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TAO TE CHING – Chapter 64. Care at the Beginning & Care at the End

a. Care at the Beginning
What lies still is easy to grasp;
What lies far off is easy to anticipate;
What is brittle is easy to shatter;
What is small is easy to disperse.

Yet a tree broader than a man can embrace is born of a tiny shoot;
A dam greater than a river can overflow starts with a clod of earth;
A journey of a thousand miles begins at the spot under one’s feet.

Therefore deal with things before they happen;
Create order before there is confusion.

b. Care at the End
He who acts, spoils;
He who grasps, loses.
People often fail on the verge of success;
Take care at the end as at the beginning,
So that you may avoid failure.

The sage desires no-desire,
Values no-value,
Learns no-learning,
And returns to the places that people have forgotten;
He would help all people to become natural,
But then he would not be natural.
—–
It’s been busy hectic here in Portland. My apologies for not being here as often as I have been. Lots of projects on the fire, Art work and editing. I am trying to organize my self out of the wet paper bag! With that said, I hope you enjoy this edition of Turfing!

Gwyllm
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On The Menu:
Invisible College 6h Edition Released!
The Green Suede Cap…
You are the one (feat. Devendra Banhart)
Aleksandr Blok, Revolutionary Poet
Devendra Banhart “Sight to behold” (Live)

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The Invisible College Magazine 6th Edition Released!

So… The Invisible College Magazine 6th Edition is now out! You can see it at IC.Earthrites.org
I think it is a nice bit of collaborative work. Please take a look at the site, and if you feel so moved, please pick up a copy! New lower price as we have found another place to publish, and there is some brilliant work in this edition. From a great interview with Jim Fadiman by Diane Darling, another visit with Lyterphotos and his series, to the poetry of Bryce Milligan and Yahia Lababidi… from the art of Jim Harter, Chuck St. John, and Oleg Korolev and much more! This is a pivotal issue. Not to be missed!
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The Green Suede Cap…

(Without the cap, with the jacket…)

I first met “The Cap” when I had just turned 17. It was a sight to behold, sitting on top of a wooden head in “The Leather Shoppe”, just off of Mt. Shasta Blvd next to Red Adams Realty in Mt. Shasta California (lovely place that). I walked into the store for the first time, and there it was. Green suede, yellow corduroy inner band. It was pretty snappy, and I desired it. The only problem was it was 9.00 dollars, and that was a lot of money back when the minimum wage was 98 cents per hour.

I got to know the owners of The Leather Shoppe, Sandie and Jim Sellers. They were up from Big Sur, and at that time in their mid 30′s, ex-beats now uber-hippies. I had sort of a crush on Sandie, she had long blond flowing hair to her waist, and soft Nordic features with extremely blue eyes. Jim was kind, thinnish with hair tied back. Both of them were sweet, and allowed me to hang out in their shop when I was in town. I would hang out and talk, and generally learn something new every time I went in.

Months past and that hat sat there unsold. I never lost my desire for it. I would make a bee-line for it every time I visited with Sandie and Jim. I had no idea about business, economics or what it took to keep a small shop open in a remote town. Slowly but surely the Sellers were losing it with their choice of location. I think the strain of it all was working against them. Still, they were kindness personified. A month before they closed up shop and left for Oregon, Sandie said to me when I came in the shop, “This is yours”, as she handed me the green suede cap. I was speechless, and then I thanked them profusely. They were absolutely beaming and laughing when I left the shop.

That cap went with me everywhere. About that time I had acquired a used dark brown leather jacket from the 1930′s, which in combination (to my eyes) were a very stylish set. With my little red book, and Mao pin in my label, I looked and felt the part of a young ardent revolutionary. (at least in style!) Whether I was hitchhiking up to Portland, or down to San Francisco via Highway 1, that cap went with me. When I went to Santa Cruz to hang, there it went, or to L.A. or Reno…

As the years went by, I would put it up on the shelf in the closest for months or years at a time. It traveled down to L.A. with me, and up to the Bay area. It sat in storage with friends when I went to Hawaii. A year later, it went with me to Europe, (along the way I had lost the leather jacket, and now had an old rain coat). The cap didn’t mind, it adapted easily. I wore it as I traveled the rails of Europe, from the Isle of Dogs, to the Hash bars along the canals of Amsterdam, to the cobbled stone streets of Freiburg and was with me when I first drank Absinthe. It crossed the Rhine with me and dallied awhile among the avenues of the Alsace Loraine. It was with me as I traveled back to Calaise, then across the Channel to Dover where in London I met Mary one Friday night.

It flew back to L.A. with us a year later, and landed eventually on a shelf where it stayed off and on for years. I nearly gave it away a couple of times, and nearly threw it away as I was going through changes and wanted to leave my past behind. Yet something stayed my hand. It went back to Europe with us, and wore it on lovely walks in Highgate Cemetery , in Wiltshire to Avebury and up Silbury Hill, and then on to the South Downs where I saw the Leylines stretching across the land illuminated like fire one dark afternoon. I wore it when I drove our Anglia out to the Devon, and up the moors to Bowden Farm.

We came back to California, and after a couple of years moved north to Washington. I was happy to have it that very cold winter, and eventually the cap made it back to Mt. Shasta when we moved south again. During the years, Sandie Sellers had moved back to Mt. Shasta, and we became friends again. She laughed when she saw the hat on me. It was a nice return. Sandie died a year later, and shortly after Jim passed in the Applegate in Southern Oregon. That year, Rowan was born. Life indeed had gone full circle. We left Mt. Shasta, never to come back except to visit. Doors do indeed close. I see Sandie still, laughing. The years have streamed by, but she is still there inside of me.

This old cap has seen wonders, drudgeries, debaucheries and moments of great beauty. It was with me in times of innocence, and times of hard scrabble. I wore it up to this last winter, where I went to get it, and it was gone. Not lost, but Rowan had borrowed it. This went on for a month or two, and I finally asked him if he wanted it. “Yes, I do” was his reply. I see him now leaving in the morning, an ardent young film-maker and general all around gentleman. I think it fits him better than it ever fit me.

There is a time for holding on, and a time for letting go. Everything has it’s time and everything eventually passes. I see the cap almost everyday. It kinda winks as it goes by. (to be continued…)

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You are the one (feat. Devendra Banhart)

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Aleksandr Blok, Revolutionary Poet

A Girl Sang a Song

A girl sang a song in the temple’s chorus,
About men, tired in alien lands,
About the ships that left native shores,
And all who forgot their joy to the end.

Thus sang her clean voice, and flew up to the highness,
And sunbeams shined on her shoulder’s white —
And everyone saw and heard from the darkness
The white and airy gown, singing in the light.

And all of them were sure, that joy would burst out:
The ships have arrived at their beach,
The people, in the land of the aliens tired,
Regaining their bearing, are happy and reach.

And sweet was her voice and the sun’s beams around….
And only, by Caesar’s Gates — high on the vault,
The baby, versed into mysteries, mourned,
Because none of them will be ever returned.
—

Gamajun, the Prophetic Bird

On waters, spread without end,
Dressed with the sunset so purple,
It sings and prophesies for land,
Unable to lift the smashed wings’ couple…
The charge of Tartars’ hordes it claims,
And bloody set of executions,
Earthquake, and hunger and the flames,
The death of justice, crime’s intrusion…
And caught with fear, cold and smooth,
The fair face flames as one of lovers’,
But sound with prophetic truth
The lips that the bloody foam covers!…
—

He, who was born

He, who was born in stagnant year
Does not remember own way.
We, kids of Russia’s years of fear,
Remember every night and day.

Years that burned everything to ashes!
Do you bring madness or grace?
The war’s and freedom’s fire flashes
Left bloody light on every face.

We are struck dumb: the toxsin’s pressure
Has made us tightly close lips.
In living hearts, once full of pleasure,
The fateful desert now sleeps.

And let the crying ravens soar
Right over our death-bed,
May those who were striving more,
O God, behold Thy Kingdom’s Great!
—

The Stranger

The restaurants on hot spring evenings
Lie under a dense and savage air.
Foul drafts and hoots from dunken revelers
Contaminate the thoroughfare.
Above the dusty lanes of suburbia
Above the tedium of bungalows
A pretzel sign begilds a bakery
And children screech fortissimo.

And every evening beyond the barriers
Gentlemen of practiced wit and charm
Go strolling beside the drainage ditches —
A tilted derby and a lady at the arm.

The squeak of oarlocks comes over the lake water
A woman’s shriek assaults the ear
While above, in the sky, inured to everything,
The moon looks on with a mindless leer.

And every evening my one companion
Sits here, reflected in my glass.
Like me, he has drunk of bitter mysteries.
Like me, he is broken, dulled, downcast.

The sleepy lackeys stand beside tables
Waiting for the night to pass
And tipplers with the eyes of rabbits
Cry out: “In vino veritas!”

And every evening (or am I imagining?)
Exactly at the appointed time
A girl’s slim figure, silk raimented,
Glides past the window’s mist and grime.

And slowly passing throught the revelers,
Unaccompanied, always alone,
Exuding mists and secret fragrances,
She sits at the table that is her own.

Something ancient, something legendary
Surrounds her presence in the room,
Her narrow hand, her silk, her bracelets,
Her hat, the rings, the ostrich plume.

Entranced by her presence, near and enigmatic,
I gaze through the dark of her lowered veil
And I behold an enchanted shoreline
And enchanted distances, far and pale.

I am made a guardian of the higher mysteries,
Someone’s sun is entrusted to my control.
Tart wine has pierced the last convolution
of my labyrinthine soul.

And now the drooping plumes of ostriches
Asway in my brain droop slowly lower
And two eyes, limpid, blue, and fathomless
Are blooming on a distant shore.

Inside my soul a treasure is buried.
The key is mine and only mine.
How right you are, you drunken monster!
I know: the truth is in the wine.

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Devendra Banhart “Sight to behold” (Live)

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Even a man who is pure in heart
and says his prayers by night
may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
and the autumn moon is bright….

Shape Shifter: Perhaps one of the subjects that I have long been fascinated with. Picture this, a seven year old on a Saturday afternoon turns the channel to a film he thinks is about science.  In the film, one of the scientist tries out a serum that transforms him into a primitive cannibalistic human who runs amok, and as the serum wears off, returns to himself.  He eventually becomes hopelessly addicted to the serum, mayhem ensues. Scientist attacks everyone, family, fellow scientist until he is fatally wounded, and is transformed back to a human as he dies and the credits roll. Said seven year old has been unable to tear himself away from the screen. A month of nightmares follows, with all the attending problems this brings. Claws at the windows, monsters under the bed. Night mares sitting on the chest, the whole package. After all these years, though he has come to enjoy some of the genre, prefers his monsters not to first be humans. Much prefers them to come ready made with fur, or scales, thank you, thank you!

