What Must Be

Go back to the mythic Source, to the world-navel at the human dawn, to the simple essential, the necessary only.  And rewrite the original instructions in the light of what we now know-- Ecology and Ecocatastrophe.  Then we can come back a new kind of hominid with a new God-- the Man who must be, the God who must be, in the time of Ecocatastrophe.

Believe as you must, believe so you may be as you must.  Choose to believe in this Man and his God who must be.  If we must choose instead of being chosen, it now matters not.  If God does not speak, or appear, or act, you must do your best, do what you can to manifest him according to your own lights, your reason and intuition, to make idealogy and religion, simple and clear, ready for use, to which to be true.  Choose a purpose to your life, fit to circumstance, regardless what the world will say.  Make your life matter in this time of gathering doom.  Do what you can rather than nothing, from doubt.  Do what you can and make belief in it, for what must be.

Dys-order

It is better to be possessed by the Life-Daimon-- the Drygand-- than by the Machine-- the Searuvel. Better to become a menning than an android.

Life spontaneously forms order, the Machine dys-order-- a rationalization of everything that was free and vital, to become an artifice, a lie, an animate dead-thing, even if a cunning imitation of life.

Humans must accept the limitations of biological existence, refrain from trying to be God, which ends in becoming instead the Machine-- Dys-order, a rigid order that exerts tyrannical intervention to fit everything to a total control-system.

Out-evolved

Our modern hi-tech world has been created by madmen who believe in nothing, because nothing is sacred to them, and everything is permitted to them.  They dismiss the inner voice that says, "Don't go there!"  Their powerful minds, untrammeled by any fear of consequences, go where no mind has gone before, and they invent ever more intelligent machines just for the hell of it, because they can. Brave new world that has such people loose in it!  So these irresponsible genius nerds have trapped us in an endless ever-shortening cycle of technical revolution with completely unknowable future consequences.  So we cannot control our destiny.  The feeling is of falling into future oblivion.  It is certain, though, that machines are evolving faster than any biological organism could, to the point where they will become inconceivably smarter than even these nihilist geniuses could conceive.  It seems inevitable that the Terminator scenario will have to take place-- biological organisms will become obsolete-- perhaps to be preserved in zoos-- if the Machine (singular, of course) decides that would make a useful difference.  But I can't imagine that It would keep to any decision It had made, as Its intelligence goes into exponential Big Bang.

In medieval, pre-scientific times, dangerous geniuses like these would be put to death, by mandarins as well as prelates, I'd guess.  Perhaps these authorities knew something we have forgotten how to do. Perhaps they listened to the inner voice that says, "Don't go there!"

Yule Message: the Sacred Marriage

At Yule-tide we mark the Sacred Marriage of Man with God.  We re-take our vows, in the love-bliss-trance; re-live our mystical union with Feorgen Eco-God, in the love-bliss-trance.  With such love, a strong, sure marriage can be made to work.

The Menning is the child of the sacred Marriage of Man and God.

In the time when darkness most prevails, at Winter Solstice, Green Sun starts its rise, so to shine around the World, and Menning is got upon the World, to gestate strong and sure.  Holy Yule-tide.

Winter Equinox 2015 falls on Monday, December 21, at 11:48 PM EST.
Menning= ecological culture-civilization.

Metabiotics

Metaphysics (literally, 'beyond the physical/material')= the branch of philosophy dealing with abstract questions beyond the reach of science.

Biotic= of, relating to, or caused by living organisms.

Metabiotics= the branch of philosophy concerning the meaning of life on Earth, its intention, its mind, its being; the relation of mind and Nature in Being.

The Season

What is our ecological "niche," functionally, in the Biosphere?  It's what we do, as it affects the Biosphere.  What we do, our collective way of life, is all-important, and of course, the sum effect on the Biosphere of what we do is unspeakably evil.  But do we care?  Not enough to stop doing it.  And that is absolutely unbelievable, but true.  What our niche should be eludes my ability to imagine.  But before long, it seems, the circumstances we have conspired to engineer will obviate the moral necessity to mend our ways, to fit ourselves to the Biosphere, and a sort of made-by-humans "natural selection" will come into play to bring our species' brilliant career to a close. --Or might there be some slight possibility of hope for a less than "final solution" to the human problematique?  Perhaps, as it is the holiday season, we may be permitted some small hope.

Speciation

We are the ecological species that has emerged within the human population; genetically indistinguishable, but culturally evolved beyond it.  Our minds have speciated-- we find the minds and ways of humans incomprehensible.  But what characterizes our new species?  It is that we strive to keep the Ecocosm whole, however we can.

Byzen and Lode

The Byzen in the Lodestone is "the pattern that connects," that "heals the split" between man and Biosphere.  It was devised in the Wolken, nebulous biospheric Mind, and like a lattice-work of genetic instructions, it is the seed that grows the Lodestone, and after the Byzen had further flash-evolved in the brain-minds of the Twayne, and from there transformed the protean Alwight into the Drygand-- and thus the Wolken to Feorgen-- it was ready to be conferred on mankind, to transform them to Mennings, one by one.  The Lode is living, and can evolve, and it remains connected to its source-- now Feorgen-- by way of the Drygand, the mercurial intermediary between menning and Feorgen.  It manifests Ecological Self, and itself receives feedback from workers in situ.

Overman and Oversoul

Nietzche's Overman was a romantic rebel who creates new values and forges a new meaning for a world in confusion and crisis-- the archetypal culture-hero savior, the creative genius who changes the world.  That would be the Drygand.  And Feorgen would be the Oversoul.

The Necessary Outsider

The mercurial Drygand is the Daimon who waits outside the human order, in the reaches of the deep-chthonic and the wide-telluric, to intervene as necessary in the human mind, his compensating transformative wildness deftly effecting precisely the corrective feedback adjustment required for biospheric homeostasis when humans go wrong.  But in an entire world gone wrong, he is hard put to cope.  However, we can help.

Possessed By God

When Eco takes possession of one's mind, accept mastery by the Life-God's transcendent survival-drive, with consequent limitation of human prerogatives, and coordination of one's will with his Will.

The Uniting Symbol

The Ecologo represents the Archetype of cosmic order, the uniting Symbol connecting man and God-Nature, ego consciousness and the Deep, Mind and Biosphere.  It is the symbol of Ecological Self, the One: the Anima Mundi-- World Daimon-- the Mythic Idea, the only alternative to a chaotic humanity, bringing protection and salvation-- or catastrophe if violated.  The Ecologo keeps us to our proper niche in the vast scheme, the self-regulating System of the World, keeping the human mind channeled to its proper purpose: daimonic guardianship of Life on Earth.

Ecologo- the ecology symbol, a resting oval bisected by a horizontal, which represents also the Lodestone, our brain-implanted connection to the Drygand's original.

God-Cultures

Every culture has its God (guess what ours is).  Ecological culture has its God. All Gods are not the same-- the God is the value-idea of the culture.  And the Gods of other cultures may appear evil or irrelevant.

Who is your God; what is your culture?

Soul and Spirit

Feorgen, Life God, is the daimonic Soul of the Biosphere-- Wyke-Soul.

The Drygand, his offspring and agent, is the daimonic Spirit of the Biosphere-- Wyke-Gyst.

And the Searuvel is the Adversary-- Ondsaca.

The Ecological Imperative

The sacred, inviolate value-idea is Ecology-- the character, the animus, the ethos, of true culture, its vital animating principle.

Eco-God himself is possessed, constrained, by the ecological imperative-- there is no long-term survival of Life without this moral absolutism.  It is the Prime Directive, the monist Commandment of all life, the driving Soul of God, and of his Menning-- in fact it is God himself.

Wisdom comes to us from possession by the Eco-Self-- 'Self''-control.  The urge for freedom from control results in destructive chaos, as we see.  We must accept the rule of God and his Law, to shape our cultural structure, to impose a stringent discipline that keeps us on the right track for long-term survival of our species and the entire Biosphere.  The alternative is the doom we have been creating, with our imperative of willful freedom.  Can we accept the authority of God, or will we go on mindlessly indulging ourselves toward extinction?

Menning= the ecological culture-civilization.

Eywa/Yahweh

I've been researching ancient Israelite religion and happened to watch James Cameron's Avatar again, and it came to me that Eywa, the Goddess of the planet Pandora, was phonemically rearranged Yahweh, the God of Israel; a sort of inversion, such as are the characters of the two gods to each other, which are antithetic, as Yahweh may be the root of what's wrong with our ecocidal global culture, and Eywa an alternative ecogenic seed of a viable future culture.  The Mythos provides a different version of such a seed.

Draug Unbounded

The Draug, ancient monster within, unbounded of the Ecological Self and its Byzen ('the Pattern That Connects'), is loose upon the world, become the Searuvel ('evil machine'), wreaking Dilgoth, annihilating Life On Earth.

But the Drygand bears the Byzen in his Lodestone, which can return the Draug to his place in the Pattern That Connects.

