Gods and demigods Trialog

Posted by studio@ceciliavicuna.com on March 01, 2024 in

Gods and demigods Trialog

February, 26, 2024 London

Left: Casa de la memoria, Santiago Chile. Right: Goddess, Acropolis Museum, Athens

Joh: I was listening to the secret history of the world about the Titans and the Greek galaxies and the wars when the gods were beginning to intermingle with human forms. I've always been intrigued by the Greek idea of the galaxies and stars doing battle in the transition period, when some of the gods were coveting and having sex with some of the women on earth and they were creating demigods. And there was a period of the commingling of god and humans-- some of the heroes, the early heroes even in other cultures, like Gilgamesh, are part godlike. And at the same time or on another part of the walk yesterday, I was listening to the audiobook named First Thought, Best Thought by Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William Burroughs, and Diane di Prima. Do you know of this book?

cec: I know about it but never read it fully.

Joh: Well, it is, to me, a completely comprehensible encyclopedia in one short volume from Ginsberg on the different poetic rhythms. I forget the names of them, but the various techniques of rhythm that various writers have used and how it connects to the breath and the heartbeat and how line breaks and placing on the page becomes part of-- I don't know if you call it the prosody or the structure of the poem. But anyway, I was listening to-- how those two things were fitting together. Why did they come to me and why was I listening to them together? I was recalling the double-slit quantum experiments that highlight the effect of participation in the creation of matter by the observer. And thinking of particularly what Ginsberg was saying about the creation of forms and how, as the poetic world in a certain era was paying attention to certain aspects of the footing or the rhythm of a poem, that many poets were following that same thing, and then they would follow a different thing. And then different poets would follow different methods of putting the pauses into the page and creating a rhythm of some sort and then writing several poems, many poems from that perspective. Ginsberg gave full weight to the individuals capacity to participate in the creativity of the universe, and I was thinking of how if you take, which I do, take literally the participatory universe; that we come together across time and space creating hard matter out of more fluid elements. 

During this transition period when gods intermingle with humans, form and material reality are still in a state of flux. It is only later that our bodies and bones harden, to close off those galactic energies/influences and we move to reliance on logic, linearity and the material world. It feels like back tracking the evolution of fish from a jellyfish to a fish that swims or to fish that walk on earth. Perhaps you could track where the deer came from, from the fish to the deer that's walking on land. That as we contemplate certain material realities that are coming into being, moving from a more liquid or malleable base toward a more solid form, that we're creating some meaning of meaning in the form of hardscape, of a table, a chair, whatever that we've all agreed over a period of time that that's a chair, that's a table, that's a horse, that's a dog, and it is created by the collective agreement on what we think a dog is.

And there was an earlier time when it wasn't that clear. There was an earlier time when things were more fluid. And I'm thinking of the galaxies and the creation of humans on earth, and the early Greek stories of implanting the god in a certain place, of the goddess hiding Jupiter in a cave in Crete and how these mythical stories begin to gel. And like part of what I get from Amber Jacobs is how she moves back from the hardscape of the current description of a Greek god in time and moves it backward to before that, into the more malleable, potential of open formlessness; from form, backward, reverse engineering into formless, formless! as a way of entering into the origin, for instance, of Metis. Metis is thought of as a character, a woman, a goddess, but going back, it becomes more malleable into an energy that is shared across the board by humans, animals, everything, where Metis is the capacity of the octopus to change shape and cover himself in sand to hide, to all of the strategies that then come out with Ulysses and so forth.

If we look at the internet. I'm of a mindset when I'm using these AI sources to look for the malleability and the early appearance of form, I want to find any kind of written resource for that, but I'm looking for that not as, "Here's hard evidence, but here is a tracing of a step that came from not-so-hard evidence to more hard evidence," and how do we uncover the traces? We're doing tracking; tracking the animal when you can-- the rain washed out, but there's the footprint in the sand. You can see it, and you can see it starting to come out.

Since you are in London now, revisiting your life there in the 70's, I see the odd thing

in my approach searching for the basis for the betrayal that you felt back then, of England against Artists For Democracy and against you personally and all of that, that the traces of that come from the British hatred of the idea of unity, of solidarity, and the beauty of what you saw in the Allende period, which was just the outcropping of an energy that had long been there before and was coming out and being honored by Allende and his followers. And there was the entire Chilean, Argentinian universe participating in a reality that was so vivid to you that it's implanted deeply into your body psyche and wants expression from you and gets expression from you over the 45 years of whatever you're doing to bring forth that energy that doesn't want to be erased. The powers want to erase the traces of the beauty of that energy. That's part of the crime scene of killing off the mother, the matricide, is you kill the mother, you chop her into pieces, you put her all over the universe, and hide her in different places and different tombs to clean the crime scene of any fingerprints or DNA or any possibility. And there is the desaparecidos and all of that kind of erasure and dropping the bodies into the Atacama and into the ocean and making the bodies disappear so that they can't be mourned, and we can't integrate that reality into our lives. Were cut off from the integration of the truth of what was there before the crime, the heinous crime of killing the mother and cutting her up and throwing her all over the universe and hiding her.

