Let’s imagine that you and I have been transported back in time to that moment long, long ago when humans everywhere are still revering the Earth as a goddess and honoring her fruitful generosity as befitting a Great Mother. The Egyptians call her Isis, the Mesopotamians Gulu. In Rome they know her as Ceres. And for the First People of Greece, her name is Demeter (pronounced Da-ME-ter).
Often conflated with the primordial goddess Gaia, Demeter is the epitome of feminine fertility. More specifically, she’s the divine emissary of the plant realm and a spiritual liaison between human and plant consciousness. The Greeks are especially fond of her for bestowing on them two invaluable gifts: the life-sustaining practices of agriculture, and the life-transforming experiences of Mysteria — an initiatory rite-of-passage facilitated by a plant-derived psychedelic.
The people commonly refer to Demeter as simply: The Mother. Especially endearing to women is The Mother’s warmhearted relationship with her daughter Persephone, whom all speak of affectionately as: The Maiden. In case you’re not already familiar with their story, here’s a brief to-the-point synopsis…
The goddess Demeter is raped by her brother Zeus, and gives birth to a daughter whom she mothers with great love and affection. Then one fateful day, Hades — Lord of the Dead, a second brother to Demeter, and Persephone’s uncle — abducts his young niece, and carries her down into the underworld against her will to be his queen.
As you might expect, Demeter is furious. So as punishment for both turning a blind eye to their daughter’s rape and deeming it a ‘marriage’, and for the trauma he visited on her, Demeter turns Zeus’ delight, the beautiful verdant Earth, cold and barren. Then grief-stricken and despondent, she wanders the desolate countryside in search of her missing child.
Meanwhile, in the Land of the Dead, Persephone is trying to come to terms with her fate. Being a queen definitely has its advantages; but being held prisoner is not OK. Most of all, however, she dearly misses her mother. So she asks her new ‘husband’ if she might visit Demeter in the Land of the Living. Realizing that Zeus is likely to compel his daughter’s wish whatever he does, Hades acquiesces. However as a parting gesture he gifts his young queen a ripe, red pomegranate.
Now Persephone knows full well that eating or drinking anything in the underworld will oblige her to remain there forever. Yet she goes ahead and eats six of those tasty little seeds anyway; and thus indelibly seals her fate.
As for Zeus, all this tumult has left him in a quandary. How can he possibly placate his sister’s wrath, punish his brother’s chicanery, do right by his daughter, and rescue his beloved Earth — all at the same time? Seeing no other option, he declares that Persephone should spend half of each year with Demeter in the Land of the Living, and the other half (one month for each of those six tiny seeds) with Hades in the Land of the Dead.
This is how the First Greeks explain the annual vegetation cycle and its perpetual oscillation between the fruitful warmth of summer and the cold, lean span of winter.
Why each September for some 2000 years, citizens of the small rural village of Eleusis and guests from all across the civilized world will gather to celebrate what the initiates of the sacred rite drink the perception-enhancing, reality-bending kykeon to brave: the terrible dark beauty of Persephone’s wedding night.
And why every year to this very day, when her summer finery is spent, the Goddess must leave her loving mother and welcoming devotees behind, and alone make the obligatory descent to the shadowy Land of the Dead and the ‘Dark One’ who ever so patiently waits…
“In the world of the dead there is no time. Yet every autumn, as the days grow shorter, the spirits of the underworld sense that Persephone must soon return. They grow restless and call to her with lost, hollow voices. In the world of the living, the sound of their cries becomes the sound of the wind sighing in the dry grass and moaning through the bare trees. For many of the living it is a sound that speaks to them of the frailty of life and the ultimate, unknowable void of death. They draw closer to the fire and to one another, and they cherish the warmth of life.” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)
PERSONAL DREAMS & COMMON DREAMS
The First People of Greece (i.e., Hellas) loved this unabashedly incestuous story of The Maiden & Her Mother. Today we call such a popular enduring tale a ‘myth’, and regard it as imaginative fiction. However according to the 18th-century historian Giambattista Vico, the original meaning of the Greek word mythos was: ‘the true story’, not the false. So which is it: fiction or truth?
The psychologist Carl Jung thought it was a little of both. Like a dream, myth floats in the liminal space between conscious and unconscious, truth and fiction. The only difference really is that dreams are personal and myths are collective. So let’s think of myth then as a ‘common dream’ — one that arises spontaneously from the collective imagination of a people, and gradually takes shape over the course of many generations. And just as dreams often play a compensatory role in our personal psyches by dramatizing problematical situations and attitudes that require our attention, common dreams do exactly the same for the collective.
Rape was a frequent occurrence in the common dreams of the Homeric Greeks. Perhaps this was simple testimony to traumas unhealed and crimes unpunished. But when a problematical theme like this appears more than once in a dream or myth, or in multiple related dreams or myths, then it’s likely that the psyche is trying to come to terms with something rather gnarly. So with not just one but two rapes, The Maiden & Her Mother had to have been trying to make a point; and I suspect that point may have been more than just compensatory. What if this strange little story was actually a well-camouflaged alternative history — one that couldn’t be spoken of openly for fear of inviting reprisal?
The Greece our historians remember was largely a society of gods and men: a more patriarchal Greece. Perhaps this poignant account of a mother/daughter relationship and the traumas they endured was a clever way of preserving the memory of an older, more matriarchal Greece and its involuntary subjugation by a rising patriarchy. In other words: as far as the collective psyche was concerned, might the women of Late Neolithic Europe (ca.10,000-4,500 BCE) have experienced the gradually tightening grip of patriarchal dominance as the psychological and moral equivalent of rape?
The term intergenerational trauma refers to certain behaviors, rooted in unhealed wounding, that are being unconsciously passed down from generation to generation. This would most certainly include any emotional, psychological, or even physiological repercussions that a long-suppressed and seemingly forgotten patriarchal coup might still be having on women today. The work of Dr. Gabor Maté can be quite helpful in understanding the possibility of bequeathed trauma.
But not all intergenerational contact is traumatic. Human culture is clearly intergenerational; and so too is the main topic of this 3-Part essay: human consciousness. So when I use the term matriarchy here, what I really mean is a manner of being human that predominantly reflects the values and priorities of a more feminine expression of consciousness. Chief amongst these is the importance of the familial commons, which includes not only the humans held close by biology and long association, but all sentient and insentient constituents of the natural world as well. In other words: the priorities of we.
By patriarchy, I mean a manner of being human that reflects the priorities of a more masculine expression of consciousness, with an emphasis on personal achievement and the other primary concerns of me.