Thus began a long fascination with shapeshifting. It has led down many an odd path, from Greek mythology, to legal papers from trial in Europe in the 1700′s. I have studied the cave paintings, and read the legends from around the world, from Indonesia, India, Siberia, across the Americas… it is a common theme to almost all peoples. I have seen people in trance take on the behaviour and outward (no not fur but stance) of various creatures. It is fascinating.

What is going on? Is there a part of us that has been tamped down but still exist? Does that part only come out as nightmare, or aberrant behaviour generally? (You know, eating the neighbors etc…) Films usually portray werewolves as being at odds with their nature, or complicit in the act. It always is portrayed as a curse. I think something happened when we turned to agriculture that buried this part of our psychi and make up.

As I grew older I moved on to Lon Chaney’s works, and various other re-interpretations of the old tale. My favourite of recent years (if you count 30 years as being such) are three films, “An American Werewolf In London, “A Company Of Wolves”. and the French film “The Brotherhood Of The Wolf”. All examine the myth from different angles, and in the mix I fall out to A Company of Wolves as my favourite, though I thoroughly enjoy and find deep meaning in the other two.

What goes on in the dream world? What do we summon up, and then dismiss with the coming of awakening? Where do we really dwell, here, or in our dreams?

Blessings,
G
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On The Menu:
Shape Shifting Quotes
The Company of Wolves-The Wolfgirl
Poetry About Werewolves
The Wolfman – Trailer 1925
Becoming An Animal – Secret Life of Ghosts & Werewolves
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Shape Shifting Quotes:

The outward form of things passes away, but the essence remains for ever. How long will you be besotted with the shape of the jug? Cast aside the jug, and seek the water. If you look too closely at the form, you miss the essence. If you are wise, you will always pick out the pearl from the shell.
– Rumi, “Masnavi”

Shape-shifting. We do it for kicks. – Wolfen 1981

♦ David: I’m a werewolf.
♦ Alex: Are you alright?
♦ David: I don’t know, I’ll let you know the next full moon.
An American Werewolf in London

♦ Little girls, this seems to say, never stop upon your way, never trust a stranger friend, no-one knows how it will end! As you’re pretty, so be wise! Wolves may lurk in every guise! Now, as then, it’s simple truth, sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth!
Rosaleen, The Company of Wolves
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The Company of Wolves-The Wolfgirl

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Poetry About Werewolves..

The Werewolves
– Wilfred Campbell

They hasten, still they hasten,
From the even to the dawn;
And their tired eyes gleam and glisten
Under north skies white and wan.
Each panter in the darkness
Is a demon-haunted soul,
The shadowy, phantom werewolves,
Who circle round the Pole.

Their tongues are crimson flaming,
Their haunted blue eyes gleam,
And they strain them to the utmost
O’er frozen lake and stream;
Their cry one note of agony,
That is neither yelp nor bark,
These panters of the northern waste,
Who hound them to the dark.

You may hear their hurried breathing,
You may see their fleeting forms,
At the pallid polar midnight,
When the north is gathering storms;
When the arctic frosts are flaming,
And the ice-field thunders roll;
These demon-haunted werewolves,
Who circle round the Pole.

They hasten, still they hasten,
Across the northern night,
Filled with a frighted madness,
A horror of the light;
Forever and forever,
Like leaves before the wind,
They leave the wan, white gleaming
Of the dawning far behind.

Their only peace is darkness,
Their rest to hasten on
Into the heart of midnight,
Forever from the dawn.
Across far phantom ice-floes
The eye of night may mark
These horror-haunted werewolves
Who hound them to the dark.

All through this hideous journey
They are the souls of men
Who in the far dark-ages
Made Europe one black fen.
They fled from courts and convents,
And bound their mortal dust
With demon, wolfish girdles
Of human hate and lust.

These, who could have been godlike,
Chose, each a loathsome beast,
Amid the heart’s foul graveyards,
On putrid thoughts to feast;
But the great God who made them
Gave each a human soul,
And so ‘mid night forever
They circle round the Pole.

A-praying for the blackness,
A-longing for the night,
For each is doomed forever
By a horror of the light;
And far in the heart of midnight,
Where their shadowy flight is hurled,
They feel with pain the dawning
That creeps in round the world.

Under the northern midnight,
The white, glint ice upon,
They hasten, still they hasten,
With their horror of the dawn;
Forever and forever,
Into the night away
They hasten, still they hasten
Unto the judgment day.
—
The Wolfman – Trailer 1925

—
The Werewolf
by: Anne S. Bushby

‘Twas at the middle hour of night;
And though the moon gave her pale light,
O’er the haunted wood a thick mist hung
And the wind was howling its leaves among.
In a cart along that way so wild
A peasant was driving his wife and child.

“For the fairy folks thou need’st fear not,
They dance ‘neath the moon on yon green spot.
Should the screech-owl cry from yonder marsh
Say a prayer, nor heed its voice so harsh.
Whate’er thou seest, be not afraid,
But clasp the child,” the faither said.

“Forward, old horse! Behind yon tree
Our church’s steeple I can see.
Get on! But hold, a moment stop–
The linch-pin is about to drop;
‘Tis crack’d–I’ll cut a stick, my dear;
Hold fast the child, and have no fear!”

An hour alone she might have sat,
When a noise she heard–”Oh, what is that?”
Lo! a coal-black hound! She sees and knows
The werewolf! while his teeth he shows,
And glares upon her child, she flings
Her apron o’er it as he springs.

His sharp teeth bite it; but she cries
To God for help, away he flies.
Her arms the helpless babe enfold,
She sits like a statue, pale and cold.
But soon her husband’s by her side,
And onwards now they safely ride.

Arrived at home, a light is brought;
She starts, as with some horrid thought:
“What? Husband! husband! can these be
Threads hanging from thy teeth I see?
Thou art thyself a werewolf then!”
“Thy words,” he said, “have set me free again!”
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Becoming An Animal – Secret Life of Ghosts & Werewolves

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“As it fell upon a day
In the merry month of May,
Sitting in a pleasant shade
Which a grove of myrtles made.”
– Richard Barnfield

“Now the bright morning star, day’s harbinger,
Comes dancing from the east, and leads with her
The flowery May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow cowslip, and the pale primrose.
Hail, bounteous May, that doth inspire
Mirth, and youth, and warm desire;
Woods and groves are of thy dressing,
Hill and dale doth boast thy blessing,
Thus we salute thee with our early song,
And welcome thee, and wish thee long.”
– John Milton, Song on a May Morning
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My Darling Friends,

I would light the Baal Fires with you, and drive the cattle through. We would dance and carouse to the early morn, and drink of the crimson loving cup, and mark this moment in the ancient way…

Here is to Lighting The Baal Fires, here is to the May Dance. A high Holy Night and Day, of laughter, drink, and romance!

Join us, for the apex of Spring has come!

Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm
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Gaia Consort – Beltane Fires

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“The May-pole is up,
Now give me the cup;
I’ll drink to the garlands around it;
But first unto those
Whose hands did compose
The glory of flowers that crown’d it.”
– Robert Herrick, The Maypole, 1660

“On the first day of May the people of the crofter townland are up betimes and busy as bees about to swarm. This is the day of migrating, bho baile gu beinn (from townland to moorland), from the winter homestead to the summer sheiling. The summer of their joy is come, the summer of the sheiling, the song, the pipe and the dance, when the people ascend the hill to the clustered bothies, overlooking the distant sea from among the fronded ferns and fragrant heather, where neighbour meets neighbour, and lover meets lover.”
– Alexander Carmichael, 1845

“Flora, , Goddess of Spring, Flowers, and youthful pleasures The Queen of Spring is a beautiful and serene Goddess. She was married to Zephyrus, the west wind. Flora is the twin sister to Faunus, the god of wild creatures, originally was called Sabine was also known as Chloris to the Greeks. It was a celebration of Nature in full blossom, a carnival of sexual fun and liberty and marked by the consumption of oceans of grog. Beans and other seeds were planted, representing fecundity. Originally a movable feast controlled by the condition of the crops and flowers, it’s believed to have been instituted in 238 BCE under the command of an oracle in the Sibylline books, with the purpose of gaining from the goddess the protection of the blossoms. Games were instituted in honour of Flora at that time, but were soon discontinued before being restored in 173 BCE in the consulship of L Postumius Albinus and M Popilius Laenas as a six-day festival, after storms had destroyed crops and vines. Offerings of milk and honey were made on this day and the surrounding five days, which comprise the Florifertum. The city would have been decorated in flowers, and the people would wear floral wreaths or flowers in their hair. Day and night there were games, pantomimes, theatre and stripteases with people of all classes in their brightest clothes. Goats and hares were let loose as they represented fertility. Gift-giving for the season included small vegetables as tokens of sex and fertility.”
– May Day and the Roman Floralia

“Cherry-ripe, ripe, ripe, I cry,
Full and fair ones; come and buy.
If so be you ask me where
They do grow, I answer: There,
Where my Julia’s lips do smile;
There’s the land, or cherry-isle,
Whose plantations fully show
All the year where cherries grow.”
– Robert Herrick, Cherry Ripe, 1648

“I [Flora/Chloris] enjoy perpetual spring: the year always shines, trees are leafing, the solid always fodders. I have a fruitful garden in my dowered fields, fanned by breezes, fed by limpid fountains. My husband filled it with well-bred flowers, saying: ‘Have jurisdiction of the flower, goddess.’ I often wanted to number the colors displayed, but could not: their abundance defied measure. As soon as the dewy frost is cast from the leaves and sunbeams warm the dappled blossom, the Horae (Seasons) assemble, hitch up their colored dresses and collect these gifts of mine in light tubs. Suddenly the Charites (Graces) burst in, and weave chaplets and crowns to entwine the hair of gods. I first scattered new seed across countless nations; earth was formerly a single colour. I first made a flower from Therapnean blood [Hyakinthos the hyacinth], and its petal still inscribes the lament. You, too, narcissus, have a name in tended gardens, unhappy in your undivided self. Why mention Crocus, Attis or Cinyras’ son, from whose wounds I made a tribute soar?”
– Ovid, Fasti 5.193
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Narsilion – Beltane

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“May, queen of blossoms,
And fulfilling flowers,
With what pretty music
Shall we charm the hours?
Wilt thou have pipe and reed,
Blown in the open mead?
Or to the lute give heed
In the green bowers.”
– Lord Edward Thurlow, To May

“There is a garden in her face
Where roses and white lilies blow;
A heavenly paradise is that place,
Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow:
There cherries grow which none may buy
Till ‘Cherry-ripe’ themselves do cry.

Those cherries fairly do enclose
Of orient pearl a double row,
Which when her lovely laughter shows,
They look like rose-buds fill’d with snow;
Yet them nor peer nor prince can buy
Till ‘Cherry-ripe’ themselves do cry.

