Kybele: Embodied Insights
Embodied Insights
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Combined with rhythmic sounds the body is driven to ecstatic experience. Combined with swaying movements, the body becomes a conduit for experiencing the divine. Trance is amplified by such reverberating resonance and vision, images of the unseen world. Hypnosis, used consciously or unconsciously is always a process of induction, deepening, and emerging.
We can also imagine what that means to our contemporary lives. In affirming ourselves, we affirm all existence. Awe as a “self-transcendent emotion,”
the upper reaches of pleasure on the boundary of fear. We tremble, but nevertheless come closer to the extraordinary event, engaging the fascinating force of the sacred event on our human psyche that unravels the very fabric of reality.
Was there a founding awefull event that gave rise to her cult? Mimetic culture and ritualized behavior (singing, dancing, and chanting) precedes mythic culture. Perhaps they watched sacred animals consume sacred plants, feeling awe at their unexpected discovery. Ritual cannibalism became symbolic.
Kybele is a Mysterium Fascinans, terrifying and fascinating, urgent, awesome, as well as dreadful, fearful, and overwhelming. We are disturbed or fascinated by our future, by our fate. These forgotten energies are passed down in an unconscious generational, or epigenetic way -- a spiral or vortex in culture.
Like the amanita mushrooms, Kybele has a radically creative and destructive aspect. She is a spore-goddess whose nature accreted layers of meaning over time. If she is the collective unconscious ("mother of the gods") itself, she begins where our consciousness stops. When we consciously embody this intimate wisdom, our bodies become temples of her living spirit.
There is always the potential in psychoactive plants for possession and inundation by potentially overwhelming affects like dissolution and disintegration, depressive or manic moods, unconscious or taboo fantasies, compulsions, and archetypal figures. Yet in this way things are kept open and alive. Kybele is a goddess of transgressions, the crossing of taboos.
Joseph Campbell reminds us, "And where we had thought to find an abomination we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outwards we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone we shall be with all the world."
Therefore, Kybele appears as intensely autonomous, full of rage to the point of madness, and profoundly inhuman. In some myths her primordial androgynous nature revolted and inflamed the gods who took action against her.
Her cult-worship was an unbridled primitive spectacle. Many aspects of it were later rejected, abandoned or tabooed by Hellenic and Roman culture. Yet she retained her inner throne. Now we have the earth-based Neo-Techno-Tribal shamanism movement -- communal ecstatic dance and transformation festivals.
We cannot suppress Kybele, but must 'see through' her dangerous images, through our enlivened senses. We must immerse in her destructive element so we can incorporate our darker side even though it is wildly dangerous. She promises liberation or metamorphosis from rationalistic one-sidedness.
In the Middle East and Anatolia, many hermetic and pagan religions, Greek and Hellenic cultures used psychoactive plants as a serious, part of religious rituals. They bridged the gap between merely intoxicated revel and numinous revelations. The impact of the psychedelic experience and imagination was enormous to the configuration of many religious and mythological characters, and archetypes.
Kybele's mythic forest remains untrammeled. Jung said, "When we do enter that forest, we enter the domain of the Wild Mother (i.e., the chthonic unconscious, the thoroughly chaotic and undifferentiated domain of Eros). We encounter both mythical beasts and domesticated animals, demons of every sort and description, and eventually the positive and negative aspects of sexuality. As we emerge from each encounter, we are impressed with the living reality of the archetypes -- entities in the depths of the psyche that seem not only to be alive and enduring, but also marked by something approaching consciousness."
Her animals are both earthly and celestial (zodiac). Cult-animals, such as the lion, panther, bears, bulls, and predatory birds, are a way of taking on their powers. Totems are generally animals, rarely plants, never natural phenomena. The clan ancestor decends from the totem. Numerous features of Greek religion link animals and gods. Their importance echoes through history from indigenous tribes to philosophers:
“As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.” (Pythagoras) "Until mankind himself extends his circle of compassion to all living things, he will not know peace." (Dr. Albert Schweitzer)
There are traces, too, of a closer identification, in which gods (and/or their worshipers) appear in animal or part-animal form. Animals taught us what to eat, what was medicine, how to dig, weave, and hunt--how to clear a way through dark forests, the trepidation of the unknown. Birds wove, probed and pounded.
Animals are also symbols or psychic images, often seen in the most ancient cave art. We still typically put animals on nursery walls, rather than other cultural icons. The Greek word for zodiac, zoidion, has two distinct meanings: 1) a living being or an "animal", and 2) an image, figure, or picture of something; where something is located, "the place of a living being," or "the place of an image." The 12 houses were called "places," "domiciles," or "regions."
