KYBELE'S ALTAR by Iona Miller, 2020
https://ionamiller2020.weebly.com/cybele.html
Primary Imagination, Nonlocal Consciousness, Entanglement, Mysteries of Collective Transformation, Mother Worship, Nature Worship, Meteorite Worship, Amanita Muscaria, Alchemosexuality, Sacramental Ecstasy, Ecosexual, Erotic Theology, Orgiastic Rites, Non-Binary Gender, Eunuch Priests, Magical Imagination, Transformative Substances, Mother Complex, Liminal Forces, Self-Initiation, Interoception, Shamanic Trance & Ecstasy, Multiple Simultaneous Realities, Invisible Light, Dissociation, Autopoeisis, Maternal Enmeshment, Germinal Image, Role-fluidity, Forest Loss, Hypnogogia, Sovereign Authority, Paranormal Romance, Wild Hunt, Transplanted Ideas, Transgressive States of Consciousness, Epochal Shift, Pluripresence, Primordial Androgyne, Twilight State
Transliminality
Dimensions of Character
Visionary Geography
Conserving the Imaginal
Mind Forest
Life-Bestowing Principle
Wild Darkness
Mother Mycelium
Knowing by Feeling
Wild Mind
Dark Sky
Archaic Roots
Sanctuaries of Silence
Prehistory
Anatolian Mysteries
Seed Ideas
Perceptual Hypnosis
Way of Devotion
Life Force
Psychogeographical Exploration
Ecosophy
The Moonlit Path
Ecosexuality
Primal Nature Goddess
Double-Bind
The Dark Queen
Dissociative Disorder
Dark Flow
Dark Mater
Deep Forest
Protecting Souls
& Guarding the Dead
Evolving Archetypal Matrix
"The Breath of Cybele"
Meeting the God-Plant
The Enduring Virgin Mother
The Ultimate Trance State
Untamable Eternal Virgin
Divine Madness
Meteorite
Prehistory is Trans-historical
Pursuit of the following far-ranging tropes are what the self-authenticating Kybele mythos brings up for me, as well as what can be provoked and invoked in the reader. Immersion in myth creates reality. Symbols and images are the currents of consciousness.
Many of our beliefs and concept creep are unconscious mythic forces at work in our daily lives. We can intentionally build a soulful relationship between our conscious and unconscious being, including the narrative field.
Archetypal psychology is influenced by Jung and Hillman's Classical Greek, Renaissance, and Romantic ideas. First and foremost, this is my offering to Kybele, and imaginal matriarchies -- a narrative of healing fiction about female spiritual and political power -- more about what human life could be like, than about what it was like.
Gnosis is the nature of psyche. Expression creates being, connecting with emergent mind and life-force. Ideas stimulate the imagination. Our primary language is myth. Used persuasively, it provides the transpersonal meaning of a larger context. There are patterns to the kinds of qualities we experience, including excesses and compulsions.
Writing is a journey into the unknown, a leap into the abyss. We can explore the psyche in a kind of archaeological excavation without ransacking the past for inspiration by re-visioning our relationship with nature, our creative energy flow, our reflective and projective nature--an aesthetics beyond art. Psyche is self-realized soul, the penetrating reality of the Soul.
Psyche participates in reading or writing, and experience. Alternative perspectives are based on differing underlying philosophical convictions. The process of writing itself is a soul-making activity. Revelation of the inner sense of words opens their interdimensionality. I don't presume to teach you anything but I can share my world with you.
This essay is a long-form discussion of many interrelated aspects. Our challenge is to recognize the many levels of interwoven unconscious influence. It attempts to conjure fresh images and fluid perceptions, as no story can be reduced to an archetype. Things as they present themselves are images, not pre-existing concepts or dogmatic categories.
Psychology is a non-linear domain. The unconscious finds its voice. It's ours to wrestle with. Myths just are, self-existing, autonomous and alive, present in the way we are. Embodied narrative intelligence is somatic incarnation serving as transformers of cosmic-material and mental experiences of embodied somatic sentience.
