Invoking the Hieros Gamos

Invoking the Hieros Gamos
Dianne Bowen drawing the footprint at EROS(ION) FLOW: 01 FEB 2011 at the Gershwin Hotel

SHAMANIC ASTROLOGY IS THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE!

Shamanic Astrology utilizes geomagnetic intuition to derive operational direction based on visual cosmic situations equally honoring evolution and involution...


Thursday, June 19, 2008

PSYCHE & COSMOS


January 23, 1997 a six-pointed star,
known as the Seal of Solomon
links the heavenly cosmology with
the earth's eastern horizon

The cosmology of the Hieros Gamos, the 21st century icon
predicted by C.G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli;
Delivered into contemporary thought by
Richard Tarnas, author of "Cosmos and Psyche,"
excerpted below:


"Humanity's 'progress of knowledge' and the 'evolution of consciousness' have too often been characterized as if our task were simply to ascend a very tall cognitive ladder with graded hierarchical steps that represent successive developmental stages in which we solve increasingly challenging mental riddles, like advanced problems in a graduate exam in biochemistry or logic. But to understand life and the cosmos better, perhaps we are required to transform not only our minds but our hearts. for our whole being, body and soul, mind and spirit, is profoundly affected by the degree to which all our facilities -- intellectual, imaginative, aesthetic, moral, emotional, somatic, spiritual, relational -- enter the process of our knowing. How we approach 'the other,' and how we approach each other, will shape everything, including our own evolving self and the cosmos in which we participate. Not only our personal lives but the very nature of the universe may demand of us now a new capacity for self-transcendence, both intellectual and moral, so that we may experience a new dimension of beauty and intelligence in the world -- not a PROJECTION of our desire for beauty and intellectual mastery but an ENCOUNTER with the actual unpredictably unfolding beauty and intelligence of the whole. I believe that our intellectual quest for truth can never be separated from the cultivation of our moral and aesthetic imagination.

As Goethe recognized, it is often the case that the very faculties we require for our knowledge can be developed only through our receptive engagement with what we wish to comprehend, which transforms us in the very process of our inquiry. Thus, the study of archetypal forms opens the archetypal eye. And thus, the open encounter with the potential reality of an ANIMA MUNDI makes possible its actual discernment. In this view, only by opening ourselves to being changed and expanded by that which we seek to understand will we be able to understand at all. Such a shift involves gradually opening our awareness to a dimension of reality that, thought potentially of deep significance, may at first seem scarcely perceptible, the subtle 'patterns which connect' --patterns of meaning within and without, the delicate and elusive, the repressed and denied, that which is obscured by our certainties, that which suggest and intimates rather than commands and proves. Such a transformation in our approach to life requires, as Jung says, a new openness to our OWN 'other,' our interior other: our unconscious, in all its plenitude of forms. For here, perhaps, we begin to encounter the interior mystery of the cosmos itself."

Richard Tarnas
"Cosmos and Psyche"

Thursday, June 12, 2008

MAY 28 PROGRAM NOTES


John Knowles projection of "Solutio" onto James Knowles "Urban Crystals"


THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE:
In Five Elements

By

Lisa Paul Streitfeld

Thank you all for coming. This evening here in the Penthouse is a celebration for me and those of you who have participated in this multimedia experiment over the past 18 months that took place in the storefront Lab gallery below us. I want to thank my partners in this enterprise: first of all, the hotel owners James and Sue2 Knowles for hosting the event and providing much needed support and guidance for this vision. Matthew Semler, the director of the Lab Gallery, was a creative collaborator who always overcame challenges with me and setting up limitations when I needed them, even when I subsequently ignored them (like no nudity!). And most of all, I want to thank John Knowles, who has traveled with me on this transformational journey every step, the results showing in the videos he made that will be screened in sequence tonight.

