacred meal. Raw and intense cave experiences soon make believers out of followers.
Kybele mediates the known and unknown, civilized and wild, life and death, as a goddess of transitions, mysteries, sensuous adventure and the landscape of eternity. Only a world of soul offers intimacy and coherent resonance to help us see and know the thought of the heart, as if in a mirror.
Kybele is mantic, oracular. In her cosmic womb we learn to open up, sense the dark matter world, and negotiate with darkness, what Jung called "the eternally fruitful climes of the soul." We embrace her glorious and inglorious passions as we embrace the image, a surrender in service to the gods; imagining into the archetypal energies of the goddess and her style of consciousness.
Living myths change with location, culture, and time, just as panpsychism grew out of animism -- the imagery of dark and luminous, fluid, electric, richly textured imagery with deep and saturated colors. It is populated by figures known and unknown that form a network of complex, entangled relationships, offering passing flashes of potential futures..
The wind has a thousand voices: the voice of soft twisting of leaves, the bending of branches, the hollowness of valleys. It voices rock walls and carries the echoes to ears that have nothing else to hear but the sounds of the world being carried on a breeze. (S.K. Abbott)
This is the most ancient conception of psyche, the belief that nature is alive with spirits and things with “souls.” That experience goes “all the way down” into submicroscopic nature. Panpsychism views the mentality of objects as a subset of universal qualities, not in terms of human consciousness. If humans and non-humans are enminded, we can know the universe more intimately, compassionately, and ecologically.
Because Kybele originates in the pre-literate era, there are many versions of her myth. Which of them are true? All of them are real -- the archaic. classical, and imperial --though they vary in key features as oral traditions do. Is she earth, or is she metaphor? Both.
Imagination is fundamental to psychic realty. Hillman suggests, "the identity of opposites mean the simultaneous perception by the perspectives of life and death, the natural and the psychic."
The lived experience of psyche helps us place a vivid personal experience within a universal cosmology, finding our place in relation to the Gods by personifying, pathologizing, and psychologizing cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates.
Meeting the God-Plant
In her Mysteries, Cybele mourned the death of her beloved and the passing of her devotees. They were transformed by her communion, mystique, and the attainment of sacred knowledge (gnosis) through identification with Attis, her son-lover. They were collectively known as the Galli.
In the myths of Attis, Kybele bargained with fate and the gods so his hair and regenerated phallus grow under the pine tree forever - an analogy for mycelium and fruits of the Amanita muscaria mushroom, a likely source for the revelers mania, dropping the habitual self for a primordial regression. It can only be described as a shamanic ordeal, a soma sacifice of all that is material.
Those who ate the mushrooms felt the god within themselves as reality dissolved into wriggling serpents. Shepherds tending flocks would have found the fly agaric high in the wild mountains after rains, when the mountains of the goddess were raging with thunderstorms on the slopes.
Daniel Atrell summarizes in his thesis:
"Abstract - The administration of initiation rites by an ecstatic specialist, now known to western scholarship by the general designation of ̳shaman‘, has proven to be one of humanity‘s oldest, most widespread, and continuous magico-religious traditions. At the heart of their initiatory rituals lay an ordeal–a metaphysical journey - almost ubiquitously brought on by the effects of a life-changing hallucinogenic drug experience. To guide their initiates, these shaman worked with a repertoire of locally acquired instruments, costumes, dances, and ecstasy-inducing substances."
Among past Mediterranean cultures, Semitic and Indo-European, these sorts of initiation rites were vital to society‘s spiritual well-being. It was, however, the mystery schools of antiquity–organizations founded upon conserving the secrets of plant-lore, astrology, theurgy and mystical philosophy–which satisfied the role of the shaman in Greco-Roman society. The rites they delivered to the common individual were a form of ritualized ecstasy and they provided an orderly context for religiously-oriented intoxication.
In the eastern Mediterranean, these ecstatic cults were most often held in honor of a great mother goddess and her perennially dying-and-rising consort. The goddess‘ religious dramas enacted in cultic ritual stressed the importance of fasting, drumming, trance-inducing music, self-mutilation, and a non-alcoholic ritual intoxication. Far and wide the dying consort worshiped by these cults was a god of vegetation, ecstasy, revelation, and salvation; by ingesting his body initiates underwent a profound mystical experience.From what limited information has survived from antiquity, it appears that the rites practiced in the eastern mystery cults were in essence traditional shamanic ordealsremodeled to suit the psychological needs of Mediterranean civilization‘s marginalized people.
This paper argues that the myths of this vegetable god, so-called ̳the Divine Bridegroom,‘ particularly in manifestation of the Phrygian Attis and the Greek Dionysus, is deeply rooted in the life-cycle, cultivation, treatment, consumption of a tree-born hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria."
(Dionysian Semiotics: Myco-Dendrolatry and Other Shamanic Motifs in the Myths and Rituals of the Phrygian Mother)
https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/7857/Attrell_Daniel.pdf?sequence=1
Clark Heinrich describes how initiates were made aware of "meeting" the god-plant and being in the presence of a god. "One can also feel extremely energetic and strong, and this strength is not an illusion. It is well known among Siberian users of the fly agaric that feats of tremendous physical endurance are possible under its influence."
Clark Heinrich, Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy, 2002, Inner Traditions, (Rochester: Park Street
It's bisexual morphology is symbolic: "the correct god-plant: the plant grows in the mountains, low to the ground; it contains the power of a god; it resembles a serpent in several ways; it stands on one "staff' and is phallic in appearance; it has white patches covering its "breast"; and it glows red like a live coal."
It can actually simulate or produce with poison a near-death experience or the psychic ego-death common to psychedelics. "The foreskin of the penis is related to the cap of the fly agaric. It could easily be construed to refer to the whole cap and not just the universal veil, and since the entire cap separates from the base at "circumcision," cutting off the cap still leaves the phallic stalk intact."
Heinrich continues, "bloody" juice flows from the moistened" cap. A woman using the fly agaric in similar fashion by herself could also address the mushroom directly with the same statement, "Surely you are a bloody husband to me." For that matter, so could a man."
Daniel Attrell describes how, "What appears to be afoot in Kybele's myth is a description of Amanita muscaria‘s life-cycle at the base of a tree, which begins in a spore dropped during the blooming and potential extirpation of a preceding generation of mushrooms. The spore falls into the earth and unites mycorrhizally with its host tree. The tree, which is the dismembered member of the once androgynous goddess, and its red fruit emerge first in the myth. The fruit conjoined with moisture...begets the birth of Attis." (Attrell)
https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/7857/Attrell_Daniel.pdf?sequence=1
Attis, his resurrecting "little finger", and his ever-growing hair are mythical symbols for the deified intoxicant.
Dactyli (Gr.) From daktulos, “a finger” is the name given to the Phrygian Hierophants of Kybele, who were regarded as the greatest magicians and exorcists. In the era of Hittites, Chaldean priests took refuge in Anatolia. The priests were five or ten in number because of the five fingers on one hand that blessed, and the ten on both hands which evoke the gods. Was that code for a powerful dosage? They also healed by manipulation and hypnosis.
Curetes were Priest-Initiates of ancient Crete, in the service of Cybele. Initiation in their temples was very severe; it lasted twenty-seven days, during which time the aspirant was left by himself in a crypt, undergoing terrible trials in a secret subterranean vault.
There were crypts under every temple in antiquity, used for initiation and burial. Kybele was associated with cannabis, "the mother plant," so we might speculate that such initiates where anointed with concentrated oils to enhance their underworld experience, similar to Egyptian initiations (Bennett).
Pythagoras was initiated into these rites and came out victorious. Zosimos and Paracelsus spoke of the homunculus as devouring himself, and giving birth to himself—the death/rebirth necessary for casting off the old and inviting in the new self image.
This bisexual goddess was worshiped with orgies of ecstatic freedom under various names for the mystery of self-reproduction. A single divine life conferred spiritual intimacy with the underworld and protective cosmic influence. The Anatolians and Ionians worshiped a divine family of a mother, and a male deity who was her son, her spouse, her brother, and sometimes father. But they were considered one bisexual being.
Her names have morphed over the years, but not her archetypal qualities. Kybele is her Greek form, and Cybele is Roman. Believers and devotees never forgot her grace or miraculous visits. As Cybele, her authority predates the Olympians, and through early Cretan practice she embodies the Titan Rhea, archaic Hekate, and even the all-encompassing Mother Goddess Gaia, and deities of Eleusis. When the Romans took over Asia Minor, Artemis became Diana and Ephesus became the provincial Roman Capital.
Later the Vatican was built over her pagan Roman shrine. The oriental cults of Cybele, Isis, and Mithras were Romanized myth, salvation, and ethics in the cults of Cybele. As a side note, Heinrich has reported that monks used tonsure and their red skull cap as symbols of amanita rites. The preparation was rubbed on the bald scalp, rather than ingested. Many priestly vestments hark back to the vivid red and white of the mushroom.
The eastern Kybele cult was absorbed into the Ophite Gnostic 'heresy' of serpent worship -- a Kundalini path that worshiped Kybele as the gnostic Sophia. This harks back to the dual raised-bodied serpents flanking the figure seen in the Neolithic totem from Gobekli Tepe, pre-dating any Indian syncretism. The serpent was primal cosmic energy, creativity, and wisdom. The serpent or dragon Adepts of divine wisdom taught primeval mysteries to archaic mankind.
In this sense, Kybele was the prototypical Black Madonna, the 'black light' of the undulant darkness, connected with caring, tending, childbirth, animals, and the bees. Caring for the earth and regeneration enlivens our care for the body. She is aware of our hardships, the uncertainty and unconsciousness of the dark cloud of unknowing, uncertainty, ignorance, and innocence. Suffering brings us into the unknown.
“Have You Forgotten? I Am Your Mother. You Are Under My Protection.”
“There is a promise Holy Mother makes to us,” explains Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Untie the Strong Woman, “that any soul needing comfort, vision, guidance, or strength can cry out to her, flee to her protection, and Blessed Mother will immediately arrive with veils flying. She will place us under her mantle for refuge, and give us the warmth of her most compassionate touch, and strong guidance about how to go by the soul’s lights.”
Forbidden Fruit
The forbidden fruit of the mythic tree is Amanita muscaria (Ruck). Different toxins and alkaloids prevail depending on the concoction. We can't be sure if the divine entheogen was abandoned or replaced by surrogates, but it induced a visionary reality and cohesive worship. It was euphemistically and symbolically known as the "bull" for its power.
We don't know if the divine elixir was a single substance or a mixture. Psilocybin and Cubensis mushrooms were also found on the plains. Drug-induced initiations were practiced throughout the known ancient world with mushrooms, opium, ephedra, cannabis, ergot, acacia, henbane, Syrian rue (mountain rue; Peganum harmala), datura, and more.
In Sacred Mushrooms of the Goddess, Ruck (p. 73-84) describes the Lesser Mysteries of Artemis as based on the wild mushroom. They pushed human experiential boundaries to their limits and beyond the agonies of ecstasy. Modern reports of ingestion in wine describe energetic states, a strong desire to dance followed by sedative effects around 3 hours, and intense dreamlike trips for hours.
"The effects of Amanita muscaria are diverse and vary according to dosage, method of preparation and the cultural and psychological expectations of the consumer. A small dose (or the initial effect of a larger one) causes bodily stimulation and a desire for movement and physical exercise.
Responses to the fly-agaric varied widely. Sometimes an intoxicated individual had to be restrained from over-exerting himself, whilst on other occasions it would induce a tranquil state of bliss in which beautiful visions appeared before the eyes. The effects can be divided into three basic stages, which sometimes overlap. About fifteen minutes after taking the mushrooms the stimulating effects begin and there is much loud singing and laughing. This stage is followed by auditory and visual hallucinations in conjunction with the sensation that things increase in size."
The goddess's dark places are crowned with woodlands and high groves, speckled with seasonal mushrooms. The Phrygians had a consuming passion for their god plants. They loved undiluted fermented grain beer. Fermentation was another fungal mystery of transformation of mead and bread.
Rejuvenation comes from connecting with pristine consciousness, the eternal aspects or forces of nature--the infinite, transcendent Source. We cannot gloss over her mycological roots. Some of what we know today can be reflected back to the ancient cult. The cave is a crucible of transcendence and shamanic transport. Kybele and Attis are essentially womb and phallus.
Kybele generates and what she generates is the god within. In this mythic dimension within, her gleaming shape-shifting vision, god-perception, and cosmic consciousness were revealed in symbolic pyrotechnics. Ecstasy meant to 'stand outside oneself,' to enter another dimension, a world apart. It demonstrates the divine resides within.
Those who know her have done so through an imparting of secret knowledge. The secrets of Kybele were originally those of the divine pharmacopeia. Her secrets remain virginal and her mysteries are inviolable. Our experiences belong only to ourselves. Each has their own. Kybele had one that was foundational first, and became symbolic of magical potency.
Knowledge of the sacramental substance has been obscured. It is little known outside of ethnomycology. Yet, archaeology confirms it. There are numerous icons of Attis shaped like mushrooms. His legend also suggests the same. Pliny attributed a sexual character to Amanita muscaria. The splotchy red mushrooms mirrored 'the spilled blood of Attis.'
Mushrooms are a perennial metaphor for the penis. They still have erotic connotations. The cult consumed fly agaric (spiritual flight). Attis was the Paleo-European key to the rites of the Great Mother. Yet it has been largely under-reported, except as a communal regression into oceanic states, a mystical return to the mother.
Elements of ritual gender-blending, transvestitism or literal and symbolic androgyny are nearly universal among shamans. Transgender shamans are metaphorically described as changing into a woman or androgynous being. But, the terms "eunuch" and "transgender" are not synonymous. Yet, this ritual androgyny is considered a sign of spirituality.
We experience that larger world and self--the rhythmic pulse of all life in the womb of the cosmic mother. This mystical fusion is somewhat akin to an expanded experience of the world. It includes oceanic feelings, the experience of being expanded, quasi-larger or more spacious than one's own body.
Oceanic feeling is a sense of fuller vision extending to apparently limitless horizons. Consciousness is encountered as more like a field than a localized point, a field that transcends the body and yet somehow interacts with it.
If we start with the Paleo-European Great Mother, we can pile up comparative material forever until all symbols are included, for she is 'the mother of all'. We can't erase inconvenient parts of history; that is denial. But it is not mere speculation either. 'Going down into the depths' of thought-patterns and emotional experience and re-emerging remains the great Mystery.
You danced with the Mother, shrieked with the Mother, bled with the Mother, and the Mother helped you heal.
How can we make her Presence, participation mystique, and animism felt in our lives today, in contemporary society? The sacred meal is her oldest ritual, despite all later modifications.
James Hillman said, "When the gods arrive on stage, everything becomes silent and the eyelids close. Plunged into oblivion by this experience, we re-emerge and without knowing exactly what is happened, we know only that we have been transformed."
The essence of all phenomena is a vibrant rhythm, the intimate nature of phenomena is directly perceptible by polyrhythmic human consciousness. For this reason, imitating is knowing. The echo is the paradigm of imitation and initiation. Her ordeal was a psychedelic metaphysical journey.
Rituals of music, dance, and drugs were a way of seeking direct contact with the deity. Drugs were synonymous with the divine influence of a deity. Whether or not some of these magical traditions and divination rites preserve relics, or hallucinations, of Paleo- and Neolithic heritage is not entirely a matter of conjecture.
The oldest female goddesses were associated with the serpentine powers of the dynamic life force, the natural cycle of life. Her names, shape and powers changed from the Anatolian Earth Mother over time and cross cultural interactions.
"Ritual dismemberment and consumption of a sacrificial victim recently hung upon a sacred tree is, a central process of actions in the rites of the Phrygian mother at large and has much relevance to the study of other mystery initiations." (Attrell)
"Internally, this manifested itself as an ordeal and a spiritual ascent for the sacrificial 'king'; essentially, his duty was to sacrifice himself to the goddess,
mimicking the mushroom itself. He was dressed as the god and suspended himself in the sun‘s rays in order to dry ‘before he was taken down and ritually murdered and eaten by the maenads, as had been done with the mushroom.
The poet Robert Graves was the first to suggest that the maenad‘s savage custom of tearing off their victims‘heads was an allegorical reference to tearing off Amanita muscaria‘s cap (since the stalk was not eaten)." ..."the 'revel‘ which ensued during these rites was no beatific feast; rather, it is a scene of desperation attended by cries of lamentation and wailing."
"The divinely inspired lamentation of women is an all-pervasive phenomenon in the religions of the dying and rising gods. In cults of the Divine Bridegroom, lamentation existed hand in hand with the ecstatic behavior arising at the sacred marriage." (Attrell)
The unconscious psyche, intuition, and associative thinking is the instinctual human essence. Psyche periodically goes into periods of descent or depression and even mania, often in a very dramatic way. She symbolically links a supernatural world of the dead to the world of the living in a realistically human shape with multiple states of being. Both the Greek and Roman cults were hybrid practices, a blend of Hellenic and Oriental cult practices.
Her tympanon (frame drum, tambourine) is the celestial sphere. She was sometimes worshiped as the pole star representing the gate of heaven or axis of the Earth, an umbilical connecting the galactic center to the world-navel, tethers the center of the Earth to the center of the Sky, a bridge linking both forms of reality in a cosmic synthesis. (Guénon 2001, Behun)
When these elements are drawn together, they reciprocally inform one another, deepening our understanding of the performative and spatial dimensions of our experience of the divine and opening the possibility of a direct relationship unbound by dogma. Direct experience is symbolically intimate.
Gaston Bachelard posed the question: ‘How could a legend be kept alive and perpetuated if each generation had not “intimate reasons” for believing in it?’ The symbolist meaning of a phenomenon helps to explain these ‘intimate reasons.’ It links the instrumental with the spiritual, the human with the cosmic, the acasual with the causal, disorder with order, and the transcendent.
The androgynous goddess, the masculine/feminine energy of the world body, means the soul or psyche has no gender. It involves masculine and feminine aesthetics.
"In liminal situations around the world, neophytes are often treated or symbolically represented as being neither male nor female. Alternatively, they may be allotted the characteristics of both genders, irrespective of their biological sex. In the given initiation rite, they are symbolically sexless or androgynous, as what Victor Turner calls ―a kind of human prima material–as undifferentiated raw material." (Attrell)
Modern ideas of motherhood and sentimental mores can only lead us astray. Kybele is a Dark Mother from the depths of pre-history. She appears in our dreams as a wild animal. as uncontrolled, unacknowledged aspects of ourselves.
MOTHER MYCELIUM
Kybele, Attis, & the Fruit of the Gods
Iona Miller, 2020
“Deep inside us is a wilderness. We call it the unconscious because we can’t control it fully, so we can’t will to create what we want from it. The collective unconscious is a great wild region where we can get in touch with the source of life.” --C.G. Jung
Kybele's religion is arguably the oldest on Earth, an early indigenous tradition. But how can we begin to comprehend the Paleolithic and Neolithic mind that still lies within our depths? We need to remember the nature goddess of the wilderness, our undomesticated wild nature. A soulful reading helps us listen more deeply.
Natural and cultural environment is crucial but doesn't exist without the mental creativity to create and learn such ways. The Neolithic is a symbolic revolution, characterized by a burst of creativity and imagistic societies. Religious experience and aesthetic effulgence can be natural or induced. How did humans become domesticated in the process of domesticating plants and animals? How did meaning relate to action and action manifest meaning?
How did Kybele's devotees come to terms with shifting human consciousness and symbolic thinking? Sacred caves and mountains were the site of Kybele's earliest ceremonies. This underworld, the dark depths of the netherworld created by the human mind, is the easiest place to contact her and our deep unconsciousness. More than a concept, cosmos is a lived, explored reality -- the experiential basis of beliefs in supernatural realms and beings.