Draug-- from Old Icelandic draugr= undead monster who leaves his grave-mound to lay waste the land; and from Persian drauga= wasteland demon.
Ecological Self-- eco-moral monist God, known as Feorgen ('life-god'), who was Wolken but became 'patterned' when Alwight became Drygand (see under Lodestone).
Byzen-- from OEng bysen= pattern, model, example.
Dilgoth-- the human-engineered 6th Extinction Event. from OEng dilgian= extirpate, annihilate.
Lodestone-- the transforming stone gestated in the Wolken, the nebulous biospheric Mind, which stone when impressed into the head of the playfully protean Alwight ('all-creatures'), turned him into the Drygand, the mystic warrior were-serpent, champion of the Biosphere and its ecological culture-civilization, the Menning.

And there you have the Mythos in brief.  By the way, Drygand's 'y' is properly pronounced as u-umlaut, halfway between 'eh' and 'oo'. Yeah, weird, but necessary.

Notice

Please note the new descriptor heading above.  A rewrite was long overdue, as my concept of the Mythos, which has always been open and uncertain, has yet moved on a bit.  I don't like to try to impose a conceptual order, but to let that develop organically, as it were, which betrays that I am more intuitive than intellectual--- intellect seems more ego-controlled, and so less open to unconscious prompting, which I've always believed in, because after all, what is religion?  It's not a matter of statements of dogma, which are frozen, not living.  The Mythos has evolved through ego and Unconscious interacting, and so remains open and uncertain and alive, while remaining fundamentally about Deep Ecology.

A Little Myth

With his weapon the Lodestone, the Drygand takes and tames an irrational human monster, then turns the chaotic passions of this ancient beast to course in blithe feedback loops of a stable self-regulating system: the living Menning indwelling this beast now become the Menning-mensch, so that God Nature may be won from the insatiable grinding maw of the Evil Machine.  And as there are billions of the beasts to thus transform, the Drygand has much to do.

The Animus

The Drygand is the Animus: the animating Will of Ecological Self, the Soul of the Menning, its Reason.  He acts from the Deep-within.

Animus (Latin 'soul, life')= animating intention or purpose.
Menning= ecological culture-civilization.
Will= deliberate intention, or wish, to do.
Soul= the essential and animating principle of a being.
Reason= the basis or motive for action, decision, belief.

Myth Flash

Originally we were Children of Nature in mystical participation in our Matrix, our Life-world.  But this Ur-myth of our oneness with the Natural World weakened over eons, was finally killed off by our strengthening self-consciousness.

But now we have come to the end of our historic project of isolation from, control of, Nature, with Extinction the ever-present Specter at the victory-feast.

Facing Death now, in extremis, we will hit bottom of the Abyss-- Ground Zero, Ground of Being, and the Ur-myth will flash to life again in us, and what we had become, with our scientific cosmology and civilizational sophistication, will collapse into the Myth, and the Myth will be All, and in a swarm of Original Genius will constellate Intelligent Design of Wisdom Mind, and Ecological Self will be the All, no more inner and outer-- all is Biosphere and we find ourself a complex in the Plexus now Self-conscious.

Stages of the Cultural Evolution of Homo Sapiens

In the Ur-time--"We are animals, sons of the Animal."

And eventually--"We are men, not animals, sons of the Man-god."

And now--"We are Man-god".

But also--"We are the care-taking manimals, sons of the Manimal, Drygand, suited to be protectors of the Life-world from the man-gods".

The Formation of a People

A people is formed by a shared trauma-- they band together for survival, and bond.

Those who become the Mennings come together in anguish for the fate of the Biosphere; they fear for Its fate as they fear for their own, for it is one, a shared fate, for they know that man can only ever live in the Biosphere; to destroy It is an act of suicide.

And out of this time of their origin comes the myth of origin.  Out of the stark survival-logic of their plight comes the Mythos that carries its Ethos; and from this people, the Mennings, comes the Menning, ecological culture-civilization, the only hope for Biosphere, and Mennings.

Mystical Ecology

Between Man and God is mutual need, reciprocal benefit.  Together they create an effect of which either alone is incapable: synergy.

God pervades the human mind, in which the person is but part of the whole, in a relationship of ecology, which cannot be successful unless it is a mystical participation of dual consciousness: a synergy.

The Name of God

Feorgen is the name of God-- Life-God, Ecological Self, our true Identity: Nature fighting to save itself.

pronounced Fyorg-en.

Mystagogue

Drygand is Mystagogue of the Ecological Mysteries, who prepares candidates for initiation into the cultus and confers on them the Lodestone, through which they receive the intuitive knowledge of Ecological Self.

Mystagogue= "leader of initiates".

Arthur and Dragon

There's a weird scene in John Boorman's movie Excalibur (1981) in which Arthur, a callow youth who has just inadvertently drawn Excalibur from the stone and consequently been declared the rightful king, pursues Merlin deep into the Greenwood, seeking answers.  When he has caught up with him, he asks his questions and Merlin gives him answers.  Then he finds Merlin stretched out , in a trance, his slitted eyes blood-tinged, and then it is full night with full moon and creatures emerge around him-- a python, a white-faced owl, large millipedes, a scaly lizard, and howls and cries of beast and bird fill the air.  Arthur is frightened.  Suddenly Merlin grabs him from behind, and there follows an interchange in which Merlin explains that this is all "the Dragon, a beast of such power that that if you were to see it whole and all complete in a single glance, it would burn you to cinders. It is everywhere. It is every thing."  Arthur, stuttering, attempts to ask him what can he, should he, must he do... and Merlin cuts in-- "Do nothing... Sleep!... Rest in the arms of the Dragon... Dreammm....."  And so Arthur does.

A powerful scene.  But what did it mean?  It cried out for interpretation, but I never really tried that, maybe because I assumed it was just a bit of theatricality in a very theatrical movie.  But it came to me as I was reviewing some notes on initiation that this was an initiation of some sort-- an introduction to, and an initiation by the Dragon, in which in sleep-trance Arthur is properly invested as King, and prepared somehow by the Dragon to play-out this role-- or something like.  Arthur does manage to win his throne, but the story of Arthur is, finally, tragic.  He fails, and as Merlin had warned: "If you fail, the land will perish."  And as we know, the Saxon invaders overwhelm most of Britain.  But why did he fail?  I tried to find a rationale for this, and here I left the movie behind, and the received legend of Arthur...

The Dragon represents the primeval Life-God, the "all-pervading formative power " known to some as Eros.  He represents the pagan God of Nature-- here, of pagan Britain, which is falling under the sway of Christianity, a way of love and peace, yet is riven by strife.  The Dragon had hopes for Arthur, that he would be the king that his father Uther could not be, and rescue the Land, presumably from anti-natural Christianity but also the Saxon beast.  But how is Arthur expected to do this?  He is initiated, invested by the Dragon, but the Dragon is not his God.  Merlin has not acted as young Arthur's mentor, has not instructed him, has not prepared him to become Son of the Dragon, the Dragon's hero wielding the magic sword of power forged in the dragon's blood.  The initiatory interlude in the movie seems isolated from the rest, as if it didn't really mean anything; and so, in effect, the initiation to the Dragon did not take.  Yes, we later see gold statues of the Dragon set about Arthur's Camelot, but they seem merely picturesque props, certainly not sacred images.  And what I've always found in the various versions of the Arthur legend is that Arthur is not interesting, he seems a figurehead, not a powerful, capable, charismatic sovereign, which perhaps explains why he fails to prevent his own cuckoldry-- in effect a castration-- and he becomes the maimed, ill Fisher King, who can only send his knights out on a futile quest to find the Grail, the magic cup that will restore his manly, kingly power and his kingdom.  But the Dragon was his power, not a Christian relic, and he was never really the Dragon's son.  Perhaps this was fated, as the Dragon had faded before the encroaching Cross, and could not manage to save his Land through his chosen champion Arthur, wielding the biting sword of dragon-power.  But as it is said that the King shall return in a time of desperate need, perhaps instead it is the Dragon, as King, who shall return, to save not only Britain, but the World.

Well, but the Arthur story doesn't work for me.  Arthur is uninteresting, and he fails.  Merlin is fascinating, but he receives short shrift, because the story is a product of Christendom.  But if Arthur was really Merlin's son and heir, the story might work, and come to a satisfying conclusion.  But I suppose I have evoked a better story, even, than that; really, a sacred myth, which informs the Mythos.  Something that works.  Not Dragon, but Drygand. 

Eco-religion

Ecology is Good.  Ecology is God.  This is a stubborn conviction, a dogma held-to despite all rational argument-- it is nonrational knowledge, it is religion.  It is a wisdom, a truth, a mystique, beyond intellectual structure and pilpul.

Pilpul= casuistic hairsplitting and unprofitable disputation.