I am grateful to the friends who contributed to the exhibitions with their art: Holly Crawford’s paintings and Yuliya Lanina’s three dimensional characters in FIRE; Daniel Rothbart with his vessels and striker in AIR; and Tatyana Stepanova and Michael Manning, whose paintings contributed to the HIEROS GAMOS while the musician Lutz Rath collaborated with the live performance. Gae Savannah and Richard Humann entered the space to exchange fruitful dialogue. I am particularly grateful to Selma Karaca for her kundalini couture which gave me the structure to undergo repeated transformations and James Knowles who’s Urban Crystals are bringing a new medium, sculpture, into this multimedia presentation tonight.

I welcome all of you who are new participants and hope that you will be engaged enough to ask questions during the course of the evening. This journey originates in my personal discovery of alchemy and a two decade development of incorporating this ancient art into my experimental autobiographical fiction. Yet, like all alchemical works, it is open to new interpretations while continually undergoing a process of greater refinement. So I welcome all your feedback. Let’s make this a truly interactive experience!

Tonight brings me to a crucial convergence point. The mythical narrative has been brought to a conclusion posted earlier in May, followed by an Appendix revealing the scientific hypothesis guiding the year long experiment. Yet, what remains is delivering this new form of storytelling to the public. As a critic, I have been searching for new art forms to embrace an emerging 21st century icon, the Hieros Gamos. After putting together works of fine art for ICONS OF THE 21st CENTURY in January 2006 at the Lab, I embarked on a long cherished dream – to do a gallery performance/installation devoted to my unique form of literature originating in the mind of Pierre Teilhard Chardin: "For the observers of the Future, the greatest event will be the sudden appearance of a collective humane conscience and a human work to make."

In both form and substance, THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE, manifests the icon to which it is devoted - the Hieros Gamos - by making a personal journey on earth, the art gallery, universal through the Internet. With this unity, the blogel (a term coined by literary critic Jeffrey Wright) was born.



NOTES ON ALCHEMY

The ancient art of alchemy was the practice of transmuting lead into gold, the metal of royalty. When Carl Jung examined the alchemical texts in the 20th century he discovered the alchemists were performing these rites as a cover for personal transformation through the four elements – FIRE, WATER, EARTH and AIR in order to reach the exalted state symbolized as the marriage of Sol and Luna during an eclipse.

This process of injecting spirit into matter was to be achieved in the goal of creating the Philosopher’s Stone which emanated the quintessential element known as the Hieros Gamos or sacred marriage of the opposites. This cosmic consciousness can be achieved through the path of the serpent power through the body.

The serpent power is known in yoga as the kundalini, which means coiled. This energy rests as the base of the spine. When it is awakened, it is transformed through the seven chakras to the top of the head where the sacred marriage between god and goddess takes place. Formal systems of alchemy have seven levels – one for each chakra.

All the occult systems were devoted to the rebirth of this energy, which was the feminine face of the divine repressed by western religions. How many of you have read the Da Vinci Code? Well, the secret society to which Sophie’s grandfather belonged was devoted to the honoring of this female power and worshiping the icon of the Hieros Gamos through sacred rituals.

Now this occult journey was always shrouded in mystery. This was so not only because it was considered a path of magic and therefore condemned as heresy by the Church. It was also because the initiate who attempted to raise this energy through the spinal column was tempting madness when this energy burned out of control. Today there is less danger of this because of all the products and procedures devoted to purification and containment of this energy.

The simplified system that I am presenting tonight was developed over a period of years while I was living in East Hollywood, supporting myself as a script analyst and devoting myself to metaphysical study. My father, a devotee of Muktanada, was a pioneer in Kundalini research. I experienced a kundalini opening at his funeral in 1983. This made my life unstable over the following decade but I managed to stay sane through three practices: healing, alchemy and writing. I went to a healer who balanced my chakras and literally channeled energy into my feet so I would stay grounded. I subsequently met an alchemist who gave me a medallion of alchemical mercury that focused my energy on my chakra of choice. And finally, I began feverishly writing as an outlet for all the cosmic energy streaming through my body. Because I always wrote about my personal journey, the alchemical path of transformation established the natural structure for my story telling.

