Rabbi Hizkiyah opened (began): “It is said, as a rose among thorns” (Shir HaShirim, 2:2). He asks, “What does a rose represent?” He answers, “It is the Assembly of Israel, meaning Malchut. For there is a rose, and there is a rose. Just as a rose among thorns is tinged with red and white, so does the Assembly of Israel (Malchut) consist of judgment and mercy. . . .”
. . . The color red designates the rose’s connection with the outer, impure forces, which, because of this connection, can suck the strength (Light) from it. This is because nine of her Sefirot are in exile below the world of Atzilut, in the world of Beria, which may already contain impure forces. And the rose also has a color white in its Sefira Keter, for her Sefira Keter is in the world of Atzilut, above the Parsa, where there is no contact with the lower, impure forces. In other words, there are two opposite states: perfection and its absence, Light and darkness. They are felt by him who merits it. (The Zohar)
“. . . Really, it is her creation, from a written form, which is very rare: I don’t know that I can think of one artist that I’ve worked with that really deserves a writing credit, in the sense of being that involved in the initial creation. An artist will tell you, ‘I’d like to do this for this video, or this project,’ but rarely is it that detailed.”
The details, in this case, resulted in a fairly surreal final product: Tropico opens with a conversation in the Garden of Eden between John Wayne, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and Jesus, as they discuss humanity with their respective accents. The colors are heavily saturated and full of glaring high-contrast that’s almost harsh, and Del Rey and her co-star, model Shaun Ross, wear leaves as they writhe around the garden. If all of that sounds conceptually bizarre, well, that’s part of the point, according to Mandler.
Mandler, whose “National Anthem” video for Del Rey reimagined both Kennedy’s “Camelot” and his assassination with Del Rey as Jackie and rapper A$AP Rocky as JFK, says that Tropico is inspired by the assassination, and the way it shattered American culture.
“The Americana vision of the last 50 years obviously starts with Kennedy,” he says. “For so many people, it’s almost like the first page of a new Bible--a new testament--when it comes to the idea of pop culture, which was kind of the death of the American icon, and the shattering of the kingdom, and what that spawned.” . . .
“The way that this veneer is pulled back to show something that’s dark underneath has been very influential in Lana’s creative education and music evolution,” he says. “There is this woman who has this outside, and then the songs she sings about represent something completely different. The two don’t really go together, and all the mystery of who she is and where she’s from, and what she’s singing about. There’s that really incredible duality, so with that, kind of framework in mind, we’ve explored different versions of that archetype--the pulling of the veneer, the search for truth in yourself and in the world around you, and ultimately being disappointed in what you have and how you find something better." . . .
“We’re essentially retelling the creation of the universe, but by starting with the pop icons of the '50s and '60s, that will recalibrate any sense of the norm. What we were trying to get to was that Adam and Eve are abolished from the Garden and kind of catapulted into this hell on earth, where nobody really does anything,” he says. “You work in a convenience store, you strip for money, you and your friend do each other’s hair and blow smoke into each other’s face and cheer at a lowrider that goes by--nothing really happens. It’s kind of like this ultimate purgatory, and the thing is, there’s not a deeper sense of faith: You don’t feel like there’s this great moral compass--everybody’s just kind of living for the moment, and it’s paper-thin. To me, that’s a fascinating examination of the result of putting pop culture icons as your pantheon of gods.” (Co.Create)
And the Garden of Eden transformed into the Garden of Evil
Some poets called it the entrance to the underworld, but on some summer nights, it was like paradise
Paradise Lost
Let's change our DNA
You're the King of fear, baby
I'm the Queen of Alchemy
I know a way to make gold by mixing our souls to escape reality
There's something I have never told you I'm not really from this world
There's something I have been withholding
I'm not like every other girl
So if you begin to think that my light might be supernatural
I'd have to say alright, you're right mon cher it is
I come from a place that your mind cannot even imagine
Life is beautiful but you don't have a clue
Sun and ocean blue
Their magnificence, it don't make sense to you
Briefly, I feel that I should take a moment and explain myself . . .
What is this? And, Why?
The particular type of essay that one finds on a blog like this, has no name. However it has existed as such for some time––say seven years or so. For practicality’s sake, it has been called a “Sync Post” because it’s a kind of writing that appears on a “Sync Blog” and its “forms flow and are all forms and no forms at the same time.” What it truly is, though, is an Information Age critique that brings meaning and connection to the media that comes between us and reality. It’s a decoding of the symbols that translate truth into being.