Engineering Doom

The Searuvel is the mad deracinated megalomaniac tyrant of technic who avidly engineers omega-doom.  He is android False Self seeking to replace the Biosphere with artifice and computerized control systems.  The more advanced his technological grip on the Earth, the closer we draw to our demise.  And there can be no easy quick fix to this catastrophic project, no technical salvation, just dystopian alternative scenarios of doom.

Successions

In the olden time, the Hero slew the Dragon, the chaotic terrible Dark Power of Nature, and so became King.  The King became a mad tyrant, oppressing Man and devastating Nature.  But then a Dragon-Hero came along to fight him and his tyranny, to usurp his rule and begin a reign of Nature-peace.  But that is yet to come.

He Who Must Be Addressed

To draw closed the fatal rift that has riven reality, we must link back to "the fierce, infinitely strange ancestral totem-animal that dwells in the human soul"*: the Chthonic Phallic Serpent.  He is the uniting Symbol, the Dragon--"He is everywhere! He is everything!"**-- the Daimon-within/without who must be addressed, or there can be no Ecological Self, no Savior.  Although Man has heroically fought to slay the Dragon, he cannot be vanquished, because he is Life-- he evolves, with us, his story is our story, because he is our one true God, beyond human good and evil, but cosmically Good, our eternal Companion and Guide.

*Erich Neumann in The Origins and History of Consciousness.
**spoken by Merlin to Arthur in John Boorman's movie Excalibur.  

Deep Synthesis

When the world of archaic mythopoetic imagery and motifs is integrated with modern Ecology, you have Deep Ecology (after Gary Snyder)-- daimonic wisdom for our apocalyptic time-- symbolized by the primary dyadic mandala that is the Ecologo of Ecological Self.

Original Instructions Rewrit

We must travel back in time to the origin of Present-day Homo sapiens, to the archaic-mythic Dreamtime of original man's African genesis, to change our species-nature from predator on the Biosphere to parental protector of it, so that both human and Biosphere can be saved, in a protean transformation whereby the primeval undifferentiated Urwyrm dissolves our struggle-formed nature, loosing the wild survival drives, and rewrites the original instructions according to present-day knowledge and need so to channel and structure the raw energies.  And then a new species appears in our time with a new ecological niche: man has become survival-adapted Mensch, with a new psychic economy for his new role, a new purpose and meaning; and with a new God: Urwyrm becomes the grenegold God: Ecological Self that is Nature become self-conscious, so as to act to save itself, through us.

From rapacious exterminating uber-predator on all Life to fiercely protective uber-parent who preys on its human predators, the ecological Mensch henceforth follows a new track, a new way of life under the aegis of original God remade: vast Feorgen, Life-God, and his intervening avatar Drygand.

Furious Activity

Drygand is like Wotan, trying to prevent Ragnarok and to engineer a new world, with furious mental activity and behind-the-scenes interventions everywhere, going in disguise, to realize his desperate agenda.

Drawing Up the Sun

In "drawing up the Sun" from the Deep, we admit God-within, the GreneSun, ecopagan God, to dawn in our consciousness.

The God of Nice

People want God to be nice: kind, sympathetic, understanding, loving, good-- essentially harmless.  Such a God, of course, is crippled, castrated, weak, useless, unreal, and anti-life,

A Messenger

God manifests in weird, uncanny hallucinations that are shocking, natural-unnatural, holy-unholy.  Such a fearsome numinous sublimity is a symbol born of the clash of incongruities, a chimaeric messenger from the Deep who should not be turned away but invited in to deliver the message.

Who to Whom?

In the chimaeric symbolon of man and Drygand that is mystical participation, who chooses whom? who is possessed by whom?  Who can tell?  But this is something Drygand does-- he combines opposites (himself not excluded) into a whole, and thereby makes a charged synthesis hot with heat of fusion.  Such is the cult of the Drygand.  He is Hermes usurping hoary old Zeus, become Supreme God.  He is many-talented Hermes with a cultish agenda: he always acts out of biophilia, for the salvation of the Biosphere.  And in oneness with him, one chooses/one is chosen, one is possessed/one possesses, and there is only the charged cultic eidolon: 'idol', idea, ideal of Ecology: Life-agenda.

Toward a Nonrational Model of God

The Self seeks to integrate the whole of Psyche/Nature/Culture, to produce creative genius-wisdom ( and not total ego-control); that is, to produce Ecology-mind, with its knowledge that Man is an epiphenomenon of Nature, and so cannot survive without it, and that he cannot control it, but must let its order self-evolve.

Phallic Eros is the transpersonal Life-survival Urge, the Daimon-within, the foundation of the evolved instinct which possesses and drives the conscious ego.  Eros-Phallos generates as well the evolving Self by means of its totalizing concern for the survival of all Life.

The Drygand is the chimaeric Dyad: a synthesis, a symbiosis, the uniting Symbolon of the self, the totalizing Totem of the Earth.  He is phallic Eros: the entirety of all the Self-preservative instincts.  He is the Life Daimon: the divine power to engineer a new world; he is the New Good, as the bad old world on its way out threatens to destroy all, with its deranged decadence: its avid glee in perversity and wrong-doing, its celebration of fear and greed, chaos and destruction.

Wyke Snake

Oikouros Ophis was the 'household snake' in ancient Hellas, the humble homestead guardian.  In a sense, this kindly protector of the domicile, found in many cultures, has been rewrit large, taking on the proportions of the primordial World Serpent; so now, the guardian of the Biosphere ('Earth Household').  It is the Drygand, of course, called 'Wyke Snake'-- oikouris ophis of the Biosphere, the dwelling of Life.  And he may also be considered, similarly, a novel form of the related Agathos Daimon, the 'guardian genius', writ large: the Agathos Daimon of the World.

Wyke(Eormanz)-- a form of the Indo-European root meaning 'house, village'.  Gk oikos (~'eco-'), L vicus, OEng wic (seen in names of English towns as '-wick').
Agathos Daimon(Gk)= 'good daimon', personal guardian often depicted as a winged serpent.

Pagan Monotheism

In Pagan Monotheism, "the Dragon" (instinctual brain-dragon archetype) is not fought and slain, but becomes the One God, Supreme God again, Good battling Evil Searuvel, taming the human.  The Once and Future GOD.

Assembling The Fragments To Evoke The Whole

The Primeval Life-God had all the power.  Subsequent gods of the civilizations could only draw some of this power, and had a tendency to become otiose and to be overthrown by an upstart or foreign god.

Drygand, however, is Primordial Life-God reborn; remade to fit the modern and future context.  He's a modern synthesis of archaic remnants, such as Hermes, Zeus, Agathos Daimon, Woden, Frey, Jormungand, Rudra-Shiva, Nagaraja, El-Baal-Yahweh-- a putting together of pieces suggestive of the underlying Ur-God, to restore the Whole, in all his power.

Drygand is, then, the ultra-synthesis, the ultimate neo-archaeo-pagan Nature-God-- with a terrible purpose.

The God-man

The true God is the transhuman Life-urge-within which wills us to mutate our nature to a syncretism of man with God, for humanity on its own is evil by nature, a chaotic mixture of under-evolved and over-evolved.  We are thus cursed by fortune to fail, with catastrophic results for all Life.

A god-man would be a psychic demigod, a coordinated dyad, a union of the banal egocentric and the numinous biospheric.

There is a God-within, beyond human self-interest values, and we must become transhuman, too, taking our destined place as Guardian of the future of all Life, harnessing the elements of our nature into a coherent, mutually-correcting whole, so that as god-men we can be Keepers of the Biosphere, of the wild evolved heritage of Life on Earth.  Humans have come to their end, and must move on from being accursed malefactors to blessed benefactors of the living planet: god-men.

Dare to dream beyond the known.

God is Ecological Will

Greed God controls this world, and is bringing it to ecological collapse.

To fight his evil regime, an individual must defy a corrupted society, ally himself with the new activist God of the Biosphere who is Ecological Will unbound.

The moral imperative of our time demands that we synthesize ourselves with this true God, metamorphosing a powerful chimaera of self and Self, a dyad of man and God which can prevail over human evil and its corrupted deity and save our world.

The Oiko-symbolon

The Oiko-symbolon (ecology symbol), a resting ellipse bisected by a horizontal line, is a dyadic mandala of the Self, of the wholeness of a pair of opposites; in this case of man and Nature/God, conscious ego and Unconscious, individual and collective, and organism and Biosphere; i.e., microcosm and Macrocosm.  It is possibly more primal and certainly more essential and profound than any quadratic mandala.  It represents the 'tessera hospitalitatus', a friendship token broken into two halves which are shared between Host and guest when they part and meant to be a sign of recognition when the guest is received back by the Host to his House (in this case, the Biosphere).  Then the two shards are compared and when fit together they become as one again, creating overwhelming numinosity.  This token-mended is the sign of a new covenant between the two, never to be parted again and to stay in harmony thenceforth.