The structure I created simplifies the alchemical transformation to the five elements in the following order: FIRE, WATER, EARTH, AIR & HIEROS GAMOS. Because this energy of my awakening manifested as erotic attraction while living below the Hollywood sign, I was always attracting characters right out of Central Casting that seemed to view an interaction with my pursuit of the Hieros Gamos as an audition for New Age comical love dramas. So, my alchemical structure quickly began to reflect in my literature the stages of falling in love combined with an intense inquiry into whether a love predicated on a 21st century icon, the Hieros Gamos, could be Real. I developed THE ALCHMEY OF LOVE as a PowerPoint presentation in 2006 as a talk on Single’s Night at Caramoor. This led to my proposing the multimedia exhibition to Matt Semler at the Lab Gallery. The result was truly a revelation: a new form of reality writing instantaneously disseminated globally causing the magical effects of my subliminal form of literature to manifest nearly simultaneously, and oftentimes beforehand.

This is what I want to share with you tonight. How diving deeply into the personal results in the universal. Magic happens as thought precedes form. Self-publishing through the Internet is the quickest and cheapest path to self-determination that exists. The commitment of owning a thought and injecting it into Cyberspace makes it instantaneously Real with practice. The hard part of this practice, of course, is ownership. Thoughts need to be attached to a firm identity for Self-Realization to occur.

Tonight, I will be reading the prologue to each Element which set the stage for the exhibition interpreted through video. Afterwards I will relate the outcome of the experiment which recorded in the blogel.

What I hope to convey is the magic that happens to an individual embarks on the path of self-determined individuation which reverberates in the immediate environment. The alchemists were forever repeating experiments as a path to perfection. The fire might be too hot, the chemical composition off, the planets might not be in the right alignment. So many things could go wrong, but they sacrificed everything to keep trying again and again to achieve the perfection of their art.

In developing my unique form of alchemical literature, I was held underground for two decades, without any offers of publication or requests for reading, so I might have the refinement emanated through this experiment. Ignited by an erotic attraction which deposited me directly into FIRE, the passage through each element initially took years, then months. But after 20 years of conscious practice in alchemy, I got it down to the five day exhibition. Even then, I needed to fully process events daily in order to keep devoted to my rules of posting every night. One breakthrough resulted in an insight that led to another until they piled up in the text as a multidimensional language interlocking images with words through symbols charged with erotic power.

So, please join me as I attempt to re-create this experience of falling in love – with a new form of literature worthy of the 21st century!

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE: APPENDIX A

"In the dream I drew an oscillation process beneath the window – actually two oscillations, one beneath the other. By turning to the right from the curves, I try to see the time on the clock. But the clock is too high, so that doesn’t work. Then the dream continues. The ‘dark unknown woman’ appears. She is crying because she wants to write a book but cannot find a publisher for it. In this book there is apparently a great deal of material on time symbolism – e.g., how a period of time is constituted when certain symbols appear in it. And at the end of one page of the book, there are the following words, read aloud by the ‘voice’: ‘The definite hours have to be paid for with the definite life, the indefinite hours have to be paid for with the indefinite life.’”


On January 23, 1938, Wolfgang Pauli, the father of modern science, had the above dream. I located it in the appendix of the book, Atom and Psyche, as I was preparing an art exhibition entitled Icons of the 21st Century.

The dream describes where we stand today as we enter the chaos preceding the resurrection of the psyche signified by the December 21, 2012 Winter Solstice alignment of the sun with the Galactic Center. The double oscillation is the symbol for Aquarius and the unseen clock represents the timing of the manifestation in the collective view represented by the window.

Like Pauli in his dream, we can no longer see time because time is no longer moving in a linear fashion. The voice alludes to the difficult passage to Jean Gebser’s “ever present origin,” the abyss at the center of the Milky Way, envisioned by the Mayans as the World Tree, a symbol for the creation and ordering of the universe. The axis of Earth/Sky at the Galactic Center is where the cosmos was divided into four quarters, each oriented to one of the cardinal points representing the “beginning of time.” This geometry marks the time and place where definite and indefinite time will converge.