Her eyes like angels watch them still;
Her brows like bended bows do stand,
Threat’ning with piercing frowns to kill
All that attempt with eye or hand
Those sacred cherries to come nigh,
Till ‘Cherry-ripe’ themselves do cry.”
– Thomas Champion, Cherry Ripe, 1610

“Maia is the Oscan Earth-Goddess, and an ancient Roman Goddess of springtime, warmth, and increase. She causes the plants to grow through Her gentle heat, and the month of May is probably named for Her. Her name means “She Who is Great”, and is related to Oscan mais and Latin majus, both of which mean “more”. She is also called Maia Maiestas, “Maia the Majestic”, which is essentially a doubling of Her name to indicate Her power, as both “Maia” and “Maiestas” have their roots in latin magnus, “great or powerful”. She was honored by the Romans on the 1st and 15th of May, and at the Volcanalia of August 23rd, the holiday of Her sometimes husband, the Fire-God Vulcan. She seems to have been paired with Vulcan because they were both considered Deities of heat: through the increasing warmth of Maia’s spring season flowers and plants sprouted and grew; while Vulcan’s stronger summer heat brought the fruits to ripeness. In a later period, Maia was confused with a Greek Goddess of the same name. This Maia (whose name in Greek can take such various meanings as “midwife”, “female doctor”, “good mother”, “foster mother”, or “aunty”) was a nymph and the mother of Hermes, the trickster God of merchants, travellers, and liars; She was also said to have been the eldest and most beautiful of the seven sisters who formed the constellation of the Pleiades, whose heliacal rising (meaning when the constellation is just visible in the east before the sun rises) signalled the beginning of summer. Through this association the Roman Maia became the mother of Mercury, and Her festival on the Ides of May (the 15th) coincided with the festival commemorating the date of the dedication of His temple on the Aventine.”
– Maia Maiestas, Goddess of Spring
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“For the May Day is the great day,
Sung along the old straight track.
And those who ancient lines did ley
Will heed this song that calls them back…
Pass the cup, and pass the Lady,
And pass the plate to all who hunger,
Pass the wit of ancient wisdom,
Pass the cup of crimson wonder.”
– Jethro Tull, Cup of Wonder

“For thee, sweet month; the groves green liveries wear.
If not the first, the fairest of the year;
For thee the Graces lead the dancing hours,
And Nature’s ready pencil paints the flowers.
When thy short reign is past, the feverish sun
The sultry tropic fears, and moves more slowly on.”
– John Dryden
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Corvus Corax – Saltarello Ductia

The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.
I don’t know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.
– Lao-tzu

The rain is either sleeting down, or we have glorious sun. Every weather pattern available, eventually shows up in Portland… Another cold spring, second in a row. If we relied on the local food without imports from other parts of the world, and with our population we might be in a world of hurt and hunger come this fall…

I have been working on my garage, turning it slowly back into the art/print studio it once was. As I sort the frames, silkscreens, and equipment I can see dreams rise and fall from when I was first working with serigraph, and remembering where things were with each design. It once completely supported us, and quite well then a series of events (like an economic downturn and the virtual death of mail order for 6 months back in George the 1st Reign in Washington..)

As I worked I tore apart several designs to reuse the frames, ones that I once hoped people would appreciate. Funnily enough, many of the ones that I pored myself into, I never sold a one. There were others that still sell, years along the way that I thought were too obscure, but they still sell to an audience that is at least appreciative of them. So… in cleaning up the space, painting the walls, sorting and cleaning screens, I am about to return at least in part of my time to printing and working in the shop. I am setting up some wood working tools as well, as I have a hankering to make objects of dubious worth and beauty. Actually, I am thinking of making some rather unusual poetry boxes, in new and various shapes and sizes.

I enjoy working with my hands, always have. I find myself greatly relieved by the physical part of working in the studio. Clears the head, allows me to find a sense of direction, even when I didn’t know I was in need of it.

Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm
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On The Menu:
Quotes On Surrealism
Terence McKenna Last Interview
Aimé Césaire: Three Poems
Eat Static – Pharaoh
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Quotes On Surrealism:

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.
John Lennon

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
Susan Sontag

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.
Salvador Dali

Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.
Brad Holland
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Terence McKenna Last Interview:

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Aimé Césaire: Three Poems
(Translated by Eshleman & Arnold)

TO THE SERPENT

I have had occasion in the bewilderment of cities to search for the right animal to adore. So I worked my way back to the first times. Undoing cycles untying knots crushing plots removing covers killing hostages I searched.
Ferret. Tapir. Uprooter.
Where where where the animal who warned me of floods
Where where where the bird who led me to honey
Where where where the bird who revealed to me the fountainheads
the memory of great alliances betrayed great friendships lost through our fault exalted me
Where where where
Where where where
The word made vulgar to me
O serpent sumptuous back do you enclose in your sinuous lash the powerful soul of my grandfather?
Greetings to you serpent through whom morning shakes its beautiful mango mauve December chevelure and for whom the milk-invented night tumbles its luminous mice down its wall
Greetings to you serpent grooved like the bottom of the sea and which my heart truly unbinds for us like the premise of the deluge
Greetings to you serpent your reputation is more majestic than their gait and the peace their God gives not you hold supremely.

Serpent delirium and peace

over the hurdles of a scurrilous wind the countryside dismembers for me secrets whose steps resounded at the outlet of the millenary trap of gorges that they tightened to strangulation.

to the trashcan! may they all rot in portraying the banner of a black crow weakening in a beating of white wings.
Serpent
broad and royal disgust overpowering the return in the sands of deception
spindrift nourishing the vain raft of the seagull
in the pale tempest of reassuring silences you the least frail warm yourself
You bathe yourself this side of the most discordant cries on the dreamy spumes of grass
when fire is exhaled from the widow boat that consumes the cape of the echo’s flash
just to make your successive deaths shiver all the more—green frequenting of the elements—your threat.

Your threat yes your threat body issuant from the raucous haze of bitterness where it corrupted the concerned lighthouse keeper and that whistling takes its little gallop time toward the assassin rays of discovery.

Serpent
charming biter of womens’ breasts and through whom death steals into the maturity in the depths of a fruit sole lord lord alone whose multiple image places on the strangler fig’s altar the offering of a chevelure that is an octopodal threat a sagacious hand that does not pardon cowards
—

AT THE LOCKS OF THE VOID

In the foreground and in longitudinal flight a dried-up brook drowsy roller of obsidian pebbles. In the background a decidedly not calm architecture of torn down burgs of eroded mountains on whose glimpsed phantom serpents chariots a cat’s-eye and alarming constellations are born. It is a strange firefly cake hurled into the gray face of time, a vast scree of shards of ikons of blazons of lice in the beard of Saturn. On the right very curiously standing against the squamous wall of crucified butterfly wings open in majesty a gigantic bottle whose very long golden neck drinks a drop of blood from the clouds. As for me I am no longer thirsty. It gives me pleasure to think of the world undone like an old copra mattress like an old voodoo necklace like the perfume of a felled peccary. I am no longer thirsty. All heads belong to me. It is sweet to be gentle as a lamb. It is sweet to open the great sluicegates of gentleness:

through the shaken sky
through the exploded stars
through the tutelary silence
from very far beyond myself I come toward you
woman sprung from a beautiful laburnum
and your eyes wounds barely closing
on your modesty at having been born

It is I who sings with a voice still caught up in the babbling of elements. It is sweet to be a piece of wood a cork a drop of water in the torrential flood of the end and of the new beginning. It is sweet to doze off in the shattered heart of things. I no longer have any sort of thirst. My sword made from a shark’s-tooth smile is becoming terribly useless. My mace is very obviously out of season and out of play. Rain is falling. It is a crisscross of rubble, it is a skein of steel for reinforced concrete, it is an incredible stowage of the invisible by first-rate ties, it is a branchwork of syphilis, it is the diagram of a brandy bender, it is the graphic representation of a seismic floodtide, it is a conspiracy of dodders, it is the nightmare’s head impaled on the lance point of a mob mad for peace and for bread.

I advance to the region of blue lakes. I advance to the region of sulphur springs.
I advance to my crateriform mouth toward which have I struggled enough? What have I to discard? Everything by god everything. I am stark naked. I have discarded everything. My genealogy. My widow. My companions. I await the boiling, I await the baptism of sperm. I await the wingbeat of the great seminal albatross supposed to make a new man of me. I await the immense tap, the vertiginous slap that will consecrate me as a knight of a plutonian order. I await in the depths of my pores the sacred intrusion of benediction.

And suddenly it is the outpouring of great rivers
it is the friendship of toucans’ eyes
it is the fulminating erection of virgin mountains
I am pregnant with my despair in my arms
I am pregnant with my hunger in my arms and my disgust in my mouth
I am invested. Europe patrols my veins like a pack of filariae at the stroke of midnight. To think that their philosophies tried to provide them with morals. That ferocious race won’t have put up with it.

Europe pig iron fragment
Europe low tunnel oozing a bloody dew
Europe old bag Europe
Europe old dog Europe worm-drawn coach
Europe peeling tattoo Europe your name is a raucous clucking and a muffled shock

I unfold my handkerchief it is a flag
I have donned my beautiful skin
I have adjusted my beautiful clawed paws

Europe
I hereby join all that powders the sky with its insolence all that is loyal and fraternal all that has the courage to be eternally new all that knows how to yield its heart to the fire all that has the strength to emerge from an inexhaustible sap all
that is calm and self-assured
all that is not you
Europe
eminent name of the turd
—

FORFEITURE

As soon as I press the little pawl that I have under my tongue at a spot that escapes all detection all microscopic bombardment all dowser divination all scholarly prospecting beneath it triple layer of false eyelashes of centuries of insults of strata of madrepores of what I must call my niagara cavern in a burst of cockroaches in a cobra twitch a tongue like a cause for astonishment makes the leap of a machine for spitting a mouthful of curses a rising of the sewers of hell a premonitory ejaculation a urinary spurt a foul emission a sulfuric rhythm feeding an uninterruption of interjections—and then right there pushing between the paving stones the furious blue eucalypti that leave far behind them the splendor of veronicas, skulls smack in the delirium of dust like the jaboticaba plum and then right there started up like the loud buzzing of a hornet the true war of devolution in which all means are justified right there the passenger pigeons of the conflagration right there the crackling of secret transmitters and the thick tufts of black smoke that resemble the vaginal vegetation thrust into the air by rutting loins. I count. Obstructing the street a honey-colored armillaria lying dwarf-like on its side a church uprooted and reduced by catastrophe to its true proportions of a public urinal. I cross over collapsed bridges. I cross under new arches. Toboggan eye at the bottom of a cheek amidst woodwinds and well-polished brasses a house abutting an abyss with in cut-away view the violated virginity of the daughter of the house the lost goods and chattels of the father and the mother who believed in the dignity of mankind and in the bottom of a wool stocking the testicles pierced by the knitting needle of an unemployed workman from distant lands.