The authors of these “Sync Pieces” are “pattern recognizers”, Synchronists, and function both as traditional artists, and a little like timeless mystics. Thus, if the phenomena experienced and known as "Sync" is the physical, real world result of the primal, creative, intelligent force of the universe, then these artists are the early observers examining, exploring, experiencing, and trying to understand this fundamental, unifying, flowing intelligence. Of course, in a quantum universe, it is not possible to observe a thing without changing it, because the observer too is part of the thing being observed. "Thou art that" in the Participation Mystique.
It's been stated that the universe is pure information. How then do we “read” it? And what is the meaning of it all? There are those of us who have found a way. (through connections; relationships.) This is not a mash-up––especially in the contemporary, pejorative sense. The creative imagination needed to hunt Black Swans or to intuit the Unknown Unknowns is a finely cultivated art. And this art has value. The practitioners of this discipline revitalize reality itself. They are more than mere hobbyists. More than just "Sync Heads". This is Generation Sync, consciously embodying the meaning of all ages timelessly. This is Sync generation. A generative power. The production and creation of the universe.
If I could make the world as pure and strange as what I see,
I'd put you in the mirror,
I put in front of me.
I put in front of me. Linger on, your pale blue eyes.
Snow
White the cocaine Lorde challenges Pop Queen Katy (I'll be
your Mirror, Mirror) for the throne; the "real" popstar opposing the ProTools construct in the Billboard narrative
She dwells in a city unseen on the reflektive screen
("Her recordings are like a mirror where anyone can see her. Through her recordings, it is as though she has been smashed into a thousand shards of voice and scattered so that she is everywhere at once.")
Wisdom, he says, put forth a receptacle of flesh for the Logos, the spiritual seed . . . We admit that the elect seed is both a spark kindled by the Logos and a pupil of the eye and a grain of mustard seed and leaven which unites in faith the genera which appear to be divided. . . . And this worked as leaven, uniting what seemed to have been divided, soul and flesh, which had also been put forth separately by Wisdom. And Adam's sleep was the soul's forgetting . . . Therefore the Saviour says, “Let your light shine,” referring to the light which appeared and gave form, of which the Apostle says “which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” that is, every man of the superior seed. . . . And Adam without his knowledge had the spiritual seed sown in his soul by Wisdom. (Excerpta ex Theodoto)
[T]he god in some sense always 'reflects' the worshipper, takes on the colour of his habits and his thoughts. The morality of a god is not often much in advance of that of his worshippers, and sometimes it lags considerably behind. The social structure is also, it is allowed, in some sense reflected in the god: a matriarchal society will worship a Mother and a Son, a patriarchal society will tend to have a cult of the Father. . . . Not only does the god reflect the thoughts, social conditions, morality and the like, but in its origin his substance when analysed turns out to be just nothing but the representation, the utterance, the emphasis of these imaginations, these emotions, arising out of particular social conditions. . . . the religion of the Kouros and the Kouretes, and of Dionysos and his thiasos are substantially the same. Both are the reflection of a group religion and of social conditions which are matriarchal and emphasize the figures of Mother and Child. The cardinal doctrine of both religions is the doctrine of the New Birth, and this doctrine is the reflection of the rite of social initiation. One element in the making of a god we have seen to be the projection of collective emotion, the reaction of man on his fellow man. But man does not sit in the void reacting on his fellow man; we have now to consider his reaction on the world of nature that surrounds him. (Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis)
Like an embodiment of the world-soul, Nature reflects back at us the face we show her. She is not the fixed entity we fondly think she is, but a sea of metaphors, constantly shape-shifting--the inviolate nymph we must preserve; the dangerous animal who destroys; the temptress we must penetrate or rape; the pregnant mother who gives birth to abundance; and so on. . . . Religion is successful when it acknowledges soul . . . The Virgin Mary was elevated by popular demand to the status of a goddess behind whom stand all the great goddesses, from Astarte to Artemis, Isis to Sophia. The daimons crept back in as mediating saints. Christ Himself was multifarious in the early days of Christianity, being freely identified with pagan gods and heroes from Osiris, Apollo and Dionysus, to Eros, [and] Orpheus . . . .