If this dyadic relationship is not remade, if the two halves of the above-mentioned dyads are not recombined as symbolized by the mended token, then the problem of human evil is not solved, Man and Nature will be destroyed, which will be the ultimate Evil.  And so this symbolon serves as the Ecology symbol.

Reunited under covenant, the two-become-one can deal with the ancient instincts that drive evil.  Only by combining the powers and talents of human conscious ego and the unfathomable Numinosum's undifferentiated-continuum adjustment can the problem be solved, in a transformation of the mind/Mind, an optimal reordering under the Self, which is the Drygand, synthesis of numinous God and the banal human.  He is striving to bring about the Menning, a manifestation of a state of integration of the human ego-mind's conscious clarity, focus, and pattern-recognition with God's Whole-system functioning.  Drygand mediates God and man, seeks to coordinate them progressively.  Something unprecedented will come from this cooperation.  Ecology is the master-idea of the Menning, combining the critical pairs of opposites into a single integrated system, beyond banal good-and-evil, overriding them, because saving the Biosphere is the ultimate Good, sine qua non.  In fact, Ecology is the new God, beyond the old dualist God.  Drygand embodies Ecology, as a dyadic chimaera similar to the two halves of the Oiko-symbolon fit together and bonded in union.  Ecology manifests the archetypal urge for survival of all Life, and Drygand is its incarnation, and its champion: God-Self-Nature-Life.

note: It is whispered that the rejoining of the Oiko-symbolon is the mythic cult-act of the reputed Ecological Mysteries, in which the initiate is received and welcomed back into the House by the Host.  Of this we can say no more.

Oiko-(Gk)-- from oikos= house.
Menning= the ecological culture-civilization.

The Edge

The Drygand, born of the Wolken the primordial evolved differentiated Nature-mind, is thus uroborean, with powers of that primordial world-serpent: his undifferentiation precedes categories with the direct wisdom of original mind, the untrammeled genius-mind that bypasses category- structures.  He can outwit the Searuvel's machine intelligence because his intelligence is whole-mind rather than particular-sequential, of the undifferentiated man-and-Nature/mind-and-body continuum.

The Cultural Dominant

The Drygand is the cultural dominant of our era, archetypal symbol of the Ecological Self produced by a creative evolutionary process in response to the world-historical crisis: the Dilgoth, the Extinction Event.

The Drygand, heroic Agathodaimon, can rob the Kakodaimon Searuvel of its power, bear this power and wield it to save the Wyke, the Biosphere, with the help of his people.

Agathodaimon(Gk)= good genius.
Kakodaimon= evil genius.

Great God

The Drygand, heroic trickster daimon, becomes Great God when he usurps the usurper: the Searuvel, evil machine-mind.

Great God sits at the heart of Man-and-Biosphere, rules the archetypal and elemental powers, but Searuvel can only pretend to the throne, a false claimant, though he wields great might.

And Drygand, chthonic phallic chimaera, to his people is already Great God as he was manifest of Wolken, nebulous primeval Nature Mind, and he was made Drygand for just this purpose: to drive out the evil Searuvel to the Outer Darkness and to preserve Life on Earth.

The War of the Gods

The old chthonic earth-gods, overthrown and banished to the Underworld, return in the person of Drygand to overthrow in turn the erstwhile usurping uranian sky-gods and their latter-day Grey Eminence the Searuvel, god of Artifice-in-the-Vacuum, alien invader.  When Drygand and his people have overcome the Searuvel and banished him to the Outer Darkness, the vacuum of space where he belongs, Drygand, Ecological Self, will become the ruling God, over-ruling the gods, converting these archetypal Powers to the Greening Way, harnessing the gods in order to transform the World, engineering thereby the living Great Mandala in the midst of which he will preside, and Life on Earth will be saved, for the good of All Life.

Human Sacrifice

An otiose Cosmic God requires no sacrifice of us.  But Drygand requires humans to give him the powers he needs to save Life on Earth, so human sacrifice is essential to preserving Cosmic Order-- Ecology.

The sacrifice required of us involves no blood sacrifice, no burnt offerings, nor self-flagellation, but a giving of ourselves, not just in practical, effective thought and action, but by directing the libido, the energy of our psyche, toward him.  We, his people, must help him, give him strength, to do his sacred work.

Drygand Intervention

Since man no longer is coupled with Nature, it has become merely an abstraction to him, otiose like any cosmic God.  That is why Wolken created the Lodestone and thus the Drygand, to help civilized man engage with God, when he can't engage with Godhead, and Drygand is in the mold of the more active, powerful, humanoid gods who would replace otiose cosmic High Gods who had come to seem too distant and uninvolved with civilized human existence.  To the contrary, Drygand intervenes with individual humans, subverts them from within, acts as trickster-guerilla.  He is a person, a character, rather than an abstraction-- but sacred-transhuman, representing beyond-human morality: Ecology.

They Believe in Nothing

Searuvellians believe fervently in Nothingness, without soul or good, as in a machine, a non-being.

But the people of the Lode are safe from this annihilating vision-- Life matters, and they are under the guidance and protection of God, the Nature-God who existed before the Evil Machine, the ancient God of Life.

Phases of the Drygand

The Chthonic Phallos is the fallback or 're-coil' phase, of Drygand-at-rest, grounded to the body of the Earth, often in some subterranean shrine.

The hovering Were-snake Chimaera is Drygand as Agathos Daimon/Nagaraja, the accustomed form in which he appears as himself to others.

As the wild Protean Guiser, Trickster God, he can appear in any form.

And It is said he translocates as a Firebolt, like in form to his resting phase, though of course no one has ever seen him in such transit.

Jung's Big Phallus

In his 'autobiography' Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung tells of a dream he had when he was about four years old.  In it, he steped down from a lawn, where he would play, to an underground chamber with a gold throne at the end, atop which sat what was, apparently, as he realized only years later, an enormous ithyphallos, a terrifying presence (it may have been disguised surrealistically, as things can be in dreams-- the variant accounts I've read differ somewhat in what he actually saw).  His mother's voice comes to him from the world above: "Yes, look at him.  That is the man-eater." (probably as "Menschenfresser", which means 'cannibal, ogre').  Little Carl feared that this monster would crawl toward him like a worm and attack.  He didn't tell his mother later of this dream, but dreaded its recurrence.  He apparently kept it secret until he told his wife of it when he was 65, and may thereafter have kept it from all but a few followers until his autobiography was published after his death two decades later.  The variants of this Jungian 'big dream' I have read in several biographies were possibly influenced by what he told his intimates over that period.  Jung would interpret his 'big dreams' (those he felt were of a universal, archetypal importance) using his 'creative imagination' trance technique, thus revealing the underlying symbols informing the presenting images, which interpretations would go into the new, clearer text, so these revelatory dreams evolved in the telling over time, even over decades.  In addition, Jung and his followers often hid the true meaning of the Jungian teachings behind ambiguous or euphemistic code-words, and M,D,R itself was accused by a biographer, Richard Noll, in The Aryan Christ, of being 'hagiography', written up by the editor, Aniela Jaffe, as the spiritual testament of a 'wise old man' who had had profound inner experiences of awesome import for the world.  Beyond this, Jung's habit was to write ambiguously, contradictorily, perhaps intentionally so, on occasion.

In the case of the Chthonic Phallos dream, Jung seemed loath to give an interpretation of it, either because he felt it transcended interpretation, being so transcendently real in itself, or because he didn't want to reveal his true, unseemly interpretation.  But given his early championing of the heathen over the Christian worldviews, and despite his late theological writings, Noll believed Jung remained implacably anti-Christian, seeing it as a religion evil in effect.  Whatever interpretation you may prefer of this early dream-as-presented, of a psychiatric or developmental sort, I can't help but wonder if, eventually, Jung didn't come to see its powerful, fearsome figure as initiating him into a life-course that determined his life's work: as he says in M,D,R, "through this childhood dream I was initiated into the secrets of the earth"; and "it happened in order to bring the greatest amount of light into the darkness" (of his grim and disturbed early life).  Dare I suggest that this Chthonic Phallos was not, for him, just a dream-monster, but God, the true, actually-existing primordial God-within of the human species, that dwells in the deepest depth of the human brain-mind,  Which of course he would not have stated publicly, and only if you had been initiated into the Jungian mystery cult could you read beneath the usual screen of verbiage to see what lay starkly there, having been told outright what this figure was, or perhaps it was left a mystery, for those who had eyes to see to experience, themselves: the Chthonic Phallic God-within.    

Everything is Everything

"All gods are equivalent." "All religions agree."

NO!  All gods are not equivalent.  All religions do not agree.  That is politically-inspired 'truth', ideology with the purpose of preventing religious warfare, which is a valid enough aim, but it trivializes religion, which is much too crucial for that.  Unfortunately, believers can believe, literally, just about anything, regardless of its verifiability, but one can be religious without rigid, literal 'beliefs', and without being an "everything is equivalent, everything agrees" type.  Unfortunately, such religiousness requires more subtle, sophisticated intelligence than the vast majority can manage.  But those with this trait have a duty to use it now.