Like the woman in Pauli’s dream, I was struggling to determine a “period of time constituted when certain symbols appear” through 20 years of compulsive writing from the collective unconscious. The journey that began with a kundalini awakening propelled me into a career as an art critic intent on finding symbols for “the beginning of time” in millennial art. It was a personal quest with a universal aim: to determine what was this myth I was destined to live by the circumstances of my birth and relate it to a new vision of art in the 21st century.

Kundalni Awakening

My father, Neo-Reichian clinical psychologist, was at the forefront of the Human Potential Movement in the 1960’s. After a decade of experimentation, he exhausted the western approaches to consciousness and gave up his worldly possessions to become a disciple of Swami Muktananda. By the end of the 1970’s, he left the Oakland ashram to research the kundalini. Co-founding the Kundalini Clinic in San Francisco, he healed individuals whose psyches were torn asunder by eruptions of the force known as the “serpent power.” He was about to bring this knowledge into the collective consciousness when he had a fated encounter with a group of women on a mountaintop in India who transmitted enlightenment through trance. These were devotees of Raja yoga, the highest form of this discipline that attempts to bring the body and psyche into spiritual union.

When my father died of a heart attack in 1983, I was working as a financial reporter in Mexico City. It seemed that his hand had reached out through his coffin because it was at his funeral that my kundalini was awakened by one of his spiritual sisters who had such elevated energy she seemed to walk on air. Cupping her hands over the crown of my head, she opened my crown chakra. I have always been an open channel but my body was unprepared for this influx of spiritual energy.

For years afterwards the only constant in my life was instability. I bounced between the opposites of love and hate, an imbalance arising from the paradox of the archetypal “wounded healer” who learns to heal by attending to one’s own psyche. The only person who could have helped my condition was dead. I traveled between various cities and the fourth dimension with frequent out of body visions. I appealed to astrologers and psychics only to be told: “You are living out a collective myth.” None of them could tell me what it was. There didn’t seem to be any precedent for a father whose earthly departure ignited his daughter’s occult powers.

Finally, I landed in Los Angeles where even during the height of the New Age movement I was looked at with alarm when I uttered the dreaded word: kundalini. As my path unfolded, however, I came to understand my father’s role in bringing this unseen energy into consciousness. I met Anodea George, the author of a seminal book on the charkas (The Wheels of Life) and discovered an acknowledgement to my father for his “pioneering kundalini research.” I befriended a beautiful Sikh woman, a publicist for gurus, who introduced me to Yogi Bijan, who brought the technology of kundalini yoga to America. And so I learned to control the desire that Christianity had associated with the feminine and taught to repress through the myth of St. Michel slaying the dragon. Ironically, the myth I needed for my healing was imbedded on the walls of temples in my adopted home of Mexico. Under the Great Eclipse of 1999, I discovered the serpent wall in the ancient Toltec city of Tula as the journey of Venus from Morning to Evening Star through my Mexican guide’s interpretation. This ancient myth resurrects the Sacred Marriage for a new age, thereby delivering the full expression of the divine feminine, her light and dark phases, into consciousness.

The Myth of Quetzalcoatl

Last summer, the celebrity obsessed media offered multiple images of the “dark unknown woman” archetype reoccurring in Pauli’s dreams. The so-called “wild women” -- Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton – let loose their kundalini energy in public while thumbing their noses at the corporate controlled mainstream media that continues to demean the female spirit. Their antics gave a face to the dark matter in space now being acknowledged by scientists. The genie is out of the bottle and my discoveries in the Aztec ruins of Mexico provided the wisdom of how to get it back in.

The kundalini power is key to the mystery surrounding 2012. We need only look at a star map to see the 13th constellation straddling the Galactic Center personified as a human figure riding a serpent. Linked to Quetzalcoatl, this figure reflects the human mastery of the dark feminine that has been repressed by western religion for several millennia. A conscious surrender to this power means resurrecting the anima mundi that Pauli expected to uncover beneath the collapsing quantum wave.