Orpheus, who was traditionally connected with Thrace, travelled into the underworld of Hades, armed only with a lyre and his songs. Like the shaman's sacred chants, they could charm the dangerous denizens of the underworld and persuade them to release souls they had abducted. Orpheus sought the release of Eurydice, his wife, who had died of a snakebite. She symbolizes his own soul - which he retrieved from Hades, only to lose her at the last minute when he fatally looked back to make sure she was following him. (However, the earliest versions of this myth relate that he was successful in retrieving her from death.) (Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul)
It might be, as the Neoplatonists thought, a property of the world itself, like an underlying soul. When Jung said that the archetypes were unknowable, he was following Immanuel Kant, who held that behind every phenomenon was an unknown 'noumenon' — an idea which echoed Plato's view that behind our world lay a world of ideal Forms. But paradoxically the archetypes could be known — through the images by which they represented themselves. (Harpur)
"Summertime Sadness" . . . two girls (lovers, kissing)
Richard Dawkins finds it impossible to avoid talking about our 'selfish genes' as if they are personal daimons. They 'create form', he says, and 'mould matter' and 'choose'. They are 'the immortals'. They 'possess us'. We are merely 'lumbering robots' whose genes 'created us body and mind'. This anthropomorphic language, I suggest, is hardly the language of science, but let it pass. For Dawkins is unconsciously literalizing a myth and part of him knows that it is natural to personify. When he asks us to believe that our most treasured attributes are mere biology, pressed into the service of our genes, he is unwittingly inverting and literalizing the traditional — and, I would assert, the true - order which sees our bodily life, on the contrary, as the mere vehicle of our daimon, . . . the 'selfish gene' is allotted to us by Chance and thereafter subjects us to its inexorable Necessity — the pattern we are forced by the genes to live out. Chance and Necessity, the twin goddesses of science, are supposed to rule our lives. But Plato's daimon tells another tale, one which science has, once again, not so much replaced as inverted and made literal. The daimon is allotted to us in accordance with the life we have already chosen. (Harpur)
Waiting for the Man
Many a schoolgirl has fallen in love with the tragic figure of Orpheus upon reading some re-telling of the ancient story of the musician’s failed attempt to retrieve his beautiful new bride, Eurydice, from the gloomy Greek Underworld so that they might be re-joined to enjoy a long life of wedded bliss together upon the sunlit earth. The idea that such a talented, magical man would brave the dark halls of Hades’ and Persephone’s house in the effort to prove that his love for a woman is stronger than death itself has made more than one adolescent female heart skip a beat.
The romantic figure of the youthful, active, passionate, sensitive musician who seeks to rescue the nubile, silent, passive, wounded woman is enormously compelling from a feminine psychological perspective. The old story suggests to each new female reader the possibility that she might hope to find just such a willing, loving man—a prince, so to speak—who feels deeply within himself that same self-consuming power of erotic relatedness that she herself has been taught to value so highly. She is encouraged by the myth to imagine a god-man whose sex and profound spirituality are commingled, who does not withhold himself, but continuously shares himself (fluidly, expansively) with her because it is his nature to do so, who sings his desire for her in deep, penetrating tones that originate from some mysterious place beyond them both, from some otherworldly, lyrical kingdom where perfect love dwells beyond the threshold of ever-suspect speech. This romantic vision is, of course, an anagogic expression of precisely that heterosexual feminine craving for erotic-emotional reciprocity that proves so dependably lucrative for rock-and-roll promoters, especially if they were fortunate enough to book Elvis Presley, Jim Morrison, Tom Jones, or the early Beatles.
The anguish of Orpheus is that of modern man divided against himself, but unified by his art, his song. Orpheus embodies . . . the craving for truth and its substitution by illusion ... His obsessive need for Eurydice and yet his revived creativity after her final death correspond to the ambivalence of the male artist toward the source of inspiration on whom he depends and yet whom he regards as a destructive obstacle to his creativity ... the primordial hostility between the sexes is basic to these interpretations of the myth. (Liz Locke)
Evil Eve gives the apple to herself in Oz . . . force of occlusion
selling candy dreams becomes force of liberation under another level
of interpretation
Malkuth (the terrestrial Paradise) below the Abyss
vs.
Binah (the celestial Paradise) above the Abyss
Babylon and Babalon
Indeed, the myths of a Fall may be exactly that: stories of a lapse from the daimonic Otherworld of imagination, symbolized by our Edens and Arcadias, into the cold grey world of facts. If there were no Fall, no lapse into literalism, soul would be everywhere manifest, as it was when God walked with Adam in the cool of the day. It would not be hidden, secret; a mystery. There would be no call for us to exert our imaginative powers of reflection, insight and mythologizing on which soul-making depends. It seems that we need that very literalism which, if it is not seen through, is so deadening. We have to acquire the 'double vision' without which there would be no art or religion worth the name because there would be no reality behind this one, no depth. We sense the presence of soul most, perhaps, whenever depth makes its appearance. (Harpur)
Whenever we are bowled over by the dazzling girl we must possess at all costs, the anima is at work. . . . The anima is the personification of the unconscious, said Jung. She is also the mediatrix between consciousness and the unconscious. She is the 'feminine' side of the psyche. She is, we might say, the image of our souls within the world-soul. She is therefore paradoxical: as archetype she is the personification of the Soul of the World, but as archetypal image - the personal way she appears to us — she is the individual soul. We think of the ego, our sense of 'I', as giving us our identity. But really it is given to the ego by the anima. . . . Anima teaches the ego — teaches us — that we are human but with inhuman depths; that we are persons with impersonal underpinnings; and that we are composed of more than one personality despite what our egos, desperate for unity, tell us. . . .