We cannot forget that ancient people sought to alter their consciousness for preternatural seeing. Rhythmic dancing, auditory-driving with rhythmic sound patterns, and hyperventilation can produce ecstatic trance states. Thought-lives manifest belief systems. All religions have an ecstatic component and all religions alter consciousness to some extent.
Kybele's lore is full of primitive mystery, exotic lands, and unfettered imagination. The essence of life is the force behind the pure force of creativity. Our survival is within that myth. Myths clothe daily life with a sense of transcendent reality.
If there is nothing but life, is the essential truth to experience the miracle of death? It is possible to be born and die without participating the Mysteries of life and death. But the paradox is that death is the fundamental mystery of life, as life is the fundamental mystery of death. The mysteries of Kybele and Attis embodied that paradox.
Shamanic Mystic Tradition
Over-driving the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems can lead to mystical experiences. Exhaustive dancing, pounding music, and psychoactive drugs can lead to flow states which produce energetic ecstasies, orgasmic rapture, and ecstatic rush.
Paradoxically, hyper-stimulation produces oceanic tranquility, detachment, letting go, and even total loss of bodily sensations. This primal and visceral renewal by the goddess was the extreme state sought by devotees of Kybele as their epiphany. The Phrygian cap worn by her son-lover Attis indicates ecstatic experience.
While this tale doesn't account for all the turning points in narrative aspects of her myth and its migration, it is likely its ancient shamanic core. We grope our way farther into the depths, alone in that vastness. We don't have to explain everything to explain something. This is not just about history but about what it means to be human today and the unity of all life.
We will stick with this main thread, the fusion of life and death, as the root metaphor of the Kybele myth to enter the yawning caverns of the unconscious self. In Memories, Dreams, and Reflections Jung said, "Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition."
The Mushroom Kingdom
The most enduring symbols of Kybele come from the Anatolian landscape: mountains, water, and predators. They concerned the relationship of the people to the land in which they lived. They used symbols of their natural landscape to define their own divinity.
Amanita muscaria grows in mycorrhizal symbiosis with the roots of its host tree like a fruit.
Her consort Attis is a personified sacred plant. The miraculous fruit symbolizes the Mystery. Carl Ruck claims that, "upon his death he became a pine tree, host for the visionary mushroom that morphologically mimics the androgynous male/female metamorphoses that are central to his myth." (Mushrooms, Myth and Mithras: The Drug Cult that Civilized Europe)
We need to look at her before the wide dissemination of her cult throughout the Mediterranean. The sacred meal is probably her cult's most ancient ritual. For thousands of years, the dark forests and shadowy mountain groves of ancient Anatolia were occasionally punctuated by the wild orgiastic sounds of banging drums, clanging cymbals, and deep-throated flutes.
Catullus Poem 63 recounts the call of Attis: “Together come and follow to the Phrygian home of Cybele, to the Phrygian forests of the goddess, where the clash of cymbals ring, where tambourines resound, where the Phrygian flute-player blows deeply on his curved reed, where ivy-crowned maenads toss their heads wildly.”
In the great web of life, we all come from one genus -- consciousness, sentience. The web of consciousness is so vast we can only perceive it with feeling and intuition. Mycorrhizae form symbiotic relationships between fungi and plants. Mushroom mycelium has a symbiotic relationship with the mycorrhizae of the pine trees under which they grow. It sprouts 'phallic' mushrooms at the base of the tree.
In the rites of Kybele, during fruiting seasons, mushrooms that grew beneath the sacred pines were dried on the tree itself apparently to increase their potency. An effigy of Attis was bound to the trunk of this tree in remembrance of his ritual castration. In celebrations of the Divine Mother Kybele and her Divine Bridegroom Attis, the red and white mushrooms were imagined as little phallic creatures that were bleeding.
The fungi colonize the root system of a host plant and share information. The mass of thread-like mycelium is the 'mother spawn' or 'mother culture' from which the fruiting bodies grow. Fungi also share an intimate relationship with humanity. They shape our consciousness, connection with nature, and perhaps our co-evolution.
Psychoactive substances are historically associated with offensive operations, transgressive and unrestrained sexuality. Mycelium wraps itself around the tangled mychorrizae like the mother-complex of Kybele wraps around the psyche of transgendered Attis.
Some mushrooms heal, while others kill, and some like the ambiguous pharmakon of old can do both. It functions as remedy, poison, and scapegoat. It brings death close as either cure or poison. Psychoactive mushrooms evoke memory -- very deep memory. They can also produce amnesia, convulsions, unconsciousness, and dissociation.
Stan Grof describes how we can tune into the psychic consciousness of animals, plants, or inorganic systems. He says, "transpersonal experience might involve "reentering" or "reexperiencing" of a prepersonal occasion," including oceanic pleromas, archaic images, phylogenetic heritage, or animal/plant identification."
Pure Power of Nature
The human impulse to gather for sacred rituals arose as humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it. When Neolithic foragers began settling down in villages, they unavoidably created a divide between the human realm and the dangerous land beyond the campfire, populated by lethal beasts. Psychedelics reaffirmed their primal alliance with the Virgin Forest.
Civilization is driven by ecological forces and the human mind. A "revolution of symbols" was a conceptual shift. It allowed humankind to imagine gods as supernatural beings resembling humans that existed in a universe beyond the physical world. Even today we follow in the footsteps of our ancestors.
Jung said, "Disalliance with the unconscious is synonymous with loss of instinct and rootlessness." (CW 7, Para 195) "But besides that [Intellect] there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche." (CW 8, Para 794)
We are entangled and embedded in Nature, but have lost touch with its life animating principle. Mycelium becomes a metaphor for our deepest living connections with primordial nature, its unconscious, underground, or chthonic aspects. We can regress to what appears to be the conscious nature of our environment, biosphere, the entire planet, or universe -- the sum of creation.
Such comprehensive vision reveals the plant-based shamanic origins of religion. This is explicit psychedelic mysticism. Psychedelics tend toward harmonization and reconnection of the brain through a 'reset' mode. To go back to our Origins, we must approach "death" as a profound transformation process that reconnects us with the archetype and myth of our origins. First come experiences of the amniotic universe and cosmic engulfment, then the death-rebirth struggle. (Grof)
Animism, a relational way of knowing what we know derived from relations with the environment, was the original basis of religion. Primary or irreducible images stand for themselves and depend on direct experience of feelings or qualities. The death-rebirth motif reflects anomalous body-self experiences and the fundamental process of transformation of the self. As part of the symbolic experience of death, the old self must die before being spiritually reborn.
Deities are central to sharing relationships with the environment, developing communal affairs, and maintaining identity. Both Attis and his plant-god analog are part of the religious motif of the dying-and-rising god, in which a god dies and is resurrected. Animals were guardians of the spirit world. Spirits arise from a sense of disembodied self and mind. Habitual patterns decompose leaving the sense of freshly reborn consciousness. Fear is released producing a sense of great energy. Resetting the brain is life changing.
The ancient body-based sense of awareness is mimetic. Shamanic metaphors are predicated on body, self, animals, and relational others. They include alter-identities and animal allies. Soul-flight is a body image metaphor of transcendence. Body and self image are universal patterns, levels of transformation of meaning, from primitive arousal to imaginal function. Combining memory and perception creates images that affect emotions and communicative interactions.
Emotions drive wide-spread bodily changes, mental states of excitement or perturbation, strong feelings, and impulses toward certain types of behavior. It is a radical change of perspective, self-reference, and reflexive self-awareness. Psychedelics are a phenomenological approach to emotions that first reduce them to a common root then resolve or reunify them.
It may be driven by the desire to worship as much as by the environment. The human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself. Such psychoactive experience is highly convincing and includes energies described as serpentine. Vision serpents reveal the serpentine nature to the world. The "serpent power" is associated with the oldest forms of the Great Goddess, who often had snakes as her familiars, the embodiment of wisdom and rebirth.
The ritual use of psychedelic plants remains the most effective tool for inducing non-ordinary healing and transformative states. The closer we come to the deep core of any archetypal experience the more the numinous effect increases. A confrontation with a divine power not of this world expands the presence of a more-than-human world.
Kybele translates as Cavern, Place of Caves, or Cave Dweller. There is an ancient connection between fungi and the raw experience of the oldest cult rites of Kybele and Attis, arguably predating the Neolithic era. Such rites for the archetypal mother may go back 20-50,000 years, under other names. This metaphor for prolonged ecstatic experience symbolizes and originates from the ancient subjective experience of self-dissolution and perceived disembodiment in trance.
"The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth. . . For the root matter is the mother of all things." (C.G. Jung, CW 18, Page xxv).
The primordial field of psyche becomes the focus. We learn to lean into the mythic field and feel its chaos without imposing premature order. The imaginal field is a paradox of fusion and distance, an impossible simultaneity. We need to practice seeing the archetypal field, as well as seeing into and through it with full-bodied feeling. It is known only by primordial experiential perception, not cognition and interpretation.
The everyday processes of living in the conscious mind usually succeed in compartmentalizing off the preconscious from our awareness. Psychic gifts can come under the service of self-destructive impulses. But occasionally, the upwelling of the preconscious area, unconditioned belonging in the world, erupts like molten magma from the mantle of the earth.
There are ancient shamanic ways of amplifying such human/beast interface. Alkaloids and alkaloid-producing plants contain consciousness altering properties, including euphoria, frenzy, dissociation, fusion, and hallucinogenic properties.
Psychotropic plants must have puzzled early humans leading to mythologizing. Early female deities have been described in this context. One of them is Kybele, as goddess of animals, mountains, caves, and medicine.
Her ecstatic cult of epiphanies and orgies arose in the Middle Euphrates and Phyrgia, was adopted by the Greeks in 1500 BC, and migrated to the Roman world from 200 BC to 400 AD as Cybele or Magna Mater. The Greeks identified her with their own Rhea, head of the ancient Minoan pantheon imported from Crete. Kybele's primary historical image was a hermaphroditic God(dess), the primordial androgyne -- sovereign matron crowned with towers, seated in a chariot drawn by lions.
But her worship originally centered on a black meteorite, a cult object, that may have been recognized as a heavenly body fallen from the sky. Such stones of divine origin were considered sacred, endowed with life, and revered as divine symbols of the gods themselves. Later, this oracular stone was moved to Rome. Thus, the singular image of Cybele carried both a chthonic and heavenly connotation, uniting the worlds above and below. Transpersonal experiences unite the macrocosm and the microcosm.
Her androgyny symbolized a wild and uncontrollable nature and savage masculine animus. A primordial nature goddess requires primordial worship. As the first immortal, Kybele is Original Consciousness. The serpent represents the initial state of unconsciousness. The paradoxical image typically appears before dissolution of the center into its unconscious element—the undifferentiated consciousness of the ground state.
She is our deepest memory. Focusing on the goddess herself, we seek a felt-sense of her living presence within us, rather than her gender fluidity, transgression, reveling retinue, castrated priesthood, or sensationalistic orgiastic rites. Knowledge of this archetypal 'mountain mother' is beyond historical knowledge. She gave birth to the other gods, to the first humans, to the animals, and to wild nature.
Kybele's earliest reported traditional practices reflect our contemporary notions of 'the Feminine,' 'warrior-women,' 'wilderness as medicine,' 'nature-based soul initiation', 'the nature-mystic experience,' and 'plant-based medicine' for healing and guidance. Her worship reveals the shamanic plant- based entheogenic origins of the religions that grew from personal encounters.
Wild Self
In Phrygia and Greece, she was "Mistress of animals" (Potnia Therōn). Her mastery of the natural world was expressed by her lions, as king of the beasts. Lions were an ancient Hittite symbol of protection and guarded their city gates. Ritual use of psychoactive plants returns humans to the animal state of direct apprehension.
But the nature mystic experience may also happen in spontaneous natural ways, to those uncommitted to any religious tradition. Peak experiences involve feelings of awe, of being utterly overpowered, of energy or urgency, of 'stupor,' 'fascination,' self-transcendence, oceanic states. absorption in the divine, and unity with living and nonliving nature. (Otto, The Idea of the Holy).
We are sensate creatures in the animal view of perception. An intelligibility of all things and shapes is inherent to the sensate imagination of our animal nature. We accept as animals a world of sensate objects and all elements of experience as directly presented. A living world can be perceived from the animistic perspective.
A complex system of mountain and ancestor worship etched meaning into the mountain terrain of those inhabiting the same landscape, the source of a power to be awed and revered. Stories of the mountain and ancestors were one, inseparable, passed down through the generations.
An interconnected ecological web between history, landscape, and culture formed that mirrors that of fungi, plants, creatures, and root systems of the dark ecology -- the mycology of consciousness. Certain areas and psychoactive species have different chemical effects.
Phrygia in Asia Minor was one such social location of psychedelic mysticism in antiquity. Sacred mountains and mushrooms shared roles as places of revelation and transformation -- places where we magically conceive ourselves through self-conceptualization and self-cultivation.
Mushroom language is euphemized, coded, masked, or buried in etymologies. They are spirits, little gods that can disappear when they don't get the right sacrifice. They can disappear from culture, remain perhaps on the periphery, and manifest themselves when they wish.
The sacred plants from earlier and wilder people linked back to ecstatic original intimacy -- to animism and participation mystique, the instinctive human tie to symbolic fantasy emanations. Natives of any area have a superior knowledge of secret magical plant life on their land. Pastoralists would have known about such things since the Ice Age Refugia in the Altai Mountains of central Asia. They would be suitable offerings for a goddess. They are 'unborn' because they have no roots or seed.
Attrell (2013) describes, "Behind closed eyes, initiates of the mysteries beheld awe-striking visions, theriomorphic transformations, and inconceivable phantasmagoria; on the outside, however, initiates were pulled through a hallucinatory ritual drama by priests and former initiates. At the root of many of these initiatory circles there endured a number of ritual practices stretching back to the Neolithic period whereby intoxicated initiates re-enacted the drama of an androgynous dying god being united with his mistress."
Knowing By Feeling
The unconscious is the "wilderness" of body and world. Nature is an environmental trigger igniting altered states of consciousness, like nature-mystic merging, "oceanic," or "peak-experience." They give us the exaltation, a primordial grace, of standing on a high mountain and gaining for a minute the awesome glory of an unimpeded grand vista.
Mountain peaks express the shared connection of supernatural power, fertility and protection between the sacred mountain, the gods, and the dead. Our wild embodied nature is lured not only by others but by landscapes, trees, forests, caves, waterways, and seascapes. Such fecund wonders enchant us as well as ideas, poetry, art, and music. Non-ordinary perception evolves through kinesthetic perception. We are somatically aroused, seduced and captivated by the animate world, the world soul.
Our wild self knows what is being said by nonhuman flora and fauna. We see the sacred in nature through the radiant consciousness of the "otherness" of natural things that springs from the depths of imagination. This is the simplest, most common form of illumination -- overpowering apprehension of the Infinite, scintillating life imminent in all living things.
Walls between the visible and the invisible grow thin, and the Eternal seems to break through into the world with a higher order of reality. This awareness: is so intangible, it strikes like a thunderclap. Then, as now, the thunder literally represents the onset of rain and the reappearance of the sacred fungi.
When the earth was struck by "fire from the gods", it was designated as holy ground. Areas hit by lightning, "thunderstones," or a meteorite gave rise to sacred status. These artifacts of heaven, prototypical sacred stones, had protective, medicinal, and revelatory qualities. (Eliade)
Awe is captivating and immersive, engaging us more with our external world and less with ourselves. We sense the presence of something “larger than ourselves” with which we begin to merge. The wildwood births physical manifestations of mythological archetypes drawn from the subconscious minds of those who enter. As 'mother of the gods, Kybele was first among them.
Our wild self is instinctively, emotionally, viscerally, and sensuously crazy about creation and enchanted by all things and possibilities with earth-infused vivacity. It calms the chaos of the transition and allows the new self to emerge reborn as a living reality. She is the source of our intuited kinship with all biological entities and animated creatures. We have to maintain faith in the process. Movement back and forth between the timeless and temporal existence is a creative passage.
With a sense of containment within a higher dimensional field, the opposites reconcile and new potential is created. The fusional field is invisible to normal perception but contains a welter of unprocessed imaginal information. The fusional complex is an archetypal pattern that organizes life between the known and the unknown. It is facilitated in non-ordinary states of consciousness.
The imaginal metaphor extends to a fundamental description of the universe and our electromagnetic embedding within that greater field. We rarely attend to the deep experiential field we experience with the other in our subtle and physical bodies.
The archetypal force of restoration and self-empowerment, as genuine needs of the psyche, appears as a synesthetic image. Archetypal presence is met with ardent particularized devotion. It is the nightside depth of our worldview. It is who we are before we even think about who we are, our psychosomatic being, our genealogy, the relational field, and cosmic field of the whole. We are centrally involved in the cosmic process.
We seek a vital and authentic life, the bedrock of reality underneath all social masks, emotional possession, and self-deception. It is a dangerous descent that resonates metaphorically with a dark and terrifying passage into the limbo of our own vulnerability, into the netherworld of the belly of the earth. The bottom drops out of our vertical cosmos.
Certain fungi can produce an experience of dreamlike phylogenetic regression back to ameboid, plant, and atomic states. We recover what the world has denied, repressed, and forgotten in our dreams through depth perception. This is the base note of our psychopoetic life song. All life is within us. This psychological awakening is a spiritual initiation that potentially restores meaning to life.
Instead of psychological concepts, engagement appears as high-impact mythological images, the "mythological unconscious" testing our ability to endure and discover integrity in depth. The path leads through the ghost-lands of the unconscious, undead aspects of personality. It illuminates the darkest layer of the inherited personality structure and the daimonic.
We confront the pitiless monsters of archetypal Grief, Loss, Cares, Diseases, Age, Dread, Hunger, Want, Death, Toil, Sleep, Catastrophe, War, and Discord. Our demons are the instinctual impulses and unconscious complexes that overcome and possess us. But it means sitting in the fire of our own fears and suffering while honoring soul's perspective.
We feel the unity of our human being as lived experience. We are endowed with a density that is lived or felt as the stratum of our existence, subject to accident, suffering, and death. It is neither objectively objective or subjective, yet mysterious and intimate. The body is our physical environment and vehicle of our openness. Genealogy can inform us that there are things within us different than we already thought.
Primal Goddess
The Clan Mother or divine Ancestress is chthonic. The word comes from "chthōn," which means "earth" in Greek, associated with things that dwell in or under the earth; chthonic sensuality and visions of chthonic initiation -- the wilderness of emotion and sexuality. The primal woman reminds us we can return back to the Indigenous, that ancient part of ourselves hidden within us, anytime.
Her favored beasts and companions, felines and canines, wolves and wild dogs, are keystone predators. They urge us to ask not what does forest do for these regulator species, but what do top predators do for the forests, which still cover a third of the world. Removing predators leads to deterioration of diversity and the whole system, downgrading the ecosystem.
In her first form, she ruled the wild -- space, place, and landscape. Paleolithic hunters sought supernatural help from the hunting goddess. She is a wild woman archetype embodied within us. Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes her as the instinctual nature of women, "a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing."
"Mother of the Gods," "Mountain Mother," Matar Kubileya is a transcendent helper/healer. She is wise and quietly gives us breath, trust, and inner peace with her indomitable spirit, manifesting in the world through the medium of creative force.
“Mother Night is the quintessential medial woman, the woman who can walk in two worlds … 'the one who knows' and who can reveal solid ways of living and unleashing creative life in both worlds.” (Estes)
She is "the generative power of the goodness of the core self—that is, all creativity and understanding that lies out of sight in darkness—often called the unconscious." Mistress of mountains and springs, her Phrygian cult monuments were carved from living rock faces. Her cosmogonic face was of black meteoric stone.