The raising of the kundalini was key to the mystery traditions that held the divine feminine in high esteem as Sophia, goddess of wisdom. The feminine power is unseen but can be made conscious through behavior. As Venus disappeared from the horizon last summer, the antics of the tabloid queens in our celebrity-obsessed culture competed for attention. After rising in Leo, the sign ruling celebrity, and continuing in her active Morning Star phase, the mystifying death of Heath Ledger captured the headlines. Allegedly named after the dark brooding Heathcliff, Ledger was propelled into fame after creating a character propelled by a kundalini attraction that, in the history of cinema, had never been so boldly presented on screen. The serpent power propelled this actor into a contemporary myth off-screen as well: the real life sacred marriage partner to his on-screen wife. Yet the difficulty in holding the public face of this emerging archetype flung this talented artist down the spiral into the dark face of Venus. His marriage broke up and he became the drug- addicted consort to the wild woman archetype.

We get daily doses of the myth of descent with Britney Spears psychotic breakdown, a drastic fall from power that gives a contemporary identity to the legions of unknown women imprisoned, hospitalized or condemned witches after this energy erupted in their bodies. The spiritual feminine arises most visible with her dark face so we acknowledge the potential of this energy pulsating through the body to wake us up and make us whole.

The Geometry of Wholeness

What does wholeness look like?

In a lengthy correspondence with Carl Jung (www.psychovision.com), Pauli expressed his belief that the hexagram is the configuration for the icon of the 21st century.

On January 23, 1997 a hexagram appeared in the heavens under a spectacular Jupiter/Uranus/Neptune alignment in Aquarius. Astrologers and metaphysicians declared this configuration as the gateway to the Age of Aquarius (gaiamind.com). Predating the Jewish religion, the hexagram, known as the Star of David or Seal of Solomon, symbolizes the unity of masculine and feminine into the sacred marriage of opposites.

I was alerted to this configuration because it took place during my solar return. Three weeks later, I attended a historic San Francisco conference that brought astrologers and scientists together for the first time. The event was planned for the Jupiter/Uranus conjunction by the organizer, Richard Tarnas (author of Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos & Psyche), who declared the Hieros Gamos as the icon of the 21st century. In September of 2000, I attended another historic conference organized by the New York Open Center on Hermeticism in the Italian Renaissance. There I learned of the practice of Marsilio Ficino whose hermetic practice of bringing heaven down to earth inspired numerous Renaissance works of art.

Bringing the Hieros Gamos into Form

I was so inspired by Ficino’s model and the manner that he ignited the west with a new humanistic vision with his small group of like=minded individuals attuned to the motions of the planets, that I decided to do the same in the art world.

With the ambition of bringing the Hieros Gamos archetype into form in accordance with celestial timing and the “sacred space” of the art gallery, I embarked on a series of actions reciproques timed for the January 23 anniversary. The place I selected was the Lab Gallery of the Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington Avenue. A few blocks from Warhol’s original factory, this was the ideal “middle realm” situated on the clearly defined geometrical grid of Manhattan to bring heaven down to earth through hermetic acts aimed at bringing the emerging archetype into form. The premiere year, 2005, was a dinner/spoken word performance with the legendary avant-garde critic/artist Richard Kostelanetz as guest of honor. Through spontaneous performance, three outstanding New York poets -- Valery Oisteanu, Max Blagg and Edwin Torres -- narrated the trajectory of 20th century Spoken Word to create a new language for the Hieros Gamos, reflecting the integration of right/left brain.

In 2006, I launched an exhibition investigating the iconography of the Hieros Gamos in contemporary art. Icons of the 21st Century opened on January 20 with 23 works and a window performance by Laurel Jay Carpenter, Red Woman, which created a spiral through a train of 100 red dresses that snaked into the gallery. As postulated by Pauli, this signature piece demonstrated the resurrection of Eros as fundamental to the emerging archetype. On January 23, I hosted a dinner with the gallery director Matt Semler in which I constituted Pauli’s dream in the window by marking the symbols. The rectangle was the dinner table whose participants listened to my gallery talk triggered by the unseen cosmological time clock – the astrology chart. Thus the public marking of symbol constituted the passage of the dream images into consciousness.

