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Radiant glimpses of divine reality

This post originally started out as a comment to a recent post at Druid Journal, Hearing the Song of the World, where Jeff shares the story of Komo the Shepherd boy.

It’s surprising that the tale of Komo is not traditional. I also thought of the myth of Adam, naming all the animals in the garden, as well as Enkidu, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, who existed in a state of harmony with the wild beasts, until he was seduced by a prostitute, and all the creatures became afraid of him.

Both of these characters exist in a state of pre-cosmic bliss, which becomes ruptured, and spirals off into a unlimited multiplicity of cosmic forms.

Music is a mythological and philosophical metaphor for the harmony of cosmos, which is pure (transcendent) magic. When we attach labels, and make distinctions, we can become ourselves, and so I think it is a necessary, though apparently tragic, loss. Kind of paradoxical, we cannot experience everything, without losing everything. The pure magic is still there, permeating reality, but we can only catch partial glimpses, that fill us with both sadness and joy, sometimes simultaneously. This glimpse into the ineffable beyond, is what C.S. Lewis called ‘Joy’: “an intense longing (Sehnsucht) for an object that is never fully given and cannot be fully present in the subjective experiences of persons in the space-time existence” (A. Demarest, Bruce & Russell Lewis, Gordon, 1994, ‘Integrative Theology’, p.156, Zondervan).

This experience of both joy and loss is wonderfully captured in the final scene of Twelve Monkeys: Dreamers Awake. Here, the hero is wounded and simultaneously united and divided from his beloved (compare the images of Shiva-Shava and the Pieta). It is in this state between death and life, male and female, beginning and end, etc, that the hero both transcends time and space, fully penetrating the magical gateway of existence, and passes back into the temporal round reborn as the mythical divine child.

This idea is more fully realized in la jetee, the short movie that Twelve Monkeys is based upon.

It is the story of a man from a post-apocalyptic future where the human race is forced to live underground. The man holds on to the childhood memory under a setting sun, of a man’s death and a woman’s face, and using this memory as an anchor he is transported into the space-time continuum, back into the past, where he meets the woman at various places and times, and into a future inhabited by evolved human beings, who provide the man with a power source to aid his present time. The advanced humans, within a mythological framework that allowed for the existence of a transcendent reality, would normally exist beyond the doorway of time (or an upper world, as in shamanic cosmology), rather than the future. Further, their foreheads are marked with a spot, corresponding with the third eye, which also mythically corresponds with the fiery gateway to paradise. The power source, corresponds with the mystical life-generating boon, recovered by other mythical heroes to aid his community, or the cosmos as a whole.

During one of the man’s encounters with the woman of the past, they both visit a museum filled with stuffed animals. Here, we are again at the threshold of death and life, between the destruction and recreation of the cosmic order, such as in the myth of Noah’s Ark that encapsulates the world of forms.

The transcendent-future beings ask the man to become one of them. Instead he refuses to become re-absorbed into the ineffable ground of existence, and asks to be returned to the past and unite him with his beloved, where he meets his death, and the wheel of existence returns to the beginning, his preexistent self becoming an ever fading memory in the mind of his childhood self.

Komo also reminds me of Orpheus, whose musical ability had the power over both life and death, but after losing his beloved in Hades he lost this power and was (literally) torn apart. His death is bound up with the separation from Eurydice, like the wounding of Adam’s side forming Eve. In the Japanese version of Orpheus’ ascent and descent, it is the Japanese Adam, Izanagi, who breaks the underworld taboo by gazing upon his sister-wife Izanami, after breaking off a tooth (jap: wo-bashira meaning ‘male pillar’) from his hair comb and lighting it (incidentally Izanami died after giving birth to the fire kami), to see nothing but a rotting corpse. The breaking of the tooth is a metaphor for castration, a wound-motif, shared by numerous mythological victims, including Osiris, who, like Orpheus, is also torn apart.

My guess is that through the death of both Eurydice and Orpheus, both are cosmically reborn. As Orpheus joined in death with Eurydice, so also Adam partook of the fruit of all things, transporting them both beyond the revolving sword of fire (a symbol of the sun), into the wheel of time.

This mystery of life through death, I believe, was a closely guarded secret, known only to those initiated in the various Mystery Religions of the ancient world. It was only with the rise of Christianity, that openly declared the secret doctrine, that the Mysteries began to reveal this truth, that had previously been punishable by death. If this is the case then it would explain why there are no solid examples of ‘resurrection’ in the Mysteries to be found prior to Christianity, other than deeply symbolic representations, such as the myth of Attis being transformed into an evergreen pine tree, rather than openly revealing that he was eternally reborn.

Cosmic rebirth in Christian terms has been transformed into a negative symbol of The Fall of the human condition into a profane state of cosmic being. Also in Buddhism, all existence is declared to be ’suffering,’ generated by the wheel of becoming, that can only be undone through the dissemination of the self which is an illusion (Hinduism: Maya), a total return beyond the solar door of reality, known as Nirvana. Nirvana means ‘to extinguish’ and behind this idea is the symbol of burning fire wood, that represents the no-self, known as Anatta. By dismantling the fire sticks, symbolizing the illusory components (Skandas) of the self, we are released from suffering.

Like, Aquilla Ka Hecate, in a recent post called The Distraction of Illusion, I reject this extreme view. All life is sacred, rather, it is the nature of the profane that is an illusion. Maya has another meaning. Magic. Instead of viewing reality as something broken or pure falsehood, an infinite collection of parts, none of which point to the true nature of our reality, I see instead a magical synergy giving birth to a multitude of forms. I have a strong belief in my own existence, and all living things (whether they be efficacious or not) as valid entities in an authentic cosmos. The universe is ever-changing ever-becoming and ever-passing-away, and it is all pretty sorrowful, but perhaps the reason why we suffer, is due to the innate reality of the experience of existence (that we might try to deny or find difficult to discern), continually pointing us towards a transcendental reality, that is also imminent within creation? Perhaps sorrow is an unavoidable consequence of our existence, and it is when we learn to embrace both sorrow and joy, that we can truly be set free in the knowledge that all things, whether good or bad (as symbolized by the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil), can provide us with radiant glimpses of divine reality (The Tree of Life).

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