Perhaps the best known proponent of the matriarchal hypothesis to date has been the controversial archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas. Many of her critics argue that there isn’t enough evidence to support the possibility of a pre-historic matriarchy. But what if this lack of evidence was deliberate? What if the patriarchy proved particularly astute at expunging the matrifocal past? We do know, for example, that over the course of the Late Neolithic, temples originally dedicated to Greek goddesses were all mysteriously re-dedicated to gods.
It’s also conceivable that some compensatory common dreams — such as the one we’re concerned with here — may have been ‘revised’ or sanitized to make the offending parties look good. No version of the many Persephone stories I’ve read has ever used the word ‘rape’, or anything even close to it. One version even claimed that the young goddess came to love her rapist because: “he treated her so well!” And perhaps it’s telling that when I search for the meaning of the term re-matriation in my online dictionary, what pops up is: re-patriation!
One can catch a glimpse of the matriarchy being systematically deposed in the history of European shamanism, since the Late Neolithic was when males began to usurp the traditionally female role of shaman and healer. So wouldn’t it be ironic if one of the vehicles the patriarchy used to achieve both gender and societal dominance was Demeter’s gift of the Agricultural Revolution?
”With the concentration of political power associated with the agricultural occupations, men sought and bequeathed the office [of shaman]. Rites increasingly became performances rather than egalitarian group activity. The pantheon of spirits, once accessible to all, became the shaman’s spirit helpers.” (Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders, The Sacred Paw, The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature 1992, brackets mine.)
Trauma experts tell us that victims of abuse have a tendency to themselves become perpetrators. However I really doubt that the old matriarchs literally abused their men. Restrained them, held them in check, yes; but mistreated them, no. I could be wrong about this, because Dr. Maté makes the point that trauma isn’t what happens to you, but what happens inside you in response to hurtful, wounding experiences. In other words: perhaps any restraint men experienced under the communal priorities of the matriarchy did negatively inhibit their instinctual need for self-accomplishment.
And yet once the patriarchs gained the upper hand, they sure acted like they’d been abused! For example: in Classical Athens, the most cosmopolitan of the Greek polities, it was the women who were being restrained and relegated to 2nd-class status. According to the classicist Norman O. Brown, by the 5th century BCE the suppression of gender-equal rights was becoming a seriously volatile issue.
I do think it’s accurate however to characterize the patriarchal Greek attitude towards women in general as largely one of distrust, perhaps even fear. This fact comes to light through another popular common dream: the tale of Jason and the Argonauts. The very first test the predominantly male crew of the Argo must pass on their initiatory journey to secure the Golden Fleece (i.e., the hegemony of masculine priorities) is to escape from the clutches of a community of bloodthirsty women.
The Argo drops anchor at Lemnos, where the crew finds the island still in the possession of a remnant of the old matriarchy. Their seductive queen laments that the men of Lemnos have all abandoned the women, and tries to persuade the Argonauts to stay on. But the voyagers high-tail it out of there when they discover the grisly truth that the men have all been ritually murdered — by their own sisters, wives, and daughters!
In addition to serving a compensatory function, there’s one more way in which personal and common dreams are similar. Both can be prophetic. On occasion I’ve had dreams that I didn’t immediately understand; but then the ensuing movement of my life would make their meaning crystal clear.
So I wonder: could a common dream of an earlier humanity ever contain a purposefully helpful prophetic message for a future humanity? Say, for instance, a dream about the rapes of the Earth Mother and her daughter, sent forward in time to help at the very moment when the patriarchal mindset is positioning itself like never before to have its way with the feminine — specifically our Mother Earth? And if you think I’m exaggerating, consider for a moment the well-coordinated attempts to deprive women of their bodily sovereignty ramping up right now across the US and elsewhere. And then, last but not least: consider the implications of Wall Street’s newly-created financial instrument: a Natural Asset Company or NAC.
BREAKING THE WESTERN HABIT
Let’s pause for a few minutes, zoom out from all these patriarchal machinations, and talk about what we’re doing here. A disturbing trend has been stealing across our lives for some time now, the consequences of which have become especially visible in the U.S. and other Western countries. The resources, traditions, and institutions that have traditionally belonged to everyone — long referred to as: ‘the commons’ — are being increasingly expropriated by private interests. Given what we just discussed, it should be obvious that this is largely a consequence of some 5000 years of patriarchal dominance and the gradually intensifying prioritization of ‘me’.
The problem is the less we hold in common, the more we divide and fragment. The flag that too many of us in the US are flying these days, including now a major political party and its de facto leader, is no longer the traditional stars and stripes; but as the novelist Kurt Vonnegut would have it, a skull and crossbones emblazoned with the words: “Hell with you Jack I got mine!” This cannot possibly make for a sustainable society. So what’s behind it? Why is this trend happening?
The long answer is this entire 3-Part essay. You’ll find the short answer in Part 2, which deals specifically with the origins of our current form of consciousness. The term ‘consciousness’ first became popular in the 17th century. Before that, the term widely used was ‘human nature’; and the question that European philosophers and theologians had long grappled with was: is human nature fixed and constant; or can it change?
Right up through the 20th century, the preferred answer was: fixed and constant. Christianity played an important role in this. However the endgame never was the West’s religious mindset, but the materialist (or physicalist) argument by philosophers and scientists that consciousness is purely a by-product of neurological processes.
Now in the 21st century, the fixity trend appears to have run its course. Even though the materialist point-of-view is still widely accepted, emerging concepts such as neuroplasticity (i.e., the brain’s ability to construct new, or re-construct old, synaptic connections) are undermining it. If your brain is capable of re-wiring itself, then the structural ‘architecture’ of your consciousness isn’t so much a hardwired by-product as it is a deeply-engrained habit. An habituated consciousness can change; so perhaps its form can morph as well?
The implications of such a reversal would be huge — and not just for philosophy, theology, and science. In a letter written to James Madison in 1789, Thomas Jefferson said: “the earth belongs to the living, and not to the dead.” Change is life; stagnation is death. Had we followed Jefferson’s advice, and made it a practice to revise the US Constitution every 19 years (i.e., to account for the evolving priorities of each new generation), our current political paralysis might never have happened. But we didn’t; and as a consequence, we’re living in a strange sort of bi-location. Part of us is in the here and now, and the rest of us is somewhere ‘back there’. “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror,” observed the revolutionary communications theorist Marshall McLuhan in 1966. “We march backwards into the future.”
If we continue in this manner, the widening gap between our increasingly outdated understanding of consciousness, and our rapidly-advancing technological capabilities, will only become more and more dangerous. We urgently need a new way to see ourselves: a higher-order perspective that’s open-ended and inclusive enough to re-integrate our long-fractured sense of self and other, self and world.
Astronauts return from space awe-inspired. The overview effect has trans-form-ed their consciousness. If every person on Earth today could have this experience, it would probably go a long ways toward antidoting all the tiresome bickering and squabbling. Unfortunately that’s not logistically possible right now.
