‘Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in’.Aldous Huxley, Island
__________
I swear I will write something soon. Very busy, life is hectic.
I hope you like todays’ Assemblage.
G
—–
On the Menu:
Philip K. Dick Interview
The Links
Painting In Dali’s Garden
The Eleusinian Mysteries: Healing and Transformation
Poetry: Boris Pasternak
Art: Maxfield Parrish
—-
____________
The Links
From Roberto: Former British Ambassador Says Terror Alert Is “Propaganda”
Sleep with Neanderthals? Apparently we (homo Sapiens) did
____________
From Roberto Venosa/ 2 reservations have opened up for this great event:
PAINTING IN DALI’S GARDEN
Dear Friends,
We are happy to announce that, under the guidance of Visionary masters, Robert Venosa and Martina Hoffmann, the ‘Painting in Dali’s Garden’ workshop will take place during September 17 – 30, of this year. September in Spain, especially in Cadaques, is a most desirable time to be there. The weather is perfect, the sea is warm and delicious, the tourist tide has receded, and the ambiance is one of tranquility, romance and inspired creativity. Perfect for painting. Cadaqués, home of Salvador Dali, and playground to many of the artistic luminaries of the past century, is one of the most romantic and historically creative locations on the Mediterranean. Set on a charmed island, a stone’s throw away from the shore, the beautiful Villa Arenella becomes home and studio to 18 participants who will learn a painting technique that has been handed down from master to master from the 15th century to the present. The updated, simplified version, as taught by Venosa and Hoffmann, makes entry into painting highly accessible for the beginner, and adds significantly to the repertoire of the experienced artist.
This is the fifth anniversary of this workshop, and we plan to expand on the pleasures (if that’s at all possible), by providing more extra-curricular activities, such as yoga and massage, as well as a few added surprises. Also, we will keep our registration fees as they have been in the past: Depending on
accommodations, the rates will vary from $2150 to $2750, and will include the painting workshop, all breakfasts and luncheons, several dinners, a boat-ride/picnic, a trip to the Dali house, a paella fiesta, and an excursion to the Dali Museum in Figueras (new).
Motor scooters and bikes, autos (although unnecessary), are readily available for rent in the town, and the plethora of restaurants and coffee houses are some of the finest on the Med. Gourmet Mediterranean food, boating, swimming, scuba diving, windsurfing, and the myriad of other pleasures that surround the magical village of Cadaqués, are all available to make your creative and social experience unforgettable.
For imagery and complete information:
http://www.martinahoffmann.com/workshops/cadaques_2006.html
For additional information, or to reserve a space, contact us at:
roberto@venosa.com
art@martinahoffmann.com
rjl@venosa.com
Visit
http://www.venosa.com
http://www.martinahoffmann.com
____________
The Eleusinian Mysteries: Healing and Transformation
For almost a thousand years, the most exclusive society in the ancient world consisted of people initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. Only the wise could be so honored; and wisdom, then as now, transcended gender, class, and country.
“Happy is he of the mortals who has seen this,” wrote Homer. “In the dark kingdom of the shadows, the fate of the initiate and the uninitiated is not the same. Those mysteries of which no tongue can speak-only blessed is he whose eyes have seen them; his lot after death is not the lot of other men!”
Like most great cults, it began with a legend long since obscured in the mists of prehistory. It’s site was Eleusis, north-west of Athens. Here Demeter, was reunited with her lost daughter Persephone. The site derives its potency from Demeter, a powerful figure in the Greek pantheon, symbolic of the Earth Mother, goddess of grain, fruitfulness, agriculture and civil laws.
The tale, recounted in one of the earliest Homeric Hymns, told how Persephone had attracted the attention of Hades, the dark Lord of the Underworld, who had carried her off to his realm beneath the earth. A distraught Demeter wandered the land, spreading famine by withholding her gifts of fruitfulness and causing crops to die. While she lingered at Eleusis with a family that had befriended her. Zeus persuaded Hades to return his captured bride.
But Persephone had eaten some pomegranate seeds in the Underworld, an act which obliged her to return to the shadowy domain for a third of every year. Nevertheless, Demeter and Persephone, in joyful reunion, became resigned to the annual parting and taught their Mysteries-an allegory of spring and rebirth- to the townspeople of Eleusis. Thereafter they annually re-enacted the celebration.