The androgynous goddess mother Cybele was represented by a meteorite, embodied in a particular meteorite called ‘born of stone’ (Johnston in Cybele, Attis and Related Cults edited by Eugene Lane 1996, p. 109). The main statue of the Artemis Temple at Ephesus may have been a black meteorite because she was said to have fallen from the sky. A black meteorite, representing the goddess, was brought to Rome from Asia Minor in 204 BCE.
Meeting the God-Plant
Fungi form a third order of being with plants and animals, much like psyche or soul is a third domain between physical and spiritual realms. Geographic speciation implies that humans and the other biological denizens of their indigenous regions evolve together in the shared environment because of ecological pressures. Neolithic hunter-gatherers would have had no problem finding such specimens and discovering their magical properties.
Myths arise from such natural juxtapositions with the natural world. Myths and cults evolve and differentiate much like species over millennia. In her Mysteries, Cybele mourned the death of her beloved and the passing of her devotees. They were transformed by her communion, mystique, and the attainment of sacred knowledge (gnosis) through identification with Attis, her son-lover. They were collectively known as the Galli.
Sacred plants become metaphors of primordial psychic experience, as well as eucharist and epiphany. In the myths of Attis, Kybele bargained with fate and the gods so his hair and regenerated phallus grow under the pine tree forever - an analogy for mycelium and fruits of the amanita muscaria mushroom, a likely source for the revelers mania, dropping the habitual self for a primordial regression.
The soul of Attis requires a psychic reset because he is stuck, unable to live compulsively with or without the Mother. This fixation turns his blocked passion into total destruction and the psychotic act of horrible self-mutilation, mirrored in the mushroom life cycle as more than metaphor. The mytheme is with us today, 5,000 years later. It can only be described as a shamanic ordeal, a soma sacrifice of all that is material. Reset, the psychotic areas of psyche become creative again. This is the basis of psychedelic therapy.
Those who ate the mushrooms felt the god within themselves as reality dissolved into wriggling serpents. Shepherds tending flocks would have found the fly agaric high in the wild mountains after rains, when the mountains of the goddess were raging with thunderstorms on the slopes.
Not much is known about Near Eastern ancient mysteries or ecstatic cults, but more and more archaeological evidence indicates the ancients used psychoactive plants in their frenzied worship. It remains controversial, but the area north of the Black Sea is known to have antic tribes that used cannabis, poppies, ephedra, and other consciousness altering plants. The meaning of symbols is experienced and engaged with in a visceral manner.
Arguably, psycho-active mushrooms are the original sacrament. We know psycho-active plants were sought out in antic times. Mushroom stipes were found in Chauvet Cave, suggesting the caps had been consumed off the stems. It self-sealed from a catastrophic rock avalanche 3,600 years BP. The art itself may be 40-28,000 Years BP. The oldest cave art depictions of mushrooms are from the paleo Selva Pascuala rock shelter, a landscape formation in eastern Spain discovered by an archeologist in 1918.
Spores of both boleteus and agaric mushrooms were discovered on the teeth of the Paleolithic Red Lady of el Miron, who died nearly 19,000 years ago. Further suggestions of symbolic fusion appear over 10,000 years ago: Göbekli Tepe has an engraving of a female figure from layer II in a squatting position, likely giving birth. But she has a most peculiar mushroom-ic head. This is interpreted today as a prototype representation of the creative Earth goddess.
The Phrygian goddess, Kybele, characterized by features of wild nature, was represented primarily by predatory birds. She would have been worshiped in that area from antiquity. In the oldest Anatolian cults, Cybele was associated with mountains, hawks, and lions. She was worshiped as "the mother of all the gods" in mountainous settings. She would have been worshiped in that area from antiquity.
It may not have been a cohesive mystery religion, but nothing would prevent celebrants and priests from potentiating their own revels and initiations with the psychedelics, or mixing them with herbs and honey to create nectar and preserve them. The Minoans added mushrooms to fermented honey. We find icons of Attis in mushroom forms, coinciding with his legends that describe the effects of imbibing fly agaric.
As one of the oldest cults of Asia Minor, there is no reason to presume the revels of Kybele and associated godforms excluded such methods. The pine tree was sacred to her and beneath it mushrooms fruited in profusion.
The natural dampness and shade of pine-covered mountain caves are often overlooked as prime locations for wild fungus, and the mountainous regions around the Mediterranean had no lack of oracular caves sacred to the Mother Goddess and the rites of her beloved. They would be well-known to mountain wanderers, shamans, and shepherds like Attis -- as well as the eunuch priests of Cybele.
Mystery cults released the soul from material bondage through direct contact in trance or ecstasy. In her Mysteries, Cybele mourned the death of her beloved and the passing of her devotees. They were transformed by her communion, mystique, and the attainment of sacred knowledge (gnosis), through identification with Attis, her son-lover.
Attis was later identified by the Greeks as Dionysus, and the Persian Mithra. Attis was a shepherd, a god of wandering mountainsides and guardian of the flock. Her priests were collectively known as the Galli. Did their frenzied intoxication come from the "drink of Gall" and was this deliriant, hallucinogenic, and entheogen?
Arnobius of Sicca makes it very clear that wine was forbidden to initiates of Attis‘ mysteries. It was forbidden for those polluted with wine to enter a sanctuary. Still, a type of frenzied intoxication occurred in the rituals of the Divine Bridegroom. "The marriage bed, however, might be interpreted as the ecstatic state itself; what rendered this marriage sacred was the very risk of dying these initiates exposed themselves to in the deliberate over-consumption of a toxic hallucinogen, the god‘s own flesh and blood."
In the myths of Attis, Kybele bargained with fate and the gods after his death, so his hair and regenerated phallus would grow under the pine tree forever. This presents an analogy for mycelium and cyclic fruiting of the amanita muscaria mushroom, a likely source for the revelers mania. They dropped the habitual self for a primordial regression. It can only be described as a sacrificial shamanic ordeal.
Ancient Anatolia was associated with the Phygian cap worn by Attis, a particular style hat, also known as the liberty cap. Wearing it denoted ecstatic experience. Psilocybe semilanceata, also commonly known as the liberty cap, is a species of fungus which still can be found in Turkey, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ukraine and Pakistan. It is associated with cattle dung and deer droppings, another easy source of acquisition, often collected as fuel. Bulls were prominent in Cybele worship, harking back to Crete.
Those who ate the mushrooms felt the god within themselves as reality dissolved into wriggling serpents. Shepherds tending flocks would have found the fly agaric high in the wild mountains after rains, when the mountains of the goddess were raging with thunderstorms on the slopes. This entheogenic tradition centered on mycolatry (the religious veneration of fungi) that passed into Rome through the Hellenized Phrygian cult of Cybele, the Great Mother Goddess. (Attrell)
"The entheogenic effects of psychedelic mushrooms were so deemed worthy of cult by a collective cultural unconscious that the mythological figure of Attis was adopted to anthropomorphize and conceal the Amanita Muscaria mushroom. Attis, having been adopted from the same Indo-European tradition of dying and rising vegetation gods as Soma and Dionysus, was fundamentally a spiritual personification of 'ek statis' itself, the cult's conduit to the Goddess of the esoteric mysteries.
When cleverly used in conjunction within a darkened and consecrated set and setting; an emphasis on ecstatic rhythm and music and orgiastic dances; and a deep inner mysticism elaborated by fasting, rituals and myths, the mysteries of Attis and Cybele would have had an immense effect on the wider religious and cultural landscape of the Roman world prior to the rise of Christianity."
Daniel Attrell argues that, "the myths of this vegetable god, so-called the Divine Bridegroom,‘ particularly in manifestation of the Phrygian Attis and the Greek Dionysus, is deeply rooted in the life-cycle, cultivation, treatment, consumption of a tree-born hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria." He summarizes in his 2013 thesis:
Dionysian Semiotics: Myco-Dendrolatry and Other Shamanic Motifs in the Myths and Rituals of the Phrygian Mother:
"The administration of initiation rites by an ecstatic specialist, now known to western scholarship by the general designation of 'shaman‘, has proven to be one of humanity‘s oldest, most widespread, and continuous magico-religious traditions. At the heart of their initiatory rituals lay an ordeal–a metaphysical journey - almost ubiquitously brought on by the effects of a life-changing hallucinogenic drug experience. To guide their initiates, these shaman worked with a repertoire of locally acquired instruments, costumes, dances, and ecstasy-inducing substances."
Those conserving the secrets of plant-lore, astrology, theurgy and mystical philosophy satisfied the role of the shaman in Greco-Roman society. The rites they delivered were a form of ritualized ecstasy that provided an orderly context for religiously-oriented intoxication.
"In the eastern Mediterranean, these ecstatic cults were most often held in honor of a great mother goddess and her perennially dying-and-rising consort. The goddess‘ religious dramas enacted in cultic ritual stressed the importance of fasting, drumming, trance-inducing music, self-mutilation, and a non-alcoholic ritual intoxication. Far and wide the dying consort worshiped by these cults was a god of vegetation, ecstasy, revelation, and salvation; by ingesting his body initiates underwent a profound mystical experience."
In The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, John Allegro identifies amanitas with ancient drug cults. The Amanita muscaria does not contain psilocybin or psilocin. Rather, the hallucinogenic chemicals this mushroom contains are muscimol and ibotenic acid.
Clark Heinrich (2002) describes in Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy how initiates were made aware of "meeting" the god-plant and being in the presence of a god. "One can also feel extremely energetic and strong, and this strength is not an illusion. It is well known among Siberian users of the fly agaric that feats of tremendous physical endurance are possible under its influence."
Such symbolism links easily with the myths of self-castration of Attis. Its bisexual morphology is symbolic: "the correct god-plant... grows in the mountains, low to the ground; it contains the power of a god; it resembles a serpent in several ways; it stands on one "staff' and is phallic in appearance; it has white patches covering its "breast"; and it glows red like a live coal."
It can actually simulate or produce with poison a near-death experience or the psychic ego-death common to psychedelics. "The foreskin of the penis is related to the cap of the fly agaric. It could easily be construed to refer to the whole cap and not just the universal veil, and since the entire cap separates from the base at "circumcision," cutting off the cap still leaves the phallic stalk intact."
Heinrich continues, "bloody" juice flows from the moistened" cap. A woman using the fly agaric in similar fashion by herself could also address the mushroom directly with the same statement, "Surely you are a bloody husband to me." For that matter, so could a man."
Daniel Attrell describes how, "What appears to be afoot in Kybele's myth is a description of Amanita muscaria‘s life-cycle at the base of a tree, which begins in a spore dropped during the blooming and potential extirpation of a preceding generation of mushrooms. The spore falls into the earth and unites mycorrhizally with its host tree. The tree, which is the dismembered member of the once androgynous goddess, and its red fruit emerge first in the myth. The fruit conjoined with moisture...begets the birth of Attis." (Attrell)
Attis, his resurrecting "little finger", and his ever-growing hair (mycelium) are mythical symbols for the deified intoxicant.
Dactyli (Gr.) From daktulos, “a finger” is the name given to the Phrygian Hierophants of Kybele, who were regarded as the greatest magicians and exorcists. In the era of Hittites, Chaldean priests took refuge in Anatolia. The priests were five or ten in number because of the five fingers on one hand that blessed, and the ten on both hands which evoke the gods. Was that code for a powerful dosage? They also healed by manipulation and hypnosis.
Curetes were Priest-Initiates of ancient Crete, in the service of Cybele. Initiation in their temples was very severe; it lasted twenty-seven days, during which time the aspirant was left by himself in a crypt, undergoing terrible trials in a secret subterranean vault.
There were crypts under every temple in antiquity, used for initiation and burial. Kybele was also associated with cannabis, "the mother plant," so we might speculate that such initiates were anointed with concentrated oils to enhance their underworld experience, similar to Egyptian initiations (Chris Bennett).
Bennett claims the visionary dream was said to awaken the Gallus to their new identification with the Goddess. Randy P. Conner commented; “It is possible to see the… drinking or eating of special substances as a fated occurrence that triggered the awareness of one’s destiny. Such experiences were said to cause an individual to experience sophrene, to ‘recover one’s senses’” (Conner 1993).
Pythagoras was initiated into these rites and came out victorious. Zosimos and Paracelsus spoke of the homunculus as devouring himself, and giving birth to himself—the death/rebirth necessary for casting off the old and inviting in the new self image.
This bisexual goddess was worshiped with orgies of ecstatic freedom under various names for the mystery of self-reproduction. A single divine life conferred spiritual intimacy with the underworld and protective cosmic influence. The Anatolians and Ionians worshiped a divine family of a mother, and a male deity who was her son, her spouse, her brother, and sometimes father. But they were considered one bisexual being.
Her names have morphed over the years, but not her archetypal qualities. Kybele is her Greek form, and Cybele is Roman. Believers and devotees never forgot her grace or miraculous visits. As Cybele, her authority predates the Olympians, and through early Cretan practice she embodies the Titan Rhea, archaic Hekate, and even the all-encompassing Mother Goddess Gaia, and deities of Eleusis. When the Romans took over Asia Minor, Artemis became Diana and Ephesus became the provincial Roman Capital.
Later the Vatican was built over her pagan Roman shrine. The oriental cults of Cybele, Isis, and Mithras were Romanized myth, salvation, and ethics in the cults of Cybele. As a side note, Heinrich has reported that monks used tonsure and their red skull cap as symbols of amanita rites. The preparation was rubbed on and absorbed through the bald scalp, rather than ingested. Many priestly vestments hark back to the vivid red and white of the mushroom.
The eastern Kybele cult was absorbed into the Ophite Gnostic 'heresy' of serpent worship -- a Kundalini path that worshiped Kybele as the gnostic Sophia. This harks back to the dual raised-bodied serpents flanking the figure seen in the Neolithic totem from Gobekli Tepe, pre-dating any Indian syncretism. The serpent was primal cosmic energy, creativity, and wisdom. The serpent or dragon Adepts of divine wisdom taught primeval mysteries to archaic mankind.
In this sense Kybele was the prototypical Black Madonna, the 'black light' of the undulant darkness, connected with caring, tending, childbirth, animals, honey, and bees. Caring for the earth and regeneration enlivens our care for the body.
She is aware of our hardships, the uncertainty and unconsciousness of the dark cloud of unknowing, uncertainty, ignorance, and innocence. Suffering brings us into the unknown. But she reminds us, “Have You Forgotten? I Am Your Mother. You Are Under My Protection.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Untie the Strong Woman says, “There is a promise Holy Mother makes to us, that any soul needing comfort, vision, guidance, or strength can cry out to her, flee to her protection, and Blessed Mother will immediately arrive with veils flying. She will place us under her mantle for refuge, and give us the warmth of her most compassionate touch, and strong guidance about how to go by the soul’s lights.”
Death & Rebirth
Stace (1960) identifies nine qualities of the psychedelic experience as follows: 1) unity of all things; 2) transformation of space and time; 3) deeply felt positive mood; 4) sacredness; 5) objectivity and reality; 6) paradoxicality; 7) alleged ineffability; 8) transiency, and 9) persisting positive changes in subsequent behavior. In the practice of mysticism there is identification with progressively more subtle "bodies" or vehicles of consciousness, culminating in a transform from a mental or causal body to a vehicle of pure Light.
In experiential psychotherapy, transformation results from deepening within the flow of psychic imagery, progressively identifying with more primal forms, and ultimately with formlessness. In psychedelic experience, expansion of consciousness dissolves ego boundaries leading to morphological transformations and ecstatic communion. In alchemy, one sought not only to find or create the Stone, but also to apply it, or use it creatively in the everyday world. Now, we might speak of integrating or actualizing the results of our transformations in daily life. Thus, self-actualization or self-realization implies the grounding of the spiritual fruits of inner exploration.
The liquid form of the Philosopher's Stone was known as the UNIVERSAL SOLVENT. According to the alchemists, the operation of solutio (liquification) has a twofold effect: it causes old forms to disappear and new regenerate forms to emerge. To a rigid consciousness, the primal ocean of the unconscious is experienced as chaotic, violent, irrational processes of generation and destruction. Through "creative regression," the generic form of ego death, consciousness recycles, recursively bending back upon itself. The direction is a recapitulation of, a re-experiencing of sequences from earlier life, conception and birth experience, ancestral awareness, genetic and physiological recognitions, molecular and atomic perception, and quantum consciousness. As consciousness explores and expands, ego dissolves.
Pure consciousness, the fundamental luminosity, is the ground state of unborn form. The generic purpose of ego death is to liberate our embodied being, precipitating communion with and re-patterning by the Whole. When all forms finally dissolve into unconditioned consciousness, the ground state of the Nature Mind is revealed as the mystic Void, the womb of creation. When the constructed forms which hold personality together are voluntarily relinquished, consciousness "liquifies" and rapidly moves toward the unconditioned state.
Though easy to say, it is sometimes difficult to achieve such liberation from the mental-conceptual activity of the nervous system. When we do, the quiescent nervous system is open and receptive to the conscious recognition of pure energy transforms with no interpretations. The Universal Solvent dissolves problems, heals, allows life to flow in new, creative patterns. These new patterns embody the evolutionary dynamic. According to chaos theory, free-flowing energy is capable of self-organization. In consciousness this means that the obstructions to free flowing energy must first be dissolved.
Through re-creational ego death, consciousness dissolves into healing communion with the whole of existence, renewing itself, emerging with a new creative potential. The need for the periodic destruction of outmoded systems implies the value of recycling consciousness through death/rebirth experience. The universal solvent is not ordinary water, but "philosophical" water, the water of life, aqua permanens, aqua mercurialis. It is also the panacea, "elixer vitae," "tincture," or universal medicine. To periodically dip into these healing waters has a tonic, rejuvenating effect which pervades all aspects of being, like a soothing balm. This divine water signifies the return of The Feminine, a reflective consciousness with inner awareness and archetypal spiritual perceptions.
This Feminine Divinity is the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, the universal animating principle, the upwelling spring of the creative Imagination, the dynamic flow of imagery, pattern, and form. This dynamic has been known as Isis, Shakti, Maya, Shekinah, Sophia, Demeter/Persephone, Mary. In psychedelic mysticism, the animating principle is being referred to as Gaian Consciousness (Abraham, 1992), which we might view as a rebirth of ancient ecstatic, communal consciousness. It is the psychobiological basis of deep ecology, the flow of relationships.
The return of chaos heralds the "greening of consciousness," the greening of the cultural wasteland. Hillman (1985) describes the anima not as a projection of, but rather the projector of psyche. We are contained within Her fantasy, not She within ours.
Grinnell (1973) describes the transformative process of solutio which facilitates the fluid, mobile basis of consciousness: For aqua permanens is a mode of the arcane substance; its symbol is water or sea-water, an all-pervading essence of anima mundi, the innermost and secret numinosum in man and the universe, that part of God which formed the quintessence and real substance of Physis, at once the highest supercelestial waters of wisdom and the spirit of life pervading inorganic matter. The arcane descriptors of this paradoxical liquid Stone are cryptic, couched in metaphor. But what does it mean experiencially and pragmatically? How does this chaotic transformative process engineer our consciousness?
The divine water, as a liquid symbol of the Self, can be experienced in many ways. It has been described as innocuously as the "stream of consciousness," and as poetically as the "Heart of The River of Created Forms." Solutio implies the liquification of consciousness through the dissolution of rigidities which inhibit free flow. They include roles, game patterns, defense strategies, rigid attitudes and beliefs, interpretations, complexes, "old" myths, and "frozen" energy surrounding traumas which manifests as fear and pain. Fossilized or ossified energies create obstructions to free flow, like boulders in a stream produce turbulence. Destructuring transformative processes can dissolve them, increasing the sense of flow.
This "liquified" consciousness is psychedelic, a nonordinary expanded awareness which dissolves fixations and habits, and loosens cramped attitudes. Mystic ecstasy, or the psychedelic state is mind-manifesting, consciousness expanding. It dissolves the identification of our consciousness with our histories, bodies, emotions, thoughts, and even beliefs. We are free to explore myriad forms, structures, and patterns, and/or become formless, resting in that unborn, unconditioned, unmodified healing state. We experience the essence of other forms of existence.