But there’s another kind of overview experience that is available to anyone who makes the effort. Because the most awe-inspiring and exquisitely beautiful understanding of ourselves that we could ever hope to have — equal in its transformative power to the view of the Whole Earth from space — is the Big Picture history of humankind’s still-evolving experience of consciousness.
The Greek word historia originally meant: a ‘looking into’ or ‘narrative about’. A history of consciousness, however, is fundamentally different from the objective chronicle of events, ideas, and personalities that bored you in school. That history was essentially a catalogue of the products of consciousness; and if consciousness were an animal, those products would be its tracks.
Tracks can be interesting. But to avert going completely over the cliff of unenlightened self-interest our societies are now heading straight for, we need to pay less attention to the tracks of consciousness, and give more attention to the phenomenon responsible for them. Because if we want to start leaving a different set of tracks behind — lasting peace rather than endless war, long-view care of Mother Earth rather than short-sighted exploitation, inclusive democracy rather than exclusive right-wing theocracy, etc. — we’re going to have to teach ourselves to in-habit a more intentional expression of consciousness. And that, in essence, is what this essay is all about.
So rather than offer you a compilation of objective knowledge about consciousness, I’m going to tell you the story of our subjective experience of consciousness. Here’s an analogy to help you understand this game-changing distinction. Studying the proliferating psychedelic literature may prove quite informative; but it probably won’t trans-form you or your consciousness. However, if you introduce one of these remarkable substances into your own bodily chemistry, it just might do both.
So for our purposes, let’s define ‘consciousness’ experientially as: an individual or group’s qualitative manner of being human in-the-world. In philosophy, the technical term for an experiential analysis is: a phenomenology. When viewed phenomenologically, consciousness presents as an inseparable blend of content and form. Content is everything we’re sensing, thinking, feeling, or otherwise perceiving. It’s the attention-grabbing foreground of our experience. Form is the invisible background that organizes the ever-changing stream of content into a functional whole. We ‘swim’ in this organization like a fish does in water; and normally we’re as unaware of it as the fish likely is of the water.
Content is uniquely individual. No other person has ever experienced the world in quite the same way as you do. Form is collective. All the members of your culture unconsciously participate in what is essentially the same form. If you’ve been educated in an alphabetically-literate Western culture, as anyone reading this essay obviously has, then you’ve been primed to in-habit the ‘Western’ form, which is the dominant configuration of consciousness in the world today. The problem is: if you remain unwittingly immersed in your conditioned form, then it’s almost impossible to see that other forms can and do exist. To be able to experience a different form, you must step outside, or ‘break’, your Western habit.
There are a number different ways to do this. One way, for example, is to immerse yourself in an indigenous or non-Western culture. You can specifically make the ‘Journey to the East’ as the novelist Hermann Hesse did so beautifully in Siddhartha, and as so many Western Buddhists today are doing. You can intentionally re-structure your patterns of perception and cognition with the help of a psychedelic and some skillful guidance. Or as I’m attempting to demonstrate here, you can use an understanding of the history of consciousness to undertake an experiential ‘Journey to the Ancestors’.
Two final caveats before we zoom back in — only this time we’ll be starting from the very beginning of the human odyssey. First: the story I’m about to share with you is from a Western point-of-view. Persons more qualified will have to tell the Eastern story, and in time compile a Whole Earth version. And second: there’s an old rule-of-thumb in the publishing industry that readers can only assimilate a maximum of 25% new information. This 3-Part essay could easily contain a good deal more; so take your time. Some things just can’t be made into a quick, easy read.
IN THE EARLY MORNING OF THE WORLD
Once asked what she had learned from a life spent amongst the orangutan communities of Borneo, the primatologist Dr. Birute Mary Galdikas' replied: “Serenity.” In one word Dr. Galdikas captured the essence of what it means to be on the Earth in the animal form of consciousness. That plants, animals, and other Earthly life-forms participate in the experience of consciousness, but in ways that are very different from humans, is a possibility that we in the West are only beginning to entertain.
For most of my adult life I’ve called the ponderosa-forested mountains of northern New Mexico home. Were I to choose a word to describe what living in the midst of these standing-up-tall-tree-people has taught me, I too would choose ‘serenity’. When I first arrived here as a young man, I had it all wrong. Nature isn’t the competitive struggle my education taught me it is. Instead it’s a complex symphony of integrated co-operation. Trees don’t hoard water and nutrients solely for their own benefit. They share them with each other through their root systems and the fungal networks they live in communication with. Above ground all appear to be distinctly separate organisms. In the hidden world below, all are one.
Something quite similar holds true for our animal brothers and sisters. ‘Survival of the fittest’ doesn’t mean that the fiercest competitors in the predation sweepstakes are the winners. That’s a Capitalist fantasy. If it were true, predatory species would be committing suicide right and left by overexploiting their food sources, and they’re not. The prudent predator lives in balanced equilibrium with its prey because collaborative inter-dependence, not unbridled self-interest, determines who’s actually the fittest.
For the First People animals (and plants) never were ‘other’, just as they aren’t for contemporary indigenous people — unless or until a person has been educationally entrained by the ontological assumptions of Western consciousness. All did, or still do, participate naturally and easily in the animal and plant forms. Each species embodies a different form of one all-embracing field. And as part of this consciousness communion, all participate in a fundamental connection to the wellspring of creation. So with regard to our animal forebears, our own pre-human ancestors, let’s call their serene, instinctual harmony with the Source: the Animal At-one-ment.
The panicked deer surrenders to the cougar’s embrace. The great flocks of birds and schools of fish all wheel about in unison. The orca families in which “overt violence or aggressive behavior between individuals, even among males, has never been observed.” And wherein social interaction isn’t typified by the Darwinian tooth and claw, but by “co-operation, co-ordination, communication, trust and acceptance.”
Some 6 million years ago our most distant hominin ancestors began the long slow journey up and out of the animal realm. In that process, they carried the At-one-ment with them; and over time advanced it through at least 17 iterations. The last of these, some 300,000 years ago, resulted in modern Homo sapiens. And somewhere in all of this — probably with the development of language-facilitated communication, estimates of which vary wildly from 70,000 years ago to several times that — the Animal At-one-ment gradually morphed into the Human At-one-ment; and in so doing became the original form, the default setting, of human consciousness.
Now it’s important to understand that this at-one state was NOT a consciously reasoned aspiration. Quite the contrary, it was completely unconscious and instinctual. It was simply the way the First People were human in-their-world. In other words: the At-one-ment was a mode of perception and cognition, with a different ‘architecture’ and a different set of ‘rules’ than the mode you and I inhabit today.