The consummation of desire is what we spend most of our lives seeking. If we find it, it is fleeting and we long to recapture it. If we do not find it, we still try to recapture it because we have all seen the divine Forms, including the Form of Beauty, before birth. And so desire is nothing other than the unconscious longing for a return to that unutterable fulfilment. Desire itself is an expression of our mortality, our separation from the Ground of all Being to which we ache to return. Our separation brings suffering. We cannot stand the pain of unconsummated desire. It creates in us an emptiness, a void. We are tempted to fill it illegitimately. (The modern mystic Simone Weil puts it starkly: 'Ail sins are attempts to fill voids.') Desire, which is good, becomes degraded. In seeking to assuage our pain we distort infinite desire into that limitless craving which used to be called concupiscence. Its essence is to want pleasure and satisfaction through another - but not to want the other. The soul's yearning for the unattainable Beloved becomes the promiscuous person's attempt to leave soul out of sex altogether, and to substitute numerical quantity for the quality of intimacy and depth. . . . Women become an interchangeable set of parts, like the hardcore pornography which butchers the beauty of women down to anatomical detail. . . .
Spirit loves humanity but, unlike soul, is less interested in people. He is highminded and serious, looking down on soul's love of gossip, rumour and mythmaking. He is suspicious of appearances, disapproves of make-up and fancy hair-dos and smart shoes. He does not see that soul's gossip and chat is a concern with relationship and personal connections; her liking of personal adornment, an expression of her concern with Beauty, which spirit always tries to 'get behind', get to Truth. It is spirit which always postulates something 'higher' 'behind' the image, such as a noumenon behind a phenomenon, a god behind a daimon, or one God behind the gods. But soul says that this is not literally so. The sense of'behindness' is built into soul's vision, supplying her sense of dimension, mystery and depth. (Harpur)
Laban-Snoop's candy-colored Teraphim, but only on the imaginal level of
Hollywood
Faking a fake
This is the reason they were called teraphim, from the verse 'For the teraphim have spoken vanity' [Zechariah 10:2], because they are the cause of man's departure from true happiness and his deviation toward imaginary happiness. This is why any worship of anyone besides God was forbidden, because unless there is fear of this [namely idolatry], there is no reason to prevent someone from [experiencing] its goodness. The witnesses to this [fact] are the cherubim, and the illuminated ones will contemplate it [the significance of the cherubim]." . . . Ibn Billya alluded to the affinity between the teraphim and the cherubim, among the most sacrosanct figures in ancient Judaism, which dwelled in the Holy of Holies. . . . the two cherubim that were part of the Holy of Holies, and the divine presence that dwelled between them and revealed herself therefrom, performed their role as a receptacle of the Shekhinah because of their anthropoid and metallic nature. However, immediately after quoting this text Ibn Zarza protests, exhorting God to safeguard someone from such a view. (Moshe Idel)
You think I'm pretty
Without any makeup on
?
Your face when sleeping is sublime
And then you open up your eyes
Then comes pancake factor number one
eyeliner, rose hips and lip gloss, such fun You're a slick little girl
And all your makeup,
Just take it off.
I've got to find you
Before the line is lost.
. . .
They don't know what I know.
It's so little that we know,
But the cup it overflows.
Little boys with their porno,
This is their world, where can we go?
