Frye's Cave and the Etruscan divination

Okay, so last night I attended a lecture by an archaeologist on Etruscan divination.
And some of what I heard fits quite well with Frye's talk of the cave.
Now, the cave is more metaphorical than, say, the garden or the mountain. The cave, says Frye, is often a dream state, a descent into the underworld, where the dead mock the hero for being "as weak as we" (Isaiah 14:10). The cave can also be under water. Frye basically equates the land of shades, the cave as any subconscious state where something is lost, cannot be seen, and he mentions the story where the fish is cut open and the king finds his long lost (and I think demon-controlling) ring. This journey is started by a call (as most journeys) but the source is not known until the hero plumbs the depths. He is apparently helped by grateful dead people (like Jerry Garcia) as well as spirit animals who guide the way. This visit to the cave shows something repressed and forgotten, something that will rise to the surface, just as the repressed proletariat eventually always strike out. And Frye takes this political model a bit further, saying that the realm of the cave has no hierarchy, and things here are even reversed, often in social terms as when Ahab becomes friends with the native whom he never would have befriended in real/ normal life. Sound familiar? "and the last shall be made first" or how about "blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom and the glory" -hmn?!!!?
Any how, the cave and the dead often reveal the future. Now, the Etruscans had some parallels here that are worthy of note, because as the woman leading the lecture last night showed, there are parallels across the globe.
First off, things are reversed in the underworld, as in a mirror. ANd guess what the Etruscans used for divination. Dunt dunt duh! A mirror, fools! Also the liver of a sacrificial beast but only because livers are shiny and, yes you got it, reflective. So things in the cave are a backward reflection. But there are other parallels about this practice of telling the future, too. For instance, the knowledge of the future, like all true knowledge, and I agree emphatically with this point, comes from the earth. And the best Etruscan prophet was born out of the dirt! Other prophets walked without shoes that their toes could be closer to the source of all true wisdom.
They also believed that the future telling knowledge sprang from the dead. In one of their divination mirrors showing the practice of divination, the one holding the mirror for the prophet is labeled as a shade, or a soul. Sometimes it is Cupid holding the mirror, and the lecturer pointed out -who is Cupid's wife? Psyche! The spirit, the soul and the dead shade that continues to exist in the underworld where it can offer up prophecy and truth. Note: the lecturer also states that the voice of prophecy is often depicted as a disembodied or severed head (a dead person a voice that comes from no where).

wisdom

So far in the Bible, I'm finding how much I dislike this God character. And if this is the case for you I do not think this excludes you from the kind of emotional wisdom spirituality can bring, just perhaps that some metaphors for this 'higher' being just dont work anymore. So create new ones, that's what I was trying to accomplish in calling God a she, because we ought to have divine fathers and mothers. That's what Blaked did, and I think that this is the true experience of wisdom. An Apothiosis that makes us a twin, the original meaning of Thomas' name, even of the creator, because we were made in it's image, endowed with the ability to create. Only when one can expand their imagination with basic knowledge of the true, can one experience knowledge, which is, I think, wisdom and gnosis. With the bible we are forced to imagine many things, like what Essau felt when he simply hugged his brother, or Joseph in the pit, or Abraham when he was dragging his son up a mountain to his doom. Knowledge, like the experience of reading the Bible, is more about the imaginitave process than some silly list of moral prohibitions.