And that breach, that attempt to keep us from remembering her like me trying to remember my mother in the symbiotic moment of the beauty of what we had and how hard it was for me to trace back into the reality of what's embedded in my body, like in your body is the body memory of the universe that you felt in the unity that you grew up with in Chile, before the coup, that like the mother, like Nammu, never heard of again after 3,000 BC. It's like she didn't exist, so how could we have murdered her? Because you can't find any evidence. You can't find the bodies. You can't find the smoking gun. 

We committed this horrible crime of separating you from who you are, but you're not going to find anything in the crime scene because we cleaned it so you can't find a trace, a fingerprint, or a DNA strand or anything to prove that she ever existed, so how could we have killed her? 

Amber Jacobs wrote about the inability to mourn, that prevents us from integrating the previous potential within the confines of the structure of the material world.

cec: That is the key of the denial, the will to stop us from integrating the qualities of that era, the beauty of those who gave their lives for the well being of all. That was the world before the desaparecidos. 

Joh: I'm stopping now.

cec: But there's one more story, I was with my London publisher, and he invited me to a meeting where directors of art institutions here in London were going to meet to discuss the silence around Gaza. And he suddenly said, "Would you like to come with me?" And I said, "Well, I'd love to come with you." And then he said, "But I don't know if I can get you in." So of course, after that, I didn't go. But I said to him, "Look, you know how Artists for Democracy began, [in London, l974] it began because I was part of the audience in an event [at the ICA] where I had not been invited to speak. And I suddenly stood up, completely uninvited, and I said in the middle of a discussion about money and art galleries: 'What are we going to do about the murdered artists in Chile?'" That's what I said.

And so I said to him, "That's what you have to do." Somebody has to stand up and say, "What are we going to do about all the murdered artists in Palestine?" And it's like he had seen the light. And I said, "Just speak from the heart. That's all we can do." And I hear you, and you're speaking from such depth,. It is so beautiful to hear you speak like that. It's the most beautiful thing in the world. And I'm so happy that you have recorded it because this is our legacy, our testament. It is these recordings where you speak with your soul, and every word that you say applies to human history, whether it is 5,000 years ago, whether it is Allende, or whether it is now in Gaza. This is the phrase most tremendous: there's no proof that she ever existed, so how could we have killed her? That's what it is. There's no proof that these guys are murdering newborn babies. How could they have murdered babies? Newborn babies by the dozens, by the thousands. It's just so unbelievable that it's exactly the same thing. And there's no other person that says it like you do, my darling. It is a wonderment to hear you.

It is the painful, brutal truth. And we will do whatever we can to transmit this.

On The Terraza

Posted by studio@ceciliavicuna.com on January 16, 2024 in

On The Terraza (on David Lewis Williams, Rock Art and the San of South Africa)

Mexico City, Feb 6, 2020

James O'Hern: (J. Wentzel van Huyssteen) talking about what David Lewis Williams says about the caves. That the cave paintings represent a momentous change in the history of human development.

Focusing on what you see in the caves as the making of a difference between us and other species, through the use of imagery very different and the assumption that this would not have happened without language. It's been well established by science that we have the same brain equipment as the Cro-Magnons. So you have the making of the split between us and them, the making of the beginning of modern man. So this discussion takes the juxtaposition between the caves and Catalhoyuk as a basis for reflection, how mankind learned to create meaning through language and imagery. Shamanism brings out other aspects, DLW discusses the spectrum of altered consciousness from normal states all the way to ecstatic that relates to the imagery showing more emotions in the deeper altered state.

We have to go back to the books where he describes the spectrum of altered states that provides a sort of context for the way people live their lives. This way of talking about degrees of shamanistic states and actions opens it up more for how it is for us to be in various states of awareness and emotional connectivity to ecstatic dimensions. Reading what DLW says about shamanism I can relate it to my daily experience, however different from the San.

Cecilia Vicuña: It brings it closer to you.

Joh: We have to read both the way in which these academic scholarly writers say of him and what DLW says about shamanism. Now it is no longer seen as some sort of separate, divided, different state to achieve. We don’t have to assign to the art of the caves in South Africa or Catalhoyuk some extraordinary quality available only to a few through some difficult state of mind.

We can relate our daily states’ fluctuations between normal and peak experiences to the art so that it is not only seen as exotic or remote.

Here's what happened: suddenly I was seeing the chronology of developments of culture between the caves 40,000 bc to 10,000 BC where the initiation rituals were done in and around the caves and then they emerge into the open at 10,000 BC with Göbekli Tepe which is at the advent of urbanization & agriculture - from there to Catalhoyuk and Catalhoyuk is the time when the elite and the power of violence appears. Then the quest of power through violence moves from Cataloyuk to Ur and Uruk with the development of the first city states and organized warfare.

The disappearance of the mother begins at Uruk 4,000 BC, up to this point I have some clarity but in ragged edges.

I was at Catalhoyuk, I was there! and had the experience of having participated in the meaning of their message.