Turns out it was just a Reflektor (It’s just a Reflektor)
“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and unchangeable object; in other words by God himself.” . . . "Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill the spiritual black hole… where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit—with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting. Our consumerist, acquisition-, action-, and image-mad culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before." ("Confronting the Void We Avoid")
Orpheus is the secret doctrine (Apollo) revealed through music
(Calliope). Eurydice is humanity dead from the sting of the serpent of
false knowledge and imprisoned in the underworld of ignorance. In this
allegory Orpheus signifies theology, which wins her from the king of the
dead but fails to accomplish her resurrection because it falsely
estimates and mistrusts the innate understanding within the human soul. (Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages)
The action begins when the hero feels the imperative to separate himself from his mother, cutting the ties to her apron strings and making his own way in the world. Typically he encounters obstacles and suffers ordeals. These he must overcome or endure, by guile or strength, in order to win the beautiful woman (usually a princess) with whom he has fallen in love. Jung described this motif in psychological terms. It is essential, he said, that the ego differentiates itself from the unconscious as the archetypal 'Mother', in order to be reunited with it as 'anima' at a higher level. In other words, just as in myth the hero is that offshoot of the gods who wants to break free of the gods, so the ego breaks free of the soul, its matrix, in order to reflect soul, to make its potential actual, and eventually to be reunited with the realized soul to form the totality of the self. . . . Like the hero, the ego is the indomitable 'spirit perspective' without whom we would remain in thrall to the perspective of the archetypal Mother. The heroic ego supplies our drive to activity and exploration; he gives us our feeling of strength, independence, willpower and our need to overcome challenges. The problems begin when these virtues become overweening, too 'masculine' and single-minded. The heroic ego begins to believe that he is not that child of soul launched outwards to experience the world and return, but wholly free of the soul as if he has escaped soul's gravity. He starts to believe that he is — the sin of hubris — not derived from the gods but self-derived. (Harpur)
Tav (400) is the cosmic resistance acting in projection from Dallet (4) through Mem (40) and thus is the ultimate end or finality of all resistance and response. It is also the final Hebrew letter. It can be viewed as the receptacle or tabernacle of the life of Aleph ascending through all of the Autiot. Thus is is here that a rebound or ultimate opposition to Aleph is found by literally reflecting Aleph as would a perfect hard cosmic mirror. Thus it reflects an energy equal and opposite to Aleph and it's here that the two flows Aleph to Tav and Tav back to Aleph, always giving life when they are in balance, can be viewed as originating. (Suares, Spectrograms)
According to Luria, the ten vessels that were originally meant to contain the emanation of God's light were unable to contain that light and were hence either displaced or shattered. As a result of this cosmic catastrophe, the Sefirot, the archetypal values through which the cosmos was created, are shattered and out of place, and the world within which we reside, is composed of the shards of the these broken values. . . . The vessels, as described by Luria's most important disciple, Chayyim Vital, are envisioned as being located in the womb of the feminine Partzuf, the Cosmic Mother, an expression of the age-old symbol of the feminine as "vessel", "receptacle" and "container". ("Shevirat ha-Kelim")
The Vessels cannot contain Miley's
light and thus they shatter; the Wrecking Ball
Miley's new image is a sort of mischievous nature spirit; i.e. a Nymphet
The knife's silent shout is between #KatyCats and #LittleMonsters; the sounds of
Purgatory and the sounds of Hell; eating the lion or being eaten
When everyone on the planet finally hates Smiley Lilith and her audacious play with Samael, eyes will turn away from the unstoppable Meat Show; in the mean time, we seem to have to suffer with Hannah Montana
Demiurge stole her Eikon and made its own version; of course the Original still makes better music
Orpheus melted the heart of Persephone, but I never had yours
I followed you back to the end of the path, but I never found the door
And you can work to save your love
You can bear it from the earth below
You can work, but you can't let go
Oh, oh, but you have to know
Don't look back
All you'll ever get is the dust from the steps before
I.e. Zooey says: When fleeing Sodom, Don't Look Back to the fleshpots of the World and have Eurydice be turned to Salt
"I used to get, 'I heard you were out at such-and-such club drinking whiskey!' [when] I was at home watching TV . . . It's sort of strange to be associated with someone that's doing such different stuff than me."
Obama = the beastly King's eye; her Dream is reflekted on the Videodrome Screen to be seen and heard by everyone (Mariah Carey being the quintessential Ubik female pop star), but not by choice, as the world falls down from quantum moment to quantum moment
Reformed with Beginningness as a moving image of eternity, as the falcon spirals:
Conventional perception is based on the division between a perceiving subject and its perceived objects. . . . Each moment of conception is an ocean of fragmentation that forces the mind to relate to phenomena in terms of differences. . . . The division between the self that knows and the object that is known is the basis of all conflict. Their confrontation produces a war that is fought to assert the vain myth of independent existence. Whatever the self takes as real is accepted and whatever falls outside of its grasp is rejected. The mind even fixates and reifies itself as an object (I can think about ‘me’). Thus we even enter into war with the idea of ourselves. This is what the mind does, which prevents any recognition of what the mind is. Because subject and object validate each other, ‘I think, therefore I am’ will immediately be followed by ‘what I experience is real because I have experienced it’. Here an important question can be asked: Is freedom from division possible? (David Chaim Smith, The Kabbalistic Mirror of Genesis)
When properly understood, B’reshit constitutes a direct assault on all conventional assumptions about the solidity of substance, the linear cohesiveness of time, and the integrity of thought. Conventional perception assumes that moments in time, appearances in space, and individual thoughts are separate, unrelated, random occurrences. The wisdom of B’reshit attacks this by asserting the changeless basis of continual change.