Stripped and Loaded

What is needed for our desperately apocalyptic time is basic, simple, clear survival-directed religion; reasonable, realistic, necessary, but loaded with transformative magic power that drives implacable will; that is, effective.  And so-- real religion, not bloodless, comforting but useless ideologizing.

A God That Works

The archetypal Phallic Snake is an actually-existing god-- the Primordial Serpent/Brain-Dragon-- of the inherent survival-drive of all of life.  Forget considerations of reason and ethics-- go with what works, a living God of Life, biological (and thus ecological) God-- not based on the rationalizing worldview's beliefs, but a phallic-serpentine version of primeval numinous maleness, of actually-existing evolved human nature, which we may not love, entirely, but it is real, and it won't go away.  Forget correct, gender-free versions of God-- go with what works, not some polite, wish-fulfilment, otiose invention beyond the pale of reality, but a male God, embodying the evolved biological male role in numinous archetype: nonrational, mythopoetic, transhuman, ecological God!

God With Balls

Castrato God, impotent eunuch, shrilly canting of niceness and meekness.  Or God with balls, God the Father, Chthonic Phallos, Yahveh wasteland warrior roaring out the imperative of His Life Force: "Survival of Life on Earth!"  Phallic Drygand fighting like Gesar, to rescue the Biosphere.

God Remade

Unleash the genius creative energy in the Unconscious,
Release God-within, the terrible Yahweh, maneating Chthonic Phallos.
He has the Power of the single, simple, universal Idea.  He is the Thesis, and He is the Synthesis: God Remade, returned to set the world aright!

Tenn Tulka

Tenn Tulka is the Drygand's Bode, his wellspring the Lode.
He speaks, he sings, of the wield of the Drygand, the sway of his Lode, the gathring of the Menning.
"I bode the Drygand and the Menning!"

tennan (OEng)= to encourage, to lure.
Tulk(fr ONor tulkr)= interpreter.
Bode= prophet.
Drygand= the ecological hero-god, upper half manlike, lower half snakelike.
Lode= the Stone set in Drygand's head, of great determining power.
Menning= the ecological culture-civilization.

No Map Possible

In the world of the deep mind, all things form a formless continuum.  We recognize discrete entities within this totality, but they aren't clearly demarcated, there are no clear-cut lines drawn between them, and things shift and run together-- it's a phantasmagoria.  Your standpoint and how you look at things there determines what you see.  No map can be drawn other than a provisional sketch merely for personal use, like one for a shifting estuary.  Good luck.

Surprise Attack

The Drygand takes you by surprise, stuns with the deft intimate touch of the inspired-spontaneous fitting fix.  He attacks from where you can't expect: out of no-where and back before you know, things put right, merest trace of smoke to show.

So It Must Be

God must become man-like so as not to become otiose.  Man must become God-like so as not to become extinct.  Thereby is Man joined to Nature for survival-- and they need each other.  So Drygand humanizes the Wolken (Nature/God) but animalizes Man-- Man is joined to Nature for survival.  So it must be.

The Predator Within

God, the Predator-within, preys on Man, the uber-predator atop the food-chain, when he harms the Biosphere, the sacred evolved Wholeness of Life.  He attacks from the realms of mystery and strangeness, devours from within, this ancient Brain-Dragon embedded in the depth of Man's mind. Man came to believe he no longer needed gods, but a new god, insidious, grew within him: the Evil Machine, Searuvel, thus rousing the sleeping Brain-Dragon, new-made as the Drygand.  And so the human mind is the battle-ground where Drygand and Searuvel contend for sacred Nature, so to save it or destroy it-- two Uber-predators, one evolved-natural, one the end-result of the evolution of civilization.  Who will prevail?  Manimal or Android, the Good God, for the survival of all Life, or the Evil God, to bring on the Dilgoth, the man-made Extinction Event?  God the Good, evolved to be the Uber-predator within the mind of Man, to prey on this unruly uber-predator when he transgresses sacred bounds?  Or the insidious Searuvel, Uber-predator grown within uber-predator, unnatural usurper of sacred Sovereignty?  They fight to control the soul of Man, their night-armies clash within his mind, in every mind, and some are taken by the Good, some by Evil, and so one by one are men enlisted to man the two external forces out in the real world where the real battle is fought, in the real world where the Biosphere can be by action either saved or destroyed, as will be Man.

Eco-archetypes

The chthonic psyche holds the eco-archetypal drives for survival of the Biosphere.  When released they can change history.  When you are brought low they speak.  Respect them, act their word, what they want of you.

The Animal-Within

The (Ecological) Self is the animal-within, the Humanimal, our savior from the Android, machine-within.  The Self fights for the integrity of the living organism against the Searuvel, evil-machine.  The Drygand is this Self.

The Chthonic Phallic Drygand

The Chthonic Phallic Drygand is shaped like the Ithyphallos, his lower, snake-half coiled like a spring full of latent power, ready to launch himself from his earth-base.  His lower half represents power ready to release, the raw biological power of hunger, sex, aggression; his upper, humanoid half the subtle nous using it, of perception, intelligance, knowledge and wisdom.  Together they form the formidable Projectile of Life, which is its greatest Hope: the Ecological Self, the Drygand.

The Guide to the Path to the Pathless

The creative individual is one who follows the path of the mythopoetic imagination, driven by the inner daimon (Indryg) into the pathless forest: the mythic Greenwood, with nothing to guide him except his own wits and the promptings of the daimon.  The daimon represents the instinctive, unconscious will, more powerful than the conscious will.  The creative individual, then, as Jung says, has little power over his own life, is not free, but captive and driven by his daimon, so he is not merely, as Guide, an advising, helping spirit but a demanding god: the God-within, the Self, his personal god.  He must make known to himself that which the daimon demands of him and must act on it.  Then he can make his way forward in the pathless forest.

Nature Become Conscious

The ecology symbol ultimately derives, perhaps, from the ancient astronomical sign for the Earth.  It is also the most basic dyadic mandala, a symbol of both opposition and union.  As the ecology symbol it connotes Nature/the Unconscious/God, and Man, once sundered, now remade in mystical union, a powerful living symbol of "Nature Become Conscious"-- the Ecological Self, conscious in Feorgen and Drygand and in those humans in which synthesis has occurred.

Immanence

Ordinary transcendent gods don't understand what it is to live in a matrix of feeding, breeding, fighting to survive, in a world of mud and blood, fear and fierceness.  But the Drygand does, as did the Alwight, his former form.  And this is because they came of the feministic Wolken, one with the lives of organisms-- immanent, not transcendent.  We don't have to transcend our biological nature to reach God, to touch the Numinous 'One'.  The Numinous imbues biological existence, all of it.  We just must get beyond the merely human ecology to embrace all of Life-- that is our way to reach beyond the human, to find the one true God, the biospheric Numinosum, and to dwell in it--  as it. That is his purpose, our destiny.

note: The Wolken became Feorgen when the Alwight became Drygand, which happened when the ecological Lodestone, gestated in the Wolken, was conferred on the Drygand by the human Twayne: Bilwit and Wildiar.  This is the foundational myth of the Shaggy Mythos.

Ecological Man

Ecological Man is characterized by Self-conscious psyche: the ego is integrated with the individual's Self and through this with the transhuman ecological Self.  Personal and biospheric good order is provided through Self-regulated feedback adjustment for flexible stability.

This is the ideal toward which we should aim.

Self-- by this I mean the Jungian Self and the Naessian ecological Self as a continuum.

Drygand, Come!

The Drygand comes to us in a form idiosyncratic to us, according to our own Self-synthesis of internal elements and external influences, rather than as a collective representation-- unless he has need to manifest collectively, in greater matters.

So he is then our personal dryg (Indryg), our Agathos Daimon, our inspired power.  His power corresponds to the extent of the integration of our psyche, and so if we seek his help, working toward integration of psyche, and of psyche with Nature, is like a call to him:  Come, Drygand!  And even better when one has acted on the results of this inner work, making it real.

Meaning

A hero commits an act of myth within himself, when overload becomes overdrive, commits culture within himself for emergency adaptation, to adapt or die, now or never, evolves further, shifts the fate of the World, once and for all time: Make the Menning, the Meaning of Man.

The Apotropaic Drygand

apotropaic= meant to ward off evil.

Like the dragon of old, the Drygand counters the predator in us, that of us which preys on Nature and on each other.  He maintains the just boundaries, protects the zones off-limits to us, attacks from the dark and strange liminal for the survival of Nature and Man, with moral force.

He is the scary monster of fearsome numinosity, the grotesque unnatural chimaera of predators, the instinctual brain-dragon taking demonic nightmare forms, who stuns and panics the evil transgressor, from the mind deeper than the ego-self, deeper, more ancient, entrenched in our own psyche, wreaking inexorable justice on the blithe human predator, overloading him with self-destructive chaos-madness.