The part that needs to be understood, is that the mother is ritual and the sense of imagery would continue to evolve later within the power of framework of the trade culture in Knossos.

I am of the same mind as that person that did these cave paintings, I would feel their statements in my body in a seamless continuity to include Knossos until Mycenae.

I am drawing a chronological & geographical line with my body all the way from the caves to Knossos.

CV: This is a key chapter for our book. And bringing on Crete, I see the volcanoes are creating an energy field that empowers ritual, just as we see expressed in Diego Rivera's museum.

The volcanic rituals are creating the extraordinary beauty of the ancient arts of Mexico.

Joh: I would call it the volcanic bosom of ritual. I felt it at El Rosario at the butterfly reserve. I participated in the extraordinary beauty of their ritual. Everything we see is volcanically based, where else do you see that?

CV: In the Andes. I grew up at the foot of volcanoes.

Joh: It is like the Dordogne. My hands last night were like coal miner's hands, they were all black from the Móle. The móle is volcanic.

A Plethora of Connectivity

Posted by studio@ceciliavicuna.com on January 12, 2024 in

Jan 6, 2014

James O'Hern:
the overtones of quantum music

they've figured out how to provoke the universe into a dance with the music of

the spheres

they have the quivering of a classical, observable system they are measuring, 

they back away from the precise meaning of a number to its vibrational essence

in a field and then they set up  a greedy algorithm

giving a blodhound a sniff of the smell of the prey

the greedy algorithm goes searching for a matching resonance

out of that dance performance emergence occurs

like an overtone from dissonant music


Cecilia Vicuña:

they have just discovered how shamanism works

what Eliade called the correspondences

they have just discovered the art of matching patterns, 

which every particle and microbe already knows

GOLDEN FLOWER OF THE TIPA TREE

Posted by studio@ceciliavicuna.com on January 11, 2024 in

GOLDEN FLOWER OF THE TIPA TREE

The little golden flower of the tipa tree pressed against my sandal.

Buenos Aires, December 2023

Cecilia Vicuña: Yesterday, my mother and I spent a long time in a little park, under tipa trees that may be more than 200 years old. They have these tiny golden flowers. And these flowers were raining, raining on us a rain of flowers. I could see that the people in the park didn't see the rain of flowers. But the rain of flowers kept coming, coming, coming. I was in awe of the beauty that we were being gifted just by quietly lying down in the park. And in the evening when I came home and removed my sandal, I saw that one of the flowers had gotten between my foot and the sandal. How did the flower get there? Impressed as glued to the sandal. And I thought: what a wonderful little gift.

James O'Hern: Yes, a beautiful gift, connecting to another dimension of meaning outside space and time. Like in the Ray Bradbury story, The Sound of Thunderii, where a time-travel hunter returns to earth from a safari in the Late Cretaceous past and notices subtle changes everywhere. "Looking at the mud on his boots, Eckels [the hunter] finds a crushed golden butterfly, whose death has apparently changed the nature of the alternative present..." such moments feel like time-travel. I remember as a boy the creation of boundless space with my horse Albert when we lay down on a caliche cliff above the Rio Grande and the desert below came alive with stories from another time: Indians battling as one with their horses, mica chips flashing signals in the caliche hills, and Monte Alban gleaming white 800 miles south in Oaxaca.

When Albert died, I was feeling a strong ESP communication with him as we were co-dreaming together, so I know he felt I was loving him. He knew I could see the courage of his ancestors, so he could feel his horse pride, his pride about where he came from.

CV: I love this idea of the wholeness, seeing the other as a lineage in front of our eyes. 

Joh: In the West the aliveness of the lineage is an unexpressed dimension, but in traditional cultures the vibratory interaction between the fields is ever present. 

CV: Yes, I agree. I feel the animals and the babies in all cultures pick up the qualities of the vibratory interaction. In New York, babies read, sense my state of mind as I walk down the street communicating with the birds, the light, and the trees. This quality of delight and appreciation is fulfilling to them. Joy completes them because they long for it. Even the flowers respond. Everything responds.

Joh: Like the vibratory communication you have with the sea. This should be part of our legacy so that this is known.

CV: Yes, I have written many times the story of how the sea showed me the way at the very start of my life. There's a film my parents made in l949 where a one-year-old Cecilia is knocked down by the waves. She is stunned for a second and then smiles in wild delight and goes for more.

Joh: The feeling of being connected in non-conceptual, non-verbal ways that Albert brought up for me is an opening to what is outside the cognitive: the immortality of our connectedness in the creation of meaning.

CV: Deep communication outside time and space may be the true function of poetry and art. I think Albert understood your message because you expressed it as poetry, in vibratory terms. You became a poet by learning to communicate with him. Human language is a huge mystery in that the non-conceptual, non-verbal exists within the verbal. Before forming, words dwell in the "not yet", "about to happen" potential from which meaning emerges. This atemporal dimension within words, its porous fluidity animates language. Long ago I wrote: Dialogar con lo que no es palabra al interior de las palabras crea la unión. (To converse with what is not word inside words creates union.)iii

Joh: In the act of conversing with Albert, words took on a vibratory quality that included the sounds of everything in the desert. Coming alive, our togetherness brought a shared 360o peripheral awareness of the sounds reverberating with the words that could see and hear a snake approaching from behind.