Roberto's blog

Roberto's talk on the miserer was beautiful. I fully understand this feeling of being moved by something outside the self, though very much a part of it, and have tried to express it in writing since I as first 'visited' by it, though my representations have always been poor when held in comparison to the experience. But sometimes reading a passage later on has brought it back to me in some degree, that priceless feeling of being moved beyond the confines of the shallow self, into a greater picture, the vein of the sacrosanct I spoke of in my last blog, the animating force, the light that exists within all things, even those things we perceive to be dead, rocks, buildings of brick, the half and half creamer that runs in tiny mystical rivulets into our iced americanos, to be absorbed into the whole so that, after only a few beautiful moments we have a homogenous solution -we can no longer tell the difference between what was once two distinctly separate fluids. This is the spiritual experience that I live for, though often fall short of, getting caught up worrying about the car that ran a stop sign and almost knocked me off my bike, or the girl who keeps stopping in front of me in the grocery store, but cant here me say 'excuse me' because she's listening to her i-pod.
The point s, that the experience Roberto is talking about is so essential to maintaining our sanity, our very existence as emotionally charged human beings, that we ought to let it move us this way even if we are in a meeting. This experience is, after all, what all art strives to create! That means letting ourselves cry even if we have to explain ourselves to people. I loathe having to explain any intense experience while I am still in it, especially to those who require explanation, and I probably would have suppressed such visceral emotional explosions, had they occured in public.
Roberto didn't.
Thank you, Roberto, for allowing yourself to be moved to such a degree, not caring if someone thought you were crazy or a weepy little bitch, and that takes a bravery that should inspire us all.

my words fly up to heaven my thoughts remain below

Today the great house lays in ruble. Organized religion has lost almost all credence to scrutinizing eyes and man wanders without guidance as Cain wanders the land of nod, longing for death but never to meet it for his enemies fear him and the blasphemous mark upon his forehead.
But so what if the house has burned? I too was there, fanning its flames according to the light bringer's will, watching its dominion of hegemony turn to ash and ruin.
And this whole topic reminds me of something Dr. Sexson said that, despite my admiration, I had to disagree with.
He said that most of us are 'untrained' in spirituality, that like the Israelites, we are in a strange land (Babylon) and cannot offer our best up to our Gods because we do not know where to find them.
In the book of Thomas, as I have already shown, Jesus says to his disciples that (and I'm paraphrasing here) "the kingdom of heaven is not some place I can point to, rather it is all about you and you do not see it."
As we wander in our expulsion from all the traditional kingdoms, here in the land of Babylon, or Nod, there is confusion and pain, but let it never be said that we are not initiated into the mysteries, its only that, as modern, secular Americans, we have had to initiate ourselves.
I HAVE been, for a few moments at a time, in very close companionship with god. And though she is yet to take me as Yahwey took Enoch, I await that moment and set aside time for this invocation nearly every day.
I have seen the kingdom swirling in blood red clouds of a shivering winter sunset, among the veiny tomatoes of my fruitful garden, plowed by the sweat of brow, or in the hidden cave on Frog rock, adorned with crystals, dank, cool atmosphere, circling bats and the childish drawings of the elders etched in crayon upon the cave walls.
Here, as everywhere the mind resides, the self can be absorbed into the stream, that vein of the sacrosanct.
It isn't the nation, the tradition, or the real estate people fight and die over, but the mind upon which all spiritual matters are hinged. Buddha, another light bearer, said to do away with all mindless tradition, and this is why I rejoice in great house's destruction. It only meant the tyranny of an initiated few anyway. Even the Bible says we do not need any training, but Jesus proclaims uninformed children to be the very basis of the kingdom, 'suffer the children to come unto me.' ANd in Exodus 20:25 it says "And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it."
All the travails of the traditional ways were perhaps useful tools to receive divine inspiration, but not without the proper mindset behind it. This is no new finding.
Sexson spoke of this as the mental maneuver required to make the genealogies, "hum, glow with life!" And in classes past, as the ecstatic experience of taking normal life, lead, and seducing from it its inner gold.
Again, I leave you with a quote from Infernal Metal band Behemoth.
"Be it not so!
Thou shall see me not in agony
failure was and is no option
'tis my undying self
the ever wandering son ov the morn
abandoned, yet never to be conquered

I nevermourn, I never look back
as long as Thy phosphoric rays
grant me more pleasure than pain
I, who is evil can receive no good
though I still crave, I'm yearning for
Thy healing touch ov grace...

pain is timeless
when I question the laws ov god
drowned in everlasting confusion
caress my hate against the mob

be it not so!
Thou shall see me not in agony
failure was and is no option
'tis my undying self
the ever wandering son ov the morn
abandoned, yet never to be conquered
the opponent!
my life's work is complete..."

