With ravished ears The monarch hears, Assumes the god, Affects to nod, And seems to shake the spheres. – John Dryden
Jicarilla – Gwyllm Llwydd
Whoa, 2 post in 3 days, returning to some normalcy, at least for a while.
So, there are some offers on this post for art, calendars and publications. Check ’em out. The publications are a bit time sensitive, especially with the holidaze, but will let you know the delivery date. Great offers on Blotter, and Prints. Stay Tuned.
There are 2 interviews with yers truly on this, one with Tom Hatsis from this past May in Ashland. The other is more recent, from Reality Sandwich! by Ronnie Pontiac. Long, but fun.
Some great music, an article that was featured in Invisible College #9, “Arcadia” and some beautiful poetry from Persia…
Anyway, I hope December is treating you well. Got my lights up 2 weeks early, heavens will wonders never cease?
A blessing on you and yours, and thanks to all who have supported my work over the past year!
Gwyllm
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On The Menu:
Time Of The Season Holiday Offerings!
The Links:
Tom Hatsis Interviewing Yers Truly
First Light – Marconi Union
Divine Inebriation
The Secret Rose Garden
Lars Leonhard – Lucid Dreams
Time Of The Season Holiday Offerings!
Calendars!
The Handy Desk Calendar:
Desk Calendar
The Wall Calendar:
Wall Calendar
Holiday Sale of The Hasheesh Eater!
Five dollars off the purchasing price, inclusive of shipping
30.00 for an unsigned copy (shipped from printers)
36.00 for a personalized signed copy. Limited to Six Books on hand
This offer is good for US sales only, sorry.
Order Soon Though To Arrive Before The Holiday!
Prints, Blotter Art On Sale. Keep the wolves away from an artist’s door!
All kinds of stuff for yer stockin’!
We are very excited about the 9th Edition, “Arcadia” in which we explore different cultural expressions from the past, present and future. Coming in at 148 pages, our largest edition yet, filled with great art, poetry, articles! For the first time we are following a theme, “Arcadia”. So excited about this one. Almost 75 pages of art alone!
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The Links:
Gwyllm Llwydd Interviewed In Reality Sandwich!
The End of Illusion
To Fight Climate Change We Must Empower Women!
Yes, the Octopus Is Smart as Heck. But Why?
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Tom Hatsis Interviewing Yers Truly At Exploring Psychedelics in Ashland, this past May….
I have spent lots of hours with Tom and his lovely friend Eden. Wonderful, good people. Life, she is good.
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First Light – Marconi Union
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An article I wrote…
From The 9th Issue Of The Invisible College Review:
Divine Inebriation
What else is Wisdom? What of man’s endeavour
Or God’s high grace, so lovely and so great?
To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait;
To hold a hand uplifted over Hate;
And shall not Loveliness be loved for ever?”
– Euripides,The Bacchae
Prologue:
Latin: maeander Greek maiandros…
This is a meander down ancient pathways. To perhaps cleave through the detritus of accumulated ages with the labrys of inner remembrance and recall down ivy laden trails into groves and grottoes of light and darkness, where our deep memories stir with the wild of the green and fecund world.
From Mt. Nysa, to Boeotia, across the wine coloured Mediterranean to Ægypt then onto Sumeria. Triumphant from India to Thrace vineyards sprung up where he strode with his maenads, leopards and wolves. The Centaurs decamped from Arcadia and followed his call from the Hellespont to the Atlas mountains… Twice born Dionysus, in whose blood and body we celebrated immortality and the dead,
a model for later incarnations… Lift up this krater of dark wine to our lips so that we might find imaginal realizations.
“Young man,
two are the forces most precious to mankind.
The first is Demeter, the Goddess.
She is the Earth — or any name you wish to call her —
and she sustains humanity with solid food.
Next came Dionysus, the son of the virgin,
bringing the counterpart to bread: wine
and the blessings of life’s flowing juices.
His blood, the blood of the grape,
lightens the burden of our mortal misery.