"When an archetype appears in a dream ~ in a fantasy, or in life ~ it always brings with it a certain influence or power by virtue of which it either exercises a numinous or fascinating effect ~ or impels to action." (Jung, CW 7)
The mythopoetic orientation reflects a vibrant experiential sense of the concrete and the abstract, the immanent and the transcendent, and the visible and ineffable at once in the sacral lived world. Metaphors open us up with associative power.
Myth is a common unifying principle. Myth permeates our understanding of our past, present and potential. Myth is a conceptual schemata embodying core metaphysical concepts and moral wisdom. Myths do cultural work. In myth-building any words or symbols can be modified from their original meanings to suit their new roles in a matrix of varied forms.
Paracelsus suggests, "The imagination acts in a similar manner in the soul, and calls forms of life into existence. The spirit is the master, imagination the tool, and the body is the sculptural material." Such open-ended creative potential encodes an infinite variety of mythological interpretations, not just one. The god-image describes stages of human experience with the autonomous psyche.
Non-factual and non-historical, myths don't explain anything, but they deepen, tantalize, enliven, interest, delight, even confuse, or provoke. They cannot be proven. Psychic Realism is a perspective on interpretive metapsychology.
The voice of Psyche includes an approach to the numinous through unconscious communication, unconscious perception and archetypal enactments, an entrainment and synchronization inexorably entwined in psyche’s dance, that manifests archetypal dynamics in matter. The polytheism of the ancient world is one step removed from animism in the linkage between the god and devotee.
The past, present, and future collapse into a timeless moment where distinctions between conscious and unconscious intent express as an ongoing pattern -- active engagement in lived experience, unconscious communications and ways to create meaningful responses to them.
Our ethical and aesthetic consciousness realizes we carry things which may be unconscious and be sensitive to that presence and our souls and what we exile to the hinterlands. No city or world are external to soul.
In the city of Ephesus, Artemis reigned not only as Queen of Heaven, but also as Mother, Healer and Savior.
"Artemis Ephesia was expressively viewed as a goddess of fertility and protection. Some of the titles of worship for Artemis include:Philomeirax, Friend of Young Girls, Paidotrophos, Nurse of Children, Orsilokhia, Helper of Childbirth, and Hêmerasia, She who Soothes. The epithets served as foundations on which the people of Ephesus were able to adapt Artemis into the realm of Kybele, Magna Mater, the Mother Goddess that ruled this area from archaic times and through the early Hellenistic period. Artemis of Ephesus was a significantly different goddess than the Greek Artemis. At the core of the worship of Artemis Ephesia was entrenched belief in her position as fertility goddess, and Mother to her people." (Carla Ionescu 2016)
Mythopoesis appears to be a fractal-imaginal dynamic. Embodied mythopoesis means "myth-making", the highest form of story-telling, a psychological archetype and cognitive frame -- the complex dramatic architecture of stories. Images exist at multiple scales.
We must always rotate a concept to accommodate the unique psychic context of diverse listeners and synergistic praxis. How does mediation between gods and world occur? How do we encounter the gods in our existence and recognize the presence of divine powers in empirical reality? We don't invent myth. Phenomenological dramatization emerges autonomously from our encounters with depth. Images arise from the flux of nature.
Marshall McLuhan says that "thematic variation' in storytelling has replaced 'narrative continuity'...Transmedia Storytelling is important to the way we interact and communicate. We’ll explore the anatomy of story and the importance of developing a contemporary narrative that can help us expand our narrative into a storyworld with multiple facets of participatory design.
We enter the realm of psyche by 'becoming' images. James Hillman suggests more than making archetypes conscious. Imagination becomes a meeting place between the conscious and unconscious by entering the metaphor of the archetype, through which our soul is deepened by tending and attending to it. Soul operates through artistic being to overcome differences between the physical and symbolic. It potentiates the gamut of feelings and sensations from the most poetical to the physical.
No theory conforms to its own standards. Our archetypal journey is to the foreign lands of the unconscious, with inner evolutionary impulses. Images and our interactions with them (whether these are scholarly, mythopoetic, ritualistic, or actively imaginal) are psyche. Her story somehow becomes our own, the fate of place that takes us from void to containing vessel.