CV: Did you think in words or concepts?

Joh: If I thought of a word, I didn't need to say it aloud. At the end of his life, Steven Hawking's principal collaborator communicated with him via an ESP where words and concepts were exchanged even without vocal expression.

CV: Another instance of this kind of collaboration is noted by epigraphers studying certain writing systems, such as the Maya script, where the words and concepts were inscribed to implicate the reader in a co-creation, to “place the viewer in the role of a seer.”iv
In a sense the immortality of our connection in the creation of meaning is that it includes us all. It is immortal because it is collective. The depth and mystery of the individual is only possible because it is part of a universe. That's why the oral matters, as you have said so many times; the "oral" is the true repository of our common knowledge.
In the long run, immortality has an ethical dimension, an orientation that forwards life and balance, permanence within impermanence.
In quantum theory, they say that given all possible outcomes, somehow 'truth' prevails.
'Truth' being the goodness and continuity of it all---- and this rule applies from the start: particle and antiparticle clash and destroy each other but one survives. This beautiful paradox makes us.

Joh: Tracking the evolution of meaning beneath the surface allows it to evolve.

CV: The original meaning of the word 'meaning' is 'intent'. I often think of this wonderful image in the Popol Vuh translated and interpreted by Dennis Tedlock: the ancient Maya sages said that when the Gods created humans, their sole purpose was to hear poetry. In other words, they wanted to hear meaning created musically. This meaning had to be beautiful, otherwise the Gods would strike humanity as a failed experiment. The ethos transmitted by the Maya is the beauty of connection, of relation. A palpable, immaterial beauty.

Joh: At the end of Albert's time, I made a blood oath to never betray the truth of our love.
 

When I shot my beloved
I hugged him heartbroken,
took off my boots
filled them with the blood
that poured from his nose.
I walked back to the ranch
with my boots sloshing wet
and slept with my socks
soaked in his blood -
 

Albert Poem by James O'Hern


CV: You told me that with Albert's death, your connection with him created the field of awareness of who you were, (the mutual you, not just you), that his death confirmed your experience, at age seven shooting a 'sacred' peyote-deer that invited you to kneel at his side as he died.

Joh: These deaths began to make more sense when I came across the "Trance the Kalahari"vi where the San shaman and the sacred eland die at the same time. The San call it !gi. The exclamation point as the instant when "superpotency" is transmitted by the animal to the hunter.

CV: Superpotency as wisdom rising from honoring the gift. The foundation of who you are began with your oath to Albert on his death. I made a similar pledge to the sea in the 60's in Con con when I understood that the Sun and the Sea could "see" me. Feeling their awareness, I dissolved into the ocean of consciousness. This was the beginning of my life as your communion with Albert on his death was the beginning of your life.
Death is the precondition for immortality, only through death we understand and see with nonphysical eyes who we are.

Joh: This is crucial to develop a virtual framework for the channel of evolution that relates these experiences to the metamorphosis of the butterfly, from caterpillar to butterfly to super-butterfly. It is about the imaginal cells in their full potential moving from formless to form.

CV: And back to formless through dissolution.

Joh: I made a pledge to Albert not knowing that it was a pledge to hold on to what we had created with each other. I mean the magic of that extraordinary creativity of soul to soul in that state. As a child I had this one notable experience being with him on a cliff overlooking the Rio Grande looking south over the desert while talking about the courage of his ancestral heritage. Here's an abused horse that's never been wanted, and we are together recalling the extraordinary way the Indians fought their battles, slinging themselves down fused along the body of the horse. And the horses operated together attacking the enemy. It was the mind of the horse, the courage of the horse that guided the battle. Communicating how proud I was of him and his heritage in our ESP way he felt it and for that short period it put us into that space where I could see Monte Alban 800 miles to the south. Then when my parents and I visited the ruins some years later, they fit right into the memory of that image I had with Albert. So, it verified the vision was not just a child's imagination. It was a co-created reality between me and Albert. And that is the bedrock for future discussion.

CV: Your description made total sense to me since it allowed me to understand the 15 Flower World Variations: A Sequence of Songs from the Yaqui Deer Dancevii I had translated in l985 in a different way.

Joh: That was the way they lived their daily existence, and that magic has not been erased from all memory, but you can't put it into words.

CV: Yes, describing the Yaqui deer dance always falls short, limiting or "censoring" its meaning.