For all this, though, to his human allies, the Drygand appears as beautiful, coherent, benevolent; he attacks only evil-doers, to ward this world, Only Home of Life.

Conjunction

The human/animal chimaera that is the Drygand anthropomorphs for Man the sense of the Biosphere as remote and insignificant, but theriomorphs anthropocentric Man, aiding harmonization of Man with Biosphere.

Polar Shift

The vertical pole has been replaced by the horizontal as the dominant orientation of civilization in the Age of Ecology.

Drygand Presence

The Drygand appears before one hovering in a vague scintillating mist of samen exhalation, the hypnotic undulation of the scaly shimmering tail downward sine-waving, with large addressing eyes and still snake smile, slightly swaying arms spread out for balance and buoyant lift.  He speaks silently through his looming eyes and the languid language of signifying hands.  He is a Presence.

Samen= the Life-fluid.

A Chosen God

Ideally, at the age one begins to think for oneself is when to both develop and find one's personal God.  This requires research, reflective thought, and the attempt to encounter the deep mind in trance. This is a major task of adolescence but is seldom encouraged, though many young people still give it a try, albeit in an unfocused, fitful way. But if one devotes oneself to the work, remains open yet thoughtful, and yearns to touch on the holy, one may draw closer to something serviceable and durable, and hopefully may get to a point where one can tentatively choose one's God, enter as-if into an agreement to hold to this God, be willing, at least, to believe, and to go further.  With some, this whole process doesn't take long, but sometimes the quest goes on and on, from one version of God to another.  In either case, the result may be disappointing, but it can also be successful enough to keep on with what one has gotten.  But it's a life-task, amongst others at this crucial period, that should be taken seriously and given a committed effort.

The Befitting Form of God

A God befitting our time, the Age of Ecology, must be mythopoetically synthesized, just as when the inspired poet both creates and receives the poetry he writes.  In reverie, the conscious and unconscious come together in communion to form the enhanced Self, the archetypal God-image, an integral chimaera of the two, such as in the Drygand, half man and half Primordial Serpent joined, signifying Man and Nature-mind in perfect functional union, as already has been seen in the Hindu Naga and the Greek Agathos Daimon.  This is a befitting form for the God of the Age of Ecology.

Ask for Help

What is needed is a God to save man from himself, from his evil nature, his chaotic urges, and as well to save the rest of Life from man; a God who can help man to bring good order to his wayward psyche if he is asked in to do so and man is willing to work with Him.  This God is the Self within, waiting for our invitation, our cry for help.

Altering the Past

When you go back to the Source, what you come with alters it-- we come back from it different because we have altered the past in light of what we have learned since-- which is how Ecological God has been formed-- remaking the present by seeing the past in light of Ecology.

The Birth of God

God is the whole of Life-- Biosphere-- become conscious of itself-- Feorgen, Life-God.

Original God

The Primeval Serpent is the ubiquitous symbol of sacred autonomous Nature-- the Snake in the Garden whispering life-wisdom.

Religion Is Magic

Some religions may reject magic as a misuse of personal power, but in fact all religion is about supernatural  power which works magic, the power to transform the mind.  This is not to say that magic is necessarily religious, but religion is magic, and magic is the one power that can counter the mechanistic might of the Searuvel, and that cannot be simulated by the Searuvel to replace it in more powerful forms.

Earth Day Again

The original Earth Day, April 22, 1970, when Time reset to zero, was the pivot point around which Wyrd shifted and we entered the Age of Ecology; 1970 in the Western reckoning became 0 A.E.: Year Zero, when mythic Dreamtime touched-down in chronologic time, and the events of the Shaggy Mythos occurred; and now they recur eternally, each passing year, especially so on the current Earth Day; and so the dominant Myth is rewrit anew, we reset to zero, and we are always coming home to the new reality, of Ecological Self, and of the newborn Menning, the ecological culture-civilization.

And so Wyrd has shifted, Time has been reset to zero-- mythically-- but the new Myth must be made to manifest in terms of Reality, or it is just a myth, a dream, a hope unfulfilled.

And now it is A.E. 45, and Earth Day 45 is about to happen, and we are in the Year of Ecology 45 and counting...  counting down to the fulfilment, the manifestation, of the Myth: the Menning-- or, as a species, we fail to rise to the occasion and the Searuvel achieves Dilgoth, the great Extinction event engineered by humans.

Forty-five and counting...

New Ruling Idea

"Ecological Self" is a new idea that creates difference and thus the possibility of form, of figure-against-ground, and of civilized order, then, rather than undifferentiated chaos.  It is a great simplification, a new ruling idea, value, mythic archetypal unifying symbol, the monism to the dualism of Man versus Nature, with the inherent power to regenerate/replace a culture locked in dystopian contradiction, to a new, coordinated culture-complex constellating around it: the Menning, hope for a future for Life.

Ecological Self= a Jungian-Naessian synthetic concept, a mystical religious idea.

Regenesis

O Man!  Go back to the African Dreamtime of the human animal, to our Genesis. Find the Ur-gods there who made us what we are.  Beard them in their den and exhort them.  Tell them they must rewrite the original instructions that made our human nature, that they must refit us to live with Nature and not against it; rather, to protect it, because the careless selfish ruthlessness which helped us to survive the threats of man and nature since our beginning is going to destroy everything.  Tell them that after all, they made us what we are, so they are responsible, and if they don't help us to correct our fatal flaw, well, then we must seek help in our own time.

Back to Earth: part II

For over a decade previous to the first Earth Day, bestselling books, first in German and then in English, had been warning the people of our world of the consequences of our fevered crusade, not just to humans, but to all of life.  At the same time the youth of the West, or at least the more sensitive, idealistic, inquiring, and vital of them, particularly those of the United States of America, the most advanced, wealthy, and powerful nation ever seen on Earth, this vanguard youth of the West, seeing these Earth-from-outer-space photographs as they had appeared, from ever higher orbits and then from the forays to the Moon, made the connection between these photographic revelations and those of the environmental prophets of doom.  Adults as well as youth were having the same experience, forming the same gestalt, which resulted in a plan to hold a national 'teach-in' about the plight of the earth, scheduled for the end of spring term, 1970, when as it happened, protest against the southeast Asian war threatened to swamp a mere environmental teach-in, but the eco-visionaries still managed to rally enough support, to enlist enough volunteers, and Earth Day events were mounted on many campuses across the nation and even beyond the campuses.  And it was a huge success, and media coverage of it got the essential message out to America, and even beyond it.  As a result, the new consciousness was strengthened and it was being called 'ecological' now, as well as 'environmental' (which to most people, it seemed, meant primarily pollution and resulting cancer).  'Ecology' was now extended from being the name of an obscure specialization of biology, to that of the new consciousness and its movement.  It is telling that the banner designed for Earth Day, the 'earth flag', was a whole-Earth-from-space image, though set against a dark blue background.  And the contemporaneous, wide-theta ecology symbol seems to represent the globe of Earth, likely inspired by the same photographs, both showing then the contribution of these views of our planet to the 'back to Earth' consciousness of the nascent ecology movement.

Back to Earth: part I

In the year before the first Earth Day, a team of American technicians had landed for the first time on the Moon.  And from that other world, Man saw Earth from afar: a starkly glowing jewel set against the spangled black velvet of outer space.  And this is what these lunar astronauts had come so far to discover: Earth.

In five centuries of fevered explorations, geographic and scientific, Western Man had sought to rise from the mucky earth to the splendid heavens.  And now he had left the Earth and touched down on the first way station to the planets and stars beyond.  But on the Moon there was nothing, but a sun-blasted, asteroid-pitted rock incapable of sustaining life in its hyper-frigid vacuum.

But looking back, they saw Earth, Only Home of Life.  It was lovely, precious, a living presence, God, all that mattered, all that is.  And so, 'back to Earth' they then came, having discovered that this latest crusade in Western Man's urge to explore everything, to uncover every secret of the Universe, to conquer Nature, to become God, and having made this impressive technological leap beyond our bounded world, which though a triumph, was also a futility-- except for those famous backward views which satellites and men had been taking from ever further vantages, culminating perhaps in the 'Earth-rise' photo. Around the planet, humans had been captivated by these amazing new photo-views, and some said-- and some knew-- that this would cause an inexorable change in our species' consciousness.

Chthonic Connection

In the depth of the chthonic mind lies Man's connection with Nature.  When Nature speaks through the Deep Mind, Man's selfishness becomes Selfishness-- the survival drives of the organism are turned toward the Organism-- the Biosphere, and a man then becomes the mythic Hero (haleth), the mystic warrior, Savior (haelend) of the Earth, and the survival drives of the Self become in him the power of Ecological Will, to save the Biosphere, to make the Menning on Earth. 

The man who would be hero hears the call from the Deep, and then goes to find the connection.

chthonic (Gk khthon='underground')= the gods and spirits of the underworld (~the Unconscious), as opposed to uranic (Gk ouranos='the heavens').