Though himself a God, it is his blood we pour out
to offer thanks to the Gods. And through him, we are blessed.”
– Euripides,The Bacchae
There were perhaps two great Gods who spanned the time of the Olympians but whose origins are far more ancient, Demeter & Dionysus. Of Demeter we will leave for another time our concern is with Dionysus.
Dionysus, Bromius, Bacchus, Eleutherios, Iacchus (may come from the Ιακχος (Iakchos), a hymn sung in honor of Dionysus.) All names/epithets for perhaps the greatest incarnation of divinity in the ancient world.
Although Thebes is said to have been city of origin, and his mother the mortal Semele and his father Zeus, there is perhaps a much older story that predates the Olympian gloss.
It is said that Dionysus is the younger of these two deities and this is of course based on the idea/assumption that grains were domesticated before grapes, but some see this as the outcome of the lack of imagination. If one goes out in the Autumn into the forest you’ll often find birds & mammals inebriated on late fruit & berries that have given themselves over to fermentation, a conspiracy between plant and free floating yeast & friendly molds. I have seen birds fall out of trees, drunk and raving from berries, a grand cacophony continues until all is consumed. Grain ferments as well of course, as an example there was a grain shipment that derailed up in British Columbia several years ago which spilled several tonnes of grain on the side of the tracks. Come the Autumn & trains had to proceed with great caution in the are of the derailment due to drunken bears laying about on the tracks, stumbling around etc.
It doesn’t take a grand leap to think that pre-neolithic peoples observed and partook of the gifts of the season. It would be foolish to consider that the roots of Dionysus doesn’t emerge in the paleolithic. This is of course imaginal thinking but if we extrapolate and veer off the familiar path then all kinds of possibilities open up around the archetype. There are enough connections between Dionysus and the green world, that the horned god found on cave walls throughout Europe & elsewhere is the progenitor of Dionysus, or Dionysus in an earlier form/incarnation. After all, when Dionysus was born he is mentioned to be “horned” surely a clue, a link lies here to earlier times.
We share the inebriated state across a wide biome of life. Flora provides it, fauna consumes it. The pursuit of this state may indeed be universal.
“He is life’s liberating force.
He is release of limbs and communion through dance.
He is laughter, and music in flutes.
He is repose from all cares — he is sleep!
When his blood bursts from the grape
and flows across tables laid in his honor
to fuse with our blood,
he gently, gradually, wraps us in shadows
of ivy-cool sleep.”
– Euripides,The Bacchae
There are many elements of inebriation. It breaks down inhibitions and brings down hierarchies of thought and societal structures.. One should not wonder at the current state of affairs with drug laws & prisons for users. Humans like their counterparts in other species are programmed for altered states, the quest for transcendence.
“Receive the god into your kingdom
pour libations, cover your head with ivy, join the dance!”
– Euripides, The Bacchae
Dionysus is closely associated with the grape and ivy in most classic volumes. Some mistake him for the sovereign of wine alone. He brings more than that. Greek wines, in classic times were not just alcohol, but an admixture of many different plant teachers. Mind you, that alcohol if used correctly can deliver a transcendental state, now pretty much forgotten due to its ubiquitous nature in modern society. Anything sacred can be reduced over time to banal commodity… but if one has the proper set and setting… The Greeks mixed wine with such substances as Papaver somniferum (Opium Poppies), Hyoscyamus niger (Henbane), Mandragora (Mandrake), and Cannabis in its various iterations was indeed a heady drink. Wine was usually mixed with water, diluted due to the added constituents. The dilution of wine to water was usually 1 to 4 parts. This gives you an idea of the strength of it. There may of been other plants (Ivy has been cited) and even perhaps fungi (Ya never know!) It is a guessing game at this time until new evidence is turned up.
One could consider that Dionysus is the persona of the divinity in nature, the wild, the untamed, unfurrowed, unfenced, forces of chaos & riot. The reassertion of our inner nature, boundless, untrammeled without the constraints of societal hierarchies, pristine, pure and dangerous. This state is both joyous, and full of grief. Everything in full measure.