I place my hand on my forehead it’s a hatching of monsoons. I place my hand on my dick. It fainted in leaf smoke. All the deserter light of the sky has taken refuge in the red white and yellow heated bars of snakes attentive to the wasting away of this landscape sneered at by dog piss.
For what?
The planets are very fertile birds that constantly and majestically disclose their guano silos
the earth on its spit alternatively vomits grease from each of its facets
fistfuls of fish hook their emergency lights to the pilasters of stars whose ancient slippage crumbles away during the night in a thick very bitter flavor of coca.

Who among you has never happened to strike an earth because of its inhabitants’ malice? Today I am standing and in the sole whiteness that men have never recognized in me.
________________

Eat Static – Pharaoh

I have come to the point of view that mind – i.e., conscious awareness of the world – is not a meaningless and incidental quirk of nature, but an absolutely fundamental facet of reality. -Professor Paul Davies

(Louis Welden Hawkins – Clytie)

Ovid, Metamorphoses 4. 204, 234 & 256 (trans. Melville) (Roman epic C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) :
“She [the Persian princess Leukothoe] was his [Helios’] one delight. Not Clymene, not Rhodos now had power to hold his heart, nor Circe’s lovely mother, nor the girl, sad Clytie. Clytie, who languished for his love, though scorned, and at that moment nursed her wound. All were forgotten for Leucothoe . . . Clytie was jealous, for she loved Sol [Helios] beyond all measure. Spurred with anger against that paramour, she published wide the tale of shame and, as it spread, made sure her [Leukothoe’s] father knew . . . [and through her tattling about the death of the girl.]

But Clytie, although her love might well excuse her grief and grief her tale-baring, the Lord of Light no longer visited; his dalliance was done. She pined and languished, as love and longing stole her wits away. Shunning the Nymphae, beneath the open sky, on the bare ground bare-headed day and night, she sat dishevelled, and for nine long days, with never taste of food or drink, she fed her hunger on her tears and on the dew. There on the ground she stayed; she only gazed upon her god’s bright face as he rode by, and turned her head to watch him cross the sky. Her limbs, they say, stuck fast there in the soil; a greenish pallor spread, as part of her changed to a bloodless plant, another part was ruby red, and where her face had been a flower like a violet [i.e. the heliotrope] was seen. Though rooted fast, towards the sun she turns; her shape is changed, but still her passion burns.”
_______________

Well Spring is struggling here, the wettest one on record if I read it all correctly. Today I worked on the garage turning it even more into a studio proper. I am very excited about this project! I later attended a great lecture on the Stoics at the local Hermetic Society. I want to thank Stephanie & Kristin for a very informative evening, and Adam & Isidora for hosting the event. I was able to catch up with Lyterphotos, and to talk to many wonderful people who I have mainly communicated with online.. Thanks to one and all for such a nice welcome and evening!

Rowan is gearing up for a 5 day shoot for a film project, and has jumped into another quarter feet first. I see him briefly as he goes in and out. Life is picking up pace for him as he enters his last year of college. It has happened so quickly!

On other subjects, the magazine looks pretty complete and we are about to kick start sales and promotions, keep tuned!

Mary and I are getting the yard together, and praying for more SUN!

Hope this finds you well!
Gwyllm
_______________

On The Menu:
The Album Leaf -Over the Pond
The Spring Festival In Greece
Rainer Maria Rilke Poems For Mid April
The Album Leaf – Into the Sea
Art: Louis Welden Hawkins
_______________

The Album Leaf – Over the Pond

______________________

The Spring Festival In Greece

Ancient Art and Ritual. by Jane Harrison

The tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were performed at Athens at a festival known as the Great Dionysia. This took place early in April, so that the time itself makes us suspect that its ceremonies were connected with the spring. But we have more certain evidence. Aristotle, in his treatise on the Art of Poetry, raises the question of the origin of the drama. He was not specially interested in primitive ritual; beast dances and spring mummeries might even have seemed to him mere savagery, the lowest form of “imitation;” but he divined that a structure so complex as Greek tragedy must have arisen out of a simpler form; he saw, or felt, in fact, that art had in some way risen out of ritual, and he has left us a memorable statement.

In describing the “Carrying-out of Summer” we saw that the element of real drama, real impersonation, began with the leaders of the band, with the Queen of the May, and with the “Death” or the “Winter.” Great is our delight when we find that for Greek drama Aristotle 1 divined a like beginning. He says:

“Tragedy–as also Comedy–was at first mere improvisation–the one (tragedy) originated with the leaders of the Dithyramb.”

The further question faces us: What was the Dithyramb? We shall find to our joy that this obscure-sounding Dithyramb, though before Aristotle’s time it had taken literary form, was in origin a festival closely akin to those we have just been discussing. The Dithyramb was, to begin with, a spring ritual; and when Aristotle tells us tragedy arose out of the Dithyramb, he gives us, though perhaps half unconsciously, a clear instance of a splendid art that arose from the simplest of rites; he plants our theory of the connection of art with ritual firmly with its feet on historical ground.

When we use the word “dithyrambic” we certainly do not ordinarily think of spring. We say a style is “dithyrambic” when it is unmeasured, too ornate, impassioned, flowery. The Greeks themselves had forgotten that the word Dithyramb meant a leaping, inspired dance. But they had not forgotten on what occasion that dance was danced. Pindar wrote a Dithyramb for the Dionysiac festival at Athens, and his song is full of springtime and flowers. He bids all the gods come to Athens to dance flower-crowned.

“Look upon the dance, Olympians; send us the grace of Victory, ye gods who come to the heart of our city, where many feet are treading and incense steams: in sacred Athens come to the holy centre-stone. Take your portion of garlands pansy-twined, libations poured from the culling of spring. . . .

‘Come hither to the god with ivy bound. Bromios we mortals name Him, and Him of the mighty Voice. . . . The clear signs of his Fulfilment are not hidden, whensoever the chamber of the purple-robed Hours is opened, and nectarous flowers lead in the fragrant spring. Then, then, are flung over the immortal Earth, lovely petals of pansies, and roses are amid our hair; and voices of song are loud among the pipes, the dancing-floors are loud with the calling of crowned Semele.”

Bromios, “He of the loud cry,” is a title of Dionysos. Semele is his mother, the Earth; we keep her name in Nova Zembla, “New Earth.” The song might have been sung at a “Carrying-in of Summer.” The Horæ, the Seasons, a chorus of maidens, lead in the figure of Spring, the Queen of the May, and they call to Mother Earth to wake, to rise up from the earth, flower-crowned.

You may bring back the life of the Spring in the form of a tree or a maiden, or you may summon her to rise from the sleeping Earth. In Greek mythology we are most familiar with the Rising-up form. Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, is carried below the Earth, and rises up again year by year. On Greek vase-paintings 1 the scene occurs again and again. A mound of earth is represented, sometimes surmounted by a tree; out of the mound a woman’s figure rises; and all about the mound are figures of dancing dæmons waiting to welcome her. All this is not mere late poetry and art. It is the primitive art and poetry that come straight out of ritual, out of actual “things done,” dromena. In the village of Megara, near Athens, the very place where to-day on Easter Tuesday the hills are covered with throngs of dancing men, and specially women, Pausanias 1 saw near the City Hearth a rock called “Anaklethra, ‘Place of Calling-up,’ because, if any one will believe it, when she was wandering in search of her daughter, Demeter called her up there”; and he adds: “The women to this day perform rites analogous to the story told.”

These rites of “Calling up” must have been spring rites, in which, in some pantomimic dance, the uprising of the Earth Spirit was enacted.

Another festival of Uprising is perhaps more primitive and instructive, because it is near akin to the “Carrying out of Winter,” and also because it shows clearly the close connection of these rites with the food-supply. Plutarch 2 tells us of a festival held every nine years at Delphi. It was called from the name of the puppet used Charila, a word which originally meant Spring-Maiden, and is connected with the Russian word yaro, “Spring,” and is also akin to the Greek Charis, “grace,” in the sense of increase, “Give us all grace.” The rites of Charila, the Gracious One, the Spring-Maiden, were as follows:

“The king presided and made a distribution in public of grain and pulse to all, both citizens and strangers. And the child-image of Charila is brought in. When they had all received their share, the king struck the image with his sandal, the leader of the Thyiades lifted the image and took it away to a precipitous place, and there tied a rope round the neck of the image and buried it.”

Mr. Calderon has shown that very similar rites go on to-day in Bulgaria in honour of Yarilo, the Spring God.

The image is beaten, insulted, let down into some cleft or cave. It is clearly a “Carrying out the Death,” though we do not know the exact date at which it was celebrated. It had its sequel in another festival at Delphi called Herois, or the “Heroine.” Plutarch 1 says it was too mystical and secret to describe, but he lets us know the main gist.

“Most of the ceremonies of the Herois have a mystical reason which is known to the Thyiades, but from the rites that are done in public, one may conjecture it to be a ‘Bringing up of Semele.’”

Some one or something, a real woman, or more likely the buried puppet Charila, the Spring-Maiden, was brought up from the ground to enact and magically induce the coming of Spring.

These ceremonies of beating, driving out, burying, have all with the Greeks, as with the savage and the modern peasant, but one real object: to get rid of the season that is bad for food, to bring in and revive the new supply. This comes out very clearly in a ceremony that went on down to Plutarch’s time, and he tells us 1 it was “ancestral.” It was called “the Driving out of Ox-hunger.” By Ox-hunger was meant any great ravenous hunger, and the very intensity and monstrosity of the word takes us back to days when famine was a grim reality. When Plutarch was archon he had, as chief official, to perform the ceremony at the Prytaneion, or Common Hearth. A slave was taken, beaten with rods of a magical plant, and driven out of doors to the words: “Out with Ox-hunger! In with Wealth and Health” Here we see the actual sensation, or emotion, of ravenous hunger gets a name, and thereby a personality, though a less completely abstracted one than Death or Summer. We do not know that the ceremony of Driving out Ox-hunger was performed in the spring, it is only instanced here because, more plainly even than the Charila, when the king distributes pulse and peas, it shows the relation of ancient mimic ritual to food-supply.

If we keep clearly in mind the object rather than the exact date of the Spring Song we shall avoid many difficulties. A Dithyramb was sung at Delphi through the winter months, which at first seems odd. But we must remember that among agricultural peoples the performance of magical ceremonies to promote fertility and the food supply may begin at any moment after the earth is ploughed and the seed sown. The sowing of the seed is its death and burial; “that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die.” When the death and burial are once accomplished the hope of resurrection and new birth begins, and with the hope the magical ceremonies that may help to fulfil that hope. The Sun is new-born in midwinter, at the solstice, and our “New” year follows, yet it is in the spring that, to this day, we keep our great resurrection festival.