Joh: The dialectic of Western words needing a subject-object type thing can't describe the experience of being in unified space with the entire universe. Integrating our experience at that level of unity means trying to develop a vocabulary, a way of speaking about it encompassing everything beyond words.
 

i Trialog recorded while James O’Hern was in New York and Cecilia Vicuña was in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for her exhibition Cecilia Vicuña, Soñar el agua, at MALBA Museum
ii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder
iii Instan, Cecilia Vicuña, Kelsey Street Press, Berkeley, CA 2002
iv 2000 Years of Mayan Literature, Dennis Tedlock, University of California Press, 2010 p. 42
v https://oysi.org/pics/Albert_%28Spanish_and_English%29_3.pdf
vi Shaman Healing Dance https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/south_africa/san_rock_art/index.php
vii https://www.abebooks.com/Flower-World-Variations-Sequence-Songs-Yaqui/30789316322/bd

PDF

Spin-Spin Triangulene

Posted by oysijim on March 21, 2017 in

Trialogs   

Oil painting by Cecilia Vicuña: Angel de la Menstruación, 1973.

In this work the "angel" enters an altered state of consciousness while staying grounded in reality, therefore her shamanic body spins in opposite directions at the same time.

Scientists recently created a "triangulene"; two entangled molecules that spin in opposite directions, allowing quantum calculations to be made.

Triangular Molecule Article

Why Should the Animals Trust Us?

Posted by oysijim on May 26, 2016 in

WHY SHOULD THE ANIMALS TRUST US?

by James O'Hern 

February 2, 2016

Amun-Kumutef, Egyptian King of the gods and Bull of His Mother.

Temple of Luxor, The Temple in Mani, R.A.Lubicz p.40

 

I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece, transcriptions, that is, for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have had published. At one performance, I passed the first movement by attempting the identification of a mushroom which remained successfully unidentified. The second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and doe leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium. The expressivity of this movement was not only dramatic but unusually sad, from my point of view, for the animals were frightened simply because I was a human being.

John Cage, Music Lover's Field Companion

J.M. Coetzee tells us, through his character Elizabeth Costello, that "animals have only their silence left with which to confront us" and that "generation after generation, heroically, [they] refuse to speak to us". Unlike Comte-Sponville, who thought he knew there is nothing behind that silence but an incapacity to speak, Coetzee suggests that their silence should be understood as the response of animals to our behavior toward them. Coetzee's sentence is powerful not because it describes an established fact, nor because mankind has "won" its "war" against nonhuman beings definitively, but because changes are underway that will bring humans to hear the silence of nonhumans once more.

Emilie Hatch and Bruno Latour, essay Morality or Moralism?

Quotes from the Archive of Ensayos.1

As a child growing up in the peyote country of South Texas I was taught to call coyotes by my Mexican Indian mentor, Chispa. From him I learned the rabbit's song.

Yyaha, yya yya, yya ayya, ayyo oviya

ayya yya, ayya yya yyo viya, ayya yya ayya yya

yyo viya

(dreams/he will dream of it/he will become a rabbit)

Swimming all day in the lake, I wanted to become a fish. I entered through the swampy cattails, crawling on my belly through the hot black mud, as would a snake. Under the pier, trying to join their circle of play, I was ashamed to hear my father's footsteps bringing watermelon to feed them. I did not want them to know I belonged to him.

When I was seven I shot my first deer. As he lay dying in the hollow of the dry creek, he was at peace and wanted me by his side. I knelt down and took his head in my arms, crying until he was gone. I never admitted this part of the story to my father.

When I was fourteen, I had to shoot my horse Albert who was old; his teeth had gone so he could no longer eat. He was my first love and, in our ritual of death, I made a vow that I would never forget him.

Venciendo el dolor de perder 

a mi único amigo, lo maté.

Le disparé en la boca 

y el saltó a la muerte.

Tuve que matar 

lo que más amaba en el mundo!

Lo abracé desconsolado 

me saqué las botas 

y las llené de la sangre 

que le salía por la nariz.

Albert by James O'Hern, translated by Cecilia Vicuña

Later that year, while still mourning my Albert, I went across the river to Nuevo Laredo with a group of older boys to drink a Ramos gin fizz at the Cadillac Bar and pay a visit to the notorious Conchita's, casa de putas, patronized by gunners and pilots from the Laredo Air Force Base and, occasionally, by our fathers.

I don't remember her name but I still feel pangs of love from my first full-on view of a vagina as she took off her panties and lay back splay-legged on the metal spring bed. She guided me through the frightful mystery of proper entry, which I had imagined as going straight in, at a 90o angle, not from down below and up.  She seemed truly excited and proud to initiate me into sex, like a conquest of sorts; apparently a tradition of honor for the muchachas de la casa to give this service for free.  When I came back a time or two, I was received as part of the family and shown off to the other girls her "cherry". 

I left my childhood, put away animal dreams and turned to girls and sex to become a man and make my way in the world.  The secret that went with me to Wall Street and big business was the unacknowledged shame of having turned my back on the Nagual lessons learned from Chispa.

In Gilgamesh, Enkidu, raised by animals, ran naked in the forest scaring the people of Uruk. The temple prostitute, Shamhat, was ordered to tame him and teach him to become civilized.  At the watering hole, she lay back under the tree of knowledge, spread her legs and said: "come plow my vulva" which he did for six days and seven nights.  Then she said: "you are beautiful, you are become like god". He believed her.   After that the animals would no longer speak to him. 