Very little is known about the Mysteries. The sacred rites took place in early autumn and the preliminary ceremonies lasted for nine days. They began with a gathering in Athens, when the names of that year’s initiates would be read out.
They met the next day and each initiate would be in charge of a young pig. The procession would head to the sea, and the initiates would wash both themselves and the animals. Then they would sacrifice the pigs and set off along the Sacred Way-the 14 mile route to Eleusis-with much light-heartedness and many stops at temples and shrines.
By the time the processing arrived in Eleusis, it would be dark. The night would be spent near the well where Demeter was befriended, the celebrants dancing by the light of flickering torches to the music of a crude oboe the aulos, and crashing cymbals. Emulating Demeter’s search, the participants would break their dancing to randomly search along the shore, ending their symbolic fast with a breakfast (according to the historian Clement of Alexandria) of barley water, wheat and sesame cakes, pomegranates, lumps of salt and young shoots of the fig tree.
Then, with growing tension, the crowd would assemble outside the telesterion, an immense hall with a roof supported by 42 massive columns. People gathered into two groups: the mystai, whose initiation was deferred for another year, and the epoptai, who were given a password and allowed to enter. On at least one occasion, men trying to bluff their way in without the password were put to death.
Certainly great efforts prevailed to see that no hint of what happened inside was conveyed to the uninitiated. The playwrite Aeschy-lus, born at Eleusis in 525 B.C., was accused of giving away the secrets in one of his plays. He escaped lynching only by proving that he had not been initiated.
Other ancients wrote about Eleusis. Cicero commented, “Nothing is higher that these Mysteries. They have sweetened our characters and softened our customs; they have made us pass from the condition of the savages to true humanity. They have not only shown us the way to live joyfully but they have taught us to die with better hope.”
Aristotle said that one did not go to Eleusis to learn, but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a receptive frame of mind. And Aristophanes added, “To us alone initiated men, who act aright by stranger and by friend, the sun shines out to light us after death.”
And in our era Jung explained. “the ordinary man was somehow liberated from his personal impotence and temporarily endowed with an almost superhuman quality. The conviction could be sustained for a long time and it gave a certain style to life and set a tone for a whole society.”
The ancient Greeks believed in the necessity of understanding the soul and coming to terms with death by abolishing one’s fear of it. This is a worthy state to achieve, and such persons who did so comprised an intellectual elite; self-confident, unencumbered by trivial concerns, truly free. The rites of Eleusis induced this happy condition.
At first the Mysteries attracted people of the locality. But with the rise to power of Athens, the cult expanded to include that city, altough the positions of authority-hierophant (high priest), daduchas (torch-bearer) and keryx (herald)-were always held by citizens of Eleusis.
For most of the centuries that Eleusis held sway, the city remained immune to outside strife. When Persian invaders burned down one temple, it was replaced with an even grander one. The new structure, of white marble, rose under the auspices of Pericles, whose favorite sculptor Ictinus had already achieved fame the Parthenon. The new Eleusinian temple’s “beauty and prodigious magnitude”-230 feet long by 180 feet wide-excited a degree of astonishment equaled only by the awe that its sanctity evoked.
But this too, eventually fell. In the 4th century A.D. Alaric the Goth laid waste to the whole surrounding province of Attica. Shortly thereafter, the Roman emperor Theodosius struck down most pagan temples, and the ruins of Eleusis lay untended and forgotten for centuries. In 1675, George Wheler an English traveler, noted, “One of the first things we came to was the stately temple of Ceres (Demeter’s Latin name), now laid prostrate on the ground, not having one stone upon another, for it lyeth all in a confused heap together.”
Half a century later, another Englishman observed “the bust of a colossal statue of excellent workmanship maimed and the face disfigured. A tradition prevails that if the broken statue be removed, the fertility of the land will cease.” This belief which first surfaced in Cicero’s writings, still had currency at the end 18th century when country folk could be observed dancing around the statue on the Full Moon at harvest time.
In 1801, over local objections, two British academics who had bribed the Turkish governor removed the statue to Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, where it remains today. Compounding their theft, they boasted about it in a pamphlet published in England shortly afterwards, explaining that their coup “required equal promptness and secrecy amidst the opposition to be expected from a herd of idle and mercenary Greeks.”
Whether there is anything to the old belief that the fertility of the land would cease with the statue’s removal can be judged by today’s visitors. They view only a region made arid and dusty by the heat, smoke, and debris from the surrounding oil refineries and industry. Doubtless the area prospers judging by the numerous shipyards and by the processing of oil, soap and aluminum. But the ecological cost has been high. For miles around, the trees, turning wistfully toward the sun, appear to be choking from pollution unknown in previous centuries.