We return to our argument, holding steadily in our minds this connection. The Dithyramb is a Spring Song at a Spring Festival, and the importance of the Spring Festival is that it magically promotes the food-supply.

Do we know any more about the Dithyramb? Happily yes, and the next point is as curious as significant.

Pindar, in one of his Odes, asks a strange question:

“Whence did appear the Graces of Dionysos,
With the Bull-driving Dithyramb?”
Scholars have broken their own heads and one another’s to find a meaning and an answer to the odd query. It is only quite lately that they have come at all to see that the Dithyramb was a Spring Song, a primitive rite. Formerly it was considered to be a rather elaborate form of lyric poetry invented comparatively late. But, even allowing it is the Spring Song, are we much further? Why should the Dithyramb be bull-driving? How can driving a Bull help the spring to come? And, above all, what are the “slender-ankled” Graces doing, helping to drive the great unwieldy Bull?

The difficulty about the Graces, or Charites, as the Greeks called them, is soon settled. They are the Seasons, or “Hours,” and the chief Season, or Hour, was Spring herself. They are called Charites, or Graces, because they are, in the words of the Collect, the “Givers of all grace,” that is, of all increase physical and spiritual. But why do they want to come driving in a Bull? It is easy to see why the Givers of all grace lead the Dithyramb, the Spring Song; their coming, with their “fruits in due season” is the very gist of the Dithyramb; but why is the Dithyramb “bull-driving”? Is this a mere “poetical” epithet? If it is, it is not particularly poetical.

But Pindar is not, we now know, merely being “poetical,” which amounts, according to some scholars, to meaning anything or nothing. He is describing, alluding to, an actual rite or dromenon in which a Bull is summoned and driven to come in spring. About that we must be clear. Plutarch, the first anthropologist, wrote a little treatise called Greek Questions, in which he tells us all the strange out-of-the-way rites and customs he saw in Greece, and then asks himself what they meant. In his 36th Question he asks: “Why do the women of Elis summon Dionysos in their hymns to be present with them with his bull-foot?” And then, by a piece of luck that almost makes one’s heart stand still, he gives us the very words of the little ritual hymn the women sang, our earliest “Bull-driving” Spring Song:

“In Spring-time, 1 O Dionysos,
To thy holy temple come;
To Elis with thy Graces,
Rushing with thy bull-foot, come,
Noble Bull, Noble Bull.”

It is a strange primitive picture–the holy women standing in springtime in front of the temple, summoning the Bull; and the Bull, garlanded and filleted, rushing to-wards them, driven by the Graces, probably three real women, three Queens of the May, wreathed and flower-bedecked. But what does it mean?

Plutarch tries to answer his own question, and half, in a dim, confused fashion, succeeds. “Is it,” he suggests, “that some entitle the god as ‘Born of a Bull’ and as a ‘Bull’ himself? . . . or is it that many hold the god is the beginner of sowing and ploughing? “We have seen how a kind of daimon, or spirit, of Winter or Summer arose from an actual tree or maid or man disguised year by year as a tree. Did the god Dionysos take his rise in like fashion from the driving and summoning year by year of some holy Bull?

First, we must notice that it was not only at Elis that a holy Bull appears at the Spring Festival. Plutarch asks another instructive Question: 1 “Who among the Delphians is the Sanctifier?” And we find to our amazement that the sanctifier is a Bull. A Bull who not only is holy himself, but is so holy that he has power to make others holy, he is the Sanctifier; and, most important for us, he sanctifies by his death in the month Bysios, the month that fell, Plutarch tells us, “at the beginning of spring, the time of the blossoming of many plants.”

We do not hear that the “Sanctifier” at Delphi was “driven,” but in all probability he was led from house to house, that every one might partake in the sanctity that simply exuded from him. At Magnesia, 1 a city of Asia Minor, we have more particulars. There, at the annual fair year by year the stewards of the city bought a Bull, “the finest that could be got,” and at the new moon of the month at the beginning of seedtime they dedicated it, for the city’s welfare. The Bull’s sanctified life began with the opening of the agricultural year, whether with the spring or the autumn ploughing we do not know. The dedication of the Bull was a high solemnity. He was led in procession, at the head of which went the chief priest and priestess of the city. With them went a herald and the sacrificer, and two bands of youths and maidens. So holy was the Bull that nothing unlucky might come near him; the youths and maidens must have both their parents alive, they must not have been under the taboo, the infection, of death. The herald pronounced aloud a prayer for “the safety of the city and the land, and the citizens, and the women and children, for peace and wealth, and for the bringing forth of grain and of all the other fruits, and of cattle.” All this longing for fertility, for food and children, focuses round the holy Bull, whose holiness is his strength and fruitfulness.

The Bull thus solemnly set apart, charged as it were with the luck of the whole people, is fed at the public cost. The official charged with his keep has to drive him into the market-place, and “it is good for those corn-merchants who give the Bull grain as a gift,” good for them because they are feeding, nurturing, the luck of the State, which is their own luck. So through autumn and winter the Bull lives on, but early in April the end comes. Again a great procession is led forth, the senate and the priests walk in it, and with them come representatives of each class of the State–children and young boys, and youths just come to manhood, epheboi, as the Greeks called them. The Bull is sacrificed, and why? Why must a thing so holy die? Why not live out the term of his life? He dies because he is so holy, that he may give his holiness, his strength, his life, just at the moment it is holiest, to his people.

“When they shall have sacrificed the Bull, let them divide it up among those who took part in the procession.”

The mandate is clear. The procession included representatives of the whole State. The holy flesh is not offered to a god, it is eaten–to every man his portion–by each and every citizen, that he may get his share of the strength of the Bull, of the luck of the State.

Now at Magnesia, after the holy civic communion, the meal shared, we hear no more. Next year a fresh Bull will be chosen, and the cycle begin again. But at Athens at the annual “Ox-murder,” the Bouphonia, as it was called, the scene did not so close. The ox was slain with all solemnity, and all those present partook of the flesh, and then–the hide was stuffed with straw and sewed up, and next the stuffed animal was set on its feet and yoked to a plough as though it were ploughing. The Death is followed by a Resurrection. Now this is all-important. We are so accustomed to think of sacrifice as the death, the giving up, the renouncing of something. But sacrifice does not mean “death” at all. It means making holy, sanctifying; and holiness was to primitive man just special strength and life. What they wanted from the Bull was just that special life and strength which all the year long they had put into him, and nourished and fostered. That life was in his blood. They could not eat that flesh nor drink that blood unless they killed him. So he must die. But it was not to give him up to the gods that they killed him, not to “sacrifice” him in our sense, but to have him, keep him, eat him, live by him and through him, by his grace.

And so this killing of the sacred beast was always a terrible thing, a thing they fain would have shirked. They fled away after the deed, not looking backwards; they publicly tried and condemned the axe that struck the blow. But their best hope, their strongest desire, was that he had not, could not, really have died. So this intense desire uttered itself in the dromenon of his resurrection. If he did not rise again, how could they plough and sow again next year? He must live again, he should, he did.

The Athenians were a little ashamed of their “Ox-murder,” with its grotesque pantomime of the stuffed, resurrected beast. Just so some of us now-a-days are getting a little shy of deliberately cursing our neighbours on Ash Wednesday. They probably did not feel very keenly about their food-supply, they thought their daily dinner was secure. Anyhow the emotion that had issued in the pantomime was dead, though from sheer habit the pantomime went on. Probably some of the less educated among them thought there “might be something in it,” and anyhow it was “as well to be on the safe side.” The queer ceremony had got associated with the worship of Olympian Zeus, and with him you must reckon. Then perhaps your brother-in-law was the Ox-striker, and anyhow it was desirable that the women should go; some of the well-born girls had to act as water-carriers.

The Ox-murder was obsolete at Athens, but the spirit of the rite is alive to-day among the Ainos in the remote island of Saghalien. Among the Ainos the Bear is what psychologists rather oddly call the main “food focus,” the chief “value centre.” And well he may be. Bear’s flesh is the Ainos’ staple food; they eat it both fresh and salted; bearskins are their principal clothing; part of their taxes are paid in bear’s fat. The Aino men spend the autumn, winter and spring in hunting the Bear. Yet we are told the Ainos “worship the Bear”; they apply to it the name Kamui, which has been translated god; but it is a word applied to all strangers, and so only means what catches attention, and hence is formidable. In the religion of the Ainos “the Bear plays a chief part,” says one writer. The Bear “receives idolatrous veneration,” says another. They “worship it after their fashion,” says a third. Have we another case of “the heathen in his blindness”? Only here he “bows down” not to “gods of wood and stone,” but to a live thing, uncouth, shambling but gracious–a Bear.

Instead of theorizing as to what the Aino thinks and imagines, let us observe his doings, his dromena, his rites; and most of all his great spring and autumn rite, the dromenon of the Bear. We shall find that, detail for detail, it strangely resembles the Greek dromenon of the Bull.

As winter draws to a close among the Ainos, a young Bear is trapped and brought into the village. At first an Aino woman suckles him at her breast, then later he is fed on his favourite food, fish–his tastes are semi-polar. When he is at his full strength, that is, when he threatens to break the cage in which he lives, the feast is held. This is usually in September, or October, that is when the season of bear-hunting begins.

Before the feast begins the Ainos apologize profusely, saying that they have been good to the Bear, they can feed him no longer, they must kill him. Then the man who gives the Bear-feast invites his relations and friends, and if the community be small nearly the whole village attends. On the occasion described by Dr. Scheube about thirty Ainos were present, men, women, and children, all dressed in their best clothes. The woman of the house who had suckled the Bear sat by herself, sad and silent, only now and then she burst into helpless tears. The ceremony began with libations made to the fire-god and to the house-god set up in a corner of the house. Next the master and some of the guests left the hut and offered libations in front of the Bear’s cage. A few drops were presented to him in a saucer, which he promptly upset. Then the women and girls danced round the cage, rising and hopping on their toes, and as they danced they clapped their hands and chanted a monotonous chant. The mother and some of the old women cried as they danced and stretched out their arms to the Bear, calling him loving names. The young women who had nursed no Bears laughed, after the manner of the young. The Bear began to get upset, and rushed round his cage, howling lamentably.

Next came a ceremony of special significance which is never omitted at the sacrifice of a Bear. Libations were offered to the inabos, sacred wands which stand outside the Aino hut. These wands are about two feet high and are whittled at the top into spiral shavings. Five new wands with bamboo leaves attached to them are set up for the festival; the leaves according to the Ainos mean that the Bear may come to life again. These wands are specially interesting. The chief focus of attention is of course the Bear, because his flesh is for the Aino his staple food. But vegetation is not quite forgotten. The animal life of the Bear and the vegetable life of the bamboo-leaves are thought of together.