I continued to identify with the “dark unseen woman” in Pauli’s dream who cried because she couldn’t get published. For my next January 23 project, I decided to launch a vehicle for immediate global publication. I invented a new form, the blogel, (www.thealchemyoflove.blogspot.com) enabling me to publish as I write. This goal was to be achieved by the public transformation of the kundalini in the body evidenced by an integrated style of writing. The intent was to create a visual language reflecting the passage of the serpent through the chakras that approximated the seven stages of alchemy. For practical purposes, I followed the system I created in my experimental fiction and reduced the stages to five elements evoked in five chapters collectively entitled The Alchemy of Love. The performance in the storefront gallery was to be a public manifestation of Pauli’s dream in which he “drew a double oscillation beneath a window”. The double wave of the Aquarian symbol is reflected in the integration of conscious/unconscious in a holistic style of writing utilizing both sides of the brain.

The alchemical experiment was initiated with a ritual ceremony in the gallery. Under the Moon/Venus conjunction in Aquarius at 12:18 PM, January 20, a priestess established a sacred space to birth the Aquarian Age icon. The second day of the writing performance was January 23. The entry Flame: Page Six presented the emerging icon of the Hieros Gamos in the context of the celebrity obsessed media dominated culture as the starting point for the alchemical journey. I spent the night on the bed in the center of the gallery and published the entry at the moment of my solar return shortly after dawn on January 24 when there was a line-up of Aquarian planets (Sun, Mercury, Venus and Neptune) on the horizon. In hermetic fashion, I was realizing my astrological imprint for the year that required delivering the face of the feminine to the collective consciousness.

The performance was to demonstrate how synchronicities regulate consciousness into time and space. I embarked on the first stage of the performance with a narrative arising from Pluto’s recent demotion from planet to asteroid. The intent was to remake the myth of Persephone’s “disappearance” as empowerment rather than victim. This reflected my disappearance into the collective unconscious (currently summed up in the media by Britney Spears’ descent into psychosis) resulting from my kundalini awakening during my father’s funeral.

During the year of performances, I plunged into the life/death cycle required by the successive stages of alchemy. While launched into AIR on September 24 I had forgotten all about Persephone when a gentleman from Liberia appeared at the window marveling that I had created an African shrine with my 19 unpublished manuscripts arranged in the form of a pentacle. “I see us dancing together,” he said and declared that he wanted to take me to Liberia as his wife. Persephone had imposed herself into the experiment through the arrival of a suitor from a country named for the liberation of the ex-slaves who founded it. Liber is the stem of Libra, the sign of Venus which rules the opposites that Persephone straddled in her dual role as underworld bride of Pluto and daughter of Ceres surfacing in spring to celebrate new life.

This synchronicity infused me with the consciousness identity that subsequently released me from the control of the Persephone myth and freed me to experience the Aquarian icon of equal partnership. The new myth began to enter the collective conscious under a Pluto/Jupiter line up on the Galactic Center on Dec 11, 2007 prior to the birth of the Sun at the Winter Solstice. During a meditation on that date, I met Jonathan Phillips, who subsequently invited me to help organize Evolver: Wake Up and Dream.

The final segment of the Lab experiment took place on January 23, 2008. The centerpiece of the exhibition was Eclipse, a chalkboard in the form of a black sphere under Tatyana Stepanova’s Waterfall sculpture representing the Aquarian cycle of eclipses bringing the third and final wave ushering the planet into the Age of Aquarius. Heaven was brought down to earth through an initial performance drawing the astrology chart for sunset on January 23.

This final stage of the birth of the Hieros Gamos was commemorated through a collaborative performance in which the Full Moon in Leo made a direct opposition to the Neptune/Mercury conjunction in Aquarius. I began by drawing the astrology chart of the performance on Eclipse and writing Pauli’s dream on the empty wall beside the projected narrative of the revival of the Lost Bride uniting with the Resurrected Groom through a video interweaving recent series by allegorical painters Tatyana Stepanova (Russia) and Michael Manning (U.S.). Stepanova painted the upcoming solar eclipse in Aquarius/Leo while I entered the light projected by the paintings to integrate Pauli’s dream symbols with the astrological symbolism of 2012 while Lutz Rath (Germany) synchronized my movements to his playing the violincello. My last act, which closed the performance, was painting the double oscillation image from Pauli’s dream in the window as the sign of Aquarius. In keeping with the final stage of alchemy, the experience was blissful.