Surely life had to be as difficult and challenging for the First People as it is for us today. It wasn’t all peace and love. I’m sure they dealt with as much conflict as we do. But at the same time they had an easy, natural, unspoken connection to life and to each other that you and I can only imagine. From a purely functional perspective, the original form was probably more closely related to what neuroscience today calls ‘primary consciousness’ — all involuntary and unconscious (autonomic) bodily systems — than to the thought-origination, cognition, and reason characteristic of our more modern ‘secondary consciousness’.
I’m also going to suggest that the at-one form of consciousness was profoundly matriarchal, just as our current Western form is fundamentally patriarchal. It has now been demonstrated that human toddlers tend to behave pro-socially towards both humans and animals. The authors of a recent study attribute this to budding altruism. I think it’s more likely a demonstration of ontogeny (individual development) recapitulating phylogeny (species development). Children today, as always, are being born into essentially the same experience of consciousness as animals and the First People; but then right from the get-go, they’re socially indoctrinated and ‘schooled’ out of it.
Now I probably don’t have to tell you that what I’m outlining here isn’t a widely embraced way of looking at things. In fact, neither of the two main competing hypotheses of human origins would be likely to concur with my evolutionary take on animal-to-human consciousness. Mainstream anthropologists and academics certainly wouldn’t, since many still generally assume that one’s form of consciousness is neurologically determined. In other words: human consciousness changes quantitatively as society evolves and people learn from their experience; but it never changes qualitatively.
However I have three good reasons for championing a consciousness-centered developmental narrative. First, I find the possibility of an organic — ‘home-grown’, if you will — evolutionary scenario more plausible than a model that depends on ‘outside’ intervention. Plants, animals, and humans are all children of Mother Earth. I don’t think we need intervention to explain the evolution of advanced civilization, even if its rise and fall has taken place more than once. The answer, I believe, is in our psychology, not in our DNA.
Second, the etymology of languages that descend directly from those of the First People appear to support the possibility of an earlier, more unified form of human consciousness. In the mother tongue of the Tzʼutujil Maya, for example, which is a derivative of the 5000-year old ‘Proto-Mayan’, there’s no verb ‘to be’. So the only way to say “I am,” or “I exist,” is to name who or what I belong to or am at-one with.
And third, I respect and take very seriously the long view of history preserved in the collective memory and oral traditions of the world’s indigenous peoples. Here’s a very distilled, somewhat enigmatic, history of consciousness from the writings of the late Cheyenne linguist Dan Moonhawk Alford. “Long ago, men, animals, spirits and plants all communicated in the same way. Then something happened. After that, we had to talk to each other in human speech. But we retained the ‘old language’ for dreams and for communicating with spirits and animals and plants.” So what happened? Why are we who we are now rather than who we were back then?
Before we can answer either of these questions, we first need to understand what our term ‘consciousness’ actually meant for our most distant human ancestors. Plato says that all human knowing is remembering. I began this essay with the old, old story of The Maiden & Her Mother to purposefully jog your memory. It’s also why I asked you to imagine yourself — some spiritual traditions would say: ‘remember yourself’ — in that long-ago moment, rather than just reading about it as you normally would.
Imagination transcends space, nullifies time, and dissolves boundaries; and to understand the First People’s at-one form of consciousness requires that we do all three. Sounds difficult; but really it’s not. It’s likely you’ve done it many times in the past while reading something that really interested you, that literally ‘captured your imagination’. So what if we were to turn that into an intentional exercise? The result would be a variation of a powerful old Sufi practice that Jung re-dubbed: active imagination. All you’ll need is some historical context (which I’ll provide), a body of text written from a first person point-of-view rather than third (which I did at the beginning, and will continue to do in each of the italicized segments that follow), and a willingness on your part to experiment. If this doesn’t appeal to you, then just enjoy the story.
Either way, it’s time we leave the ‘early morning’ of the human world — 300,000 BCE (the emergence of modern Homo sapiens) to 3,000 BCE (the decline of the primal matriarchy) — and move on to ‘late morning’ — 3000 BCE (the rise of the patriarchy) to 400 CE (the end of the At-one-ment). If we zoom in on the very end of this ‘late AM’ period, not only will we have much more than primitive tools, artifacts, campgrounds, and burial sites to work with, it will also allow us to better see why everything, in a marvelous word coined by James Joyce, is about to “wholyrolyover.”
So let’s return now, you and I, in imagination, to Greece at the end of the fourth century CE…
Every autumn for as long as anyone can remember, when it’s time for Persephone to return to the Land of the Dead, the Greek tribes throw her a going-away party in the guise of local harvest festivals. One of these humble beginnings has outgrown all others, and has blossomed into Greece’s most beautiful, powerful, and influential spiritual tradition: the Eleusinian Mysteria or Mysteries of Eleusis.
The name Eleusis means: ‘place of birth’. The time-honored rite that’s still flourishing in this modest agricultural village is the last great societal institution of the Greek At-one-ment. Its violent demise in 396 CE will be a true cultural tragedy, and one more reason why the common dreams of the day continue to be so haunted by traumatic rape. And as you’re about to see, the deeper cause of the rite’s downfall is the best example I know of what Moonhawk was actually referring to when he dropped his enigmatic hint: “then something happened.”
HOLDING TOGETHER
“When Persephone hears the first, faint sighs of the dead in the cooling autumn winds, she is filled with dread. ‘They call to me. They call to me,’ she thinks as she gathers the harvest. ‘But how can I leave this life? It is too beautiful. The sky is too blue, the sun is too warm, the air is too sweet to leave behind. The spirits of the dead cannot understand. They are cold and remote. They have forgotten the beauty of life.’” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)
The year is 364 CE. You and I have come to what today is modern Greece, but at the time of our visit is the Roman Province of Achaea. For three centuries now, the Greeks have been peaceful subjects of the Roman Empire; but trouble is brewing. Emperor Valentinian I has just issued a decree outlawing all nocturnal festivals — a blow aimed directly at the region's last surviving and most beloved Goddess shrine: the temple complex at Eleusis. News of this has traveled fast; and the Greek people are literally up in arms.
Inspired by the story of Persephone and Demeter, and observed each year in honor of both, the Eleusinian rite has been a work-in-progress now for close to 2000 years. It originated sometime around 1500 BCE, when the Greeks were little more than a quarrelsome family of indigenous tribes. In the centuries that followed, the rite grew steadily in size, sophistication, and renown. But of late it’s become a round plug in a square hole. With roots deep in the primal matriarchy, the rite is a miniaturized version of the At-one-ment trying to survive in an increasingly unfriendly patriarchal environment.
By 500 BCE, when most of the other traditional goddess shrines had been re-dedicated to gods, the matrifocal observance at Eleusis was still attracting upwards of 40,000 celebrants from all across the civilized world.