Then comes the actual sacrifice. The Bear is led out of his cage, a rope is thrown round his neck, and he is perambulated round the neighbourhood of the hut. We do not hear that among the Ainos he goes in procession round the village, but among the Gilyaks, not far away in Eastern Siberia, the Bear is led about the villages, and it is held to be specially important that he should be dragged down to the river, for this will ensure the village a plentiful supply of fish. He is then, among the Gilyaks, taken to each hut in the village, and fish, brandy, and other delicacies are offered to him. Some of the people prostrate themselves in front of him and his coming into a house brings a blessing, and if he snuffs at the food, that brings a blessing too.

To return to the Aino Bear. While he is being led about the hut the men, headed by a chief, shoot at the Bear with arrows tipped with buttons. But the object of the shooting is not to kill, only apparently to irritate him. He is killed at last without shedding of his sacred blood, and we hope without much pain. He is taken in front of the sacred wands, a stick placed in his mouth, and nine men press his neck against a beam; he dies without a sound. Meantime the women and girls, who stand behind the men, dance, lament, and beat the men who are killing their Bear. The body of the dead Bear is then laid on a mat before the sacred wands. A sword and quiver, taken from the wands, are hung about the Bear. If it is a She-Bear it is also bedecked with a necklace and rings. Food and drink, millet broth and millet cakes are offered to it. It is decked as an Aino, it is fed as an Aino. It is clear that the Bear is in some sense a human Bear, an Aino. The men sit down on mats in front of the Bear and offer libations, and themselves drink deep.

Now that the death is fairly over the mourning ends, and all is feasting and merriment. Even the old women lament no more. Cakes of millet are scrambled for. The bear is skinned and disembowelled, the trunk is severed from the head, to which the skin is left hanging. The blood, which might not be shed before, is now carefully collected in cups and eagerly drunk by the men, for the blood is the life. The liver is cut up and eaten raw. The flesh and the rest of the vitals are kept for the day next but one, when it is divided among all persons present at the feast. It is what the Greeks call a dais, a meal divided or distributed. While the Bear is being dismembered the girls dance, in front of the sacred wands, and the old women again lament. The Bear’s brain is extracted from his head and eaten, and the skull, severed from the skin, is hung on a pole near the sacred wands. Thus it would seem the life and strength of the bear is brought near to the living growth of the leaves. The stick with which the Bear was gagged is also hung on the pole, and with it the sword and quiver he had worn after his death. The whole congregation, men and women, dance about this strange maypole, and a great drinking bout, in which all men and women alike join, ends the feast.

The rite varies as to detail in different places. Among the Gilyaks the Bear is dressed after death in full Gilyak costume and seated on a bench of honour. In one part the bones and skull are carried out by the oldest people to a place in the forest not far from the village. There all the bones except the skull are buried. After that a young tree is felled a few inches above the ground, its stump is cleft, and the skull wedged into the cleft. When the grass grows over the spot the skull disappears and there is an end of the Bear. Sometimes the Bear’s flesh is eaten in special vessels prepared for this festival and only used at it. These vessels, which include bowls, platters, spoons, are elaborately carved with figures of bears and other devices.

Through all varieties in detail the main intent is the same, and it is identical with that of the rite of the holy Bull in Greece and the maypole of our forefathers. Great is the sanctity of the Bear or the Bull or the Tree; the Bear for a hunting people; the Bull for nomads, later for agriculturists; the Tree for a forest folk. On the Bear and the Bull and the Tree are focussed the desire of the whole people. Bear and Bull and Tree are sacred, that is, set apart, because full of a special life and strength intensely desired. They are led and carried about from house to house that their sanctity may touch all, and avail for all; the animal dies that he may be eaten; the Tree is torn to pieces that all may have a fragment; and, above all, Bear and Bull and Tree die only that they may live again.

We have seen (p. 71) that, out of the puppet or the May Queen, actually perceived year after year there arose a remembrance, a mental image, an imagined Tree Spirit, or “Summer,” or Death, a thing never actually seen but conceived. Just so with the Bull. Year by year in the various villages of Greece was seen an actual holy Bull, and bit by bit from the remembrance of these various holy Bulls, who only died to live again each year, there arose the image of a Bull-Spirit, or Bull-Daimon, and finally, if we like to call him so, a Bull-God. The growth of this idea, this conception, must have been much helped by the fact that in some places the dancers attendant on the holy Bull dressed up as bulls and cows. The women worshippers of Dionysos, we are told, wore bulls’ horns in imitation of the god, for they represented him in pictures as having a bull’s head. We know that a man does not turn into a bull, or a bull into a man, the line of demarcation is clearly drawn; but the rustic has no such conviction even to-day. That crone, his aged aunt, may any day come in at the window in the shape of a black cat; why should she not? It is not, then, that a god ‘takes upon him the form of a bull,’ or is ‘incarnate in a bull,’ but that the real Bull and the worshipper dressed as a bull are seen and remembered and give rise to an imagined Bull-God; but, it should be observed, only among gifted, imaginative, that is, image-making, peoples. The Ainos have their actual holy Bear, as the Greeks had their holy Bull; but with them out of the succession of holy Bears there arises, alas! no Bear-God.

We have dwelt long on the Bull-driving Dithyramb, because it was not obvious on the face of it how driving a bull could help the coming of spring. We understand now why, on the day before the tragedies were performed at Athens, the young men (epheboi) brought in not only the human figure of the god, but also a Bull “worthy” of the God. We understand, too, why in addition to the tragedies performed at the great festival, Dithyrambs were also sung–”Bull-driving Dithyrambs.”

We come next to a third aspect of the Dithyramb, and one perhaps the most important of all for the understanding of art, and especially the drama. The Dithyramb was the Song and Dance of the New Birth.

Plato is discussing various sorts of odes or songs. “Some,” he says, “are prayers to the gods–these are called hymns; others of an opposite sort might best be called dirges; another sort are pæans, and another–the birth of Dionysos, I suppose–is called Dithyramb.” Plato is not much interested in Dithyrambs. To him they are just a particular kind of choral song; it is doubtful if he even knew that they were Spring Songs; but this he did know, though he throws out the information carelessly–the Dithyramb had for its proper subject the birth or coming to be, the genesis of Dionysos.

The common usage of Greek poetry bears out Plato’s statement. When a poet is going to describe the birth of Dionysos he calls the god by the title Dithyrambos. Thus an inscribed hymn found at Delphi 1 opens thus:

“Come, O Dithyrambos, Bacchos, come.
. . . . . . .
Bromios, come, and coming with thee bring
Holy hours of thine own holy spring.
. . . . . . .
All the stars danced for joy. Mirth
Of mortals hailed thee, Bacchos, at thy birth.”
The Dithyramb is the song of the birth, and the birth of Dionysos is in the spring, the time of the maypole, the time of the holy Bull.

And now we come to a curious thing. We have seen how a spirit, a dæmon, and perhaps ultimately a god, develops out of an actual rite. Dionysos the Tree-God, the Spirit of Vegetation, is but a maypole once perceived, then remembered and conceived. Dionysos, the Bull-God, is but the actual holy Bull himself, or rather the succession of annual holy Bulls once perceived, then remembered, generalized, conceived. But the god conceived will surely always be made in the image, the mental image, of the fact perceived. If, then, we have a song and dance of the birth of Dionysos, shall we not, as in the Christian religion, have a child-god, a holy babe, a Saviour in the manger; at first in original form as a calf, then as a human child? Now it is quite true that in Greek religion there is a babe Dionysos called Liknites, “Him of the Cradle.” 1 The rite of waking up, or bringing to light, the child Liknites was performed each year at Delphi by the holy women.

But it is equally clear and certain that the Dionysos of Greek worship and of the drama was not a babe in the cradle. He was a goodly youth in the first bloom of manhood, with the down upon his cheek, the time when, Homer says, “youth is most gracious.” This is the Dionysos that we know in statuary, the fair, dreamy youth sunk in reverie; this is the Dionysos whom Pentheus despised and insulted because of his young beauty like a woman’s. But how could such a Dionysos arise out of a rite of birth? He could not, and he did not. The Dithyramb is also the song of the second or new birth, the Dithyrambos is the twice-born.

This the Greeks themselves knew. By a false etymology they explained the word Dithyrambos as meaning “He of the double door,” their word thyra being the same as our door. They were quite mistaken; Dithyrambos, modern philology tells us, is the Divine Leaper, Dancer, and Lifegiver. But their false etymology is important to us, because it shows that they believed the Dithyrambos was the twice-born. Dionysos was born, they fabled, once of his mother, like all men, once of his father’s thigh, like no man.

But if the Dithyrambos, the young Dionysos, like the Bull-God, the Tree-God, arises from a dromenon, a rite, what is the rite of second birth from which it arises?

We look in vain among our village customs. If ever rite of second birth existed, it is dead and buried. We turn to anthropology for help, and find this, the rite of the second birth, widespread, universal, over half the savage world.

With the savage, to be twice born is the rule, not the exception. By his first birth he comes into the world, by his second he is born into his tribe. At his first birth he belongs to his mother and the women-folk; at his second he becomes a full-fledged man and passes into the society of the warriors of his tribe. This second birth is a little difficult for us to realize. A boy with us passes very gradually from childhood to manhood, there is no definite moment when he suddenly emerges as a man. Little by little as his education advances he is admitted to the social privileges of the circle in which he is born. He goes to school, enters a workshop or a university, and finally adopts a trade or a profession. In the case of girls, in whose up-bringing primitive savagery is apt to linger, there is still, in certain social strata a ceremony known as Coming Out. A girl’s dress is suddenly lengthened, her hair is put up, she is allowed to wear jewels, she kisses her sovereign’s hand, a dance is given in her honour, abruptly, from her seclusion in the cocoon state of the schoolroom, she emerges full-blown into society. But the custom, with its half-realized savagery, is already dying, and with boys it does not obtain at all. Both sexes share, of course, the religious rite of Confirmation.

To avoid harsh distinctions, to bridge over abrupt transitions, is always a mark of advancing civilization; but the savage, in his ignorance and fear, lamentably overstresses distinctions and transitions. The song process of education, of passing from child to man, is with him condensed into a few days, weeks, or sometimes months of tremendous educational emphasis–of what is called “initiation,” “going in,” that is, entering the tribe. The ceremonies vary, but the gist is always substantially the same. The boy is to put away childish things, and become a grown and competent tribesman. Above all he is to cease to be a woman-thing and become a man. His initiation prepares him for his two chief functions as a tribesman–to be a warrior, to be a father. That to the savage is the main if not the whole Duty of Man.