The New Paradigm Leap

Pauli’s January 23, 1938 dream took place five days after the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris. Saturn, the timer, was at Zero degrees Aries, the exact degree rising at noon on the Winter Solstice 2012. This exhibition introduced the public to the collective unconscious, which Pauli was exploring with Carl Jung through an intense collaboration regarding the emergence of the Aquarian Age archetype uniting personal and universal through the dream.

In keeping with the goal of the five-chapter installation/performance, my personal emergence into the Aquarian Age archetype took place in a January 25 performance through the submergence into the light projections refracted by Waterfall. The performance, Infinity, was projected onto a mannequin wearing a Selma Karaca Kundalini Couture creation entitled Waterfall which transformed the innovated the corset into a Mobius Strip. This ingenious work represented not only fashion and art coming together, but the ultimate liberation of women to express holistically. The hallway projection of my Waterfall performance at the Lab onto the Waterfall garment worn by the mannequin during Evolver: Wake Up and Dream provided the visual synchronicity by which the Hieros Gamos archetype passed into the collective unconscious.

A tarot reader declared afterwards that the cards she kept turning up during the event indicated a heart opening. This was my experience during a 1:00 AM chakra balancing session as well. Just as Waterfall was at the center of Eclipse in the Lab, the heart was at the center of the Mobius Strip of the Waterfall. Both of these works were made by Aquarian artists and the synchronicity of the matching titles of their seminal works were magical manifestations of the Aquarian symbol of the Waterbearer surfacing under the shadow of an eclipse cycle integrating mind (Aquarius) with heart (Leo). This delivery of image back to its source as magic (www.brooklynrail.org/2006/07/film/magic-and-images), as postulated by art critic David Levi Strauss, brought 20 years of alchemical experiments to a crescendo realized by my synchronous performance with the avant-garde magician of sound, Lutz Rath.

The immediate publication of symbols uniting Pauli’s dream (indefinite time) with live performance (definite time) on the anniversary of his January 23 dream reflect a new era in which mythical content of the collective unconscious is instantaneously made conscious through the World Wide Web. This inquiry into consciousness in time and space moved me from the role of critic/observer to performer/participant. Immediately prior to the performance, my sister contacted me with a dream.

In this dream, the timekeeper was no longer the old man with an hourglass imaged in western time but a crone. This could indicate a return to lunar time as postulated by Daniel Pinchbeck in his book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. My sister, a Capricorn, was on one side of the timekeeper while I, an Aquarius, was on the other. The dream represented the timely integration of the two planets ruling Aquarius that bring heaven (Uranus) down to earth (Saturn). In this personal exchange with my sister, the filmmaker of Female Perversions, I was given a message regarding the resolution to the dilemma of the unpublished woman in Pauli’s dream who has written “a great deal of material on time symbolism – e.g. how a period of time is constituted when certain symbols appear in it.” Having this essay published on Reality Sandwich is a realization of the dreams that tie the father of modern science to the present dilemma of the long repressed divine feminine in giving voice to the experience of its emergence.

This bold new direction that art takes in the 21st century returns us to our ancient roots in shamanism revived by Ficino, the influential humanist philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. Hermetic practice revisions creative acts in time and space as mediations between heaven and earth. My real time creative manifestation of Pauli’s dream established a literal middle path on the gallery floor between definite time (the astrological chart of the performance) and indefinite time (the dream). By forging the path of the “in between” through the tension of the opposites, the artist guides a new cosmology into the culture as was done in ancient times when the priests determined the timing of sacred ceremonies through their knowledge of planetary relationships. Thus we have a return to the model of the Italian Renaissance, when Marsellio Ficino inspired artists to revision humanism with his hermetic infusion of astrology into everyday life through practices such as the revival of orphic hymns paying homage to the planetary gods.