Now, some 900 years later, the rite remains a major institution of pan-Hellenic culture — even as it struggles with diminishing participation and increasing allegations of corruption. Truth is the we-oriented At-one-ment, which has been the rite’s psycho-spiritual foundation, is on its last legs. A new kind of human — more rationally astute, individualistic, and me-oriented — is beginning to call the polis home. Rumor has it that wealthy Athenians are hosting parties where the rite’s fabled consciousness-enhancing kykeon is being illegally served, the carefully-guarded formula apparently procured by theft or bribery.
Eleusis sits on a fertile agricultural plain, just 22 kilometers west of Athens. It’s the spot where Demeter, in her desperate wanderings in search of her missing daughter, is said to have first been treated kindly by humans. The Mother rewarded this kindness by gifting humanity the aforementioned practices of agriculture and the sacred rite — a symbiosis that inspired the rite’s simple closing: “Rain, bring fruit,” and that will continue to be remembered and honored long after the rite is gone. A Brit named E.D. Clark will visit the ruined shrine in 1801 CE, and write about finding Persephone’s larger-than-life statue standing half-buried in a huge steaming pile of manure.
The Emperor Valentinian is a devout Christian — but a well-educated, pragmatic one. The uproar his decree is causing genuinely disturbs him; and so he turns to his trusted provincial Governor, Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, for counsel. Should he back down and allow Eleusis to remain a living hothouse of paganism? Or hold firm, and risk it becoming a nexus of insurgency against Roman occupation?
The reported exchange that takes place between the Emperor and is Governor is a perfect cameo of what’s at stake in this pivotal moment. Valentinian no longer in-habits the at-one form of consciousness. His literate urban education and religious indoctrination have made him a living embodiment of the new patriarchal form. Praetextatus, on the other hand, is not only a staunch pagan (from the Latin paganus, meaning: 'country boy’), but a veteran initiate of the Eleusinian rite as well. So like the rite, he too is still spiritually rooted in the matriarchal At-one-ment.
You’re making a grievous mistake, warns the popular Governor of Achaea. Not only is your decree fostering resentment and fomenting rebellion, it’s making life unlivable for the Greek people. Not only that, it’s dangerous for the whole world. Praetextatus daring rebuke both agitates and perplexes the powerful Emperor of Rome. And just so you understand the risk the Governor is taking by speaking so forthrightly, when Plato spoke similarly to the Emperor Dionysus of Syracuse he narrowly escaped execution and was immediately sold into slavery.
Praetextatus concludes the brief exchange by distilling the Mysteria’s fundamental raison d’être into six prescient words. And he does so not only for Valentinian’s benefit but for yours, mine, and all posterity’s — including everyone who finds themselves psycho-spiritually dis-integrating, societally dis-connected, and at-one-ment deprived in this 21st century of the Common Era. It’s imperative that the Eleusinian tradition be allowed to continue, adjures the zealous Governor. And why? Because, in his own exact words, the periodic celebration of the rite: “holds the whole human race together.”
BURIED IN THE BODY
So what else can we infer about the First People and their experience of consciousness? The first Westerner that I’m aware of to dig deep into this question was an Italian historian named Giambattista Vico. In 1725 CE, Vico published his magnum opus: The New Science. The book was as revolutionary, and as controversial, as its author. Vico once predicted that trouble would follow him to his grave. At his funeral procession, the different colleges of his university argued about who should have the honor of bearing his coffin. A riot broke out, police dispersed the crowd, and his coffin was left abandoned in the middle of a deserted road.
Vico was the West’s first true historian of consciousness. He was also the first to see history as recurring cycles rather than linear progressions; and the first to argue that theoriginal humans were very different from modern humans. He took special issue with an attitude that’s still quite prevalent today, what he dubbed: “the conceit of scholars” — i.e., the presumption that humans in the past perceived, thought, and emoted exactly as we today do.
“The first gentile peoples, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters. This discovery, which is the master key of this Science, has cost us the persistent research of almost all our literary life, because with our civilized natures we cannot at all imagine and can understand only by great toil the poetic nature of these first men.” (Giambattista Vico, The New Science, 1725 CE, emphasis mine.)
So who exactly were the First People? They were poets, not “wise philosophers, meaning: they were all emotion rather than intellectual. “They were, so to speak, all body.” In other words: they were “not in the least abstract, refined, or spiritualized, because they were entirely immersed in the senses, buffeted by the passions, buried in the body.”
When Vico was writing The New Science, the term ‘consciousness’ was only beginning to take on its modern psychological meaning. So even though that was exactly what he was talking about, Vico doesn’t routunely use the term. Nonetheless I think it’s safe to surmise that for the First People, as now, the foundation of human consciousness was sensory experience. Surely their brains would have worked with exactly the same kind of sensory input as ours do today. So why aren’t you and I as immersed in the sensory world as they? Here’s how the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter explains it…
“A remarkable change took place in the human condition about three thousand years ago with the rise of Euclidian space, three dimensional perspective, and above all the phonetic alphabet. Each of these inventions favored the eye at the expense of all other senses. The value accorded the eye destroyed the harmonic orchestration of the senses and led to an emphasis upon the individual experience of the individual sense, especially the sense of sight. Where other senses were employed, it was with the bias of the eye.” (Edmund Carpenter, They Became What They Beheld, 1970, emphasis mine.)
3000 years ago was also when the trend towards patriarchal dominance was gaining momentum. So the re-organization of sensory interplay to favor visual dominance — a phenomenon Carpenter elsewhere terms: “synchronization” — must have accompanied and supported the patriarchal agenda. One strong possibility is that synchronization of the senses may have increased human focus and functional efficiency in those with access to the cultural developments Carpenter refers to above — and it was the men who took control of the access.
By contrast, throughout the preceding cycle of matriarchal organization, human sensation was “harmonically orchestrated,” meaning: all five senses contributed equally to a balanced symphony of information. The closest proximation moderns have to this radically different manner of being sensorially in-the-world — a manner that could easily have been less focused and more diffused — is a rather rare condition called synesthesia. Some individuals experience it spontaneously; others experience it under the influence of psychedelics…
Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway (for example, hearing) leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway (such as vision). Simply put, when one sense is activated, another unrelated sense is activated at the same time. This may, for instance, take the form of hearing music and simultaneously sensing the sound as swirls or patterns of color. (www.psychologytoday.com)
“All body,” however, implies no mind — at least not what you and I understand the term to mean. Yet despite being fully immersed in their orchestrated senses, and buried in their bodies, the First People’s neocortexes — the thought and higher-function area of their brains — were probably as fully developed as ours. Still it appears that they lived more consistently in their paleo-mammalian emotional and reptilian instinctual centers. So did the term ‘thought’ have any meaning at all for them?