The Oneness of all life and existence is directly experienced through a variety of transformations ranging from plant and animal identifications to planetary and universal consciousness. Entering the turbulent flow of the stream of consciousness, we can ride its currents back to the Source, pure unconditioned cosmic consciousness. We can imbibe the life-giving qualities of this "water" through mind-expanding experiential contact with this deep consciousness. The transformative process is also reflected in our modern physical worldview as chaos theory, which we can view as a modern "myth," a new metaphor for the dynamics of consciousness.
Chaos is ubiquitous in nature, pervading all dynamic processes, perturbing them unpredictably. Chaos theory shows us that nature is continually unfolding new forms from the chaotic matrix of creation. Our dynamic consciousness is an essentially chaotic process. Chaos tracks a time evolution with sensitive dependence on initial conditions. When we "return" experiencially to the "initial conditions" of our existence, our whole being is holistically repatterned. Our historical limitations are superseded by the creative power of the eternal Now. We can allow chaos, as the universal solvent, to liquify consciousness and re-create ourselves.
The journey into deep consciousness appears inherently chaotic because the state of uncertainty pervades each moment of transition. Underlying moments of transience there are momentary blanks in awareness--little voids--flickering microstates which repattern each phase. Whether the experience is one of loss of personal boundaries or direct perception of stark, raw reality, or visionary dreams, there is no predicting where the chaotic orbit of consciousness will roam next. To embrace chaos in our consciousness journeys, therefore means to cooperate and flow with the transformative process, opening ourselves to our deepest emergent potential.
It's O.K. to let go periodically and temporarily become unstructured nothingness and open to holistic re-patterning. Chaos is self-organizing, self-iterating, and self-generating. It is an evolutionary force. The tendency of new forms emerging from chaos is toward a higher degree of adaptation, hence evolution (Kauffmann, 1991). This "recycling" of consciousness leads to a self-referential vortex. Chaotic systems revolve around nexus points, known as strange attractors, because of their unpredictable quality. Rather than being "point-like," they are more like vortices within vortices.
This is the vortex of the system, the vortex of self, where all levels cross. It overwhelms or tangles the mental processes, the self-imaging processes that maintain the illusion of stable personality and individual boundaries. In solutio, the body is joined with the soul and spirit. The skin-boundary dissolves into visceral as well as spiritual perception. Awareness of physical processes may be greatly amplified, appearing as impressions, intuitions, sensations, sounds, odors. The body is always speaking silently. Through this raw, physical expression, that which was solid becomes liquified, dissolved, deliteralized.
The concrete image of the body "morphs" into the flow of pure energy, in a variation of Transubstantiation. It is the "rapture" of being seized up into the heavenly realm. The flow of dynamic energy from the deep Self reawakens and activates the body, and also that portion of the unconscious that the body carries. The body not only carries, but is the memory of the entire evolutionary cycle. Consciousness can access any portion of this material memory through creative regression. The body manifests kinesthetic, preverbal, and preconceptual memory of its direct experience. Immersion in the healing creative energy flow is like a spiritual baptism, which facilitates creative reformation of ordinary consciousness, and even the physical body.
1) RETURN TO THE WOMB OR PRIMAL STATE
The alchemist Paracelsus said, "He who enters the kingdom of God must first enter his mother and die." That death-like silence is also our mother, the virgin womb of the imagination. The dynamics of "creative regression" are common to mystical experience, psychedelic exploration, and therapeutic consciousness journeys. All lead to immersion in the flow of the stream of consciousness.
Creative regression is a generic form of the myth of the eternal return, chronic recurrence, reiteration. In the dynamics of chaos theory we find this recursive motion in the concept of iteration--self-similarity--which produces the similarity in infinitely descending scales of fractal generation. Iteration is like a stretching and folding of the spacetime continuum. Experientially it manifests within us as a spiritualizing instinct, a recursive "bending back" of instinct toward that which is primordial and divine.
Thus, whether induced through psychoactive substances, mystical transport, or experiential psychotherapy typical imagery recycles, recapitulates, or reiterates cascades of impressionistic transformations spanning the entire spectrum of archetypal experiences--morphological transformations. These include but are not limited to childhood, birth, embryonic development, ancestral, mythic, genetic, evolutionary, universal, and quantum consciousness. Access to the entire continuum of organic and inorganic evolution as well as the collective unconscious becomes available. That information most pertinent to the whole self emerges in the stream of consciousness as virtual experience. What is pertinent is what gets spontaneously "downloaded," and it repeats and reiterates the basic issues in yet another, eternally creative way.
Stan Grof has cataloged an extensive taxonomy of these states, most notably in THE ADVENTURE OF SELF-DISCOVERY (1988). Such experiences of cosmic consciousness constitute a "return to the Mother," the blissful fusion of primal union, at both personal and universal levels. The direction of this dynamic process is recursive, bending back through deep time, ontology, and phylogeny. It echoes the semantic roots of the words religion and yoga, which imply a "linking backward" in the bond between gods and man, a craving for ecstasy, and transcendence of the limitations of physical form (Milkman, 1987).
Jung called this dynamic an opus contra naturam, a work against nature. But chaos theory shows us it is actually quite organic, natural, and instinctual. In alchemy it was the Great Work. Consciousness turns back on itself, reiterating each level of organization, de-structuring each strata as it dives deeper toward the unconditioned, formless beginning, or "unborn" state. This primal state is amniotic bliss experienced as the Void, the cosmic womb. Images of the Great Mother system become reactivated, though not exactly in their original form. Imagery like fractals is self-similar, but not entirely identical.
This creative regression is to the prepersonal domain, the preverbal, preconceptual domain, not the transpersonal spiritual domain (transverbal, transconceptual). Typically in the first few dreamhealing sessions, a person will enter a dream symbol doorway which leads back to a conception memory. They may or may not recognize it as such during the journey. But in content, the symbolism is very clear. The imagery is fundamental or primal, appearing as a dance of energy, matter, and consciousness--the body-ego's conscious experience. These images are close to the stuff of our creation -- the prima materia -- of our existence. We may experience it as free-floating: a paradox of chaos and a deep-felt sense of flowing and peace.
The imagery here is psychedelic -- consciousness expanding -- an autonomous manifestation of imagination. The panoply of the ceaseless transformation of energy may overwhelm the senses, leading to a sense of total chaos. There is nothing to do but let go, surrender to it, merge with it, flow with it. The dancing energy waves and patterns are perceived as deep whorls, spinning spirals, black holes, infinite voids, gray clouds of nothingness. There is melding of the senses -- synesthesia -- such as "tasting" music, "seeing" sound, etc. Simple throbbing and other extremely primitive sensations may be experienced. Experience of this state produces a new acceptance of the original conditions of conception, and re-structuring of the primal self-image.
We go into the primal chaos to begin the process of reformation from our pre-structural beginning. In essence, we re-enter the womb as we are initiated in the mysteries of the psyche. We re-conceive our primal self image, healed by communion with the creative Source.
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REFERENCES
Attrell, Daniel, 2013, Dionysian Semiotics: Myco-Dendrolatry and Other Shamanic Motifs in the Myths and Rituals of the Phrygian Mother. https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/7857/Attrell_Daniel.pdf?sequence=1
Bennett, Chris, The Mother Plant of the Goddess – Cannabis
https://canniseur.com/author/chris-bennett/
Birgitte Bøgh, The Phrygian Background of Kybele
https://www.academia.edu/1229474/The_Phrygian_Background_of_Kybele?email_work_card=title
Clark Heinrich, 2002) Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy, Inner Traditions, (Rochester: Park Street).
Roller, Lynn E., In search of god the mother : the cult of Anatolian Cybele. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1342&context=ijts-transpersonalstudies Cybele, Attis, and the Mysteries of the "Suffering Gods" A Transpersonal Interpretation by Evgueni A. Tortchinov
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Iona Miller is a nonfiction writer for the academic and popular press, clinical hypnotherapist (ACHE) and multimedia artist. Her work is an omni-sensory fusion of intelligence, science-art, new physics, symbolism, source mysticism, futuring, and emergent paradigm shift, creating a unique viewpoint. She is interested in extraordinary human potential and experience, and the EFFECTS or unexpected consequences of doctrines of religion, science, psychology, and the arts. Miller practiced as an innovative Clincal Hypnotherapist through the 1980s and 1990s. She now enjoys active retirement in the Rogue Valley in So. Oregon, USA.
She serves on the Advisory Boards of Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, DNA Decipher Journal, and Scientific God Journal, as well as the Board of Directors of Medigrace, Inc. & Calm Birth; a Miami-based Integral Medicine institute. She also works in Risk Management and Cyber Security.
She has worked with the Science-Art Centre (Australia) since 2003, and the Editorial Board of CRAFT, AU (Community Resilience through Action for Future Transitions) from its inception. The Center for the Study of Digital Life (CSDL) was formed (2012) as a 'digital' RAND Corporation, to try to avoid WW III or worse, by coordinating effects of East, West, and Digital spheres.
MYTHIC STUDIES
Mythology is the most archaic and profound record we have of mankind's essential spirit and nature. As far back as we are able to trace the origins of our species, we find myth and myth-making as the fundamental language through which man relates to life's mystery and fashions meaning from his experiences. The world of myth has its own laws and its own reality. Instead of concepts and facts that make logical sense, we find patterns of irrational imagery whose meaning must be discerned or experienced by the participant-observer. Discovering these patterns of meaning is what Jung meant by the symbolic approach to religion, myth, and dream.
The mythic image is not to be taken literally and concretely as it would be in the belief-system of a particular religion, nor is it to be dismissed as 'mere illusion,' as often happens in scientific circles. Instead, we must approach myth symbolically as revealed eternal 'truths' about mankind's psychic existence — about the reality of the psyche. 'Once upon a time' does not mean 'once' in history but refers to events that occur in eternal time, always and everywhere.
The term mythology can refer either to a collection of myths (a mythos) or to the study of myths (e.g., comparative mythology). A myth is a sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind assumed their present form, although, in a very broad sense, a mythic character can refer to any traditional story.
Myth is an "ideology in narrative form". Myths may arise as either truthful depictions or overelaborated accounts of historical events, as allegory for or personification of natural phenomena, or as an explanation of ritual. They are transmitted to convey religious or idealized experience, to establish behavioral models, and to teach.
Gods and goddesses are "Symbiotic Autonomous Systems", the patterns of
psychic perception. Such symbols move and awaken the mind. Carl Jung defines archetypes as
“primordial images—symbols which are older than historical man; which have been ingrained in
him from earliest times, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still making up the groundwork of the human psyche” (Jung, 1933, p. 113).
James Hillman (1975b) in Revisioning Psychology says, "Let us imagine archetypes as the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world...They are similar to other axiomatic first principles, the models or paradigms that we find in other fields" (p. xiii).
The patterns of archetypes are often viewed and explained as mythical metaphors from which entire cultures have been based. These myths represent the archetypes as a powerful image language that communicates traditional wisdom. As “living things", they are always transforming into something new, something potentially revelatory.
Kybele has been closely related with Attis, Dionysus, Rhea, Hekate, and Demeter,
as well as the Anatolian Artemis of Ephesus and the Roman Cybele.
The spirit is energy, quest, relationship, and life force. Truth changes sociologically, as well as historically; it often resides in useful fictions and the artistic language of mytho-poetics. We must avoid being impoverished in our self-understanding by stepping outside of conventional academic strictures in our interpretations of ancient Divinities, Myth, and Cult.
Post-postmodern animism is an excavation and revitalizing of the world. How the world is alive and imbued with spirit is re-visioned in Archetypal Psychology and phenomenology. We can't collapse the many streams of a myth into one, including its reception as received truth in today's world. Does prehistoric religion equates to indigenous religion and thus shamanism or have they erroneously become conjectural lenses for scholars looking into the distant human past?
We cannot excavate religion for a primordial source of human spirituality. We often don't know the ritual or mythological significance of an artifact or what sort of ideology it might have conveyed in its original context. When we try to imagine the archaic we know neither what we're looking for nor what ... we cannot appeal to the apologetic posturing of “development” routinized by history. It is a mistake to link myth with belief. Archetypal studies adds another layer to these mysteries of unbridled sensuality and socially uncontrolled behavior.
Kybele remains as much a moving target as she did in antiquity before she was personified or anthropomorphized. Both the concept of a universal goddess religion (Gimbutas) and universal shamanism (Eliade) have been 'seen through' as modern conceptual myths. But, here we are mainly concerned with the indigenous religion of Phrygian Kybele, despite controversies over her worship, names and forms, including rock-cut art.
Contemporary groups might give new meaning and projective interpretations to prehistoric sites and artifacts. Ruck’s “magical plants” included wild ivy, flowers such as opium, and fungi such as amanita mushrooms and LSD-producing ergot mold, all inhabit the space of Wild intoxicants, a celebration of both the divine and bestial dimensions that may relate to the protection of sacred game animals, the sacrifice of sacred animals, and symbolic, ritualistic metamorphosis of human to sacred animal.
Shamanism itself is now considered an academic myth, a fictionalization of 'the primitive other' in Ethnology, Archaeology, and Historiography, contradicting Eliade, Gimbutas, and Wasson, among others. And yet there is ample physical evidence of the use of entheogens in rituals by indigenous Paleo-shamans and their historical successors. 'Primitive mankind' remains an imaginal construction, overgeneralized and superficial, beyond contemporary descriptions of rites.
So, it seems it is the characterization and generalization of shamans by Enlightenment colonial thinkers, ethnographic pioneers, and romantic New Age neo-shamanism that is questionable, rather than their existence as cross-cultural social shapers. Universal or not, Thracian and Anatolian shamans were oracular mystic practitioners knowledgeable in reading the stars, using advanced remedies from nature, divining and communing with nature, animals and spirits, alike.
Local legends suggest, like the goddess, they drew on the powers in the natural world, including those of earth and animals, and mediate non-ordinary states, between the world of the living, the spirits, and ancestral spirits of the dead.
We are enmeshed and entangled with invisible entitles. Pathological manifestations of alterations to the sense of self is dissociative. Awe is related to a diminished sense of self, flow, and peak-experience. Self-transcendence involves the expansion of personal boundaries,a larger dimension emerging from an innate religious instinct.
An ecstatic specialist, still known in academics as a ‘shaman’, confers initiation as one of humanity’s oldest, most widespread, and continuous experiences -- a sacramental means of grace and cathartic blessing. Self-transcendence is an innate desire to discover meaning. Spirituality is an innate human capacity to experience transcendence.
Much depends on whether we take a psychological, aesthetic, orthodox, or heterodox approach. A Mythologist studies and applies archetypes to reveal meaning and create change in perspectives and individuals. They use the power of archetypes for remembrance, to create amazing viewpoints, and change lives.
KYBELE - DISINTEGRATION & REBITH
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EXCERPTS
KYBELE: WILD AT HEART
Body of Images; Wilderness of Soul
by Iona Miller, (c)2019
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KYBELE: THE WILD FEMININE
A Wilderness of Soul
Iona Miller, (c)2020
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MOTHER MYCELIUM
Kybele, Attis, & the Fruit of the Gods
Iona Miller, 2020
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PRIMARY RELIGION
- Unity of the material and supernatural worlds
- Physical place is a spiritual focus.
- Orality: the spoken word has a real power: it expresses metaphor; the word is the thing it represents.
- Time is cyclical not linear; a recurring cycle of birth, growth, death, rebirth, return.
- Ritual: not mere ‘plays’ or re-enactments; making a spiritual event of the past exist in the present, a ‘re-present’, or being present again.
- Liminality: in-between state when an individual or society is in transition.
- Numinosity: the sense of the sacred infusing existence.
Where do you stand? What is around and beneath you?
Is it solid ground or pavement; is it earthen or synthetic?
Is there magic in the land there? Is it powerful, wild, or tame?
Is its energy flowing through you? Does it effect your magic?
Soil is more than mere matter; it contains spirit -- the place where you live.
Can we recover the wild sacred?
Both the name and the visual image of the Phrygian goddess first appear in central Anatolia (modern Turkey), during the early first millennium BCE and spread from there, first to the Greek cities on the west coast of Anatolia, and then to mainland Greece and to Greek cities in the western Mediterranean. The goddess's cult was imported into Rome at the end of the third century BCE, where she became an important figure in Roman religion.
Her chthonian character, myth, and ritual, had connections to the spiritual underworld. The imaginal activity of the ancients had a mythological dimension. Many of the supernatural figures and mythological events which appear in later religious traditions, were probably discoveries of the Stone Age. For millennia Mother Earth gave birth by herself, through parthenogenesis. Born from the Earth, humansn returned there at death.
Both Jung and Hillman agree that the soul's goal often has less to do with life than death which may be part of its aim. The death mother is nature's shadow. If we can understand this consciousness, as well as the forms of the world in their manifestation, then we have taken a step forward that allows us to restore consciousness by giving it back its true dimension.
Agrarian cultures developed notions of circular time and cosmic cycles, a new orientation to both inner and outer life. Settled life organizes the "world" differently from a nomadic life, according to the seed cycle of death rebirth, earth and sky, periodic renewal. The mystery of birth, death, and rebirth is the rhythm of vegetation and its mythological dramas, including mythical themes of gods who die and return to life, the cosmic cycle of chthonian fertility and life/death/postexistence.
Root metaphors of neolithic culture include: 1) Cults of the dead and of fertility, 2) the "mystery" of vegetation. 3) hope of a postexistence. 4) A cosmology, a "center of the world" and inhabited space as an imago mundi.
We dissolve in the mysterious ground of being, the sublime wellspring of creativity. Enduring psychospiritual transformation needs to be grounded in “somatic transfiguration.” In humanity's emerging consciousness somewhere between the darkness of imagination and physical mazes, deep caverns seem like uterine spaces or living, breathing internal cavities that snake for miles. Caves -- the original temples -- were worshiped and feared as the center of the earth with miles of crumbling tunnels and steep precipitous drop offs multiple-stories deep.
The lunar 'ground' is a fathomless depth. Humankind has journeyed deep into them and used these dark and treacherous labyrinths of tortured and twisting passages with seemingly bottomless pits, to live, to hide, to explore, and to worship with pilgrimage, art, and rituals.
With its flickering fires, smoky caverns, and hidden dangers the cave gave rise to mythic and archetypal recollections and dreams of ancestral spirits. But all who descend into the underworld do so at their own risk. Initiatory passageways and vertical shafts have dangerous hand and footholds etched in lava and ice, and studded with magical curtains, spires, crystals and inscriptions.
Caves represent the deep impenetrable strata of the "maternal unconscious", re-entry into the containing womb of the Mother, an ancient motif of death and rebirth. This grave is a subterranean temple and nocturnal rites of passage, the flow of underground waters,, and all the ferocious beasts and treasures the caverns of the psychic underworld conceal.
"A meaningful katabasis into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge is for the restoration of the whole person. The dead become an imaginal presence, "the growing understood as descent in the world, becoming useful to it and contributing to form, requires that it is descend in the world that is under the world. To be an ancestor, a benefactor, a conservative and a mentor you must have knowledge of the shadows, being trained "from the dead" (from past things, which have become invisible and however continue to vivify our life with their influence). The "Dead" return as ancestors, especially in moments of crisis, when we feel lost. Then the dead "yes", offering a deeper knowledge and support. Having already fallen, they know the chasms; there their extraordinary resources. They don't need to come back literally in the form of voices and visions, because they are already palpable in anything tends to jump down, on any occasion we are not up to. They are the gravity force of the psyche." (James Hillman)
The Greek word for 'revealed' actually means 'reappear,' like rivers and streams that flow underground and spring forth again. The course remains invisible until it reappears to sight. Creative environmental function includes experiencing a sense of beauty and compassion, supporting and serving life and nature with nature-assisted expressions.