Shamhat, emissary of Ishtar, goddess of love, embodies the procreative life-force: cosmic eroticism, spirit and matter united as one.  In rituals of divine sex, she is eternal life while the king must lay with her to earn his right to the throne and stay alive for another year. Through sacred coupling, the king renews his vow to govern by the goddess' rules of wisdom, which include duties as divine-caretaker.

For humans, the everlasting life of the goddess is implicit in the birthing capacities of women while, for men, the fear of death at the hands of the goddess is embedded in the act of sex itself.  

Shamhat initiates Enkidu into the ways of the world through the sacred ritual of sex. He emerges from this rite-of-passage believing her cajolery but, at the same time, feels his very existence is threatened so he must kill her and seize the power she holds over him.  

When Enkidu feels his newfound powers, he denies her part in the divine union and turns away.  She shrinks, feeling culpable for coercing him to do her bidding. In that moment, both separate from the goddess, Nature and the wild.2

Both are caught in the trap of the "mimetic double bind" or "mimetic violence" (as explained by René Girard and JM Coetzee).  ..."desire does not know itself.  It proceeds from lack..." The unity of spirit is split into a subject-object relationship and mimetic rivalry develops from the struggle for the possession of what is believed held by the object-other, which leads to an escalating threat of violence.

Fuelled by fear and rage, Enkidu breaks from Shamhat's erotic embrace to challenge Gilgamesh, King of Uruk in battle.  Enkidu is defeated but, due to his great courage, wins the King over to become his most trusted companion. Together they destroy the forest and blatantly defy the rules of the goddesses to become our first warrior-heroes

In the earliest Sumerian sources (clay tablets and god-lists), Nammuii is named as our primeval "Mother who gave birth to Heaven and Earth".  In the Enûma Elišh, the oldest written “creation myth, Nammu is supplanted by Tiamat who is murdered by her offspring the Sun God Marduk who chops her into pieces and buries her body parts in the four corners of earth.”iii

Nammu and Tiamat become the first desaparecidos

Before the Enûma Elišh, the genealogy of the god-lists had been restructured to acclaim Marduk as sole creator of the universe.  As Erich Neumann says in The Great Mother,iv a "radical shift in the center of gravity" occurs as "the process of masculinization finally crystallizes" and the pre-patriarchal perspective of unity is supplanted by the duality of opposites. Amber Jacobs in Why Matricide? sees this transition as setting the stage for the "fantasy that the father can procreate alone"; the "mother is reduced to nurse the seed...giving genetic sovereignty to the father."

In Greek mythology, Zeus impregnates Metis, turns her into a fly, swallows her and gives birth to Athena through a vaginal split in his skull.  Metis, like Tiamat, is desaparecido, never heard of again. Athena becomes the first motherless-mother, giving birth to a succession of gods and warriors cut off from the memory of who they are and where they come from. 

In The Life of Metis: Cunning Maternal Interventions, Amber Jacobs writes: 

Turning to Aeschylus’s Oresteia as my object of study whilst trying to think about the meaning of matricide in western culture and discourses was in some senses an obvious move. It is a foundational ancient myth that tells of a son (Orestes) who murders his mother as a revenge murder for her murder of his father. Clytemnestra, (his mother) had killed Agamemnon (Orestes father) as revenge for her murder of their eldest daughter who he had sacrificed in order to win a war. Father kills daughter, mother kills father, son kills mother. The Oresteia attempts to resolve itself around the question of Orestes’ crime in the first court of democratic justice set up by Athena.   Orestes, the matricidal son is put on trial. The jury is split down the middle – half side with the mother’s cause and half with the father. It is up to the goddess Athena to cast the determining vote.  Athena votes for Orestes and in so doing condones matricide and implicitly condones the violence against the daughter by the father. Her reason for siding with Orestes is (quote) ‘No mother gave me birth. Never bred in the darkness of the womb. In all my heart I am my father’s child’... 

This new breed of warrior-hero, "cut off from the memory of who they are and where they come from" robotically lash out at the ghost of the memory of their own mother.   Matricide, rape and violence toward women (and "dark people") are justified in the name of the hero's "divine duty" to rid the world of threats of evil lurking in the shadows. 

Matricide "constitutes the central act of the heroic lifestyle" and the "theological psychology of the West".  

Luce Irigaray quoted in Thinking With Irigarayvi

In a way, all of our Western patriarchal system amounts to this: killing without openly committing a murder; that is to say, little by little depriving us of the surroundings that allow us to live, by polluting, annihilating the equilibrium of the environment, destroying the plant and animal worlds, and finally humanity itself. 

In the Beginning She Was, by Luce Irigarayvii 

From the time of Gilgamesh, heroes go forth into battle using the power of violence to seek fame and immortality.  To bolster the hero's bravado and inspire him to murder without remorse, the memory of the Mother is erased, the goddess of wisdom supplanted by the goddess of war.   However, denial of our true origins presents a formidable challenge requiring evermore-drastic measures; denial of Her very existence.  The warrior, caught in a "mimetic double-bind", reenacts her murder again and again but she refuses to die.viii His wild flailing is extrapolated from Enkidu's and Shamhat to the world at large.