This “initiation” is of tremendous importance, and we should expect, what in fact we find, that all this emotion that centres about it issues in dromena, “rites done.” These rites are very various, but they all point one moral, that the former things are passed away and that the new-born man has entered on a new life. Simplest perhaps of all, and most instructive, is the rite practised by the Kikuyu of British East Africa, 1 who require that every boy, just before circumcision, must be born again. “The mother stands up with the boy crouching at her feet; she pretends to go through all the labour pains, and the boy on being reborn cries like a babe and is washed.”

More often the new birth is simulated, or imagined, as a death and a resurrection, either of the boys themselves or of some one else in their presence. Thus at initiation among some tribes of South-east Australia, 2 when the boys are assembled an old man dressed in stringy bark fibre lies down in a grave. He is covered up lightly with sticks and earth, and the grave is smoothed over. The buried man holds in his hand a small bush which seems to be growing from the ground, and other bushes are stuck in the ground round about. The novices are then brought to the edge of the grave and a song is sung. Gradually, as the song goes on, the bush held by the buried man begins to quiver. It moves more and more and bit by bit the man himself starts up from the grave.

The Fijians have a drastic and repulsive way of simulating death. The boys are shown a row of seemingly dead men, their bodies covered with blood and entrails, which are really those of a dead pig. The first gives a sudden yell. Up start the men, and then run to the river to cleanse themselves.

Here the death is vicarious. Another goes through the simulated death that the initiated boy may have new life. But often the mimicry is practised on the boys themselves. Thus in West Ceram 1 boys at puberty are admitted to the Kakian association. The boys are taken blindfold, followed by their relations, to an oblong wooden shed under the darkest trees in the depths of the forest. When all are assembled the high priest calls aloud on the devils, and immediately a hideous uproar is heard from the shed. It is really made by men in the shed with bamboo trumpets, but the women and children think it is the devils. Then the priest enters the shed with the boys, one at a time. A dull thud of chopping is heard, a fearful cry rings out, and a sword dripping with blood is thrust out through the roof. This is the token that the boy’s head has been cut off, and that the devil has taken him away to the other world, whence he will return born again. In a day or two the men who act as sponsors to the boys return daubed with mud, and in a half-fainting state like messengers from another world. They bring the good news that the devil has restored the boys to life. The boys themselves appear, but when they return they totter as they walk; they go into the house backwards. If food is given them they upset the plate. They sit dumb and only make signs. The sponsors have to teach them the simplest daily acts as though they were new-born children. At the end of twenty to thirty days, during which their mothers and sisters may not comb their hair, the high priest takes them to a lonely place in the forest and cuts off a lock of hair from the crown of each of their heads. At the close of these rites the boys are men and may marry.

Sometimes the new birth is not simulated but merely suggested. A new name is given, a new language taught, a new dress worn, new dances are danced. Almost always it is accompanied by moral teaching. Thus in the Kakian ceremony already described the boys have to sit in a row cross-legged, without moving a muscle, with their hands stretched out. The chief takes a trumpet, and placing the mouth of it on the hand of each lad, he speaks through it in strange tones, imitating the voice of spirits. He warns the boys on pain of death to observe the rules of the society, and never to reveal what they have seen in the Kakian house. The priests also instruct the boys on their duty to their blood relations, and teach them the secrets of the tribe.

Sometimes it is not clear whether the new birth is merely suggested or represented in pantomime. Thus among the Binbinga of North Australia it is generally believed that at initiation a monstrous being called Katajalina, like the Kronos of the Greeks, swallows the boys and brings them up again initiated; but whether there is or is not a dromenon or rite of swallowing we are not told.

In totemistic societies, and in the animal secret societies that seem to grow out of them, the novice is born again as the sacred animal. Thus among the Carrier Indians 1 when a man wants to become a Lulem, or Bear, however cold the season, he tears off his clothes, puts on a bearskin and dashes into the woods, where he will stay for three or four days. Every night his fellow-villagers will go out in search parties to find him. They cry out Yi! Kelulem (“Come on, Bear”) and he answers with angry growls. Usually they fail to find him, but he comes back at last himself. He is met and conducted to the ceremonial lodge, and there, in company with the rest of the Bears, dances solemnly his first appearance. Disappearance and re-appearance is as common a rite in initiation as simulated killing and resurrection, and has the same object. Both are rites of transition, of passing from one state to another. It has often been remarked, by students of ancient Greek and other ceremonies, that the rites of birth, marriage, and death, which seem to us so different, are to primitive man oddly similar. This is explained if we see that in intent they are all the same, all a passing from one social state to another. There are but two factors in every rite, the putting off of the old, the putting on of the new; you carry out Winter or Death, you bring in Summer or Life. Between them is a mid-way state when you are neither here nor there, you are secluded, under a taboo.

To the Greeks and to many primitive peoples the rites of birth, marriage, and death were for the most part family rites needing little or no social emphasis. But the rite which concerned the whole tribe, the essence of which was entrance into the tribe, was the rite of initiation at puberty. This all-important fact is oddly and significantly enshrined in the Greek language. The general Greek word for rite was tĕlĕtē. It was applied to all mysteries, and sometimes to marriages and funerals. But it has nothing to do with death. It comes from a root meaning “to grow up.” The word tĕlĕtē means rite of growing up, becoming complete. It meant at first maturity, then rite of maturity, then by a natural extension any rite of initiation that was mysterious. The rites of puberty were in their essence mysterious, because they consisted in initiation into the sanctities of the tribe, the things which society sanctioned and protected, excluding the uninitiated, whether they were young boys, women, or members of other tribes. Then, by contagion, the mystery notion spread to other rites.

We understand now who and what was the god who arose out of the rite, the dromenon of tribal initiation, the rite of the new, the second birth. He was Dionysos. His name, according to recent philology, tells us–Dionysos, “Divine Young Man.”

When once we see that out of the emotion of the rite and the facts of the rite arises that remembrance and shadow of the rite, that image which is the god, we realize instantly that the god of the spring rite must be a young god, and in primitive societies, where young women are but of secondary account, he will necessarily be a young man. Where emotion centres round tribal initiation he will be a young man just initiated, what the Greeks called a kouros, or ephebos, a youth of quite different social status from a mere pais or boy. Such a youth survives in our King of the May and Jack-in-the Green. Old men and women are for death and winter, the young for life and spring, and most of all the young man or bear or bull or tree just come to maturity.

And because life is one at the Spring Festival, the young man carries a blossoming branch bound with wool of the young sheep. At Athens in spring and autumn alike “they carry out the Eiresione, a branch of olive wound about with wool . . . and laden with all sorts of firstfruits, that scarcity may cease, and they sing over it:

“Eiresione brings
Figs and fat cakes,
And a pot of honey and oil to mix,
And a wine-cup strong and deep,
That she may drink and sleep.”
[paragraph continues] The Eiresione had another name that told its own tale. It was called Korythalia, 1 “Branch of blooming youth.” The young men, says a Greek orator, are “the Spring of the people.”

The excavations of Crete have given to us an ancient inscribed hymn, a Dithyramb, we may safely call it, that is at once a spring-song and a young man-song. The god here invoked is what the Greeks call a kouros, a young man. It is sung and danced by young warriors:

“Ho! Kouros, most Great, I give thee hail, Lord of all that is wet and gleaming; thou art come at the head of thy Daimones. To Diktè for the Year, Oh, march and rejoice in the dance and song.”

The leader of the band of kouroi, of young men, the real actual leader, has become by remembrance and abstraction, as we noted, a daimon, or spirit, at the head of a band of spirits, and he brings in the new year at spring. The real leader, the “first kouros” as the Greeks called him, is there in the body, but from the succession of leaders year by year they have imaged a spirit leader greatest of all. He is “lord of all that is wet and gleaming,” for the May bough, we remember, is drenched with dew and water that it may burgeon and blossom. Then they chant the tale of how of old a child was taken away from its mother, taken by armed men to be initiated, armed men dancing their tribal dance. The stone is unhappily broken here, but enough remains to make the meaning clear.

And because this boy grew up and was initiated into manhood:

“The Horæ (Seasons) began to be fruitful year by year and Dike to possess mankind, and all wild living things were held about by wealth-loving Peace.”

We know the Seasons, the fruit and food bringers, but Dikè is strange. We translate the word “Justice,” but Dikè means, not Justice as between man and man, but the order of the world, the way of life. It is through this way, this order, that the seasons go round. As long as the seasons observe this order there is fruitfulness and peace. If once that order were overstepped then would be disorder, strife, confusion, barrenness. And next comes a mandate, strange to our modern ears:

“To us also leap for full jars, and leap for fleecy flocks, and leap for fields of fruit and for hives to bring increase.”

And yet not strange if we remember the Macedonian farmer (p. 32), who throws his spade into the air that the wheat may be tall, or the Russian peasant girls who leap high in the air crying, “Flax, grow.” The leaping of the youths of the Cretan hymn is just the utterance of their tense desire. They have grown up, and with them all live things must grow. By their magic year by year the fruits of the earth come to their annual new birth. And that there be no mistake they end:

“Leap for our cities, and leap for our sea-borne ships, and for our young citizens, and for goodly Themis.”

They are now young citizens of a fenced city instead of young tribesmen of the bush, but their magic is the same, and the strength that holds them together is the bond of social custom, social structure, “goodly Themis.” No man liveth to himself.

Crete is not Athens, but at Athens in the theatre of Dionysos, if the priest of Dionysos, seated at the great Spring Festival in his beautiful carved central seat, looked across the orchestra, he would see facing him a stone frieze on which was sculptured the Cretan ritual, the armed dancing youths and the child to be year by year reborn.

We have seen what the Dithyramb, from which sprang the Drama, was. A Spring song, a song of Bull-driving, a song and dance of Second Birth; but all this seems, perhaps, not to bring us nearer to Greek drama, rather to put us farther away. What have the Spring and the Bull and the Birth Rite to do with the stately tragedies we know–with Agamemnon and Iphigenia and Orestes and Hippolytos? That is the question before us, and the answer will lead us to the very heart of our subject. So far we have seen that ritual arose from the presentation and emphasis of emotion–emotion felt mainly about food. We have further seen that ritual develops out of and by means of periodic festivals. One of the chief periodic festivals at Athens was the Spring Festival of the Dithyramb. Out of this Dithyramb arose, Aristotle says, tragedy–that is, out of Ritual arose Art. How and Why? That is the question before us.
_____________
Footnotes:
76:1 Poetics, IV, 12.
78:1 See my Themis, p. 419. (1912.)
79:1 I, 43. 2.
79:2 Quaest. Græc. XII.
80:1 Op. cit.
81:1 Quæst. Symp., 693f.
85:1 The words “in Spring-time” depend on an emendation to me convincing. See my Themis, p. 205, note 1.
86:1 IX.
87:1 See my Themis, p. 151.
102:1 See my Prolegomena, p. 439.
103:1 Prolegomena, p. 402.
107:1 Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. I, p. 228.
107:2 The Golden Bough,2 III, 424.
108:1 The Golden Bough,2 III, 442.
111:1 The Golden Bough,2 III, p. 438.
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Rainer Maria Rilke Poems For Mid April

Girl’s Lament

In the years when we were
all children, this inclining
to be alone so much was gentle;
others’ time passed fighting,
and one had one’s faction,
one’s near, one’s far-off place,
a path, an animal, a picture.