So let the kingdom be dragged forever down to the earth, void of shame, let us not mend the rocks, nor loathe our inadequacies. Rather let us find the vein of sanctity flowing through all things, and through this allow the most mundane to be lifted on high.
"My words fly up to heaven, my thoughts remain below" -Claudius

Death Metal is Awesome!

Sitting here, thinking about this culture of degradation, the prison system, the way men and women are coerced into comidifying themselves, either as sex objects or as beasts of burden according to gender preconceptions... And I wonder, is our current culture of patriarchy very similar to the one of the old testament, the one in which Lynda spoke about, where even men are women, that is to say, property?
To an extent I think this is true. One of the things that anarchist philosophers stress is that when we put ourselves over someone else, we necessarily give credence to a hierarchy that puts us eternally below another. The class system of the Israelite' is obvious, especially in Exodus, when the rules of slavery are exemplified. Hebrews come before all non-Hebrews, men come before women, and fathers before all these, with men of property always the greatest of these (for as exodus says "a man is his money") and God, or the supposed mouthpieces for this invisible character, always at the topmost, meeting out the rape he sees appropriate for all his underlings.
So here I am, thinking about class structure and rocking out to some death metal and as I segway with my eternally infernal attitude into my next blog, I would like to show you some of these lyrics by a band called Behemoth, which are really much more Gnostic than Satanist.
"I the sun ov man
The offspring ov the stellar race
My halo fallen and crushed upon the earth
That i may bring balance to this world

I son ov perdition
From sheer nothingness transgressed
Unto the highest self - to utmost freedom
To explore the starry nature ov my rage

I pulse ov existence
The law ov nature undenied
I hold the torch ov Heraclites
So i can shake the earth and move the suns

I divine iconoclast
Injecting chaos into my veins
With life accepted
With pain resurrected
Is the embrace ov god in man profound

The joy ov a dawn
The ecstasy ov dusk
Nourished have i this karmic flow
Where great above meets great below
Let it be written!
Let it be done!"
Here we see a few examples of Biblical hyperbole, the reason for the fall, the narcissism originally thought consecrated for the demiurge only, and the importance of words. He says "let it be written, let it be done" just as God said "let there be water, and there was water" because to believe something, to form that belief into words and speak it aloud is to "shake the earth and move the suns." The belief,once expressed becomes reality.
So as concerns the oppression of human beings everywhere based on supposedly non-existent class distinctions, sex, race, nationality and especially that filthy filthy lucre, I say this.
Let gather the ravens, and may justice run down as waters and righteousness as an unfailing stream. Let the manacles be lifted from protagonists everywhere. Let it be written! Let it be done!

Responses

I like that others are also seeing the hypocrisy of this Yahwey dude, who, at least morally speaking, is not very righteous. Trish's statement that God is an "ass hat" I found to be both accurate and poignant. In the blog before this one she talks about different groups in modern times likening themselves to peoples in the bible and I cant help but remember the first time I read Exodus as an adult.
I was doing a weekend in jail for, well something some religions consider to be a SACRED activity (in my belief, far from a profane one) and I think I will leave it at that... But there I was, in North Dakota, a waste land of dust half the year and ice the other half, with nothing more than a narrow strip of sky to see through the tiny one window, a television (probably to ensure complacency), and a bible. The bible was the only printed material available that I could call literature so I picked it up and turned to genesis. What I saw in Pharao I saw in what the American Justice system has become. Now 2.3 million are behind bars since harsher sentencing begun back in the eighties, and if you don't believe me here's an article from the Washington post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/02/28/ST2008022803016.html
I started looking around me at the fuckups and misfits behind these bars, and in the three days I sat there, meditating and reading the bible, I came to see these people as MY people. And I spoke aloud for Pharao (or the military industrial complex)to let my people go. I thought God was actually quite awesome (modern usage) for the whole first half of the book, before all the bureaucratic mumbo jumbo in the second half, and some of those passages really affected me.