Metamodern is is a category created to describe some recent developments in art, literature and cinema, a proposed set of developments in philosophy, aesthetics, and culture. Worldviews evolve from modern to postmodern to post-postmodern with its soulful, aesthetic, poetic Romantic approach.
Modernism is pre-systemic; based on individual liberty, including economic liberty, and the values necessary for achieving personal and economic success. Postmodernism is a worldview that takes a systemic view that divides the world into oppressed and oppressors. It reacts (and over-reacts) against modernism. Depth psychology could be called postmodern in its intricacies. Arguably, Archetypal Psychology is post-postmodern.
A post-postmodern or integral worldview is based on a meta-systemic view that is integral emergent, learning-focused, and looks at the world as a self-organizing set of systems that come together in a marriage of love and freedom. An integral vision has positive roles for -- and seeks to integrate positive aspects of -- tribal instincts, traditional values, individual success stories, and a healthy pluralism.
Mythic or sacred imagination has true inspirational and initiatory power. It rises above the banal inasmuch as it is able to access the sacred transpersonal, mythopoetic dimension, serving as a path of spiritual transcendence, and even self-initiation.
Images invite our consideration as manifestations of soul, as myth and poetry. Care of the soul is cultivating and tending images. The realm of heart is the realm of soul that links us to the life force. The energizing force of the new Romanticism is that it promotes humanity against the forward progress of science and the rise of scientism.
Tensions between the primal connection to nature and scientific institutional power have led to a cultural reawakening – a sort of Romantic revivalism. Scientific inquiry fails to fully construct a complete picture of nature, as theories of everything continue to fail. Science is exploited into dystopian realities fraught with neo-eugenics through gene engineering and unequal access to drugs and medical care.
Mythopoesis means "myth-making" that integrates traditional mythological themes and archetypes into contemporary fiction. "To be sane, we must recognize our beliefs as fictions." (Hillman)
Myth-making could be considered the highest form of human pastime, story-telling dreams and fantasy, epic, meaning, and archetype. Metaphorical psyche-based images play through, transform, and enrich our experience with deeper understanding and broader knowing. More fully expressed lives are inwardly richer.
Vermeulen and van den Akker described metamodernism as a "structure of feeling" that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism like "a pendulum swinging between…innumerable poles". According to Kim Levin, writing in ARTnews, this oscillation "must embrace doubt, as well as hope and melancholy, sincerity and irony, affect and apathy, the personal and the political, and technology and techne." (Wikipedia)
The aesthetic is a departure and perpetuation of modern and post-modern aesthetics, a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond them. They defy well established schemes of modernist and post-modernist aesthetics, in search for a more sensible and, arguably, sustainable way to express the present.
“…we see what our idea lets us see. The evidence we gather in support of a hypothesis and the rhetoric we use to argue it are already part of the archetypal constellation we are in…both role and idea are archetypally governed.” Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, 126
Turner proposed metamodernism as "the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons," and concluded with a call to "go forth and oscillate." Wiki
Authors claim that modernist and post-modernist aesthetics are no more able to interpret our present and that seemingly incompatible features of the two systems can coexist side 'by'side in today's culture! the word Metamodernism features the prefix meta-, meaning +beyond, and relates with metaxis, used by Plato to describe the condition of in-betweenness. Metamodernist aesthetic is not a mere Hegelian synthesis of the two previous systems, but stands in between the two! In practice, metamodernist sensibility cuts through the post-modernist morass of contemporary culture by restoring some modernist tools.
Metamodernism is the dominant cultural logic of contemporary modernity. Metamodernism is characterised by interest in the mythological and archetypal. It can be grasped as a generational attempt to surpass postmodernism and a general Romantic response to our present, crisis-ridden moment.
Images move us outward into alternative visions of reality, recreation of the outer world and transformation within the imaginal. Slowly a response begins to come, finding voice through us, That daimon is a voice of the anima mundi, and there is no division between the little inner voices and the total world of the soul. Loss of soul is disconnectedness from what matters most.
In other words, it is this soul that speaks through me and through all of us. K. Levin (2012) says, “the postmodern culture of relativism, irony, and pastiche" is over, having been replaced by a post-ideological condition that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling.