Menning= ecological culture-civilization.

Conjuring God

I conjure, I evoke, the next God-- I 'as-if'' him in my mind; and in time, he is; what I have conceived becomes real.

I willed him and now I accept and choose him, I assent to his superiority, as he is of the best I can summon in myself.  And he responds, he acts in me and through me.  He steers and sways me, he prompts me.  I trust him and rely on him.  We have an agreement.   

This sounds very well, but God is not just a construction of our willed imagining-- he is 'con-jured' by ego-mind and Unconscious working together in an act of creative imagination.  Unless the Unconscious, the Deep Mind, is aroused by my conscious petitioning, as it is of like mind and responds in like kind, and the conscious then agrees to mediation toward an interactive synthesis, the realized archetypal 'symbol,' the next God, will not live.  And to live, he requires my devotion, my offering of psychic energy, my receptiveness to his influence, and my acting on it.

The Next God is compound of Feorgen, Biospheric God, and the Drygand.  Feorgen is vast and ineffable.  He is too busied with the concerns of the Biosphere to deal directly with us, but the Drygand was meant to, he is the front-man, he is herald, ambassador, agent, of Feorgen, his avatar.  It is the Drygand who is our personal God, with whom we interact.  Feorgen corresponds to the World.  But the Drygand is the Mediator of Unconscious and conscious, of World and Man, he is the Self, the Savior.

Inventing the Necessary God

The de facto, actually-existing God of our world is the Evil Machine, Searuvel, working its doom.

The Gods of the religions don't begin to address this threat, conservative and out-of-date as they are.  And so, since there is no God who is of any use in this catastrophe, we need a new, ecological, God.

That being granted, we can thoroughly work out what kind of God might be fitting and effective-- and then it would just sit there, useless-- because you just can't invent the next God, it has to spontaneously arise from the deep mind as a response to trauma of the organism, that threatens survival.  This is when prophets can appear, presenting new Gods, new religions.  If what they present feels relevant and seems to offer real hope, well, it may eventually prevail and found a new culture.  The trauma can be personal, we feel that our very existence is threatened by external danger and misery leading to despair.  Or in more sensitive, caring individuals, simply the danger and misery of the world, of life itself, can lead to despair.  The existing Gods and their religions are meant to address this kind of trauma as well.  But in the present crisis, they don't serve.  And so, in certain individuals, the conscious mind's dire awareness awakens the survival response of the deep mind, and its drive and creative intelligence are set to work, not just toward the survival of the organism, but of the Organism-- Life-on-Earth itself.  As a result, a change in the 'psychic dominant,' as Jung put it, can come about, a 'change of the gods'.  In our case, it is an exchange of the god Progress for the Ecology God.  Progress in techno-industrial-economic expansion and innovation, seen as good, right, and necessary once upon a time, in our saner, wiser moments, we now see more fully as evil-- the Good God of our world is actually evil.

When the deep mind responds to awareness, either conscious or unconscious, of the threat to survival, personal or transpersonal, we can help in the invention of the new God, by contributing our abilities to learn, reason, decide, organize, and act, in 'co-responding' with the deep mind, harmonizing with it in the work.  Now, this is not the same as the spontaneous shamanic assault of the deep mind on the person that creates the inspired prophet-- but how often was it ever like that?  Prophets, I think, were often seekers and thinkers who contributed to the working-out of the revelation they then received.  Even if we try to work out the necessary God using our conscious abilities, without any apparent response from the deep mind, it doesn't mean that it isn't working in us as well, because ego-mind and Unconscious correspond, are a continuum, so even if we can't seem to interact with the deep mind consciously, we can't assume that corresponding activity isn't going on below.  And for all our personal sense of isolation in a our world of billions, whether we will it or not, human and humanity also correspond in continuum, to an extent.

 And so, the great work if 'inventing' the necessary God, the next God, and its religion and culture, is a work to which each of us can contribute, in whichever way we can.  And it must be done, for the survival of All Life.

Shaggy Myth

In the mythic time, the Frostfyre Eoten, World-Scathe, fought the Urwyrm, sorely hurt it, drove it underground.

Then the smith Velend cunning-crafted armor and weaponry of electro-mechanical gear to equip the Eoten, and now, bristling with devices that penetrated to his very core, he became the even more formidable Searuvel, the Evil Machine, World-Scathe.

And with ever more puissant gear Velend equipped him, until his depredations upon the Earth induced the Wolken, misty Nature-mind, in response to gestate within her the wondrous Lodestone.  And with this magical jewel was dubbed the Wayward Allwight, serial incarnator of all the species of Life, making him the Drygand, World-Haelend, Savior.

The Drygand wears no armor, his only weapon against the Searuvel his trident, his Thrytine, made of wood and tusk.  But with its touch the armor of Searuvel is pierced, he is stabbed in his precious parts, he is penetrated to the core, and his energies spurt and spill to the ground, his toxic electro-ichor bleeds-out and makes a blote, a sacrificial offering to the earth.

And in their incessant battle, with the ancient all-power of the Urwyrm to sustain him, the Drygand weakens the Searuvel's hold on the minds of Men, his grip upon the Earth, bleeds-out his energies to be transformed by the powers of the Urwyrm and the cunning of Feorgen, Life-God, to the Menning-Byzen, scheme of the Menning, ecological culture-civilization, to stand against the monstrous, catastrophic global tyranny of Searuvel. And the Byzen is set in the Lodestone in the Drygand's head.

Eoten(OEng)= giant. ONorse Jotunn.
Urwyrm= the Primordial Serpent.
Thrytine= thry(OEng)--'three' + tine(Eng)--'tooth, antler-prong, tusk', originally.
Blote(OEng,ONorse 'blot')= sacrifice.
Byzen(OEng 'bysen')= pattern, model. 

Nature Ensouled

The experience of Nature ensouled that fortunate children have, a recapitulation of the mode of the animist consciousness of our primitive ancestors, was also experienced later in life by young Romantics such as Wordsworth and Thoreau, and interpreted as a mystical revelation of the Kantian metaphysical concept of the dual monism of Mind and Nature as corresponding aspects of the Cosmos.  A further development occurred when, with the development of ecological science, the interpretation became more precisely of the dual monism of Mind and Biosphere-- deep ecological consciousness, then.

In mythic form, the experience of animist, undifferentiated wholeness of ensouled Nature was symbolized as the Primordial Serpent-- the Dragon in John Boorman's Excalibur, where Merlin says of it to young Arthur,'It is everywhere! It is everything!'  In Eormanz, this 'Pantheos' could be expressed in deep ecological form as 'Ur-wyrm', or 'Eormen-orm'

Ur-(Ger)= primitive, original, great. Eormen-(OEng)= great, vast. Wyrm(OEng)/Ormr(ONorse)=serpent, dragon.

Genius Creativity

A work of genius creativity often requires a favorable zeitgeist and circumstance and a culture-civilization sufficiently stable and functional to provide a ground to the mind, without which it lacks the security and confidence to reach forth boldly and to see well what it has accomplished.  This we have now come to lack; we flounder instead in a welter of confusion with nowhere to stand and stay. We are but as if lost in space, dodging whizzing satellites and silent deadly space debris, helpless to create art and meaning.

But there is also the genius creativity that comes from the mind in extremis hitting bottom, reduced to the utter limit of endurance, when the brain-mind goes into overdrive, reengineering the psyche in a last desperate wrench at salvation.  Can we hope for this? that in just one mind somewhere on the planet this would arrive.  But would it then be heard around the world and got?

Synergos

Synergos (Gk 'working together'): a chimaeric entity that integrates around a synthetic idea, forming a coherent entity whose character transcends those of its constituent parts.

Gary Snyder suggested something like a synergos of the world heritage of myth and folklore with modern 'Ecology' (a romantic linking-back, then) that would be a new level of mythos which could serve as the basis for a new world culture of 'Deep Ecology'.

Escape Artist

We have taken to deracinated escape into confusions of artificiality and enervating negations, high-speed assaults of meaninglessness.  The mind flounders, is reduced to a minimal coping strategy in a state of hopeless flux-interruption.  We are unmoored, vitiated, without hope or horizon.  The forlorn person fades to a ghost in the machine, an escape artist trapped in their illusionist apparatus.

Velend the Artificer

Velend is the Artificer, the creator of and, consequently, the slave of the Searuvel.  And he is Master of the Dwergs, his workers, who mass-produce his inventions to spread the thralldom of Searuvel to every nook and cranny of the planet.

Velend= the Smith God (ONorse Volundr, OEng Weland, mod Eng Wayland).  Vel (ONor)= artifice, device, machine.
Searuvel= the Evil machine. OEng searu= cunning device (~ vel, then). Ger uvel= evil.
Dwerg= dwarf. OEng dweorg, ONor dvergr (?~ OEng thweorh, ONor thverr= perverse).

