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.