The primordial dynamism of B’reshit is evident in the relentlessness of perception. Considering the ‘texture’ of cognition is helpful in appreciating this. Ordinary perception is an ever-changing ocean of transformation. Waves of thought arise and fall back onto themselves, following an unquestioned and unexamined continuum. When an attempt is made to grasp a thought or feeling, the perceived moment and its contents immediately slips away into the next moment. The next moment always presents itself in a subtly different manner than the last. As this occurs, the moment that was originally sought has vanished before it could even be glimpsed. Neither the content nor context of any moment of perception is the fortress of security that it is assumed to be. The artifice of perception erodes on contact with any attempt to investigate it. The only conclusion that can be made is that the unfolding of perceptual events is not a static parade of frozen moments to be grasped at one by one, it is a constant, uncatchable and elusive barrage.
Exoteric religion interprets the Bible’s first word as an indication of creation ‘ex nihilo’. In the proto-historical mythology a distinction is made between ‘before’ and ‘after’ creation. In the mystical sense, this separation is nullified by the equalizing nature of Divinity, which goes beyond all distinctions. It is asserted by the essential nature of B’reshit, which equalizes all divisions with the wisdom of pure creativity. The wisdom of B’reshit is a ‘Beginningness’ that cannot be experienced or known in any conventional sense. Ordinary perception cannot comprehend its own nature. This would be like trying to see your own face without a mirror. B’reshit is not a concept about wisdom that confronts the mind like a visitor, it is the mirror of the mind itself and reflects whatever habits and tendencies the mind clings to. However B’reshit is beyond all habits - it is the open reflectivity of the mirror that can reflect anything. It is equal before birth and after death, it is beyond change, but is the basis of all change. It is the common basis of what is known as well as that which knows it. Realization of this simultaneity is gnosis (mystical realization).
The wisdom of B’reshit continually explodes into phenomenal play. It is always arising and dissolving, beyond grasp, never static, insubstantial yet vivid. (Ibid.)
The Korybantes (/ˌkɒr.ɪˈbænt.iːz/; Ancient Greek: Κορύβαντες) were the armed and crested dancers who worshipped the Phrygian goddess Cybele with drumming and dancing. They are also called the Kurbantes in Phrygia, and Corybants in an older English transcription. The Kuretes were the nine dancers who venerate Rhea, the Cretan counterpart of Cybele, Mother of the Gods. . . . These armored male dancers kept time to a drum and the rhythmic stamping of their feet. ("Korybantes")
The Goddess Rhea . . . is 'the stable and united cause of all intellectuals, and the principle and original monad, abiding in herself, unfolding into light all intellectual multitude, and again convolving it into herself and embosoming her progeny' (Ioc. cit., xi). . . . Proclus (in Tim., p. 4), informs us that Nature is the last of the demiurgic causes of the Sensible World; that is to say, he speaks of invisible Nature, or the subtle or psychic body of the gross envelope of the World. This Body is full of productive forms and forces, through which all mundane existences are governed. She proceeds from the vivific Goddess Rhea. Through her ‘the most inanimate beings participate of a certain soul'. Thus in the Xth Hymn, Orpheus speaks of her 'turning the swift traces of her feet with a swift whirling'. . . . 'That one of the conceptions which we form of Nature is, that it is the character of everything, and that in consequence of this, we employ the name of it in all things, and do not refuse to say the nature of souls, of intellect, and even of deity itself.' . . . Plato in Cratylus mystically connects her name (Rhea) with the idea of 'flowing' (from (ῥέω – 'to flow'), meaning thereby simply 'that fontal power by which she contains in transcendent union the divisible rivers of life'. Rhea, is, therefore, the 'mother of lives', the mystical Eve, the 'mother of all living'. . . .
Now Rhea . . . is called 'brass-sounding' and 'drum-beating'. . . . Iamblichus (De Mysteriis, III. ix) goes into the matter of the so-called Corybantic and Bacchic 'frenzies' produced by musical instruments in the Mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus . . . Music and Mantras, therefore, were used by the Orphics to attract, or call down, the influence of the Mother of the Gods, who at the same time was the 'Store-house of Life', of Divine Nature. Thus Proclus in his Commentary on Euclid (ii) tells us that 'the Pole of the World is called by the Pythagoreans the Seal of Rhea' . . . .
Damascius, On First Principles, writes: 'The ogdoad pertains to Rhea, as being set in motion [remember the idea of “flowing” contained in the name] towards everything according to its differentiation, and yet nevertheless remaining firmly and cubically established.'
Taylor explains this by saying (Ioc. cit.): 'Damascius uses the word “cubically”, because eight is a cubic number. Rhea, therefore, considered as firmly establishing her off-spring Jupiter in Saturn, who exists in unproceeding union, is fabulously said to have given Saturn a stone instead of Jupiter . . . . Another interesting explanation of this famous 'stone' is that it means the 'discus', that is to say, the Svastika, which is the glyph of the fourfold creative forces of the universe. . . .