And I still imagined, that life
would always keep providing
for one to dwell on things within,
Am I within myself not in what’s greatest?
Shall what’s mine no longer soothe
and understand me as a child?

Suddenly I’m as if cast out,
and this solitude surrounds me
as something vast and unbounded,
when my feeling, standing on the hills
of my breasts, cries out for wings
or for an end.

Ignorant Before The Heavens Of My Life

Ignorant before the heavens of my life,
I stand and gaze in wonder. Oh the vastness
of the stars. Their rising and descent. How still.
As if I didn’t exist. Do I have any
share in this? Have I somehow dispensed with
their pure effect? Does my blood’s ebb and flow
change with their changes? Let me put aside
every desire, every relationship
except this one, so that my heart grows used to
its farthest spaces. Better that it live
fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than
as if protected, soothed by what is near.

Palm

Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk
only on feelings. That faces upward
and in its mirror
receives heavenly roads, which travel
along themselves.
That has learned to walk upon water
when it scoops,
that walks upon wells,
transfiguring every path.
That steps into other hands,
changes those that are like it
into a landscape:
wanders and arrives within them,
fills them with arrival.

What Survives

Who says that all must vanish?
Who knows, perhaps the flight
of the bird you wound remains,
and perhaps flowers survive
caresses in us, in their ground.

It isn’t the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold
armor –from breast to knees–
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you.

___________________

The Album Leaf – Into the Sea

__________________

“O Day after day we can’t help growing older.
Year after year spring can’t help seeming younger.
Come let’s enjoy our winecup today,
Nor pity the flowers fallen.”
– Wang Wei, On Parting with Spring

This Edition Is dedicated to the memory of Paul Bingman.

For those who have past into the Western Lands. My thoughts are with you.

Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm

On The Menu:
William Butler Yeats Quotes
The Earth Breath
April Prose & Poetry
Loreeena McKennitt – Dante’s Prayer
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William Butler Yeats Quotes:

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

“What can be explained is not poetry.”

“I bring you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams.”

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

“In dreams begin responsibilities.”

“Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.”

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The Earth Breath

-A.E. (George) Russell

After that awakening earth began more and more to bewitch me, and to lure me to her heart with honied entreaty. I could not escape from it even in that busy office where I sat during week-days with little heaps of paper mounting up before me moment by frenzied moment. An interval of inactivity and I would be aware of that sweet eternal presence overshadowing me. I was an exile from living nature but she yet visited me. Her ambassadors were visions that made me part of themselves. Through the hot foetid air of the gaslit room I could see the feverish faces, the quick people flitting about, and hear the voices; and then room, faces and voices would be gone, and I would be living in the Mother’s being in some pure, remote. elemental region of hers. Instead of the dingy office there would be a sky of rarest amethyst; a snow-cold bloom of cloud; high up in the divine wilderness, solitary, a star; all rapt, breathless and still; rapt the seraph princes of wind and wave and fire, for it was the hour when the King, an invisible presence, moved through His dominions and Nature knew and was hushed at the presence of her Lord. Once, suddenly, I found myself on some remote plain or steppe, and heard unearthly chimes pealing passionately from I know not what far steeples. The earth-breath streamed from the furrows to the glowing heavens. Overhead the birds flew round and round crying their incomprehensible cries, as if they were maddened, and knew not where to nestle, and had dreams of some more enraptured rest in a. diviner home. I could see a ploughman lifting himself from his obscure toil and stand with lit eyes as if he too had been fire-smitten and was caught into heaven as I was, and knew for that moment he was a god. And then I would lapse out of vision and ecstasy, and hear the voices, and see again through the quivering of the hot air the feverish faces, and seem to myself to be cast out of the spirit. I could hardly bear after thinking of these things, for I felt I was trapped in some obscure hell. You, too, trapped with me, dear kindly people, who never said a harsh word to the forgetful boy. You, too, I knew, had your revelations. I remember one day how that clerk with wrinkled face, blinking eyes and grizzly beard, who never seemed. apart from his work, to have interests other than his pipe and paper, surprised me by telling me that the previous midnight he waked in his sleep, and some self of him was striding to and fro in the moonlight in an avenue mighty with gigantic images; and that dream self he had surprised had seemed to himself unearthly in wisdom and power. What had he done to be so high in one sphere and so petty in another? Others I could tell of, too, who had their moment of awe when the spirit made its ancient claim on them. But none were so happy or so unhappy as I was. I was happy at times because the divine world which had meant nothing to my childhood was becoming a reality to manhood: and I knew it was not a dream, for comrades in vision soon came to me. they who could see as I saw, and hear as I heard, and there were some who had gone deeper into that being than I have ever travelled. I was more miserable than my work-a-day companions, because the very intensity of vision made the recoil more unendurable. It was an agony of darkness and oblivion, wherein I seemed like those who in nightmare are buried in caverns so deep beneath the roots of the world that there is no hope of escape, for the way out is unknown, and the way to them is forgotten by those who walk in light. In those black hours the universe, a gigantic presence, seemed at war with me. I was condemned, I thought, to be this speck of minute life because of some sin committed in remote ages, I and those with me. We were all lost children of the stars. Everything that suggested our high original being, a shaft of glory from the far fire in the heavens spearing the gloom of the office, the blue twilight deepening through the panes until it was rich with starry dust, the sunny clouds careering high over the city, these things would stir pangs of painful remembrance and my eyes would suddenly grow blind and wet. Sometimes, too, I would rebel and plot in my obscurity, and remember moments when the will in me seemed to be a titanic power, and my spirit would brood upon ways of escape and ascent to its native regions, as those fallen angels in Milton’s tremendous narrative rose up from torture, and conspired to tear the throne from Him. And then all that would appear to me to be futile as a speck of dust trying to stay itself against the typhoon, and the last door would close upon me and leave me more hopeless than before.
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April Prose & Poetry

“Spring has again returned.
The Earth is like a child that knows many poems.
Many, O so many. For the hardship
of such long learning she receives the prize.

Strict was her teacher.
The white in the old man’s beard pleases us.
Now, what to call green, to call blue,
we dare to ask: She knows, She knows!”
– Rainer Marie Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, XXI
—

“Narcotic greens
narcotic greens
like reeling firmaments disclose
in their appearing randomness
the sweetest means that you or she
or any wandering Thales might
choose to be
wonder-struck with
at the moment
when we die”
– Marianne Bluger, In April
—

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly–and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”
– Omar Khayyám
—

“You start in April and cross to the time of May
One has you as it leaves, one as it comes
Since the edges of these months are yours and defer
To you, either of them suits your praises.
The Circus continues and the theatre’s lauded palm,
Let this song, too, join the Circus spectacle.”
– Ovid, Fasti (V.185-190, CE)
—
“O thou with dewy locks, who lookest down
Thro’ the clear windows of the morning, turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!

The hills tell each other, and the listening
Valleys hear; all our longing eyes are turned
Up to thy bright pavilions: issue forth,
And let thy holy feet visit our clime.

Come o’er the eastern hills, and let our winds
Kiss thy perfumed garments; let us taste
Thy morn and evening breath; scatter thy pearls
Upon our love-sick land that mourns for thee.”
– William Blake, To Spring, 1820
—

“We do not ask what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens… The diversity of the phenomena of Nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.”
– Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum
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Loreeena McKennitt – Dante’s Prayer

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. – Carl Sagan


The Guide

In the greatest sessions
One does not know that
there is a guide

In the next best sessions
One praises the guide

It is worse when
One fears the guide

The worst is that
One pays him

If the guide lacks trust
in the people

Then
The trust of the people
will be lacking

The wise guide guards his words
The wise guide sits serenely

When the greatest session is over
The people will say-

“It all happened naturally”

or

“It was so simple, we did it
all ourselves.”
– Tim Leary (Psychedelic Prayers)

My first encounters with the Tao Te Ching was with Tim Leary’s “Psychedelic Prayers”, back in late 1966, early 1967. Ever so often I included them in an entry for Turfing, I find a certain grounding in the action. This is one of those times. After reading his interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, I went out and purchased a copy of the full “Ching”, and it became my constant companion, and guide through a perilous journey in my early life. Tim’s work touched me and saved my life in a variety of ways, and this is but one of them.

Our lives are touched by countless people(s), and more often or not, we are not even faintly aware of the debt we owe others, even for our lives. Blissfully ignorant of the struggles and the passions that went before, we often blunder through life without giving thought, or gratitude for those who laid the path for us. I feel Tim blazed the way for countless people, at great cost to himself, and at times those around him. We weave a world with our actions, and once things have been set in motion it is hard to see where it all falls out in the mix.

With that said, I hope you have time to go through the whole of this edition, it isn’t large, and I think you might well like it.

Thank you Tim, for the gifts you brought to my life!

Blessings,
Gwyllm

—
On The Menu:
The Links
Aldous Huxley Quotes
Poetry: Psychedelic Prayers
DeadMau5 – Everything Before
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The Links:
Communicating With Whales
The Ancient Scribes…
Gender Bending Chicken
Kids On Speed And The Birth Of Misbehaviour
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Aldous Huxley Quotes

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas.

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
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Poetry: Psychedelic Prayers

L S D
(life light love, seed sun son, death daughter dna)

Hold in reverence
This great Symbol of Transformation
And the whole world comes to you

Comes to you without harm, and
Dwells in commonwealth
Dwells in the union of heaven and earth

Offer music…..
Food…..
Wine…..
And the passing guest will stay for a while

But the molecular message
In its passage through the mouth
Is without flavor

It cannot be seen
It cannot be heard
It cannot be exhausted by use

It remains
—

Let There Be Simple Natural Things During The Session

Let there be simple, Natural things
To contact during the sessions –

hand woven cloth
uncarved wood
flowers – growing things
ancient music
burning fire
a touch of earth
a splash of water
fruit, good bread, cheese
fermenting wine
candles
temple incense
a warm hand
fish swimming
anything which is over
five hundred years old

Of course it is always best to be
secluded with nature
—

All Things Pass

All things pass

A sunrise does not last all morning

All things pass

A cloudburst does not last all day

All things pass

Nor a sunset all night

All things pass

What always changes?

Earth…Sky…thunder…
Mountain…water…
wind…fire lake…

These change

And if these do not last

Do man’s vision’s last?
Do man’s illusions?

During the session
Take things as they come

All things pass
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DeadMau5 – Everything Before

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There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self. – Aldous Huxley