Death Sweat Of The Cluster Available Now!
"It has arrived! Those who have been patient, my sincerest thanks.
27 essays taken from Groupname for Grapejuice from 2012 to 2015 plus one yet unseen introduction. Four hundred and two pages, seven major sections, their titles composing a Lovecraftian tale of seven lines.
Gorgeous original cover and interior art by Kaylee Pickinpaugh -- a new zodiac gyring out or spiraling into an interior empyrean of the Earth and transfiguring the whole text into a magic item. Endless curling details. Flanked by Moon and Sun, bridged at usura and Eleusis, shining throughout. Thoth and Pan.
Editing and layout wizardry by Alan Abbadessa and Jason Barrera of Sync Book Press. A melange of fonts, formats and letter dimensions: start it anywhere, bibliomantic and aphoristic. A tactile object that's exactly the right smoothness, size and weight in one's hands."
~B(oo)k! : Death Sweat of the Cluster
(from Chapter 8)
Finn MacCool, or Fionn mac Cumhaill, was a mythical warrior of ancient Ireland and the son of a great leader. As a boy he left his home and came to be the servant of the shaman-poet, Finn Eces. This strange yet powerful man was on a quest to catch the Salmon of Wisdom, a fish whose flesh would grant all of the world's knowledge to the first person who ingested it.
The salmon had itself eaten nine hazelnuts that had fallen into the primordial Well of Wisdom, the ultimate source of Ireland's major rivers. After seven years, Finn Eces finally caught the fish and, desiring to eat it and attain omniscience, asked his young apprentice, Finn MacCool, to cook it for his dinner. The story goes, though, that young Finn, while touching the fish to test if it was cooked, burned himself on the scalding fish fat and bit his thumb in pain. The fat touched his tooth and all of the knowledge of the world flowed into the mind of Finn MacCool.
Finnegans Wake, then, is the dream of one who knows, or once knew, everything. However, as the illuminating essay, "Celtic Cauldrons at the Wake," explains the Wake is the story of the Fall of Finn and the forgetting of this knowledge.
By washing in a sacred cauldron and placing his thumb to his tooth he could recall everything ever known. In the Wake, however, it is suggested that Finn somehow lost this power, that the cauldron became dry, and that this act of forgetting is equated with the Fall
All of the symbols being tracked on this blog -- the cauldron, the fish, the tooth, the feminine waters of the sacred river -- are present in the story. This tale of the young Finn is equivalent to the Welsh story of the poet Taliesin, mentioned before in this blog. Identical symbols are involved in the anamnesis experience of Philip K. Dick in February of 1974.
Dick is suffering from an impacted wisdom tooth when he meets a young woman at his door wearing a fish symbol necklace. The woman herself -- the dark-haired girl -- appears frequently in Dick's writing and is the embodiment of the divine Sophia. She is equivalent to the river goddess Annah of Irish myth. The symbol of the cauldron, grail or cup in Dick's writing is the subject of a previous post.
The most remarkable thing, though, is that these events show two different episodes in the same story. Finn is forgetting or falling asleep, and Dick is in the process of remembering or waking up.
There is a fish at the start of the story and a fish at the end. Two fishes.
The Two Sons of God
These two fishes are the subject of a major study by Carl Jung entitled Aion. In this text, Jung makes the case that the original early Christian ichthys symbol -- the one which blasted PKD to his core when it appeared on his doorstep -- is related to the two fishes comprising the astrological sign of Pisces.
The over two thousand years of the Age of Pisces has almost entirely coincided with the age of Christianity. Jung is quick to emphasize, though, that "there is no evidence in the old literature that the Christian fish symbolism was derived from the zodiac," and that the connection he makes is purely a "synchronistic concomitant."
As a synchronicity, though, it is extremely profound. One problem in attempting to correspond these two symbols is that the first has one fish and the second has two. In Jung's view, though, the Pisces symbol is merely more complete. He explains "that in the astrological interpretation Christ is in fact only one of the fishes, the role of the other fish being allotted to the Antichrist." The ichthys refers just to Christ, ruling over the first thousand years of the Age, while the Antichrist is the second inverted fish of the zodiacal sign.
Astrologically interpreted, the designation of Christ as one of the fishes identifies him with the first fish, the vertical one. Christ is followed by the Antichrist, at the end of time. The beginning of the enantiodromia would fall, logically, midway between the two fishes. We have seen that this is so. The time of the Renaissance begins in the immediate vicinity of the second fish, and with it comes that spirit which culminates in the modern age.
Jung characterizes this spirit with the process of "dechristianization" in the West coinciding with "the Luciferian development of science and technology." He notes how the immense and almost unimaginable destruction of World War Two was often compared with the terrible vision of the end of the world and the coming of the Antichrist as presented in the New Testament. Without a doubt this same Luciferian and destructive spirit still dominates the present.
For Jung, just as every individual has a shadow side so there is a "dark half of the human totality, which ought not to be judged too optimistically." This dark side is precisely represented by the Antichrist, the inverted fish. In a civilization dominated by a highly dualistic ideology like Christianity the rift between the two halves is especially marked.
The psychological concept of the self, in part derived from our knowledge of the whole man... cannot omit the shadow that belongs to the light figure, for without it this figure lacks body and humanity. In the empirical self, light and shadow form a paradoxical unity. In the Christian concept, on the other hand, the archetype is hopelessly split into two irreconcilable halves, leading ultimately to a metaphysical dualism the final separation of the kingdom of heaven from the fiery world of the damned.
The flower of new life and rebirth
Meaning: Queen; Star; Goddess of the sea; Di...
Pisces
Description
Sign ruler: Jupiter and Neptune