On possible answer can be found in the work of the animal behaviorist Temple Grandin. According to Grandin, animals think in sensory impressions (visual images, sounds, touches, smells, and tastes) and by making sensory-based associations. Furthermore Grandin stresses that these associations are never established through abstract mentation; but through immediate, place-specific, personal experience. Every dog-parent can see that their dog thinks and makes choices. Do I want the toy or the treat? But canine thinking isn’t reasoned thought. It’s emotive, instinctual, concrete, and pragmatic; and so too was the First People’s since they were still very close in time to their own animal origins.
Further support for this possibility comes from the philologist Bruno Snell, who in The Discovery Of The Mind (2011) tells us that his linguistic analyses of the 8th century BCE Iliad and Odyssey found no verbs referring to the general function of sight. Neither did he find any indication whatsoever of the kind of abstract, language-mediated conceptualizations and generalizations, that habitually populate our modern thought processes. What he did find was verbs that described specific concrete modes of seeing — for example: “the stare of the snake.”
The anthropologist Robert Lawlor discovered the same thing in his fieldwork in the Australian bush. “In spite of this linguistic power to distinguish each aspect and each individual plant, tree, or animal, Aboriginal languages have no words for abstract, generalized categories such as tree, plant, or animal.” (Robert Lawlor, Voices Of The First Day, 1991, emphasis mine.) And why are Snell’s and Lawlor’s discoveries important? Because as Snell concludes: “If they had no word for it, it follows that as far as they were concerned it did not exist.”
Earlier I pointed out that a speaker of traditional Tz'utujil Mayan can only say ‘I am’ by naming who or what I belong to or am at-one with. Wouldn’t this mean that in the consciousness of the First People the individualized sense of ‘I’, that moderns take for granted is a universal human experience, also didn’t exist?
This alone might help explain the greatest disparity of all between the First People’s at-one psychology and that of moderns. The matrix of their sensory-based, concrete thinking is NOT the individual, but the group they’re a member of. The personally constructed, carefully cultivated, private point-of-view, which is the psychological cornerstone of the modern experience of individuality, didn’t even begin to emerge until the latter half of the 1st millennium BCE.
Clearly, like ourselves, the First People were unique beings with singular capabilities and talents. However our identities weren’t based on these distinguishing qualities, but on their family, clan, and totemic relationships. It’s likely that this communal psychology too is a legacy of their lingering proximity to the Animal At-one-ment. Orcas, for instance, who live in extended family groupings, appear to display a sense of ‘self’ that’s diffused throughout the entire family.
The corollary to this is that the First People were neither self-aware, nor self-conscious, in the way those terms are understood today. According to Snell, the Homeric Greeks neither experienced their own bodies as integrated units, nor themselves as the source of their own decisions. Instead they attributed all acts of volition to the agency of gods and spirits. Similarly, in a personal communication, Michael Michailidis wrote…
“The ancient understanding of nature reveals a consciousness that did not presuppose objective space and time. For the ancient Greeks, things did not move through a uniform grid that we understand as objective space but rather came in and out of existence like flickering lights, as potencies where realized into actualities and faded back into potencies.”
I find his characterization of ancient Greek consciousness of special interest because it’s almost exactly the way the linguist Benjamin Whorf describes the Hopi world-view. So taking all this into consideration, it seems to me that we’re forced to come to three basic conclusions…
First: that the term ‘at-one-ment’, when used to describe the First People’s manner of being in-the-world, means exactly what it says.
Second: if people today can think more generally and abstractly about a world the First People only thought about concretely, then in the time between them and us the meaning of the word ‘think’ has significantly changed. And if what it means ‘to think’ has changed, then so too has the meaning of the term ‘consciousness’.
And third: if the meaning of consciousness has changed dramatically in the past, what’s to stop it from happening again in the future? What if it’s already happening right now?
THE BEAR MOTHER
Even though we couldn’t ask for a better characterization of the At-one-ment, Praetextatus’ claim that the Eleusinian Mysteria “holds the whole human race together” might seem a bit over the top. But remember: this is coming from a high-ranking initiate of Eleusis. So what exactly is Praetextatus trying to tell the sitting Emperor of Rome?
He could be alluding to the fact that people from all across the Roman Empire travel to Eleusis each September to take part in the Greater Mysteria, the culminating event of the ceremonial year. He could also be talking about the archetypal experience of death and rebirth, symbolized by Persephone’s annual descent to the Land of the Dead and ascent to the Land of the Living, that unites the inner circle of initiates and the outer circle of public celebrants in one sacred, mutually beneficial rite-of-passage. But it could also be that he’s hinting at the deep personal healing, and renewed social cohesion, enabled by the At-one-ment-bolstering kykeon — the famed potion imbibed by both initiates and celebrants on the rite’s final day.
Based on a formula found in The Homeric Hymn To Demeter (7th century BCE), the kykeon was essentially an herbal tea brewed with a generous portion of barley water. Revealing details of the rite was punishable by death; so the Hymn’s formula has to be at best incomplete. What many insiders did get away with saying, and not pay with their lives, was that the culminating night rocked their souls. It may well have been an herbal brew; but it seems unavoidable to assume that one of its main ingredients had to have been a powerful, ‘soul-rocking’ psychedelic.
This possibility was first suggested in the 1950’s by the synthesizer of LSD, the chemist Albert Hofmann. Then 50 years later Hofmann, the mycologist Gordon Wasson, and the Greek scholar Carl A. P. Ruck further developed the idea in The Road To Eleusis (2008). One strong possibility is a psycho-active ergot that grows on barely, Demeter’s gift to the ancient Greeks, and their staple grain.
One thing psychedelics do quite well is dissolve boundaries — not only the ones that separate humans one from another, but also the ontological boundary between humans and the Goddess. All-become-one then through the agency of the brew as the rite draws to its conclusion on a night that the historian of religion Walter F. Otto once compared to “the terrible festival of the deathbed.” A night when the graves of the dead were said to open, and the spirits of the ancestors issued forth to join with the living in remembering their at-one-ment with each other, The Mother, and The Maiden.
Demeter’s association with Greece’s staple grain, and her motherly concern for the fruitful living Earth earned her the name: ‘Barley Mother’. However as Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders point out, the words 'barley' and 'bear' share a common etymology. So Demeter's name could also be understood to mean: 'Bear Mother', or better still: 'Grain of the Bear Mother'.
“The bear is thus also identified with spiritual well-being and with physical health and healing. Not only is it the animal of beginnings, but also of re-beginnings — of recovery from spiritual malaise and physical illness and, metaphorically, revival from death.” (Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders, The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature, 1992.)