The mind goes still as primal awareness expands into wholeness. Something without physical form shines forth from the hidden world in that very moment. These luminous experiences, true works of art, drive us onward in the Quest. We are struck with divine inspiration and the passion to see it through to completion. Sensuous cognition of beauty is a revelation, an astonishment.
Who is Kybele in our consciousness today? We are fundamentally tied to and grounded in nature. We learn to "stand our ground" in the deep interiority of the psychological field with new vigor.
She is the universal veil which encloses and incorporates the Mysteries. It is a membrane that ruptures as the fruiting body grows. The image says everything and dictates all that follows. You just stay true to the image.
Indigenous mind is at the root of nonconscious understanding, accurate knowledge of the universe, including Precession. Ancient time is related to distance. The ancients tapped the information field underlying the material structures of the universe and read the living heart of the cosmos, subquantal, subliminal, subconscious, autonomic, reflexive, amorphous cognition, the nonrepresentational activity of the psyche (Arieti, 1976).
They ask, “What does the land want? What does the river want? What does the wolf want? What does the forest want?" The sky, the sun, the moon, the wind, the trees, beasts, and ancestors are holy beings. They are always watching, and have needs and interests entangled with our own. Kybele is the wisdom of the ancient forest, mysteries hidden deep within the earth, and clouded peaks.
Wild At Heart
The essential feminine, this wild darkness, the virgin forest -- the sensuous fantastic -- lights our way in the imaginal perspective of an ensouled world. Kybele is the autonomous fantasy maker that animates imagination of visible and invisible worlds and the seething excitation of instincts. We can tend and attend to the inner wilds, the symbolic language of nature, wandering through the imagery-infused world.
Kybele is the sole and original parent and our wild creativity. The throbbing heart of creation acts through its own center. The darkness of the depths, suffused with self-generated light, is also called spiritual Nature, Anima Mundi, or soul that exists in an invisible state as Primary Imagination, infused throughout the cosmos animated by collective soul.
Campbell said, “The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” (A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living)
Ritualized movement and silence speaks volumes, reverberating with future frequencies, opening interiority and ecstatic communion -- a kaleidoscopic fusion of the senses, the inverted articulation of attunement to reverberating echos. In active sensing we actively coordinate movement with the information we want to sense and find, integration of sensory and motor information, learning in a concrete way.
We return in mystery to the embrace of the goddess, the wild feminine, committed to the wildness within. The Virgin of Conception was the original sacrificial virgin, psychoactive buds of cannabis, burned as a sacred offering to the Goddess. She doesn't enter us, but emerges from deep within perception as action, something elemental.
The secret is inside the creation and based in nature and our own intrinsic nature, bringing more of the unconscious and mythic into consciousness through the mothering path of awakening. Life pours forth from itself.
Interconnectivity manifests in our deep psychic bond with the earth, its creatures and plants, and the cosmos as a whole. Evidence of this interrelationship arises in our personal lives in dream images and synchronicities, and in the powerful and visceral sense of engagement we feel with the natural world.
Wild Darkness
Kybele gives voices to mute places, a marriage of trees, rocks, and starry sky. Narrative gives a grounded sense of self. The margins are the center of the imagination. Reflecting her own cavernous interiority, she transforms inhospitable, harsh terrains into inviting primordial parks and riverbeds flowing with the imaginal. We yearn to float downstream; reverie moves us forward. Landscape is a provocateur.
To see the beauty we must stop, breathe and absorb into the moment, the only reality we all really have. Some cultures create zoomorphic figures and geometric patterns to transform the vast land into a highly symbolic, ritual and social-cultural landscape. She speaks for their unspeakable immensity that reminds us we are truly small.
Liminal places connect outside with inside across all experiential domains. Wandering off the path of hypermodernity, we are arrested, trapped in her magically woven web of poetic resonance. There is a synergetic relation between landscape, instinct and imagination that rekindles all as a unified field that is the mycelial root of sacred places of heart and mind.
Relationships are the poetry of life and connecting with the land. Kybele is the earth from which we grow, our connection to dreams, the animal realm, our ancestors, and deep unconscious. She is the dust under our feet beyond those areas of origin that can be mapped, giving place a face in the present.
What is this invisible ground whose image we carry in our souls where spiritual ideals merge with worldly realities? Isn’t it always right here, right now everywhere always, forever? The contextual background, the invisible environment, is the fundamental ground from which both mind and matter emerge, the luminous absolute space of reality beyond the mere absence of energy/matter. The radiant ground is the fundamental source.
Mother Mycelium
We all come from one genus -- consciousness, sentience. Mycorrhizae are symbiotic relationships that form between fungi and plants. The fungi colonize the root system of a host plant and shares information. The closer we come to the deep core of any archetypal experience the more the numinous effect increases, as a confrontation with a power not of this world but the more-than-human world.
"The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth. . . For the root matter is the mother of all things." (C.G. Jung, CW 18, Page xxv).
The field becomes the focus. We learn to lean into the field and feel its chaos without imposing premature order. The field is a paradox of fusion and distance, an impossible simultaneity. We need to practice seeing the field, as well as seeing into and through it with full-bodied feeling. It is known only by experiential perception, not interpretation.
The everyday processes of living in the conscious mind usually succeed in compartmentalizing off the preconscious from our awareness. Psychic gifts can come under the service of self-destructive impulses. But occasionally, the upwelling of the preconscious area, unconditioned belonging in the world, erupts like molten magma from the mantle of the earth.
Knowing By Feeling
The unconscious is the "wilderness" of body and world. Nature is an environmental trigger igniting altered states of consciousness, like nature-mystic merging, "oceanic," or "peak-experience." They give us the exaltation, a primordial grace, of standing on a high mountain and gaining for a minute the awesome glory of a grand vista.
Mountain peaks express the shared connection of supernatural power, fertility and protection between the sacred mountain, the gods, and the dead. Our wild embodied nature is lured not only by others but by landscapes, trees, forests, and seascapes, fecund wonders as well as ideas, poetry, art, and music. Non-ordinary perception evolves through kinesthetic perception. We are somatically aroused, seduced and captivated by the animate world.
Our wild self knows what is being said by nonhuman flora and fauna. We see the sacred in nature through the radiant consciousness of the "otherness" of natural things. This is the simplest, most common form of illumination -- overpowering apprehension of the Infinite, life imminent in all living things.
Walls between the visible and the invisible grow thin, and the Eternal seemed to break through into the world with a higher order of reality. This awareness: is so intangible, it strikes like a thunderclap.
Wild Mind
Does a wild mind call for a field guide to the psyche, a grove full if ancient trees, the circuits of the stars, or deep crumbling cave arched beneath a mighty mountain? The Chaldean Oracles suggested nature "commands fate", referring to its ensoulment.
How can we fully embody our multifaceted wild minds, commit ourselves to the largest, soul-infused story we’re capable of living, and serve the greater Earth community -- the relationship between our human psyche and the rest of nature? Kybele has meant different things in different epochs.
Psyche is in the world, not just in ourselves. It's in our loves, in our personal and collective lives, just as much as our culture and nature. The gods and ourselves, in interstitial space (tissue space), are in the world, also present as in-scapes of our imaginations.
Divesting enculturation we learn to see in the dark through her eyes, through imaginal sight, through inner and outer wilderness vision quests or trance journeys that revitalize and re-enchant us. Arguably, soul is an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person's fate.
Planetary poetics reveal what it means to be in an undisturbed place. True listening to the earth equalizes each sound's value. Every place has a sound that connects us back to the land. Silence is the Presence of everything in the natural acoustic system, undisturbed. Acoustic space nurtures our nature, says Gordon Hempton.
“...there is a fundamental frequency for each habitat” — a tonal quality that shapes the sense of place and the quality of presence. What emerges is the embodied awareness that silence, like the art of sculpture, is the removal of excess material so that the true form — of one’s consciousness, of the world, of life itself — can be revealed."
Archaic Roots
Imagine yourself waking through untrammeled forest in ancient times, when thoughts receded into the direct experience of a world enlivened by direct experience of an utterly wild living landscape. By pale moonlight the ancient woods were shadowy and indistinct with multifaceted nature.
Pine trees were sacred to Attis. Clay images, fragments of tree or black fir-idols and phallic votives have been found at the important sacred groves, suggesting the severed members of Kybele and Attis. Their mushroom analogs flourish under those pines, a co-evolution of psyche and place.
Entheogens, namely wild mushrooms, probably pla yed an important role in the Mysteries in ritual intoxication and ASC. Wild amanitas or other psychoactive wild fungi were included in the mysteries. (Ruck) In the 'Corpus Cybelae Attidisque" we discover many other icons of Attis formed like mushrooms. Unfettered and wild, she is the forest -- nature’s expressive powers of vegetative growth.
"The root is the mysterious tree, it is the subterranean, inverted tree. For the root, the darkest earth—like the pond, but without the pond—is also a mirror, a strange opaque mirror which doubles every aerial reality with a subterranean image." (Gaston Bachelard)
A complex knot of feelings and impulses arises including nostalgia for union with the mother, the way things were before. They are echoed in the enchanted landscape and incidents that arise through it, confirming that felt-sense of an ancient state of consciousness. The connection is renewed with oneself, primordial nature, the ecosphere and constellations of ancestral memories. Every place is a different energetic setting.
Walking toward a sacred grove, the elemental wood, everything in it is alive and watching and whispering with the movement of the trees and the breezes all around, and geomagnetic currents. All are gestures of a god -- a mote of sunlight, the flight of a bee or butterfly, the scurry of a deer, murmur of water, the flash of lightning, and crack of thunder.
Our perspective becomes an imaginative relationship to the world. We tune our animal senses to the sensible terrain. Even invisible electromagnetism and an unidentified substratum through which all the forms of the world appear and disappear. Electromagnetism is the life breath of matter, the appearance in consciousness of the universe.
Such affinities with forces and forms of nature were not symbols, but were the goddess. Whole dimensions of images lie glistening in the dark unknown, refined by millennia, all meant to happen and speaking volumes -- each a portent of punishment or reward, warning or premonition that entered consciousness.
"Images are primary psychic realities. In experience, itself, everything begins with images." (On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, trans. with preface and introduction by Colette Gaudin. Spring Publications: Dallas, 1987, p. 84 [Original in French, 1960].)
The face of the myth was a meteorite. Even stones embodied the most absolute and deep experience - the experience of the eternal, which we realize in moments when we feel immortal. Kybele's oldest image was black meteoric stone, a venerated stone from the heavens, full of life and the unrestrained exploding forces of nature and creativity.
Such evocative images and sonic references became the basis of the unfolding Mysteries, sought in the shelter of caves that automatically internalized consciousness, returning it from the far horizons of complex rhythms and cycles. The heart-cave is the chambers of the heart. The initiate marries the goddess with a sacred meal. Raw and intense cave experiences soon make believers out of followers.
Kybele mediates the known and unknown, civilized and wild, life and death, as a goddess of transitions, mysteries, sensuous adventure and the landscape of eternity. Only a world of soul offers intimacy and coherent resonance to help us see and know the thought of the heart, as if in a mirror.
Kybele is mantic, oracular. In her cosmic womb we learn to open up, sense the dark matter world, and negotiate with darkness, what Jung called "the eternally fruitful climes of the soul." We embrace her glorious and inglorious passions as we embrace the image, a surrender in service to the gods; imagining into the archetypal energies of the goddess and her style of consciousness.
Living myths change with location, culture, and time, just as panpsychism grew out of animism -- the imagery of dark and luminous, fluid, electric, richly textured imagery with deep and saturated colors. It is populated by figures known and unknown that form a network of complex, entangled relationships, offering passing flashes of potential futures..
The wind has a thousand voices: the voice of soft twisting of leaves, the bending of branches, the hollowness of valleys. It voices rock walls and carries the echoes to ears that have nothing else to hear but the sounds of the world being carried on a breeze. (S.K. Abbott)
This is the most ancient conception of psyche, the belief that nature is alive with spirits and things with “souls.” That experience goes “all the way down” into submicroscopic nature. Panpsychism views the mentality of objects as a subset of universal qualities, not in terms of human consciousness. If humans and non-humans are enminded, we can know the universe more intimately, compassionately, and ecologically.
Because Kybele originates in the pre-literate era, there are many versions of her myth. Which of them are true? All of them are real -- the archaic. classical, and imperial --though they vary in key features as oral traditions do. Is she earth, or is she metaphor? Both.
Imagination is fundamental to psychic realty. Hillman suggests, "the identity of opposites mean the simultaneous perception by the perspectives of life and death, the natural and the psychic."
The lived experience of psyche helps us place a vivid personal experience within a universal cosmology, finding our place in relation to the Gods by personifying, pathologizing, and psychologizing cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates.
Meeting the God-Plant
In her Mysteries, Cybele mourned the death of her beloved and the passing of her devotees. They were transformed by her communion, mystique, and the attainment of sacred knowledge (gnosis) through identification with Attis, her son-lover. They were collectively known as the Galli.
In the myths of Attis, Kybele bargained with fate and the gods so his hair and regenerated phallus grow under the pine tree forever - an analogy for mycelium and fruits of the Amanita muscaria mushroom, a likely source for the revelers mania, dropping the habitual self for a primordial regression. It can only be described as a shamanic ordeal, a soma sacifice of all that is material.
Those who ate the mushrooms felt the god within themselves as reality dissolved into wriggling serpents. Shepherds tending flocks would have found the fly agaric high in the wild mountains after rains, when the mountains of the goddess were raging with thunderstorms on the slopes.
Daniel Atrell summarizes in his thesis:
"Abstract - The administration of initiation rites by an ecstatic specialist, now known to western scholarship by the general designation of ̳shaman‘, has proven to be one of humanity‘s oldest, most widespread, and continuous magico-religious traditions. At the heart of their initiatory rituals lay an ordeal–a metaphysical journey - almost ubiquitously brought on by the effects of a life-changing hallucinogenic drug experience. To guide their initiates, these shaman worked with a repertoire of locally acquired instruments, costumes, dances, and ecstasy-inducing substances."
Among past Mediterranean cultures, Semitic and Indo-European, these sorts of initiation rites were vital to society‘s spiritual well-being. It was, however, the mystery schools of antiquity–organizations founded upon conserving the secrets of plant-lore, astrology, theurgy and mystical philosophy–which satisfied the role of the shaman in Greco-Roman society. The rites they delivered to the common individual were a form of ritualized ecstasy and they provided an orderly context for religiously-oriented intoxication.
In the eastern Mediterranean, these ecstatic cults were most often held in honor of a great mother goddess and her perennially dying-and-rising consort. The goddess‘ religious dramas enacted in cultic ritual stressed the importance of fasting, drumming, trance-inducing music, self-mutilation, and a non-alcoholic ritual intoxication. Far and wide the dying consort worshiped by these cults was a god of vegetation, ecstasy, revelation, and salvation; by ingesting his body initiates underwent a profound mystical experience.From what limited information has survived from antiquity, it appears that the rites practiced in the eastern mystery cults were in essence traditional shamanic ordealsremodeled to suit the psychological needs of Mediterranean civilization‘s marginalized people.
This paper argues that the myths of this vegetable god, so-called ̳the Divine Bridegroom,‘ particularly in manifestation of the Phrygian Attis and the Greek Dionysus, is deeply rooted in the life-cycle, cultivation, treatment, consumption of a tree-born hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria."
(Dionysian Semiotics: Myco-Dendrolatry and Other Shamanic Motifs in the Myths and Rituals of the Phrygian Mother)
https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/7857/Attrell_Daniel.pdf?sequence=1
Clark Heinrich describes how initiates were made aware of "meeting" the god-plant and being in the presence of a god. "One can also feel extremely energetic and strong, and this strength is not an illusion. It is well known among Siberian users of the fly agaric that feats of tremendous physical endurance are possible under its influence."
Clark Heinrich, Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy, 2002, Inner Traditions, (Rochester: Park Street
It's bisexual morphology is symbolic: "the correct god-plant: the plant grows in the mountains, low to the ground; it contains the power of a god; it resembles a serpent in several ways; it stands on one "staff' and is phallic in appearance; it has white patches covering its "breast"; and it glows red like a live coal."
It can actually simulate or produce with poison a near-death experience or the psychic ego-death common to psychedelics. "The foreskin of the penis is related to the cap of the fly agaric. It could easily be construed to refer to the whole cap and not just the universal veil, and since the entire cap separates from the base at "circumcision," cutting off the cap still leaves the phallic stalk intact."
Heinrich continues, "bloody" juice flows from the moistened" cap. A woman using the fly agaric in similar fashion by herself could also address the mushroom directly with the same statement, "Surely you are a bloody husband to me." For that matter, so could a man."
Daniel Attrell describes how, "What appears to be afoot in Kybele's myth is a description of Amanita muscaria‘s life-cycle at the base of a tree, which begins in a spore dropped during the blooming and potential extirpation of a preceding generation of mushrooms. The spore falls into the earth and unites mycorrhizally with its host tree. The tree, which is the dismembered member of the once androgynous goddess, and its red fruit emerge first in the myth. The fruit conjoined with moisture...begets the birth of Attis." (Attrell)
https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/7857/Attrell_Daniel.pdf?sequence=1
Attis, his resurrecting "little finger", and his ever-growing hair are mythical symbols for the deified intoxicant.
Dactyli (Gr.) From daktulos, “a finger” is the name given to the Phrygian Hierophants of Kybele, who were regarded as the greatest magicians and exorcists. In the era of Hittites, Chaldean priests took refuge in Anatolia. The priests were five or ten in number because of the five fingers on one hand that blessed, and the ten on both hands which evoke the gods. Was that code for a powerful dosage? They also healed by manipulation and hypnosis.
Curetes were Priest-Initiates of ancient Crete, in the service of Cybele. Initiation in their temples was very severe; it lasted twenty-seven days, during which time the aspirant was left by himself in a crypt, undergoing terrible trials in a secret subterranean vault.
There were crypts under every temple in antiquity, used for initiation and burial. Kybele was associated with cannabis, "the mother plant," so we might speculate that such initiates where anointed with concentrated oils to enhance their underworld experience, similar to Egyptian initiations (Bennett).
Pythagoras was initiated into these rites and came out victorious. Zosimos and Paracelsus spoke of the homunculus as devouring himself, and giving birth to himself—the death/rebirth necessary for casting off the old and inviting in the new self image.
This bisexual goddess was worshiped with orgies of ecstatic freedom under various names for the mystery of self-reproduction. A single divine life conferred spiritual intimacy with the underworld and protective cosmic influence. The Anatolians and Ionians worshiped a divine family of a mother, and a male deity who was her son, her spouse, her brother, and sometimes father. But they were considered one bisexual being.
Her names have morphed over the years, but not her archetypal qualities. Kybele is her Greek form, and Cybele is Roman. Believers and devotees never forgot her grace or miraculous visits. As Cybele, her authority predates the Olympians, and through early Cretan practice she embodies the Titan Rhea, archaic Hekate, and even the all-encompassing Mother Goddess Gaia, and deities of Eleusis. When the Romans took over Asia Minor, Artemis became Diana and Ephesus became the provincial Roman Capital.
Later the Vatican was built over her pagan Roman shrine. The oriental cults of Cybele, Isis, and Mithras were Romanized myth, salvation, and ethics in the cults of Cybele. As a side note, Heinrich has reported that monks used tonsure and their red skull cap as symbols of amanita rites. The preparation was rubbed on the bald scalp, rather than ingested. Many priestly vestments hark back to the vivid red and white of the mushroom.
