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.