Demeter’s totemic at-one-ment with the bear is not only aligned with the Eleusinian rite’s core theme of death and rebirth, it also hints at the Mother’s esoteric role as patroness of Greece's most primordial spiritual lineage. Because as Shepard and Sanders go on to note: "The occupation to which the bear becomes an appendage is shamanism.”
SUPPOSING TRUTH IS A WOMAN — WHAT THEN? (Friedrich Nietzsche)
The Greeks were the product of two diverse genetic and cultural streams. One consisted of peaceful indigenous agriculturalists who revered the Goddess, and the other of bellicose equestrian invaders from the Caucasus who worshiped a sky-god. As different as these two streams were, they had one thing in common. Both were structurally 'shamanist', meaning: organized around the principles and practices of shamanism.
In Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Healing and Consciousness (2000), the anthropologist Michael Winkelman argues that the world-wide distribution of this time-honored practice is less a consequence of cultural diffusion, and more the result of its being “a universal biological adaptation that enhances the evolutionary fitness of the species.” We tend to remember the patriarchal Greeks as paragons of rationality. What we don’t remember, because it’s not part of the patriarchal model of Greek history, is that the matriarchs who preceded the patriarchal rationalists were evolutionarily-fit shamanists.
With agricultural roots deep in both the practice of shamanism and the Neolithic Revolution, the Greeks were naturally attentive to the annual vegetation cycle. They explained the workings of this life-sustaining cycle with the story of The Maiden & The Mother.
Cycles are circles in time. Each has two phases: waxing (increase) and waning (decrease). Sometimes both phases are manifest in a single process, such as in the life-cycle of a plant. And sometimes cycles entangle two polarities in a perpetual revolving dance, for example: day and night, summer and winter, or matriarchy and patriarchy. And when a major cycle — like the matriarchal one from which the dream of Demeter and Persephone first emerged — is coming to an end, mightn’t one expect the collective psyche of a shamanist culture to engender a common dream to alert those affected and help them make the necessary evolutionary adjustments?
In the mid-1920’s a grave was discovered at Dolni Vestonice, an archaeological site in the Czech Republic. The burial was estimated to have taken place 26,000 years ago. Interred paraphernalia identified the deceased as a shaman. What was surprising, however, was that the remains were those of a 40 year-old woman. This was a game-changer, because it flew in the face of the long-standing patriarchal assumption that shamanism was exclusively a male prerogative.
Since then, the now established fact that everywhere First Shaman was a woman has garnered more support. For example: the archaeologist Christopher Powell — who has done extensive fieldwork at Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico — once told me that when the Maya depicted altered states, it was always the queens who were shown receiving the visions, and never the kings. So why then is a male by the name of Melampus — better known as “Black Foot” — credited with being Greece’s First Shaman?
For the same reason that, with the sole exception of poetry, few women in Greek history are even remembered. As we’ve already seen, women in patriarchal Greece were effectively the property of males. Still today, an unconscious patriarchal bias has continued to infect successive generations of Greek scholars — both male and female. Our current cycle of patriarchy first got started around 7000 BCE, but didn’t begin to achieve full dominance until after 3000 BCE. That’s when the matriarchal roots of shamanism were erased, and women in general reduced to chattel.
It seems that in Neolithic societies (12,000 — 4500 BCE), women held a far more equitable status. This was recently re-confirmed by the funerary treatment given a female infant some 10,000 years ago, suggesting that even the youngest females were recognized as full persons. The most profound work to date on the pre-historic matriarchal cycle was done by the controversial archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas. In her view, the First People were by nature matrifocal, egalitarian, peaceful, and Goddess-aligned.
During the 8th millennium BCE, in the region Gimbutas terms “Old Europe” — which includes Greece — the descendants of the First People were living in large dwellings in small artistically-sophisticated towns, sustained by agricultural environs, and interconnected by established trade routes.
By the 3rd millennium BCE, the Goddess Cultures of Old Europe were in rapid decline. By 500 BCE, the remnants of the matriarchal At-one-ment were being pushed to the margins by an unprecedented new form of consciousness — the Western form: the subject/object split — strategically co-opted by the patriarchy, and which is the subject of Part 2 of this essay.
By 500 CE, the emerging centers of Western political power and commerce were fully committed to the new form and the new reality. From then on, humans who were at-one, instinctual, emotional, poetic, communal, buried in the body, immersed in the senses, unself-conscious, of no-mind, imaginative, spirited, animist, shamanist, ritualistic, and Goddess-conscious were becoming increasingly rare. And then, save for surviving indigenous enclaves and scattered remnants, they were gone.
The women shamans may have been forgotten; but the practices they perfected over thousands of years remained a powerful, even if somewhat hidden, force in the patriarchal takeover of Greek culture. Pythagoras (c. 571-495 BCE), for example, required his students to engage in a disciplined regime of yoga-like practices, passed down from the shamanic tradition, as part of their philosophical training. In The Greeks and the Irrational (2004), E.R. Dodds recounts how a demoralized Plato, angry and bereft at his teacher Socrates’ senseless execution, didn’t turn to his beloved philosophy for healing, but to these same Pythagorean praxes.
Socrates himself (c.469-399 BCE), when the outcome of any matter was in doubt, was known to recommend another traditional shamanic praxis: divination. Oracles like those at Delphi and Dodona gave broad cultural sanction to expanded states of consciousness pioneered by the indigenous shamans. Temples of healing dedicated to the God Aesclepius, like those at Epidauros and on the Isle of Kos, were popular pilgrimage destinations well into the Hellenistic Period. Cures were based on information obtained in dream-states, often induced with soporific medicines such as opium.
The treasured pinnacle of this deep shamanist undercurrent, however, was the second gift of the Bear Mother: the Mysteria. And in the context of shamanist society, the use of entheagenic agents (literally: 'becoming the Goddess within') would have been quite natural. However, as essential as such sacraments may have been in facilitating the desired experience, their role was primarily a means to an end. This end, which is the raison d’être of all shamanic practice, is a re-unification of any discordant or separative tendencies within the individual and the community. In other words: restoring both to their original, at-one state.
The main ingredient in the kykeon was barley. So whatever else may have been married to this grain to enable the shrine’s transcendental mission, could the Barley Mother — the Bear Mother — possibly have bequeathed humanity a more precious gift than a path and a practice that teaches humans how to live at-one with Her, with nature, and with each other? And now, the worldly fate of this extraordinary gift is about to be decided.
THE CONCEIT OF SCHOLARS
When last we saw Praetextatus, he was boldly and perhaps somewhat foolishly telling the Emperor of Rome that his decree outlawing Greece’s nocturnal festivals was a really bad idea. Once again: as an initiate of Eleusis, Praetextatus still holds the At-one-ment close. He may not understand the Mysteria as such, but they’re increasingly becoming a time-capsule of sorts, a miniaturized version of the old consciousness being passed forward in time to an increasingly disinterested Late Antiquity.