The eastern Kybele cult was absorbed into the Ophite Gnostic 'heresy' of serpent worship -- a Kundalini path that worshiped Kybele as the gnostic Sophia. This harks back to the dual raised-bodied serpents flanking the figure seen in the Neolithic totem from Gobekli Tepe, pre-dating any Indian syncretism. The serpent was primal cosmic energy, creativity, and wisdom. The serpent or dragon Adepts of divine wisdom taught primeval mysteries to archaic mankind.
In this sense, Kybele was the prototypical Black Madonna, the 'black light' of the undulant darkness, connected with caring, tending, childbirth, animals, and the bees. Caring for the earth and regeneration enlivens our care for the body. She is aware of our hardships, the uncertainty and unconsciousness of the dark cloud of unknowing, uncertainty, ignorance, and innocence. Suffering brings us into the unknown.
“Have You Forgotten? I Am Your Mother. You Are Under My Protection.”
“There is a promise Holy Mother makes to us,” explains Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Untie the Strong Woman, “that any soul needing comfort, vision, guidance, or strength can cry out to her, flee to her protection, and Blessed Mother will immediately arrive with veils flying. She will place us under her mantle for refuge, and give us the warmth of her most compassionate touch, and strong guidance about how to go by the soul’s lights.”
Forbidden Fruit
The forbidden fruit of the mythic tree is Amanita muscaria (Ruck). Different toxins and alkaloids prevail depending on the concoction. We can't be sure if the divine entheogen was abandoned or replaced by surrogates, but it induced a visionary reality and cohesive worship. It was euphemistically and symbolically known as the "bull" for its power.
We don't know if the divine elixir was a single substance or a mixture. Psilocybin and Cubensis mushrooms were also found on the plains. Drug-induced initiations were practiced throughout the known ancient world with mushrooms, opium, ephedra, cannabis, ergot, acacia, henbane, Syrian rue (mountain rue; Peganum harmala), datura, and more.
In Sacred Mushrooms of the Goddess, Ruck (p. 73-84) describes the Lesser Mysteries of Artemis as based on the wild mushroom. They pushed human experiential boundaries to their limits and beyond the agonies of ecstasy. Modern reports of ingestion in wine describe energetic states, a strong desire to dance followed by sedative effects around 3 hours, and intense dreamlike trips for hours.
"The effects of Amanita muscaria are diverse and vary according to dosage, method of preparation and the cultural and psychological expectations of the consumer. A small dose (or the initial effect of a larger one) causes bodily stimulation and a desire for movement and physical exercise.
Responses to the fly-agaric varied widely. Sometimes an intoxicated individual had to be restrained from over-exerting himself, whilst on other occasions it would induce a tranquil state of bliss in which beautiful visions appeared before the eyes. The effects can be divided into three basic stages, which sometimes overlap. About fifteen minutes after taking the mushrooms the stimulating effects begin and there is much loud singing and laughing. This stage is followed by auditory and visual hallucinations in conjunction with the sensation that things increase in size."
The goddess's dark places are crowned with woodlands and high groves, speckled with seasonal mushrooms. The Phrygians had a consuming passion for their god plants. They loved undiluted fermented grain beer. Fermentation was another fungal mystery of transformation of mead and bread.
Rejuvenation comes from connecting with pristine consciousness, the eternal aspects or forces of nature--the infinite, transcendent Source. We cannot gloss over her mycological roots. Some of what we know today can be reflected back to the ancient cult. The cave is a crucible of transcendence and shamanic transport. Kybele and Attis are essentially womb and phallus.
Kybele generates and what she generates is the god within. In this mythic dimension within, her gleaming shape-shifting vision, god-perception, and cosmic consciousness were revealed in symbolic pyrotechnics. Ecstasy meant to 'stand outside oneself,' to enter another dimension, a world apart. It demonstrates the divine resides within.
Those who know her have done so through an imparting of secret knowledge. The secrets of Kybele were originally those of the divine pharmacopeia. Her secrets remain virginal and her mysteries are inviolable. Our experiences belong only to ourselves. Each has their own. Kybele had one that was foundational first, and became symbolic of magical potency.
Knowledge of the sacramental substance has been obscured. It is little known outside of ethnomycology. Yet, archaeology confirms it. There are numerous icons of Attis shaped like mushrooms. His legend also suggests the same. Pliny attributed a sexual character to Amanita muscaria. The splotchy red mushrooms mirrored 'the spilled blood of Attis.'
Mushrooms are a perennial metaphor for the penis. They still have erotic connotations. The cult consumed fly agaric (spiritual flight). Attis was the Paleo-European key to the rites of the Great Mother. Yet it has been largely under-reported, except as a communal regression into oceanic states, a mystical return to the mother.
Elements of ritual gender-blending, transvestitism or literal and symbolic androgyny are nearly universal among shamans. Transgender shamans are metaphorically described as changing into a woman or androgynous being. But, the terms "eunuch" and "transgender" are not synonymous. Yet, this ritual androgyny is considered a sign of spirituality.
We experience that larger world and self--the rhythmic pulse of all life in the womb of the cosmic mother. This mystical fusion is somewhat akin to an expanded experience of the world. It includes oceanic feelings, the experience of being expanded, quasi-larger or more spacious than one's own body.
Oceanic feeling is a sense of fuller vision extending to apparently limitless horizons. Consciousness is encountered as more like a field than a localized point, a field that transcends the body and yet somehow interacts with it.
If we start with the Paleo-European Great Mother, we can pile up comparative material forever until all symbols are included, for she is 'the mother of all'. We can't erase inconvenient parts of history; that is denial. But it is not mere speculation either. 'Going down into the depths' of thought-patterns and emotional experience and re-emerging remains the great Mystery.
You danced with the Mother, shrieked with the Mother, bled with the Mother, and the Mother helped you heal.
How can we make her Presence, participation mystique, and animism felt in our lives today, in contemporary society? The sacred meal is her oldest ritual, despite all later modifications.
James Hillman said, "When the gods arrive on stage, everything becomes silent and the eyelids close. Plunged into oblivion by this experience, we re-emerge and without knowing exactly what is happened, we know only that we have been transformed."
The essence of all phenomena is a vibrant rhythm, the intimate nature of phenomena is directly perceptible by polyrhythmic human consciousness. For this reason, imitating is knowing. The echo is the paradigm of imitation and initiation. Her ordeal was a psychedelic metaphysical journey.
Rituals of music, dance, and drugs were a way of seeking direct contact with the deity. Drugs were synonymous with the divine influence of a deity. Whether or not some of these magical traditions and divination rites preserve relics, or hallucinations, of Paleo- and Neolithic heritage is not entirely a matter of conjecture.
The oldest female goddesses were associated with the serpentine powers of the dynamic life force, the natural cycle of life. Her names, shape and powers changed from the Anatolian Earth Mother over time and cross cultural interactions.
"Ritual dismemberment and consumption of a sacrificial victim recently hung upon a sacred tree is, a central process of actions in the rites of the Phrygian mother at large and has much relevance to the study of other mystery initiations." (Attrell)
"Internally, this manifested itself as an ordeal and a spiritual ascent for the sacrificial 'king'; essentially, his duty was to sacrifice himself to the goddess,
mimicking the mushroom itself. He was dressed as the god and suspended himself in the sun‘s rays in order to dry ‘before he was taken down and ritually murdered and eaten by the maenads, as had been done with the mushroom.
The poet Robert Graves was the first to suggest that the maenad‘s savage custom of tearing off their victims‘heads was an allegorical reference to tearing off Amanita muscaria‘s cap (since the stalk was not eaten)." ..."the 'revel‘ which ensued during these rites was no beatific feast; rather, it is a scene of desperation attended by cries of lamentation and wailing."
"The divinely inspired lamentation of women is an all-pervasive phenomenon in the religions of the dying and rising gods. In cults of the Divine Bridegroom, lamentation existed hand in hand with the ecstatic behavior arising at the sacred marriage." (Attrell)
The unconscious psyche, intuition, and associative thinking is the instinctual human essence. Psyche periodically goes into periods of descent or depression and even mania, often in a very dramatic way. She symbolically links a supernatural world of the dead to the world of the living in a realistically human shape with multiple states of being. Both the Greek and Roman cults were hybrid practices, a blend of Hellenic and Oriental cult practices.
Her tympanon (frame drum, tambourine) is the celestial sphere. She was sometimes worshiped as the pole star representing the gate of heaven or axis of the Earth, an umbilical connecting the galactic center to the world-navel, tethers the center of the Earth to the center of the Sky, a bridge linking both forms of reality in a cosmic synthesis. (Guénon 2001, Behun)
When these elements are drawn together, they reciprocally inform one another, deepening our understanding of the performative and spatial dimensions of our experience of the divine and opening the possibility of a direct relationship unbound by dogma. Direct experience is symbolically intimate.
Gaston Bachelard posed the question: ‘How could a legend be kept alive and perpetuated if each generation had not “intimate reasons” for believing in it?’ The symbolist meaning of a phenomenon helps to explain these ‘intimate reasons.’ It links the instrumental with the spiritual, the human with the cosmic, the acasual with the causal, disorder with order, and the transcendent.
The androgynous goddess, the masculine/feminine energy of the world body, means the soul or psyche has no gender. It involves masculine and feminine aesthetics.
"In liminal situations around the world, neophytes are often treated or symbolically represented as being neither male nor female. Alternatively, they may be allotted the characteristics of both genders, irrespective of their biological sex. In the given initiation rite, they are symbolically sexless or androgynous, as what Victor Turner calls ―a kind of human prima material–as undifferentiated raw material." (Attrell)
Modern ideas of motherhood and sentimental mores can only lead us astray. Kybele is a Dark Mother from the depths of pre-history. She appears in our dreams as a wild animal. as uncontrolled, unacknowledged aspects of ourselves.
MOTHER MYCELIUM
Kybele, Attis, & the Fruit of the Gods
Iona Miller, 2020
“Deep inside us is a wilderness. We call it the unconscious because we can’t control it fully, so we can’t will to create what we want from it. The collective unconscious is a great wild region where we can get in touch with the source of life.” --C.G. Jung
Kybele's religion is arguably the oldest on Earth, an early indigenous tradition. But how can we begin to comprehend the Paleolithic and Neolithic mind that still lies within our depths? We need to remember the nature goddess of the wilderness, our undomesticated wild nature. A soulful reading helps us listen more deeply.
Natural and cultural environment is crucial but doesn't exist without the mental creativity to create and learn such ways. The Neolithic is a symbolic revolution, characterized by a burst of creativity and imagistic societies. Religious experience and aesthetic effulgence can be natural or induced. How did humans become domesticated in the process of domesticating plants and animals? How did meaning relate to action and action manifest meaning?
How did Kybele's devotees come to terms with shifting human consciousness and symbolic thinking? Sacred caves and mountains were the site of Kybele's earliest ceremonies. This underworld, the dark depths of the netherworld created by the human mind, is the easiest place to contact her and our deep unconsciousness. More than a concept, cosmos is a lived, explored reality -- the experiential basis of beliefs in supernatural realms and beings.
We cannot forget that ancient people sought to alter their consciousness for preternatural seeing. Rhythmic dancing, auditory-driving with rhythmic sound patterns, and hyperventilation can produce ecstatic trance states. Thought-lives manifest belief systems. All religions have an ecstatic component and all religions alter consciousness to some extent.
Kybele's lore is full of primitive mystery, exotic lands, and unfettered imagination. The essence of life is the force behind the pure force of creativity. Our survival is within that myth. Myths clothe daily life with a sense of transcendent reality.
If there is nothing but life, is the essential truth to experience the miracle of death? It is possible to be born and die without participating the Mysteries of life and death. But the paradox is that death is the fundamental mystery of life, as life is the fundamental mystery of death. The mysteries of Kybele and Attis embodied that paradox.
Shamanic Mystic Tradition
Over-driving the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems can lead to mystical experiences. Exhaustive dancing, pounding music, and psychoactive drugs can lead to flow states which produce energetic ecstasies, orgasmic rapture, and ecstatic rush.
Paradoxically, hyper-stimulation produces oceanic tranquility, detachment, letting go, and even total loss of bodily sensations. This primal and visceral renewal by the goddess was the extreme state sought by devotees of Kybele as their epiphany. The Phrygian cap worn by her son-lover Attis indicates ecstatic experience.
While this tale doesn't account for all the turning points in narrative aspects of her myth and its migration, it is likely its ancient shamanic core. We grope our way farther into the depths, alone in that vastness. We don't have to explain everything to explain something. This is not just about history but about what it means to be human today and the unity of all life.
We will stick with this main thread, the fusion of life and death, as the root metaphor of the Kybele myth to enter the yawning caverns of the unconscious self. In Memories, Dreams, and Reflections Jung said, "Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition."
The Mushroom Kingdom
The most enduring symbols of Kybele come from the Anatolian landscape: mountains, water, and predators. They concerned the relationship of the people to the land in which they lived. They used symbols of their natural landscape to define their own divinity.
Amanita muscaria grows in mycorrhizal symbiosis with the roots of its host tree like a fruit.
Her consort Attis is a personified sacred plant. The miraculous fruit symbolizes the Mystery. Carl Ruck claims that, "upon his death he became a pine tree, host for the visionary mushroom that morphologically mimics the androgynous male/female metamorphoses that are central to his myth." (Mushrooms, Myth and Mithras: The Drug Cult that Civilized Europe)
We need to look at her before the wide dissemination of her cult throughout the Mediterranean. The sacred meal is probably her cult's most ancient ritual. For thousands of years, the dark forests and shadowy mountain groves of ancient Anatolia were occasionally punctuated by the wild orgiastic sounds of banging drums, clanging cymbals, and deep-throated flutes.
Catullus Poem 63 recounts the call of Attis: “Together come and follow to the Phrygian home of Cybele, to the Phrygian forests of the goddess, where the clash of cymbals ring, where tambourines resound, where the Phrygian flute-player blows deeply on his curved reed, where ivy-crowned maenads toss their heads wildly.”
In the great web of life, we all come from one genus -- consciousness, sentience. The web of consciousness is so vast we can only perceive it with feeling and intuition. Mycorrhizae form symbiotic relationships between fungi and plants. Mushroom mycelium has a symbiotic relationship with the mycorrhizae of the pine trees under which they grow. It sprouts 'phallic' mushrooms at the base of the tree.
In the rites of Kybele, during fruiting seasons, mushrooms that grew beneath the sacred pines were dried on the tree itself apparently to increase their potency. An effigy of Attis was bound to the trunk of this tree in remembrance of his ritual castration. In celebrations of the Divine Mother Kybele and her Divine Bridegroom Attis, the red and white mushrooms were imagined as little phallic creatures that were bleeding.
The fungi colonize the root system of a host plant and share information. The mass of thread-like mycelium is the 'mother spawn' or 'mother culture' from which the fruiting bodies grow. Fungi also share an intimate relationship with humanity. They shape our consciousness, connection with nature, and perhaps our co-evolution.
Psychoactive substances are historically associated with offensive operations, transgressive and unrestrained sexuality. Mycelium wraps itself around the tangled mychorrizae like the mother-complex of Kybele wraps around the psyche of transgendered Attis.
Some mushrooms heal, while others kill, and some like the ambiguous pharmakon of old can do both. It functions as remedy, poison, and scapegoat. It brings death close as either cure or poison. Psychoactive mushrooms evoke memory -- very deep memory. They can also produce amnesia, convulsions, unconsciousness, and dissociation.
Stan Grof describes how we can tune into the psychic consciousness of animals, plants, or inorganic systems. He says, "transpersonal experience might involve "reentering" or "reexperiencing" of a prepersonal occasion," including oceanic pleromas, archaic images, phylogenetic heritage, or animal/plant identification."
Pure Power of Nature
The human impulse to gather for sacred rituals arose as humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it. When Neolithic foragers began settling down in villages, they unavoidably created a divide between the human realm and the dangerous land beyond the campfire, populated by lethal beasts. Psychedelics reaffirmed their primal alliance with the Virgin Forest.
Civilization is driven by ecological forces and the human mind. A "revolution of symbols" was a conceptual shift. It allowed humankind to imagine gods as supernatural beings resembling humans that existed in a universe beyond the physical world. Even today we follow in the footsteps of our ancestors.
Jung said, "Disalliance with the unconscious is synonymous with loss of instinct and rootlessness." (CW 7, Para 195) "But besides that [Intellect] there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche." (CW 8, Para 794)
We are entangled and embedded in Nature, but have lost touch with its life animating principle. Mycelium becomes a metaphor for our deepest living connections with primordial nature, its unconscious, underground, or chthonic aspects. We can regress to what appears to be the conscious nature of our environment, biosphere, the entire planet, or universe -- the sum of creation.
Such comprehensive vision reveals the plant-based shamanic origins of religion. This is explicit psychedelic mysticism. Psychedelics tend toward harmonization and reconnection of the brain through a 'reset' mode. To go back to our Origins, we must approach "death" as a profound transformation process that reconnects us with the archetype and myth of our origins. First come experiences of the amniotic universe and cosmic engulfment, then the death-rebirth struggle. (Grof)
Animism, a relational way of knowing what we know derived from relations with the environment, was the original basis of religion. Primary or irreducible images stand for themselves and depend on direct experience of feelings or qualities. The death-rebirth motif reflects anomalous body-self experiences and the fundamental process of transformation of the self. As part of the symbolic experience of death, the old self must die before being spiritually reborn.
Deities are central to sharing relationships with the environment, developing communal affairs, and maintaining identity. Both Attis and his plant-god analog are part of the religious motif of the dying-and-rising god, in which a god dies and is resurrected. Animals were guardians of the spirit world. Spirits arise from a sense of disembodied self and mind. Habitual patterns decompose leaving the sense of freshly reborn consciousness. Fear is released producing a sense of great energy. Resetting the brain is life changing.
The ancient body-based sense of awareness is mimetic. Shamanic metaphors are predicated on body, self, animals, and relational others. They include alter-identities and animal allies. Soul-flight is a body image metaphor of transcendence. Body and self image are universal patterns, levels of transformation of meaning, from primitive arousal to imaginal function. Combining memory and perception creates images that affect emotions and communicative interactions.
Emotions drive wide-spread bodily changes, mental states of excitement or perturbation, strong feelings, and impulses toward certain types of behavior. It is a radical change of perspective, self-reference, and reflexive self-awareness. Psychedelics are a phenomenological approach to emotions that first reduce them to a common root then resolve or reunify them.
It may be driven by the desire to worship as much as by the environment. The human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself. Such psychoactive experience is highly convincing and includes energies described as serpentine. Vision serpents reveal the serpentine nature to the world. The "serpent power" is associated with the oldest forms of the Great Goddess, who often had snakes as her familiars, the embodiment of wisdom and rebirth.
The ritual use of psychedelic plants remains the most effective tool for inducing non-ordinary healing and transformative states. The closer we come to the deep core of any archetypal experience the more the numinous effect increases. A confrontation with a divine power not of this world expands the presence of a more-than-human world.
Kybele translates as Cavern, Place of Caves, or Cave Dweller. There is an ancient connection between fungi and the raw experience of the oldest cult rites of Kybele and Attis, arguably predating the Neolithic era. Such rites for the archetypal mother may go back 20-50,000 years, under other names. This metaphor for prolonged ecstatic experience symbolizes and originates from the ancient subjective experience of self-dissolution and perceived disembodiment in trance.
"The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth. . . For the root matter is the mother of all things." (C.G. Jung, CW 18, Page xxv).
The primordial field of psyche becomes the focus. We learn to lean into the mythic field and feel its chaos without imposing premature order. The imaginal field is a paradox of fusion and distance, an impossible simultaneity. We need to practice seeing the archetypal field, as well as seeing into and through it with full-bodied feeling. It is known only by primordial experiential perception, not cognition and interpretation.
The everyday processes of living in the conscious mind usually succeed in compartmentalizing off the preconscious from our awareness. Psychic gifts can come under the service of self-destructive impulses. But occasionally, the upwelling of the preconscious area, unconditioned belonging in the world, erupts like molten magma from the mantle of the earth.