But the most stupendous thought of all is, that all this multiplicity is, after all, One Deity; emanating, evolving, converting and reabsorbing itself; creating and preserving, destroying and regenerating itself; the Self, by itself, knowing itself, and separating from itself, and transcending itself. (G.R.S. Mead, Orpheus)
Step through the mirror into the Underground, Orpheus
The Veil (Πέπλοϛ): in the public processions of the Panathenaea this famous mystic Veil or Web (cf. no.9) was borne aloft like the sail of a galley, but this was only the symbol. Mystically it signified the Veil of the Universe studded with stars, the many-coloured Veil of Nature . . . This was the famous Veil of Isis, that no 'mortal' had raised, for that Veil was the Spiritual Vesture of the man himself, and to raise it he had to transcend the limits of individuality, break the bonds of death, and so become immortal. . . . Aristotle, quoting the Orphic writings, speaks of the 'animal born in the webs of the net' . . . 'Homer calls Nature a woman, weaving a web with purple threads (our bodies with crimson fluids [lit. blood]), or a marble loom (our bones).' . . . But all these are only the lower correspondences of the real Web of Destiny, which resides in the spiritual nature itself. (Mead)
Do you wanna see the girl who lives behind the aura, behind the aura?
Do you wanna touch me, cosmic lover?
Do you wanna peek underneath the cover?
Do you wanna see the girl who lives behind the aura Behind the aura, behind the aura, behind the aura?
She was unstoppable
Moved fast just like an avalanche
But now she's stuck deep in cement
Wishing that they'd never ever met
. . .
Yeah, I let him rule my world
The soul enters a profound darkness from which only the grace of God can deliver it. . . . Soul is expressed in metaphors of descent, depth and darkness. She favours the Underworld and the circuitous route. She is not transcendent but immanent, lying hidden within the world. Slowly, meanderingly, she follows the downward spiral of imagination towards its dark wisdom. She prefers the twilight to the light, where things mingle and worlds intersect. . . . She savours death, whose bitterness is an initiation; spirit leaps over death and its darkness to emphasize the light of rebirth. (Harpur)
Night, then, is the Mother of the Gods, or, as Orpheus says, 'the Nurse of the Gods is immortal Night' . . . To her was given the highest art of divination, for Mâyâ is the creative power of the Deity, the means whereby he 'imagines' the universe, or thinks it into being. . . . Night (the occult power of Deity) gives birth to the noumenal and phenomenal universes; in the words of Orpheus (Hermias, ibid.): 'And so she brought forth Earth [the phenomenal universe] and wide Heaven [the noumenal], so as to manifest visible from invisible'. (Mead)
Rhea was also called Brimô by the Phrygians, and her son (Zeus) was called Brimos. This in the macrocosm; in the microcosm Rhea was the Spiritual Soul (Buddhi) which gave birth to the Human Soul (Manas). . . . “Our Lady hath borne a sacred son, Brimô [hath given birth to] Brimos” — that is to say, the strong to the strong. Our Lady (he says) is the spiritual generation, the celestial, the above; and the “strong” he who is born'. . . . Dionysus was fed on lion's milk. Further, Herodotus (V.92.) mentions an oracle which declares, 'an eagle lays her egg on the rocks and gives birth to a lion', and Aristophanes, who frequently ventured to jest concerning the Mysteries, says (Eqq., 1037), 'There is a woman who shall give birth to a lion in Holy Athens'. (Mead)
Catwoman in a Misérable dream
Life of Pi 22/7 = the missing puzzle piece and the Tzimtzum division (box cutting)
Pi Patel is the tiger adrift on Katy's salty tears
P. Chism is the Daath Prism that splinters the (Lana Del/Carly/Miley) Ray of Light into the varicolored spectrum below the abyss to create ARTpop-Murder (a beautiful picture that requires torturing the [Elisa] Lamb, as Philip Dick says)
Boxcutters recall the original act of Terra Terror
Nobody cares; let's go see a movie and forget
"In a bizarre twist, WCVB-TV today reported that after the gruesome killing, Chism walked to Hollywood Hits theaters in Danvers and watched Woody Allen's latest film Blue Jasmine - a movie about a middle-aged woman's mental breakdown."