We still contain this archaic mode deep within ourselves, within our psyche, much as we retain entoptic visionary sensation. As embodied mythopoesis (myth-making), Kybele mediates between the boundaries of the known and unknown, the civilized and the wild, the worlds of the living and the dead, and the continuity of lives both living and dead (often in dreams or visions).
There is an Ecology of Souls. The life-world is always there as the background of all human experiences. She is the primal consciousness that instructs all life how to live in the world and not just on it.
The primordial female figure is connected with the underworld, ancestors, and the power of the deceased. The archaic cult of Kybele, with its mania, frenzy, chaos, thrashing, shrieks, droning horns, screaming flutes, and cacophony drives altered states.
The sacred mushroom is identified by its common Greek metaphor as an erect penis. The severed phallus-mushroom is an analogue of the deity. The severed member is a phallus with its resemblance to its botanical analogue.
Her revels might be likened to the first primal scream therapy. We have maligned the forests, the species, and the life force of the planet. We need a perceptual rebirth. One that comes from the heart. Paleolithic Kybele is a forest of symbolism -- the invisible made visible in psychic events, soul process, and revelatory meaning.
Her rustic aesthetic is a field of immediacy, of encounter, organized within a distribution of the sensible, a more primitive form of rhythmic language than words. Even largely unconscious flowing information elicits physical responses. We can speak imagistically like dreams themselves.
We have a visceral connection to the vocal terrain through its utterance and through the wordless knowing of intuitive listening in space. Rolling on the ground screaming might be the beginning of the way.
We can explore evidence for cult use of psychoactive substances. Though a lifeform radically alien to ours, fungal nature is sublime, a hidden world, a miraculous web of connections, interactions and communication. We are stopped dead in our tracks and have no choice but to stare in awe at our relationship with the living world.
Fungi raised bread and fermented drinks. Typically a variety of fungi are used as food for the soul in folk medicine. Rain induces the mushrooms to fruit. The sacred violet also blooms in spring around the Festival of Attis. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet, and the ways we think, feel and behave.
Mycelium is a web of wonder that underlies every step we take. The natural world is more fantastic than any fantasy, if you have the means to perceive it. Psychoactive fungi, 'true food,' embody that means of revealing essential being as the fundamental phenomena of psychic reality.
Belief in something is closely related to the way of life of the believers and their entangled lives. Religion clearly relates to lived reality, cultural processing of primary processes and powers in human life. Psyche itself in its own imaginative visibility is irreducible.
The cult of Kybele-Attis concerns fundamental love of imagination, and communion with the goddess by amplifying that primordial imaginal capacity and inherent urge. Because such love is obsessively self-referential, it is symbolically incestuous, an introversion to an imaginal character in an imaginal realm. The 'fantasy principle' is more fundamental than even the 'pleasure' or 'reality' principles.
Old academic cult models of automatic ascending development are obsolete and presumptuous. Over time, her Phrygian cults and iconography were transformed from her archaic meteoric and monumental rock-cut images in the Phrygian highlands.
Her mysteries were private rites with a chthonic aspect. They were eventually subsumed by the influences and interpretations of her Greek, Roman and other foreign devotees.
This ancient and mysterious figure has been altered so many times, we don't know her true origin or meaning. More than a fertility icon, the mountain-cave goddess is the doorway to the mystical encounter that leads to rebirth. Her perfect image is breath -- wind, soul, breath of creation, breath of life.
Rather than a vegetation-god, Attis the personification of an intoxicating sacred plant, linked to the pine tree that hosts the visionary mushroom, its miraculous mystery fruit. It mimics the androgynous male/female metamorphosis central to the myth. (Ruck)
Sacrificing virility to the gods can be a metaphor for the surrender of ordinary consciousness to ecstatic transformation. The living mythology of Kybele-Attis has a shamanic core from the Archaic period, which can be seen in her ancient artifacts, connection to the dead, and ritualized communicative behavior. The sacramental meal was also a love-feast.
The nocturnal ritual likely preceded the myths and legends, which are a multi-cultural confabulation. Hellenistic, Dionysian, and Roman literature later imported notions that re-directed and sanitized the original Anatolian tales but never influenced the native Phrygian practice in return. Outmoded archaeological interpretations of such a hodge-podge of eras and imported concepts and characterizations are a further impediment.
The totem animal or vegetable was sacred, so eaten as an act of communion. The ritual of Attis, a vegetation god, specifically included, "feeding on milk as if we were being born again." They danced erotically in the service of the goddess and god, generating power through the compelling force of rhythm of movement. They were carried beyond themselves.
In the evocative dance, life is ordered and reverts to potent primeval feeling and motion. Feelings are more than personal, reflecting universal phenomena working in our unconscious -- structures of behavior and feeling called by the names of vivifying divinities. Feeling accurately identifies the nature of the ancient mythology.