Because of its industrial nature, Eleusis is not popular with tourists. This is unfortunate, because the sacred site is only a half-hour bus ride from Athens and here and there you can discover much of its original mystical charm-all the more so, ironically, because of its relative lack of attention.
Immense broken pillars lie everywhere, many with ancient lettering still visible, and patches of blue and white tile in intricate patterns define the areas of ancient floors. Great stone stairways lead up the gentle tree-clad hill behind the remains of the vast telesterion, it’s back to the rock and frontal facade toward the early-morning sun. Underground chambers and what remains of the ceremonial well lie almost overgrown with waist-high grass.
In the adjoining museum are a plaster reconstruction of the ancient site, marble pigs, and statues of Demeter with chipped faces. A tab-leau depicts what may be rites from the Eleusinian Mysteries-but who can really know about this most famous of human secrets? Over it all seem to hover the lovely spirits of the eternal mother and daughter, Demeter and Persephone. And from below, perhaps a hint of a rumble from the everpresent god of the netherworld.
“Then you will find a breath about your ears
Of music, and a light about your eyes
Most beautiful-like this-
and myrtle groves,
And joyous throngs
of women and of men,
The initiated.”
-Aristophanes
From Mystical & Magical Sites, by Elizabeth Pepper & John Wilcock, Phanes Press, 1992.
____________
Poetry: Boris Pasternak
Hops
Beneath the willow wound round with ivy
we take cover from the worst
of the storm, with a greatcoat round
our shoulders and my hands around your waist.
I’ve got it wrong. That isn’t ivy
entwined in the bushes round
the wood, but hops. You intoxicate me!
Let’s spread the greatcoat on the ground.
—-
“But He Was Belov’d…”
But he was belovd. Not a thing
Could vanish or lose its lifes mission,
The lesser his talent and kin,
And sketches of his compositions.
Youd just rise up your music stand
And just touch the cold keyboard
The effort will dazzle you and
Youll smooth all her wings, strong and broad.
And come the white snows and moon,
And windows glass double-braided,
And twigs in the silver galloons
And time will be suddenly ended.
And you will be shocked in a flesh,
When sunk into concerts embraces:
Much humbler than we ourselves
Is our everyday deathless.
—-
Dream
1913, 1928
I dreamed of autumn through the glass half-lightened,
Of friends and you in their joyful band,
And, like a falcon, which took blood in fighting,
Heart was descending on your gentle hand.
But time did go, grew older, failed to hear,
And only slightly silvering the frames,
Sunrise was catapulting bloody tears
Of late September on the glasses panes.
But time did go, grew older. And the crumbled,
Like ice, was thawing and breaking sofas silk.
And suddenly you stopped and stayed the silent,
And dream, like echo of a bell, did sink.
I waked. The dawn was, like the autumn, blackened,
The passed by wind was carrying far away,
Like a straw rain running behind a hay-cart,
The crag of birches running the skys gray.
—-
Echo
1915
A little nightingale, for a night,
Means what a pail means for wells, fulled.
Im not sure, that starry skies glide
From songs to the other ones, truly.
But when her night song fuller rings,
The night oer the song comes else broader.
A root of a tree better brings
When sop strikes into rooters borders.
And if there is wordless delight
Of beauty of leafage of birches,
It seems, that a song strikes a hut,
With chain, that is mighty and tortures.
And then sadness drops from the steel,
And then night dissolves into mire,
And all, till the far ploughed fields
Through it from the garden, is spied.
—-
March
The sun is hotter than the top ledge in a steam bath;
The ravine, crazed, is rampaging below.
Spring — that corn-fed, husky milkmaid –
Is busy at her chores with never a letup.
The snow is wasting (pernicious anemia –
See those branching veinlets of impotent blue?)
Yet in the cowbarn life is burbling, steaming,
And the tines of pitchforks simply glow with health.
These days — these days, and these nights also!
With eavesdrop thrumming its tattoos at noon,
With icicles (cachectic!) hanging on to gables,
And with the chattering of rills that never sleep!
All doors are flung open — in stable and in cowbarn;
Pigeons peck at oats fallen in the snow;
And the culprit of all this and its life-begetter–
The pile of manure — is pungent with ozone.