There are ancient shamanic ways of amplifying such human/beast interface. Alkaloids and alkaloid-producing plants contain consciousness altering properties, including euphoria, frenzy, dissociation, fusion, and hallucinogenic properties.
Psychotropic plants must have puzzled early humans leading to mythologizing. Early female deities have been described in this context. One of them is Kybele, as goddess of animals, mountains, caves, and medicine.
Her ecstatic cult of epiphanies and orgies arose in the Middle Euphrates and Phyrgia, was adopted by the Greeks in 1500 BC, and migrated to the Roman world from 200 BC to 400 AD as Cybele or Magna Mater. The Greeks identified her with their own Rhea, head of the ancient Minoan pantheon imported from Crete. Kybele's primary historical image was a hermaphroditic God(dess), the primordial androgyne -- sovereign matron crowned with towers, seated in a chariot drawn by lions.
But her worship originally centered on a black meteorite, a cult object, that may have been recognized as a heavenly body fallen from the sky. Such stones of divine origin were considered sacred, endowed with life, and revered as divine symbols of the gods themselves. Later, this oracular stone was moved to Rome. Thus, the singular image of Cybele carried both a chthonic and heavenly connotation, uniting the worlds above and below. Transpersonal experiences unite the macrocosm and the microcosm.
Her androgyny symbolized a wild and uncontrollable nature and savage masculine animus. A primordial nature goddess requires primordial worship. As the first immortal, Kybele is Original Consciousness. The serpent represents the initial state of unconsciousness. The paradoxical image typically appears before dissolution of the center into its unconscious element—the undifferentiated consciousness of the ground state.
She is our deepest memory. Focusing on the goddess herself, we seek a felt-sense of her living presence within us, rather than her gender fluidity, transgression, reveling retinue, castrated priesthood, or sensationalistic orgiastic rites. Knowledge of this archetypal 'mountain mother' is beyond historical knowledge. She gave birth to the other gods, to the first humans, to the animals, and to wild nature.
Kybele's earliest reported traditional practices reflect our contemporary notions of 'the Feminine,' 'warrior-women,' 'wilderness as medicine,' 'nature-based soul initiation', 'the nature-mystic experience,' and 'plant-based medicine' for healing and guidance. Her worship reveals the shamanic plant- based entheogenic origins of the religions that grew from personal encounters.
Wild Self
In Phrygia and Greece, she was "Mistress of animals" (Potnia Therōn). Her mastery of the natural world was expressed by her lions, as king of the beasts. Lions were an ancient Hittite symbol of protection and guarded their city gates. Ritual use of psychoactive plants returns humans to the animal state of direct apprehension.
But the nature mystic experience may also happen in spontaneous natural ways, to those uncommitted to any religious tradition. Peak experiences involve feelings of awe, of being utterly overpowered, of energy or urgency, of 'stupor,' 'fascination,' self-transcendence, oceanic states. absorption in the divine, and unity with living and nonliving nature. (Otto, The Idea of the Holy).
We are sensate creatures in the animal view of perception. An intelligibility of all things and shapes is inherent to the sensate imagination of our animal nature. We accept as animals a world of sensate objects and all elements of experience as directly presented. A living world can be perceived from the animistic perspective.
A complex system of mountain and ancestor worship etched meaning into the mountain terrain of those inhabiting the same landscape, the source of a power to be awed and revered. Stories of the mountain and ancestors were one, inseparable, passed down through the generations.
An interconnected ecological web between history, landscape, and culture formed that mirrors that of fungi, plants, creatures, and root systems of the dark ecology -- the mycology of consciousness. Certain areas and psychoactive species have different chemical effects.
Phrygia in Asia Minor was one such social location of psychedelic mysticism in antiquity. Sacred mountains and mushrooms shared roles as places of revelation and transformation -- places where we magically conceive ourselves through self-conceptualization and self-cultivation.
Mushroom language is euphemized, coded, masked, or buried in etymologies. They are spirits, little gods that can disappear when they don't get the right sacrifice. They can disappear from culture, remain perhaps on the periphery, and manifest themselves when they wish.
The sacred plants from earlier and wilder people linked back to ecstatic original intimacy -- to animism and participation mystique, the instinctive human tie to symbolic fantasy emanations. Natives of any area have a superior knowledge of secret magical plant life on their land. Pastoralists would have known about such things since the Ice Age Refugia in the Altai Mountains of central Asia. They would be suitable offerings for a goddess. They are 'unborn' because they have no roots or seed.
Attrell (2013) describes, "Behind closed eyes, initiates of the mysteries beheld awe-striking visions, theriomorphic transformations, and inconceivable phantasmagoria; on the outside, however, initiates were pulled through a hallucinatory ritual drama by priests and former initiates. At the root of many of these initiatory circles there endured a number of ritual practices stretching back to the Neolithic period whereby intoxicated initiates re-enacted the drama of an androgynous dying god being united with his mistress."
Knowing By Feeling
The unconscious is the "wilderness" of body and world. Nature is an environmental trigger igniting altered states of consciousness, like nature-mystic merging, "oceanic," or "peak-experience." They give us the exaltation, a primordial grace, of standing on a high mountain and gaining for a minute the awesome glory of an unimpeded grand vista.
Mountain peaks express the shared connection of supernatural power, fertility and protection between the sacred mountain, the gods, and the dead. Our wild embodied nature is lured not only by others but by landscapes, trees, forests, caves, waterways, and seascapes. Such fecund wonders enchant us as well as ideas, poetry, art, and music. Non-ordinary perception evolves through kinesthetic perception. We are somatically aroused, seduced and captivated by the animate world, the world soul.
Our wild self knows what is being said by nonhuman flora and fauna. We see the sacred in nature through the radiant consciousness of the "otherness" of natural things that springs from the depths of imagination. This is the simplest, most common form of illumination -- overpowering apprehension of the Infinite, scintillating life imminent in all living things.
Walls between the visible and the invisible grow thin, and the Eternal seems to break through into the world with a higher order of reality. This awareness: is so intangible, it strikes like a thunderclap. Then, as now, the thunder literally represents the onset of rain and the reappearance of the sacred fungi.
When the earth was struck by "fire from the gods", it was designated as holy ground. Areas hit by lightning, "thunderstones," or a meteorite gave rise to sacred status. These artifacts of heaven, prototypical sacred stones, had protective, medicinal, and revelatory qualities. (Eliade)
Awe is captivating and immersive, engaging us more with our external world and less with ourselves. We sense the presence of something “larger than ourselves” with which we begin to merge. The wildwood births physical manifestations of mythological archetypes drawn from the subconscious minds of those who enter. As 'mother of the gods, Kybele was first among them.
Our wild self is instinctively, emotionally, viscerally, and sensuously crazy about creation and enchanted by all things and possibilities with earth-infused vivacity. It calms the chaos of the transition and allows the new self to emerge reborn as a living reality. She is the source of our intuited kinship with all biological entities and animated creatures. We have to maintain faith in the process. Movement back and forth between the timeless and temporal existence is a creative passage.
With a sense of containment within a higher dimensional field, the opposites reconcile and new potential is created. The fusional field is invisible to normal perception but contains a welter of unprocessed imaginal information. The fusional complex is an archetypal pattern that organizes life between the known and the unknown. It is facilitated in non-ordinary states of consciousness.
The imaginal metaphor extends to a fundamental description of the universe and our electromagnetic embedding within that greater field. We rarely attend to the deep experiential field we experience with the other in our subtle and physical bodies.
The archetypal force of restoration and self-empowerment, as genuine needs of the psyche, appears as a synesthetic image. Archetypal presence is met with ardent particularized devotion. It is the nightside depth of our worldview. It is who we are before we even think about who we are, our psychosomatic being, our genealogy, the relational field, and cosmic field of the whole. We are centrally involved in the cosmic process.
We seek a vital and authentic life, the bedrock of reality underneath all social masks, emotional possession, and self-deception. It is a dangerous descent that resonates metaphorically with a dark and terrifying passage into the limbo of our own vulnerability, into the netherworld of the belly of the earth. The bottom drops out of our vertical cosmos.
Certain fungi can produce an experience of dreamlike phylogenetic regression back to ameboid, plant, and atomic states. We recover what the world has denied, repressed, and forgotten in our dreams through depth perception. This is the base note of our psychopoetic life song. All life is within us. This psychological awakening is a spiritual initiation that potentially restores meaning to life.
Instead of psychological concepts, engagement appears as high-impact mythological images, the "mythological unconscious" testing our ability to endure and discover integrity in depth. The path leads through the ghost-lands of the unconscious, undead aspects of personality. It illuminates the darkest layer of the inherited personality structure and the daimonic.
We confront the pitiless monsters of archetypal Grief, Loss, Cares, Diseases, Age, Dread, Hunger, Want, Death, Toil, Sleep, Catastrophe, War, and Discord. Our demons are the instinctual impulses and unconscious complexes that overcome and possess us. But it means sitting in the fire of our own fears and suffering while honoring soul's perspective.
We feel the unity of our human being as lived experience. We are endowed with a density that is lived or felt as the stratum of our existence, subject to accident, suffering, and death. It is neither objectively objective or subjective, yet mysterious and intimate. The body is our physical environment and vehicle of our openness. Genealogy can inform us that there are things within us different than we already thought.
Primal Goddess
The Clan Mother or divine Ancestress is chthonic. The word comes from "chthōn," which means "earth" in Greek, associated with things that dwell in or under the earth; chthonic sensuality and visions of chthonic initiation -- the wilderness of emotion and sexuality. The primal woman reminds us we can return back to the Indigenous, that ancient part of ourselves hidden within us, anytime.
Her favored beasts and companions, felines and canines, wolves and wild dogs, are keystone predators. They urge us to ask not what does forest do for these regulator species, but what do top predators do for the forests, which still cover a third of the world. Removing predators leads to deterioration of diversity and the whole system, downgrading the ecosystem.
In her first form, she ruled the wild -- space, place, and landscape. Paleolithic hunters sought supernatural help from the hunting goddess. She is a wild woman archetype embodied within us. Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes her as the instinctual nature of women, "a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing."
"Mother of the Gods," "Mountain Mother," Matar Kubileya is a transcendent helper/healer. She is wise and quietly gives us breath, trust, and inner peace with her indomitable spirit, manifesting in the world through the medium of creative force.
“Mother Night is the quintessential medial woman, the woman who can walk in two worlds … 'the one who knows' and who can reveal solid ways of living and unleashing creative life in both worlds.” (Estes)
She is "the generative power of the goodness of the core self—that is, all creativity and understanding that lies out of sight in darkness—often called the unconscious." Mistress of mountains and springs, her Phrygian cult monuments were carved from living rock faces. Her cosmogonic face was of black meteoric stone.
The androgynous goddess mother Cybele was represented by a meteorite, embodied in a particular meteorite called ‘born of stone’ (Johnston in Cybele, Attis and Related Cults edited by Eugene Lane 1996, p. 109). The main statue of the Artemis Temple at Ephesus may have been a black meteorite because she was said to have fallen from the sky. A black meteorite, representing the goddess, was brought to Rome from Asia Minor in 204 BCE.
Meeting the God-Plant
Fungi form a third order of being with plants and animals, much like psyche or soul is a third domain between physical and spiritual realms. Geographic speciation implies that humans and the other biological denizens of their indigenous regions evolve together in the shared environment because of ecological pressures. Neolithic hunter-gatherers would have had no problem finding such specimens and discovering their magical properties.
Myths arise from such natural juxtapositions with the natural world. Myths and cults evolve and differentiate much like species over millennia. In her Mysteries, Cybele mourned the death of her beloved and the passing of her devotees. They were transformed by her communion, mystique, and the attainment of sacred knowledge (gnosis) through identification with Attis, her son-lover. They were collectively known as the Galli.
Sacred plants become metaphors of primordial psychic experience, as well as eucharist and epiphany. In the myths of Attis, Kybele bargained with fate and the gods so his hair and regenerated phallus grow under the pine tree forever - an analogy for mycelium and fruits of the amanita muscaria mushroom, a likely source for the revelers mania, dropping the habitual self for a primordial regression.
The soul of Attis requires a psychic reset because he is stuck, unable to live compulsively with or without the Mother. This fixation turns his blocked passion into total destruction and the psychotic act of horrible self-mutilation, mirrored in the mushroom life cycle as more than metaphor. The mytheme is with us today, 5,000 years later. It can only be described as a shamanic ordeal, a soma sacrifice of all that is material. Reset, the psychotic areas of psyche become creative again. This is the basis of psychedelic therapy.
Those who ate the mushrooms felt the god within themselves as reality dissolved into wriggling serpents. Shepherds tending flocks would have found the fly agaric high in the wild mountains after rains, when the mountains of the goddess were raging with thunderstorms on the slopes.
Not much is known about Near Eastern ancient mysteries or ecstatic cults, but more and more archaeological evidence indicates the ancients used psychoactive plants in their frenzied worship. It remains controversial, but the area north of the Black Sea is known to have antic tribes that used cannabis, poppies, ephedra, and other consciousness altering plants. The meaning of symbols is experienced and engaged with in a visceral manner.
Arguably, psycho-active mushrooms are the original sacrament. We know psycho-active plants were sought out in antic times. Mushroom stipes were found in Chauvet Cave, suggesting the caps had been consumed off the stems. It self-sealed from a catastrophic rock avalanche 3,600 years BP. The art itself may be 40-28,000 Years BP. The oldest cave art depictions of mushrooms are from the paleo Selva Pascuala rock shelter, a landscape formation in eastern Spain discovered by an archeologist in 1918.
Spores of both boleteus and agaric mushrooms were discovered on the teeth of the Paleolithic Red Lady of el Miron, who died nearly 19,000 years ago. Further suggestions of symbolic fusion appear over 10,000 years ago: Göbekli Tepe has an engraving of a female figure from layer II in a squatting position, likely giving birth. But she has a most peculiar mushroom-ic head. This is interpreted today as a prototype representation of the creative Earth goddess.
The Phrygian goddess, Kybele, characterized by features of wild nature, was represented primarily by predatory birds. She would have been worshiped in that area from antiquity. In the oldest Anatolian cults, Cybele was associated with mountains, hawks, and lions. She was worshiped as "the mother of all the gods" in mountainous settings. She would have been worshiped in that area from antiquity.
It may not have been a cohesive mystery religion, but nothing would prevent celebrants and priests from potentiating their own revels and initiations with the psychedelics, or mixing them with herbs and honey to create nectar and preserve them. The Minoans added mushrooms to fermented honey. We find icons of Attis in mushroom forms, coinciding with his legends that describe the effects of imbibing fly agaric.
As one of the oldest cults of Asia Minor, there is no reason to presume the revels of Kybele and associated godforms excluded such methods. The pine tree was sacred to her and beneath it mushrooms fruited in profusion.
The natural dampness and shade of pine-covered mountain caves are often overlooked as prime locations for wild fungus, and the mountainous regions around the Mediterranean had no lack of oracular caves sacred to the Mother Goddess and the rites of her beloved. They would be well-known to mountain wanderers, shamans, and shepherds like Attis -- as well as the eunuch priests of Cybele.
Mystery cults released the soul from material bondage through direct contact in trance or ecstasy. In her Mysteries, Cybele mourned the death of her beloved and the passing of her devotees. They were transformed by her communion, mystique, and the attainment of sacred knowledge (gnosis), through identification with Attis, her son-lover.
Attis was later identified by the Greeks as Dionysus, and the Persian Mithra. Attis was a shepherd, a god of wandering mountainsides and guardian of the flock. Her priests were collectively known as the Galli. Did their frenzied intoxication come from the "drink of Gall" and was this deliriant, hallucinogenic, and entheogen?
Arnobius of Sicca makes it very clear that wine was forbidden to initiates of Attis‘ mysteries. It was forbidden for those polluted with wine to enter a sanctuary. Still, a type of frenzied intoxication occurred in the rituals of the Divine Bridegroom. "The marriage bed, however, might be interpreted as the ecstatic state itself; what rendered this marriage sacred was the very risk of dying these initiates exposed themselves to in the deliberate over-consumption of a toxic hallucinogen, the god‘s own flesh and blood."
In the myths of Attis, Kybele bargained with fate and the gods after his death, so his hair and regenerated phallus would grow under the pine tree forever. This presents an analogy for mycelium and cyclic fruiting of the amanita muscaria mushroom, a likely source for the revelers mania. They dropped the habitual self for a primordial regression. It can only be described as a sacrificial shamanic ordeal.
Ancient Anatolia was associated with the Phygian cap worn by Attis, a particular style hat, also known as the liberty cap. Wearing it denoted ecstatic experience. Psilocybe semilanceata, also commonly known as the liberty cap, is a species of fungus which still can be found in Turkey, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ukraine and Pakistan. It is associated with cattle dung and deer droppings, another easy source of acquisition, often collected as fuel. Bulls were prominent in Cybele worship, harking back to Crete.
Those who ate the mushrooms felt the god within themselves as reality dissolved into wriggling serpents. Shepherds tending flocks would have found the fly agaric high in the wild mountains after rains, when the mountains of the goddess were raging with thunderstorms on the slopes. This entheogenic tradition centered on mycolatry (the religious veneration of fungi) that passed into Rome through the Hellenized Phrygian cult of Cybele, the Great Mother Goddess. (Attrell)
"The entheogenic effects of psychedelic mushrooms were so deemed worthy of cult by a collective cultural unconscious that the mythological figure of Attis was adopted to anthropomorphize and conceal the Amanita Muscaria mushroom. Attis, having been adopted from the same Indo-European tradition of dying and rising vegetation gods as Soma and Dionysus, was fundamentally a spiritual personification of 'ek statis' itself, the cult's conduit to the Goddess of the esoteric mysteries.
When cleverly used in conjunction within a darkened and consecrated set and setting; an emphasis on ecstatic rhythm and music and orgiastic dances; and a deep inner mysticism elaborated by fasting, rituals and myths, the mysteries of Attis and Cybele would have had an immense effect on the wider religious and cultural landscape of the Roman world prior to the rise of Christianity."
Daniel Attrell argues that, "the myths of this vegetable god, so-called the Divine Bridegroom,‘ particularly in manifestation of the Phrygian Attis and the Greek Dionysus, is deeply rooted in the life-cycle, cultivation, treatment, consumption of a tree-born hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria." He summarizes in his 2013 thesis:
Dionysian Semiotics: Myco-Dendrolatry and Other Shamanic Motifs in the Myths and Rituals of the Phrygian Mother:
"The administration of initiation rites by an ecstatic specialist, now known to western scholarship by the general designation of 'shaman‘, has proven to be one of humanity‘s oldest, most widespread, and continuous magico-religious traditions. At the heart of their initiatory rituals lay an ordeal–a metaphysical journey - almost ubiquitously brought on by the effects of a life-changing hallucinogenic drug experience. To guide their initiates, these shaman worked with a repertoire of locally acquired instruments, costumes, dances, and ecstasy-inducing substances."
Those conserving the secrets of plant-lore, astrology, theurgy and mystical philosophy satisfied the role of the shaman in Greco-Roman society. The rites they delivered were a form of ritualized ecstasy that provided an orderly context for religiously-oriented intoxication.
"In the eastern Mediterranean, these ecstatic cults were most often held in honor of a great mother goddess and her perennially dying-and-rising consort. The goddess‘ religious dramas enacted in cultic ritual stressed the importance of fasting, drumming, trance-inducing music, self-mutilation, and a non-alcoholic ritual intoxication. Far and wide the dying consort worshiped by these cults was a god of vegetation, ecstasy, revelation, and salvation; by ingesting his body initiates underwent a profound mystical experience."
In The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, John Allegro identifies amanitas with ancient drug cults. The Amanita muscaria does not contain psilocybin or psilocin. Rather, the hallucinogenic chemicals this mushroom contains are muscimol and ibotenic acid.