Every archetypal image has its own insights, excess and intensity. With the feeling function we reduce intellectual speculation to matters close at hand, personal issues of food and nature.
During the creative process, our own attributes, states, feelings and emotions are transferred onto the materials by a transformative function. They transform into an affect of nourishment that provides a regenerative sensibility which is healing.
The primitive feeling function is mainly a reaction of yes and no, like and dislike, acceptance and rejection. Rage... jealously... lying... resentment... blaming... greed... These forbidden feelings and behaviors arise from the dark, denied part of ourselves - the shrieking and raving personal shadow.
Ecstatic dancing creates powerfulness while dancing away superfluous power in loss of self, ritual madness, and the conversion of vital energy. Attis as primordial Old One was a primeval creating force, who unsexed himself under the pine-tree, the tree-mother of the Phrygians. Attis appears in the Greek world around the middle of the fourth century BC. His worshipers went into the mountains calling for him.
Attis was explicitly identified with potentially fatal Amanita muscaria mushrooms. The danger of the descent is in identifying with the instinctive world. Depth includes depth-perception, perceiving through the depths of soul, that take us to the Divine Soul. She is the means by which our inner depths can be felt in their Presence, here and now.
The Phrygian cap worn by her son-lover Attis indicates ecstatic experience. The ancient image is that of a god torn to pieces and eaten by adorers. The Phrygian god was born of a virgin, died and rose at Easter time, and left a sacramental meal eaten from consecrated musical instruments of the cult: frame drum or tambourine, cymbal, and castanets.
Worshipers cried, "I have eaten from the drum, I have drunk from the cymbal, I have carried the earthen dish" (on their heads). The god is killed and worshiped in effigy, then eaten by the initiates of Attis, swallowing all the magic power. The fundamental idea was that eating the god was a means of identifying with the god of the Mystery. Bad spirits might also enter.
The violent death, 'passion,' and resurrection of the god were enacted in sacred rites. Emasculated Mesopotamian priests were the models for Kybele's transgendered eunuch priests. Eating pork was taboo for Attis worshipers. They deposited their members in sacred subterranean places.
Ritual theophagy is the sacrifice and distribution of a god's 'flesh' to be consumed by worshipers to open a vast mystery. Eating new mycelial fruit was a sacrament, eucharist, or communion with the deity. The mycelium becomes entwined in whatever substrate it's in, making an inseparable mass of substrate and mycelium. If environmental conditions are right, the mycelium will produce a mushroom, the fruiting body. The mushroom is actually the reproductive structure of this organism.
The divine being was eaten or absorbed by the votaries. Weird or uncanny qualities arose they did not understand. They absorbed the awesome and dreadful aspects of the sacred thing. Union was predicated on food and sex, consuming or sexual merging with the god, including sensed Presence.
This article is a mytho-poetic exploration of the Paleo- and Neolithic psycho-historical context of the Kybele-Attis cult. This primal and visceral renewal by the goddess was the extreme state sought by devotees of Kybele as their epiphany. The votary was united to the divinity by imbibing some holy food or drink. Suedfeld, P., & Geiger, J. (2008) say the sensed presence is a coping resource in extreme environments. The sensed presence effect is enhanced by exhaustion, drugs, "twilight sleep," or sleep deprivation.
The "sensed presence", including the God-image, arises when the right hemispheric sense of self falls out of phase with the left hemispheric self. The right ‘self' is experienced as an external presence. Commonly, a person feels that the sensed presence is not themselves at all. Sensed presence experiences occur in a wide variety of situations, to a wide variety of people; and the presences themselves vary in appearance, identity, and behavior. There are many kinds of sensed presence phenomena. They include psychotic, feverish, and drug-induced hallucinations; angelic and other religious visitations, ghosts, "corner of the eye" glimpses of someone almost seen or almost heard, quite common among recently bereaved persons; vivid dreams and daydreams. Sometimes a presence is recognized as a religious figure, friend, acquaintance, or relative. They often appear when the person is weakened by exhaustion or illness; on the verge of death from cold, thirst, or starvation; lost and alone; or in an unusually stimulus-poor environment. Most surprisingly, they do not just serve as companions: they actually help the person in trouble, sometimes by offering useful information or advice and at other times by seeming to take a hand in whatever needs to be done to improve the chances of survival. The sensed presence may be the left-hemisphere interpreter’s explanation for right-hemisphere anomalies.
The danger of the descent is that the individual could identify with or be possessed by the instinctive world. Depth includes depth-perception, perceiving through the depths of soul, that take us to the Divine Soul. She is the means by which our inner depths can be felt in their Presence, here and now. The Phrygian cap worn by her son-lover Attis indicates ecstatic experience.