Back though to this… Demeter & Dionysus as Goddess & God are exalted and constrained by nature, a trait which they share with us. The seasons are the their holy path, which seems to culminate in harvest and riot. The round of the year hold them close to us, the joy of flowering spring, a drowsy indolent summer, the abrupt changes and beauty of autumn, and the grief and sadness of winter. The fields of grain cut down, the vine left to rot on the midden. These are divinities that are born, live and die yearly. This is a part of their immortal mystery, tied to the ancient cycles of life and death.
“Knowledge is not wisdom: cleverness is not without awareness of our death, not without recalling just how brief our flare is. He who overreaches will, in his overreaching, lose what he possesses, betray what he has now. That which is beyond us, which is greater than the human, the unattainably great, is for the mad, or for those who listen to the mad, and then believe them.”
– Euripides,The Bacchae
That we might live again, in all immortality, we eat this flesh, we drink this wine…
“He is the god of epiphanies—sudden spiritual manifestations—and of transformation, and there is more shape-shifting associated with Dionysus than with any other Greek god except for his father, Zeus, whose metamorphoses were usually prompted by his pursuit of women.
– Euripides,The Bacchae
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The Secret Rose Garden (and More)
The Poetry of Sa’d Ud Din Mahmud Shabistari
Tavern Haunters
The tavern is the abode of lovers,
The place where the bird of the soul nests,
The rest-house that has no existence
In a world that has no form.
The tavern-haunter is desolate in a lonely desert,
Where he sees the world as a mirage.
The desert is limitless and endless,
For no man has seen its beginning or ending.
Though you feverishly wander for a hundred years
You will be always alone.
For the dwellers there are headless and footless,
Neither the faithful nor infidels,
They have renounced both good and evil,
And have cast away name and fame,
From drinking the cup of selflessness;
Without lips or mouth,
And are beyond traditions, visions, and states,
Beyond dreaming of secret rooms, of lights and miracles.
They are lying drunken through the smell of the wine-dregs,
And have given as ransom
Pilgrim’s staff and cruse,
Dentifrice and rosary.
Sometimes rising to the world of bliss,
With necks exalted as racers,
Or with blackened faces turned to the wall,
Sometimes with reddened faces tied to the stake.
Now in the mystic dance of joy in the Beloved,
Losing head and foot like the revolving heavens.
In every strain which they hear from the minstrel
Comes to them rapture from the unseen world.
For within the mere words and sounds
Of the mystic song
Lies a precious mystery.
From drinking one cup of the pure wine,
From sweeping the dust of dung-hills from their souls,
From grasping the skirts of drunkards,
They have become Sūfīs.
—-
One Light
What are “I” and “You”?
Just lattices
In the niches of a lamp
Through which the One Light radiates.
“I” and “You” are the veil
Between heaven and earth;
Lift this veil and you will see
How all sects and religions are one.
Lift this veil and you will ask —
When “I” and “You” do not exist
What is mosque?
What is synagogue?
What is fire temple?
—-
A Drop of Seawater
Behold how this drop of seawater
has taken so many forms and names;
it has existed as mist, cloud, rain, dew, and mud,
then plant, animal, and Perfect man;
and yet it was a drop of water
from which these things appeared.
Even so this universe of reason, soul, heavens, and bodies,
was but a drop of water in its beginning and ending.
…When a wave strikes it, the world vanishes;
and when the appointed time comes to heaven and stars,
their being is lost in not being.
—-
The Marriage of the Soul
Descending to the earth, that strange intoxicating beauty of the unseen world
lurks in the elements of nature.
And the soul of man,
who has attained the rightful balance,
becoming aware of this hidden joy,
straightaway is enamored and bewitched.
And from this mystic marriage are born
the poets’ songs, inner knowledge,
the language of the heart, virtuous living,
and the fair child Beauty.
And the Great Soul gives to man as dowry
the hidden glory of the world.
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Lars Leonhard – Lucid Dreams
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