Clark Heinrich (2002) describes in Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy how initiates were made aware of "meeting" the god-plant and being in the presence of a god. "One can also feel extremely energetic and strong, and this strength is not an illusion. It is well known among Siberian users of the fly agaric that feats of tremendous physical endurance are possible under its influence."
Such symbolism links easily with the myths of self-castration of Attis. Its bisexual morphology is symbolic: "the correct god-plant... grows in the mountains, low to the ground; it contains the power of a god; it resembles a serpent in several ways; it stands on one "staff' and is phallic in appearance; it has white patches covering its "breast"; and it glows red like a live coal."
It can actually simulate or produce with poison a near-death experience or the psychic ego-death common to psychedelics. "The foreskin of the penis is related to the cap of the fly agaric. It could easily be construed to refer to the whole cap and not just the universal veil, and since the entire cap separates from the base at "circumcision," cutting off the cap still leaves the phallic stalk intact."
Heinrich continues, "bloody" juice flows from the moistened" cap. A woman using the fly agaric in similar fashion by herself could also address the mushroom directly with the same statement, "Surely you are a bloody husband to me." For that matter, so could a man."
Daniel Attrell describes how, "What appears to be afoot in Kybele's myth is a description of Amanita muscaria‘s life-cycle at the base of a tree, which begins in a spore dropped during the blooming and potential extirpation of a preceding generation of mushrooms. The spore falls into the earth and unites mycorrhizally with its host tree. The tree, which is the dismembered member of the once androgynous goddess, and its red fruit emerge first in the myth. The fruit conjoined with moisture...begets the birth of Attis." (Attrell)
Attis, his resurrecting "little finger", and his ever-growing hair (mycelium) are mythical symbols for the deified intoxicant.
Dactyli (Gr.) From daktulos, “a finger” is the name given to the Phrygian Hierophants of Kybele, who were regarded as the greatest magicians and exorcists. In the era of Hittites, Chaldean priests took refuge in Anatolia. The priests were five or ten in number because of the five fingers on one hand that blessed, and the ten on both hands which evoke the gods. Was that code for a powerful dosage? They also healed by manipulation and hypnosis.
Curetes were Priest-Initiates of ancient Crete, in the service of Cybele. Initiation in their temples was very severe; it lasted twenty-seven days, during which time the aspirant was left by himself in a crypt, undergoing terrible trials in a secret subterranean vault.
There were crypts under every temple in antiquity, used for initiation and burial. Kybele was also associated with cannabis, "the mother plant," so we might speculate that such initiates were anointed with concentrated oils to enhance their underworld experience, similar to Egyptian initiations (Chris Bennett).
Bennett claims the visionary dream was said to awaken the Gallus to their new identification with the Goddess. Randy P. Conner commented; “It is possible to see the… drinking or eating of special substances as a fated occurrence that triggered the awareness of one’s destiny. Such experiences were said to cause an individual to experience sophrene, to ‘recover one’s senses’” (Conner 1993).
Pythagoras was initiated into these rites and came out victorious. Zosimos and Paracelsus spoke of the homunculus as devouring himself, and giving birth to himself—the death/rebirth necessary for casting off the old and inviting in the new self image.
This bisexual goddess was worshiped with orgies of ecstatic freedom under various names for the mystery of self-reproduction. A single divine life conferred spiritual intimacy with the underworld and protective cosmic influence. The Anatolians and Ionians worshiped a divine family of a mother, and a male deity who was her son, her spouse, her brother, and sometimes father. But they were considered one bisexual being.
Her names have morphed over the years, but not her archetypal qualities. Kybele is her Greek form, and Cybele is Roman. Believers and devotees never forgot her grace or miraculous visits. As Cybele, her authority predates the Olympians, and through early Cretan practice she embodies the Titan Rhea, archaic Hekate, and even the all-encompassing Mother Goddess Gaia, and deities of Eleusis. When the Romans took over Asia Minor, Artemis became Diana and Ephesus became the provincial Roman Capital.
Later the Vatican was built over her pagan Roman shrine. The oriental cults of Cybele, Isis, and Mithras were Romanized myth, salvation, and ethics in the cults of Cybele. As a side note, Heinrich has reported that monks used tonsure and their red skull cap as symbols of amanita rites. The preparation was rubbed on and absorbed through the bald scalp, rather than ingested. Many priestly vestments hark back to the vivid red and white of the mushroom.
The eastern Kybele cult was absorbed into the Ophite Gnostic 'heresy' of serpent worship -- a Kundalini path that worshiped Kybele as the gnostic Sophia. This harks back to the dual raised-bodied serpents flanking the figure seen in the Neolithic totem from Gobekli Tepe, pre-dating any Indian syncretism. The serpent was primal cosmic energy, creativity, and wisdom. The serpent or dragon Adepts of divine wisdom taught primeval mysteries to archaic mankind.
In this sense Kybele was the prototypical Black Madonna, the 'black light' of the undulant darkness, connected with caring, tending, childbirth, animals, honey, and bees. Caring for the earth and regeneration enlivens our care for the body.
She is aware of our hardships, the uncertainty and unconsciousness of the dark cloud of unknowing, uncertainty, ignorance, and innocence. Suffering brings us into the unknown. But she reminds us, “Have You Forgotten? I Am Your Mother. You Are Under My Protection.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Untie the Strong Woman says, “There is a promise Holy Mother makes to us, that any soul needing comfort, vision, guidance, or strength can cry out to her, flee to her protection, and Blessed Mother will immediately arrive with veils flying. She will place us under her mantle for refuge, and give us the warmth of her most compassionate touch, and strong guidance about how to go by the soul’s lights.”
Death & Rebirth
Stace (1960) identifies nine qualities of the psychedelic experience as follows: 1) unity of all things; 2) transformation of space and time; 3) deeply felt positive mood; 4) sacredness; 5) objectivity and reality; 6) paradoxicality; 7) alleged ineffability; 8) transiency, and 9) persisting positive changes in subsequent behavior. In the practice of mysticism there is identification with progressively more subtle "bodies" or vehicles of consciousness, culminating in a transform from a mental or causal body to a vehicle of pure Light.
In experiential psychotherapy, transformation results from deepening within the flow of psychic imagery, progressively identifying with more primal forms, and ultimately with formlessness. In psychedelic experience, expansion of consciousness dissolves ego boundaries leading to morphological transformations and ecstatic communion. In alchemy, one sought not only to find or create the Stone, but also to apply it, or use it creatively in the everyday world. Now, we might speak of integrating or actualizing the results of our transformations in daily life. Thus, self-actualization or self-realization implies the grounding of the spiritual fruits of inner exploration.
The liquid form of the Philosopher's Stone was known as the UNIVERSAL SOLVENT. According to the alchemists, the operation of solutio (liquification) has a twofold effect: it causes old forms to disappear and new regenerate forms to emerge. To a rigid consciousness, the primal ocean of the unconscious is experienced as chaotic, violent, irrational processes of generation and destruction. Through "creative regression," the generic form of ego death, consciousness recycles, recursively bending back upon itself. The direction is a recapitulation of, a re-experiencing of sequences from earlier life, conception and birth experience, ancestral awareness, genetic and physiological recognitions, molecular and atomic perception, and quantum consciousness. As consciousness explores and expands, ego dissolves.
Pure consciousness, the fundamental luminosity, is the ground state of unborn form. The generic purpose of ego death is to liberate our embodied being, precipitating communion with and re-patterning by the Whole. When all forms finally dissolve into unconditioned consciousness, the ground state of the Nature Mind is revealed as the mystic Void, the womb of creation. When the constructed forms which hold personality together are voluntarily relinquished, consciousness "liquifies" and rapidly moves toward the unconditioned state.
Though easy to say, it is sometimes difficult to achieve such liberation from the mental-conceptual activity of the nervous system. When we do, the quiescent nervous system is open and receptive to the conscious recognition of pure energy transforms with no interpretations. The Universal Solvent dissolves problems, heals, allows life to flow in new, creative patterns. These new patterns embody the evolutionary dynamic. According to chaos theory, free-flowing energy is capable of self-organization. In consciousness this means that the obstructions to free flowing energy must first be dissolved.
Through re-creational ego death, consciousness dissolves into healing communion with the whole of existence, renewing itself, emerging with a new creative potential. The need for the periodic destruction of outmoded systems implies the value of recycling consciousness through death/rebirth experience. The universal solvent is not ordinary water, but "philosophical" water, the water of life, aqua permanens, aqua mercurialis. It is also the panacea, "elixer vitae," "tincture," or universal medicine. To periodically dip into these healing waters has a tonic, rejuvenating effect which pervades all aspects of being, like a soothing balm. This divine water signifies the return of The Feminine, a reflective consciousness with inner awareness and archetypal spiritual perceptions.
This Feminine Divinity is the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, the universal animating principle, the upwelling spring of the creative Imagination, the dynamic flow of imagery, pattern, and form. This dynamic has been known as Isis, Shakti, Maya, Shekinah, Sophia, Demeter/Persephone, Mary. In psychedelic mysticism, the animating principle is being referred to as Gaian Consciousness (Abraham, 1992), which we might view as a rebirth of ancient ecstatic, communal consciousness. It is the psychobiological basis of deep ecology, the flow of relationships.
The return of chaos heralds the "greening of consciousness," the greening of the cultural wasteland. Hillman (1985) describes the anima not as a projection of, but rather the projector of psyche. We are contained within Her fantasy, not She within ours.
Grinnell (1973) describes the transformative process of solutio which facilitates the fluid, mobile basis of consciousness: For aqua permanens is a mode of the arcane substance; its symbol is water or sea-water, an all-pervading essence of anima mundi, the innermost and secret numinosum in man and the universe, that part of God which formed the quintessence and real substance of Physis, at once the highest supercelestial waters of wisdom and the spirit of life pervading inorganic matter. The arcane descriptors of this paradoxical liquid Stone are cryptic, couched in metaphor. But what does it mean experiencially and pragmatically? How does this chaotic transformative process engineer our consciousness?
The divine water, as a liquid symbol of the Self, can be experienced in many ways. It has been described as innocuously as the "stream of consciousness," and as poetically as the "Heart of The River of Created Forms." Solutio implies the liquification of consciousness through the dissolution of rigidities which inhibit free flow. They include roles, game patterns, defense strategies, rigid attitudes and beliefs, interpretations, complexes, "old" myths, and "frozen" energy surrounding traumas which manifests as fear and pain. Fossilized or ossified energies create obstructions to free flow, like boulders in a stream produce turbulence. Destructuring transformative processes can dissolve them, increasing the sense of flow.
This "liquified" consciousness is psychedelic, a nonordinary expanded awareness which dissolves fixations and habits, and loosens cramped attitudes. Mystic ecstasy, or the psychedelic state is mind-manifesting, consciousness expanding. It dissolves the identification of our consciousness with our histories, bodies, emotions, thoughts, and even beliefs. We are free to explore myriad forms, structures, and patterns, and/or become formless, resting in that unborn, unconditioned, unmodified healing state. We experience the essence of other forms of existence.
The Oneness of all life and existence is directly experienced through a variety of transformations ranging from plant and animal identifications to planetary and universal consciousness. Entering the turbulent flow of the stream of consciousness, we can ride its currents back to the Source, pure unconditioned cosmic consciousness. We can imbibe the life-giving qualities of this "water" through mind-expanding experiential contact with this deep consciousness. The transformative process is also reflected in our modern physical worldview as chaos theory, which we can view as a modern "myth," a new metaphor for the dynamics of consciousness.
Chaos is ubiquitous in nature, pervading all dynamic processes, perturbing them unpredictably. Chaos theory shows us that nature is continually unfolding new forms from the chaotic matrix of creation. Our dynamic consciousness is an essentially chaotic process. Chaos tracks a time evolution with sensitive dependence on initial conditions. When we "return" experiencially to the "initial conditions" of our existence, our whole being is holistically repatterned. Our historical limitations are superseded by the creative power of the eternal Now. We can allow chaos, as the universal solvent, to liquify consciousness and re-create ourselves.
The journey into deep consciousness appears inherently chaotic because the state of uncertainty pervades each moment of transition. Underlying moments of transience there are momentary blanks in awareness--little voids--flickering microstates which repattern each phase. Whether the experience is one of loss of personal boundaries or direct perception of stark, raw reality, or visionary dreams, there is no predicting where the chaotic orbit of consciousness will roam next. To embrace chaos in our consciousness journeys, therefore means to cooperate and flow with the transformative process, opening ourselves to our deepest emergent potential.
It's O.K. to let go periodically and temporarily become unstructured nothingness and open to holistic re-patterning. Chaos is self-organizing, self-iterating, and self-generating. It is an evolutionary force. The tendency of new forms emerging from chaos is toward a higher degree of adaptation, hence evolution (Kauffmann, 1991). This "recycling" of consciousness leads to a self-referential vortex. Chaotic systems revolve around nexus points, known as strange attractors, because of their unpredictable quality. Rather than being "point-like," they are more like vortices within vortices.
This is the vortex of the system, the vortex of self, where all levels cross. It overwhelms or tangles the mental processes, the self-imaging processes that maintain the illusion of stable personality and individual boundaries. In solutio, the body is joined with the soul and spirit. The skin-boundary dissolves into visceral as well as spiritual perception. Awareness of physical processes may be greatly amplified, appearing as impressions, intuitions, sensations, sounds, odors. The body is always speaking silently. Through this raw, physical expression, that which was solid becomes liquified, dissolved, deliteralized.
The concrete image of the body "morphs" into the flow of pure energy, in a variation of Transubstantiation. It is the "rapture" of being seized up into the heavenly realm. The flow of dynamic energy from the deep Self reawakens and activates the body, and also that portion of the unconscious that the body carries. The body not only carries, but is the memory of the entire evolutionary cycle. Consciousness can access any portion of this material memory through creative regression. The body manifests kinesthetic, preverbal, and preconceptual memory of its direct experience. Immersion in the healing creative energy flow is like a spiritual baptism, which facilitates creative reformation of ordinary consciousness, and even the physical body.
1) RETURN TO THE WOMB OR PRIMAL STATE
The alchemist Paracelsus said, "He who enters the kingdom of God must first enter his mother and die." That death-like silence is also our mother, the virgin womb of the imagination. The dynamics of "creative regression" are common to mystical experience, psychedelic exploration, and therapeutic consciousness journeys. All lead to immersion in the flow of the stream of consciousness.
Creative regression is a generic form of the myth of the eternal return, chronic recurrence, reiteration. In the dynamics of chaos theory we find this recursive motion in the concept of iteration--self-similarity--which produces the similarity in infinitely descending scales of fractal generation. Iteration is like a stretching and folding of the spacetime continuum. Experientially it manifests within us as a spiritualizing instinct, a recursive "bending back" of instinct toward that which is primordial and divine.
Thus, whether induced through psychoactive substances, mystical transport, or experiential psychotherapy typical imagery recycles, recapitulates, or reiterates cascades of impressionistic transformations spanning the entire spectrum of archetypal experiences--morphological transformations. These include but are not limited to childhood, birth, embryonic development, ancestral, mythic, genetic, evolutionary, universal, and quantum consciousness. Access to the entire continuum of organic and inorganic evolution as well as the collective unconscious becomes available. That information most pertinent to the whole self emerges in the stream of consciousness as virtual experience. What is pertinent is what gets spontaneously "downloaded," and it repeats and reiterates the basic issues in yet another, eternally creative way.
Stan Grof has cataloged an extensive taxonomy of these states, most notably in THE ADVENTURE OF SELF-DISCOVERY (1988). Such experiences of cosmic consciousness constitute a "return to the Mother," the blissful fusion of primal union, at both personal and universal levels. The direction of this dynamic process is recursive, bending back through deep time, ontology, and phylogeny. It echoes the semantic roots of the words religion and yoga, which imply a "linking backward" in the bond between gods and man, a craving for ecstasy, and transcendence of the limitations of physical form (Milkman, 1987).
Jung called this dynamic an opus contra naturam, a work against nature. But chaos theory shows us it is actually quite organic, natural, and instinctual. In alchemy it was the Great Work. Consciousness turns back on itself, reiterating each level of organization, de-structuring each strata as it dives deeper toward the unconditioned, formless beginning, or "unborn" state. This primal state is amniotic bliss experienced as the Void, the cosmic womb. Images of the Great Mother system become reactivated, though not exactly in their original form. Imagery like fractals is self-similar, but not entirely identical.
This creative regression is to the prepersonal domain, the preverbal, preconceptual domain, not the transpersonal spiritual domain (transverbal, transconceptual). Typically in the first few dreamhealing sessions, a person will enter a dream symbol doorway which leads back to a conception memory. They may or may not recognize it as such during the journey. But in content, the symbolism is very clear. The imagery is fundamental or primal, appearing as a dance of energy, matter, and consciousness--the body-ego's conscious experience. These images are close to the stuff of our creation -- the prima materia -- of our existence. We may experience it as free-floating: a paradox of chaos and a deep-felt sense of flowing and peace.
The imagery here is psychedelic -- consciousness expanding -- an autonomous manifestation of imagination. The panoply of the ceaseless transformation of energy may overwhelm the senses, leading to a sense of total chaos. There is nothing to do but let go, surrender to it, merge with it, flow with it. The dancing energy waves and patterns are perceived as deep whorls, spinning spirals, black holes, infinite voids, gray clouds of nothingness. There is melding of the senses -- synesthesia -- such as "tasting" music, "seeing" sound, etc. Simple throbbing and other extremely primitive sensations may be experienced. Experience of this state produces a new acceptance of the original conditions of conception, and re-structuring of the primal self-image.
We go into the primal chaos to begin the process of reformation from our pre-structural beginning. In essence, we re-enter the womb as we are initiated in the mysteries of the psyche. We re-conceive our primal self image, healed by communion with the creative Source.
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REFERENCES
Attrell, Daniel, 2013, Dionysian Semiotics: Myco-Dendrolatry and Other Shamanic Motifs in the Myths and Rituals of the Phrygian Mother. https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/7857/Attrell_Daniel.pdf?sequence=1
Bennett, Chris, The Mother Plant of the Goddess – Cannabis
https://canniseur.com/author/chris-bennett/
Birgitte Bøgh, The Phrygian Background of Kybele
https://www.academia.edu/1229474/The_Phrygian_Background_of_Kybele?email_work_card=title
Clark Heinrich, 2002) Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy, Inner Traditions, (Rochester: Park Street).
Roller, Lynn E., In search of god the mother : the cult of Anatolian Cybele. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1342&context=ijts-transpersonalstudies Cybele, Attis, and the Mysteries of the "Suffering Gods" A Transpersonal Interpretation by Evgueni A. Tortchinov
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Iona Miller is a nonfiction writer for the academic and popular press, clinical hypnotherapist (ACHE) and multimedia artist. Her work is an omni-sensory fusion of intelligence, science-art, new physics, symbolism, source mysticism, futuring, and emergent paradigm shift, creating a unique viewpoint. She is interested in extraordinary human potential and experience, and the EFFECTS or unexpected consequences of doctrines of religion, science, psychology, and the arts. Miller practiced as an innovative Clincal Hypnotherapist through the 1980s and 1990s. She now enjoys active retirement in the Rogue Valley in So. Oregon, USA.
She serves on the Advisory Boards of Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, DNA Decipher Journal, and Scientific God Journal, as well as the Board of Directors of Medigrace, Inc. & Calm Birth; a Miami-based Integral Medicine institute. She also works in Risk Management and Cyber Security.
She has worked with the Science-Art Centre (Australia) since 2003, and the Editorial Board of CRAFT, AU (Community Resilience through Action for Future Transitions) from its inception. The Center for the Study of Digital Life (CSDL) was formed (2012) as a 'digital' RAND Corporation, to try to avoid WW III or worse, by coordinating effects of East, West, and Digital spheres.