How else do we account for the collective insanity that murdered 250,000 women during the Witch-hunts of the Middle Ages and then killed 70,000,000 indigenous people during early European Imperial colonization?3

I feel guilty and complicit.

As an infant I was blessed with a nebulous bodysense of womb-presence wrapped around me, tethered to the stars with a cosmic umbilical. A gathering of love in the "beads of the chromosomes",ix a celestial flow that somehow got lost in the wet murk. 

I knew my father's rage from inside the womb. His blows of humiliation landed on both my mother and me. I was tied to the yoke of an ongoing battle between my mother and father and could not love her, or be loved by her, outside their field of hate. I still feel the wound but can't get to it.  Her distress coursing through my veins, calling me to a mission: to kill my father for her.

Inside her womb I learned to slow my heartbeat to match hers. With Chispa's teachings of the Nagual, I was able to see my mother's pain as the cry of a dying rabbit; her shame and rage converted to an offering in the wisdom of the universe.

But like Enkidu, I turned away from animal dreams in a quest for glory. Having learned 'how to have sex' from a Mexican prostitute and charged with my mother's rage, I entered the gates of Wall Street with the swagger of a hit man.  I became 'one of them', caught in the double-bind of desire turned against itself.  As Luce Irigaray said 

...the quest for glory and not the quest for shared flowering of desire or love. The potential of desire has become an aptitude for wounding and killing the adversary. 

Enkidu had an erection lasting 7 days and 7 nights, the thrusting power of his penis producing exaltation and submission as spoils of war and violence.  In a rite-of-passage my penis was granted magical powers like Beowulf's sword. Without knowing it, I had been initiated into the ancient cult of the Penis-King.  

“The child's tiny penis becomes a magic phallus, which will ultimately be able to eliminate all inadequacy.”xi

After Tutankhamen died, he was embalmed with an erect penis; the embodiment of Osiris/Amun-Ra4 who supplanted the Great Mother as the creator of the universe. The Mother is gone, the circle is squared; the Great Round of life and death is replaced by man's everlasting erection.

The Dead King Hunts and Eats the Gods

The planets are stilled,

For they have seen the King appearing in power

As a god who lives on his fathers

And feeds on his mothers;

[...]

The King is the Bull of the sky,

Who conquers at will,

Who lives on the being of every god,

Who eats their entrails,

Even of those who come with their bodies full of magic

[...]

Those who are in the sky serve the King,

And the hearthstones are wiped over for him

With the feet of their women. 

Translation from the Pyramid Texts (2,400-2,300 BC),

Barbaric Vast & Wild, Jerome Rothenberg and John Bloomberg-Rissman 

Pecker as king! The cosmic gift of love converted into the power of violence. Was this a pact with the devil?  

For me, this pull eclipsed the beauty of womb-presence and being one with the animals.  I never looked back or gave it a second thought until 1975 when I visited Altamira.

At Altamira I saw cave paintings for the first time. Something in me changed. The great red and black bisons planted a thorn in my side.  I say thorn in my side remembering Camilio Jose Cela’s story, The Family of Pascual Duarte. How Pascual’s life was foretold by one incident. He had this setter bitch named Chispa, half mongrel, half wild.  He would take her hunting and talk with her, as I did with my horse Albert.  One day, Chispa’s stare was too much for Pascual, so he shot her.5

In bouts of rage against my father, my mother would say "don't you ever forget who you are and where you came from." I never understood what she meant but I took it as a plea to do this for her.  After she died, I traced her DNA back 17,000 years to "Velda", one of the “Seven Daughters of Eve”,xii who lived in the Cantabrian mountains near Altamira during the time it was painted.

The pain of being cut off from our first mother puts us all in the same category:  motherless children filled with shame. We carry the genetic memory of an arrow planted in her belly by the sun god, wincing each time the blade is twisted. Torn away from her embrace, we are never to know from whence we came. We are left with the yearning of an abandoned calf, a virus with no ancestry.

The mother condemned for a witch and burnt with dry
wood, and her children gazing on;
The hounded slave that flags in the race and leans by the
fence, blowing and covered with sweat,
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck,                                                                                                                             The murderous buckshot and the bullets,
All these I feel or am.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

What was lost between my mother and the stars, between me and the pain of a dying rabbit, all came back to me in the cave.  The bison-bull, father of my fathers that carried her across the sea to Crete where she gave birth to the Minotaur. Signs of her most ancient "rites" recently found in the Rising Star Caves of South Africa; ancestral bones intentionally deposited deep in the belly of the cave 2,000,000 years ago. Her footsteps planted in the mud of Langebaan Lagoon 120,000 years ago as she prepared to journey "out of Africa".   Since then, a ritual cave has been found in Kalahari Desert of Botswana where the rainbow serpent danced with her 70,000 years ago. 