The blonde in a phenomenal wig has a mental breakdown and returns to her brunette sister in Crowley Corners (the Lovers, or two sisters)
Queens of the Sparks (in the) Middle School: Cheerleaders dancing on the sidelines, in the stands; teacher singing "there's a Spark in you" but unheard
White Widow Mall attack ends on the 24th; Killer Queen
Katy appears on the 25th, rocking the Eva Braun couture in Nutzi
Land--Berlin is "like a Mecca," she says--Black Suns turning in the
center
SChisms in the Chvrches
I am gonna break you down
To tiny, tiny parts
I never believed, but I see it now
I'm learning your lesson, I’m learning your lesson
Did it make you feel so clever
Did you wear it on your sleeve
Did you see another picture
Where I was not a part so far entwined
There's no other way
Never run far
Take a good swing at me
And everything is even
So finally, we agree
No place for promises here
You better run, you better run so
Hide, hide, I have burned your bridges
I will be a gun
And it's you I'll come for
I, I, have never felt so easy
I will be a gun, and it's you I'll come for
Who are you to tell me how
To keep myself afloat
I tread the water all the while
You stuck in the knife
That you held at my back
Nature was only the first casualty of the rational ego. It was followed by all the other manifestations of soul: imagination was downgraded to fantasy, the province of women and children, whose status was equally reduced; and the past was no longer a perfect state we had descended from, but a dark superstitious place we must transcend. Eventually soul itself was looked upon as a fantasy or illusion. If spirit is always striving to break free of soul, the rational modern ego is precisely the delusion that it has succeeded. . . . Just as soul banished from the world returns as a threatening goddess, so soul banished from the mind returns as a hostile unconscious, nagging us with neurotic symptoms or ravaging us with madness. And the more the ego insists that consciousness only resides with him, that only he lives in the light, the more distorted and threatening the unconscious seems. From soul's point of view, she has been banished from Nature, which is now soulless machinery. She has no choice but to take refuge within the human psyche. But she also fails in this because she is excluded by the narrow, brilliant spotlight of consciousness which casts everything else into shadow. She is compelled to hide behind consciousness — in the unconscious. Except that she does not so much fill the unconscious as form it. The unconscious is the product of the rational ego which cast the soul into darkness. . . . Soul will not abide neglect. If we want to avoid the poison shirt, we must attend closely to all the images in which she appears to us, no matter how apparently inferior or insignificant, repellent or frightening. Only by talking to soul, and listening, can we know ourselves. If our puffed-up egos ignore her, we will lose her - not really, for soul cannot finally be lost. She is the Ground of all Being. But we can temporarily drive her away and stalk the Earth as disconnected empty shells, like zombies. (Harpur)
Once upon a time, on a tropical island far away, there lived a strange woman. She wore a long gown of black lamé that fit her like a glove. But the poor thing, she was caught in a giant spider web that grew out of her own body. One day a shipwrecked man drifted onto the beach. She fed him and cared for his wounds. She nourished him with love and brought him back to life. When he awoke, he gazed up at the spider-woman and saw a perfect tear-drop slide from under her mask. Why is she crying? (Kiss of the Spider Woman)
The Spider Woman (or her Eidolon) makes propaganda for the Nazis (not
sees), but is the same woman who brings Raul Julia back to life after
another manner; William Hurt the gallus knows to identify with the
Heroine in the moving pictures
Mohammed's Mother = the Magna Mater veiled, the Black Stone Kaaba of Mecca at the center of things; those who already know her darkness may live apart from the Smiley Milieu
World War Z in the shopping mall Candyland consumerist paradise = Dawn of the Dead
lowly guest decked in Bull Minotaur costume, a pole-dancing prisoner
of Hades (= Dark Pop); Katy's track with Juicy J "Dark Horse" reduces
him to the role of lowly supplicant--she has seduced the Beast
(Beetlejuicy) and he has willingly come to her bed
I knew you were
You were gonna come to me
And here you are
But you better choose carefully
’Cause I’m capable of anything
Of anything and everything
Make me your Aphrodite
Make me your one and only
Don’t make me your enemy, your enemy, your enemy
So you wanna play with magic
Boy, you should know what you're falling for
Baby do you dare to do this
Cause I’m coming at you like a dark horse
Are you ready for, ready for
A perfect storm, perfect storm
Cause once you’re mine, once you’re mine
There’s no going back
. . .
She’s a beast
I call her Karma
. . .
She swears by it but if you break her heart
She turn cold as a freezer
That fairy tale ending with a knight in shining armor
She can be my Sleeping Beauty
. . .
Her love is like a drug
I was tryna hit it and quit it
But lil' mama so dope
I messed around and got addicted
Divorce = "hey Judas," be a pal and nail Orpheus to the
cross and have the Beetles goad the Sun through the Velvet Underground
The natural way to enter Hades is to die. But you do not necessarily have to die literally. You may, like Orpheus - like all shamans — die metaphorically. This means the death of the ego and its literalistic perspective in order that the daimonic, imaginative self can come into being. This death is the kind experienced during the rites of passage . . . It is called initiation. . . . It is an axiom for all religions that to understand reality, arrive at Heaven or achieve bliss we must die and be reborn. That is, we must 'die to ourselves' and be reborn as new selves. This metaphorical death takes precedence over literal death. It is the death of the ego in order that the self may come into being. (Harpur)