As a Christian, Valentinian’s decision determining the Mysteria’s fate is purely a matter of political exigency. So it’s to everyone’s surprise, especially Praetextatus’, when the Emperor decides to heed his trusted advisor’s wise counsel and rescinds his controversial decree. As you might expect, the Greek people are overjoyed. However, just as Greg Kinear's character in the film Ghost Town barely escapes being hit by an air conditioner falling from the window of a high-rise apartment, only to step off the curb and be killed by a bus, Eleusis' stay of execution is temporary.
Just three decades later, on a moonless night in 396 CE and on the order of the then-emperor Arcadius, an allied force of Christianized Roman troops and pagan Visigoth tribesmen overrun Greece’s last surviving Goddess-complex and reduce it to rubble. How could this rape not have been the preeminent insult prophesied in the dream of The Maiden & Her Mother? Whether I’m right about this or not, you might think that this is the end of the story. And in one way it is; but in another way it’s not. Because what happens next is really what you and I have come all this way back in time to witness.
If the whims of zealous Christian emperors, and the cruel barbarism of ill-intentioned invaders weren't enough, Eleusis, the last surviving large-scale social institution of the At-one-ment, is fated to suffer a third and final blow. Razed complexes can be rebuilt, and traumatized traditions healed. But what happens when the form of consciousness that underpins and sustains your very existence simply goes away?
In the centuries following the desecration, the Eleusinian rite becomes a subject of interest for Christian commentators and historians. But they just can’t wrap their heads around it, because their embodiment of consciousness is so structurally different from the one they’re trying to understand. They just don’t get it. As a result, they make the mistake we’re still perpetuating to this day: Vico’s “Conceit of Scholars.” They project the individualistic form of consciousness their literacy-based educations have conditioned them to inhabit onto the pre-individualistic past. And how can they possibly understand an experience that the at-one Greeks said was ‘arreton’ — ‘beyond the capacity of words to convey’ — with more words?
“Of the ear of wheat silently manifested at the climax of the ceremony, or of the so simple words…’Rain, bring fruit,’ the Christian writers say ironically, ‘that is the great and ineffable Eleusinian mystery!’ They outdo themselves listing the unworthy, common objects that are supposed to constitute the mysterion. And thus they prove that for them the pagan arreton has ceased to exist.” (Karoly Kerenyi & Ralph Manheim, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, 1991)
As Kerenyi points out, the Christians constantly refer to the magical autumn days of Mysteria (plural) with the singular form mysterion — something the Greeks themselves never did. They search for the mystery, the secret; and finding nothing they can recognize, they deride the gullibility of their ancestors; and arrogantly conclude that the whole 2000-year Eleusinian tradition has been nothing but an elaborate hoax.
REQUIEM
“When her preparations are complete, she spends one last day gazing on the beauty of her world, drinking in its colors and sounds and fragrances so that she will not forget it during her long stay in the dark. Finally, at dusk, she stands on the edge of the world and weeps as she watches the sun touch the horizon. In her hand she holds a pomegranate, the symbol of her promise to the souls of the dead. The sun drops behind the bulk of the earth, and Persephone lifts a single pomegranate seed to her lips. ” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers”, Parabola, Summer 1996.)
When Eleusis falls in 396 CE, the Greek At-one-ment falls with it. One world ends, and a new world begins. The patriarchal coup is essentially complete. In Part 2 we’ll explore just how the patriarchs leveraged their ‘weapon of choice’ to accomplish this impressive feat. We won’t have to imagine the new world because their new world is your and my world. We know it well. So I guess that means that our experiment in historical imagination is also complete — or almost anyway. There’s one last incident I want you to participate in. Think of it as an epilogue of sorts.
But first: with her earthly shrine in ruins, Demeter’s sorrowful wanderings in search of her beloved daughter take on a whole new significance, because as much as Persephone Eleusis too is her child. Still from this day forward, the barren landscapes of winter will be a constant reminder of a world bereft of its Mysteries, no longer able to hold together, and straight on course towards a future of increasing separation, division, and discord.
Ever since the 5th century BCE, the Mysteria have been struggling to adapt to, and serve the needs of a new form of consciousness embodied in a more rational, less empathic individual intent on becoming more self-aware through philosophical inquiry. The long-standing tradition of communal initiation has been abandoned, and individual initiation is now becoming the accepted norm.
That things are changing in the year 396 is certainly no secret; but why they’re changing remains an enigma. 300 years earlier the philosopher and priest of Delphi Plutarch (46-119 CE) had expressed consternation at the fact that the number of Grecian oracles seemed to be steadily dwindling; but he mistakingly blamed it on an overall decline in Greece’s population. And even though the old at-one consciousness will never completely disappear, but manage to maintain a weak pulse in the cultural underground of the Western esoteric tradition from 3rd century CE Neo-Platonism to the 21st century psychedelic revival, still it’s Plutarch himself who gives the eulogy for the At-one-ment late in the 1st century CE.
In De Defectu Oraculorum he recounts how the spirits choose a simple, unlettered Egyptian named Thamus, a man still very much in the habit of the old consciousness, to deliver to the world the sad news concerning the fate of Pan: the divine custodian of open meadows, untouched forests, and the wild undomesticated Earth.
Keep in mind that less than a millennium earlier the majority of Pan’s responsibilities with regard to the vegetative landscape of the Animal and Human At-one-ments were those of Demeter and Persephone. It’s doubtful they even realize it; but both Pan and Plutarch have become unwitting instruments of the patriarchal coup. And in such an exclusionary environment, it almost seems as if our alter-ego goddesses of the plant realm have had to resort to disguising themselves as a god and a philosopher, exactly as women in 4th century BCE Athens were forced to disguise themselves as men if they desired to attend Plato’s lectures.
So, in conclusion, let’s try to imagine this…
Thamus is the pilot of a ship on which you, I, and Plutarch’s grammar teacher — ironically, the person directly responsible for his becoming an exemplar of the emerging patriarchal consciousness — have booked passage. One evening, while the ship is quietly drifting on a windless sea near the Isle of Paxi, a mysterious voice booms out: “Thamus! When you come opposite Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead.”
Once the shock of hearing this subsides, and after much discussion, all of us onboard decide that if the wind carries our vessel past Palodes, Thamus should remain silent. But if we find ourselves becalmed, then he should do as instructed. So when the ship nears Palodes, and the sea grows breathlessly still, Thamus shouts out: “Great Pan is dead!”
Before he has a chance to even finish, a chorus of agonized groans arises from the pastoral isle, mingled with interjections of disbelief. This uproar continues unabated for some time. Then just as suddenly as it all began, it all stops; and we find ourselves feeling strangely alone and adrift in an eerie, disquieting silence.