Twenty years after Altamira, I found her in the Chauvet Cave. Startled by her giant clitorisxiii dangling from the ceiling in the deepest region of the cave and, painted on it, her vulva open, legs spread, as she received her bison-bull lover 30,000 years ago.

In his book  "Wisdom Sits In Places" Keith Basso says, for Apaches, history is not linear, past events described “as they are occurring” creating a vivid sense of what happened long ago ---right here on this spot---could be happening now.

From the moment I set foot on the metal stairs descending into the entryway way at Chauvet, I was on a spacewalk between this world and the next. I entered the dreamscape dressed in a blue jumpsuit, helmet with a miner's lamp, rubber shoes and a rope harness.  I literally peed in my pants as I took the first few steps on the aluminum catwalk. 

Stunned by gallery displays of whinnying horses come alive; lions, aurochs, rhinos, and bears, beautiful cave bears with friendly snouts -- menageries floating in and out of permeable walls, unanchored to any grounding; a sense of being among them trotting alongside, wanting to go where they were headed.  Suddenly, in the Skull Chamber; amber glow-lit room all on its own, the relic-skull of a cavebear reverently placed on a stone altar.  This is the closest I have come in waking life to re-entering the liminal space of my mother's womb.

Floors scattered with bear skeletons, bits of bone stuck                                                                                                                               into fissures, two humerus bones planted upright. 

A bear skull altar in the middle of the Skull Chamber. 

Conversation with a bear: 

They scratch the wall so I do too.                                                                                                                                                  Finger tracings and hand prints                                                                                                                                                     answer the bear’s scratches. 

 

The bear comes back                                                                                                                                                               scratches on top of the handprints                                                                                                                                                     co-creating the temple.

El Conejo Escriba, by James O'Hern, 

OYSI Books

When we emerged from the caves we turned our backs to our animal origins like sons today deny their own fathers. We betrayed the bears and our vulva mothers. We broke with the animals and learned to kill them without remorse. 

If you can kill animals without reverence, you can kill anything.

 

 

Endnotes:

1http://www.fatuma.net/text/R.A.SchwallerdeLubicz-TheTempleinMan-SacredArchitectureandthePerfectMan.pdf

2Ensayos is "a nomadic research program based in Tierra del Fuego (TdF)...Since 2010 Ensayos has brought together artists, scientists and other thinkers and doers to address issues of land use, ecology and ethics at the end of the world." 

3Is Shamhat the originator of original sin...the first "Eve"? 

4David Tsumura, Creation and Destruction, p1.

5Thinking with Irigaray, by Mary C. Rawlinson p. 20

6The Great Mother, by Erich Neumann, p.211. 

7The Origins and History of Consciousness, Part 2 by Erich Neumann, pp. 131-134

8Thinking with Irigaray By Mary C. Rawlinson, p. 20

9In the Beginning She Was, by Luce Irigaray, p.125 

10Ibid

11The "American Indian Holocaust" was far and away the most massive act of genocide in the History of the world.

12George Oppen, New Collected Poems, Route, p. 185

13In The Beginning She Was by Luce Irigaray, pp. 708 -710

14Thinking with Irigaray, p. 134 (Manninen 1992, 4).

15Amun-Kamutef, Amun-Ra, Tutankhamen's symbolic precursor, was the chief deity of the Egyptian Empire. Amun-Ra also came to be worshipped outside of Egypt, in Ancient Libya and Nubia, and as Zeus Ammon came to be identified with Zeus in Ancient Greece. 

16"It appears, then, "to be Pascual’s destiny to kill; to that end, his assignment becomes one he fulfills consistently. Along the way, he also slashes a man in a barroom brawl and stabs to death a mare that has thrown Lola and killed the baby she carried inside."                                 From a book review of Real Magicalism in the Family of Pascual Duarte by Stephen Siciliano. 

17The Seven Daughters of Eve by Brian Sykes

18Since its discovery in 1994, the cave has been sealed off to the public with access severely restricted. In January 2004, Clayton Eshleman  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Eshleman) and I were granted the rare privilege of an extensive tour of the original Chauvet Cave by one of its discoverers, Jean-Marie Chauvet. A facsimile installation of Chauvet Cave was opened to the public in April 2015.

19Described by some as a penis though there are no male figures in the cave.  http://library.ciis.edu/resources/regenesis/31000_chauvet.pd

 

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Ancient Art, Living Pigment and Women Artists

Posted by oysijim on March 02, 2015 in

Blog Entries   

In the Bradshaw website they analyze how the paintings go from cherry color (ochre) to purple.

The bacteria can either destroy what they come in contact with or preserve it into eternity.

How and what makes the choice?

How did the ancient artists know that pigment was alive?

Perhaps through hundreds of years of observation and transmission of oral knowledge.

Ochre itself was deemed a connector to the energy of the universe. It wasn't just symbolic, it was an actual mechanism, a dynamic living bridge...

The paintings go back as far as 70,000 years and are figurative, depicting women dancing.

Women artists probably created them.