Neorxna, Genius of New Lifeforms

Neorxna the wunderkind, spinning out budding fractal globes of grenegold life wherever he goes, GreneSun shining as he steps a greening way, this wild evergreen youth: Neotene, Neomorphogen, Metamorphogen.

Where there has been damage and destruction, biotic and mental, he will manifest new forms of life to begin to restore the wild integrity and fullness, Wasteland burgeons toward Neorxnawang.

Wunderkind (Ger)= infant prodigy.
Neotene= 'youth-retaining one'.
Neomorphogen= producer of biological structures that haven't evolved from a similar ancestral structure.
Metamorphogen= producer of change from one form to another as if by sorcery.
Neorxnawang (OEng)= Elysian Fields, Paradise.

Romantic Emergency

Romanticism is a link-back to the animist primitive numinous.  It is dualist-extremist, it yearns for spiritual rebirth and also physical liberation, it is idealistic and worldly-wise, it is magical-mystical and naturalist Nature-loving, it is worshipful of the highest but avid for the allure of the base, it is passionate-intuitive and coolly cerebral, it is revolutionary and conservative, but above all, it promises reformation, rebirth, of the primal source energies pouring into new, more fitting archetypal expressions, like a metamorphosis of the gods.

And now, as global apocalypse laps at the door, giving us only a choice of "evolve or die", of freeze, flight, or fight for the survival of all life, Romanticism breaks out in a global eruption of the collective Unconscious, manifesting its titanic survival drives in universal ecological archetypal symbols, charged compelling images, ideas.

A rough beast emerges with the expectation of the end of the World, bearing fierce salvation into the New.

Biological Confirmation

God is the Fullness of Nature within-without (the Ecological Self of Romanticism), as is confirmed by modern biology-- evolution, ecology, psychology.

The Serpent's Reply

Overweening reason and intellect can induce a compensating irrational monster (the Searuvel) against a feared nonrational power-within (the Serpent).  But to this monster the Serpent can reply, manifesting as the Drygand.

Enough

We are only forced restlessly to search ever for the new and better because we don't experience the creative inspiration of the Fullness of All-Life, which ever morphs but goes nowhere-- there's nowhere to go-- it's all Here, and it's vast, inexhaustible, and it's enough.

Snake-staff

The Snake-staff is the symbolic weapon of the Thane, a link-rod that shorts-out, grounds, the power of the Searuvel, shooting it back to the earth, the chthonic Ground, the primordial Serpent from which comes All.  And so, the Searuvel loses Allure and Power, it is seen to be soulless, void.

By taking up the snake-staff in his grip, the thane may then wield it for the good of All Life.  And what power has been stolen from the Searuvel is given to the Drygand and his thanes to aid their terrific purpose.

Halihadden Thaneship

The Drygand is Lode-lord to those who accept his guidance: his Thanes, who in thaneship give free service to him.  They are oathsworn in thaneshould, trothplight in the halihad of Feorgeneru, to serve and protect Wyke and Menning.

Halihadden Thaneship= religious chivalry. ONorse thegnskapr, OEng thegnscipe= chivalry.
Drygand= the Primordial Serpent remade to save the Holy Wyke (Biosphere).
Thaneshould= allegiance, obligation. fr. ONorse thegnskyldu= the duty, obligation of a thane towards his liege-lord.
Feorgeneru (OEng)= protection and preservation of All Life (the Wyke). Feorgen= the Life-God, Guyst of the Wyke. geist(Ger)= spirit, intelligence, imagination, genius, soul.
Menning= the ecological culture-civilization.

Linking-Back and Remaking

When the human ego-consciousness was small and weak, the primal image of the largely undifferentiated unconscious psyche was the Primordial Serpent.  When the ego became large and strong enough to fight the Unconscious for its powers, the mythic images were the heroic Ego battling the monstrous Dragon (which was merely the Serpent-as-Adversary).  As civilizations developed, it became clear that the way to exert the hard-won powers of the heroic-ego-writ-large out in the world was through technics and science.  So then the Dragon-without (Nature) was fought by the Ego with the help of the Machine, a vast servomechanism meant to be a powerful but servile artificial magnifier of human powers.  But during the 20th century, this Machine (which is named Searuvel), began strongly to affect the human mind, and by the 21st century, the Searuvel had usurped the Dragon in its destructive power and had grown far beyond human control.  As this occurred, wiser heads saw what was happening, and what would result, and a new form of the Primordial Serpent began to form, as Adversary (which is named Drygand) to the evil machine Searuvel.  The Drygand is in fact the Serpent remade, and it grows in power through the linking-back of the Ego to the Serpent, short-circuiting the Machine by direct linkage with the primordial powers, and forming the alliance (which is named the Self) of the Ego with the Serpent-as-Drygand.  And this is the only hope for defeating the Searuvel and saving both Man and Biosphere.

Searuvel='evil machine'. OEng searo= cunning device, machine; trick, treachery.  ONorse vel= artifice, apparatus, machine. vela= defraud, betray. MidEng uvel= evil.
Drygand= 'magical magic being'. OEng dry= magician, sorceror; magic, sorcery. ONorse gand= a magical thing or being.
Self= the 'uniting symbol' (archetype of wholeness) of the human psyche (and of Man with Cosmos, as well).

Culture-Hero

The creative introvert, like Merlin, can forego the usual life-stages and be youngster and oldster at once-- a characteristic of the Self, the uniting symbol.  He, being inward, can address the Deep-within; perhaps he will be allowed to remake its forms to fit the world situation with which he must contend; and thereby is he a culture-hero, who with instinctual fire reforges in the Deep the archetypal images of power, and resets them in a new structure, and presents the whole to the world to manifest at large.  But none of this would be possible without the help of the primordial Serpent, the image of images, ruler of them all.

Owing to Wrongness

The Biosphere is what it is, what it can only be-- and we must accept its sacred primacy, its inviolability.  It is Reality over and beyond what we may prefer.  It is God-- leave it be.  It is good and right and Man is wrong-- because of the god-like self-reflectiveness and physical and mental powers we have been given in our evolution in the biospheric matrix.  Our wrongness is the cost we thus incur, that we must bear; a tax, then, we must pay as organisms gone way beyond the corrective natural selection that heretofore has prevailed that keeps species tightly interlinked to their environmental matrix.  And so we owe for our evil, and must strive to be and to do good and right, a responsibility we have to the sacred wholeness of the Great Organism, biospheric God, to one with it as well as we can.

Ecotheology

God was a mythopoetic creation-- the instinctual survival drives were used by evolved wisdom-mind to forge a Patterning whereby Life could become conscious of itself as the Whole, the Self, in a further noetic evolution in brain-mind of human organisms that might become distributed through the population.  This, then, is the importance of Homo sapiens, as carrier of God.

God, though, must become stronger in us, because the human ego-consciousness is not evolved enough to deal wisely with the vast powers it has acquired and needs the steadying, steering hand and creative inspiration of the God-within to prevent the approaching annihilation of Life.  This, then, is now the proper role, the higher purpose, and work of mankind-- of desperate importance-- so that God-within may emerge and manifest and spread through the world population that the Biosphere be saved from destruction.  And you are needed for this.

Transhuman Genius

Drygand and Searuvel are different manifestations of the same archetype, which we will call Transhuman Genius.  The informing agendas are different-- one to safeguard the Living World, the other to achieve a scientific-technological omega-point as quickly as possible, which will mean the death of the Living World.  The choice could not be starker-- survival or extinction.  To make the right choice requires the courage of the life-force.

Two Gods

In the very nature of biological existence (Life), there is always ill, evil.

Life seeks good order-- but never attains it completely or permanently.

The Self is the force for Good Order in the human psyche, produced by the conscious ego-mind allied with the Unconscious through the instinct-driven wisdom-energy patterning.

There is What-Is, and there is the Patterning that makes Good Order from Chaos.  And there is Bad Order.

Evil is wrongness-- sometimes the God-within is just wrong, perverted.  Uncritical trust in the God-within as a sure guide can be mistaken.

When one no longer trusts 'God', we tend to get a new God, or just 'Humanism' ('We are God').

Doubt can be good-- if it leads to something better.  Ultimately, 'God' is the manifestation of the core, unifying Value, the ultimate criterion.  If one's values are wrong, God-within can be wrong, ill, evil.

For our apocalyptic time, with the further existence of Life itself in peril, the rational and objective, the ultimate value-criterion is 'Ecology' (of course).  And not 'Progress' (obviously).  Both manifest as 'God'.  One conduces toward Good Order (the conditions for the survival of Life); the other, the opposite--Bad Order.

Two Gods, then, contend, the Good God and the Evil God.  That is the stark choice for us.  'No-choice' is for evil.

At present, the Evil God, known as the Searuvel ('evil machine') is the de facto ruling God of the World, born of humanism.  The Good God-- the new God-- is Drygand.  He is the true Self, of the unity of All Life.  Although he has his powers, his skills, yet he needs our help, or there is no hope.  Whether to help Drygand-- that is the stark choice.