To bring the knowledge of 2012 into the body through everyday rituals establishes a process of an evolutionary consciousness in our bodies. Daily acts of consciousness in time and space is how we can travel the middle bath that brings the icon of the Hieros Gamos in our psyches. And here we have a tradeoff for surrendering our obsession with consumption that is driving our planet into ecological ruin – to fill ourselves with the spirit of holism contained in this new archetype. It may seem like a minor accomplishment in the face of such grave challenges, yet multiply one raised consciousness by the potential of millions hooked into the Internet and you have a collective leap into a New Paradigm of an interconnected universe.

Friday, April 18, 2008

CONCLUSION: AS ABOVE, SO BELOW


Bow Bridge Reflected


I.

One, two, three
Four, five
Six

Six seeds
Of the pomegranate
Ingested by Persephone
In the Underworld

Six seeds
For the six months of abstinence
Six seeds
To summon the Lovers
Surrender, her body said

And so she did
Six seeds prompting
Six visitations underground
Six pairs of twins
With their promise
Of transcendence

Thrice Great Hermes
The patron of alchemy
Winged god
Extending high
To Olympus
And low
To the underworld

Only Mercurius
Promised release
From the eternal cycle
Life, death, rebirth
Hermes the agent of alchemy
Alighting in his chariot
To carry you
Through the Seventh Gate
Venus and the Moon
On a crescent boat

And so it happens
Precisely
Six months after Pluto
Appeared from Liberia
At the Lab window
Proclaiming you as his wife
And insisting you bleach
Your hair blonde
For the underground journey

The seventh pair of twins
Balancing male and female
Light and darkness
With precision timing
Of the clock maker
On the Vernal Equinox
To the penthouse
Above the Laboratory
With the Sun in his pocket

Six sets of twins
#1. The fossilized art historian
Reducing you to tears
#2. The limping metallurgist
Aligned with underworld power
#3. The globetrotting midget
Divided by his finite game
#4. The Greek high priest with his
Spirit chorus of thousands
#5. The Maypole dancer swallowed
By his Shadow
#6. The hallucinogenic storyteller
Bearing the cross of the wounded male

And then
Seven appears
The number of mystical completion
In his button down male elegance
The gardener
With his six seeds
And tools for cultivation
The pen to till the fertile soil
Of the resurrected Goddess

He lets you guide him through
The Classical portals to
Origin of the World
Saturn’s scythe to clear the ground
Jupiter’s bow and arrow to point the direction
Uranus’s Tower to electrify the growth
And Sun for warmth!

In the penthouse
Of the urban temple
For the ancient goddess
Persephone at a banquet
In her pink spiral dress
The first blush of spring
Celebrating one cycle closing
And a new one opening in

The resting place
Of the ancient goddess
Who gave birth
To the Aquarian Age goddess
Her corset engaging the heart
In an infinite game
Uniting heaven & earth

And so, he invites you
Thrice Great Hermes
Into his mansion
With its many rooms
Lined with books
Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, German
He is fluent in all languages of man
And the gods who speak in symbols

He greets you
On his love seat
With kisses
On your hand
Then your mouth
Lifts you on his winged chariot
Fueled by desire

“I want you natural,” he says
Stroking the arch of your foot
Worshipping your body
As a temple
Brimming with Aquarian spirit

Placing you in a constellation
All your own, where
The stars and earth dance
In rapturous wonder
And the lover’s caress
Carries a command:
Lover, come plow my field!
And gods and mortals are intertwined
In desire’s heavenly breath

One, two, three
Four, five
Six seeds consumed
By the Lovers
And pleasure is born
Under Jupiter’s Bow

Crossing the bridge
You confront your future
The nuptials decreed
By Trice Great Hermes
Pointing the direction
Through the chakras
Of Central Park

II.


KristInanna's Bow

He lets you guide him
Through the portals
Of visual knowledge
A Zig-Zag trajectory of history
To the Origin of the World
The inner sanctum
The cave where the learned
Are reborn as Sages
Of a New Era in cyclical time

And so
The timers of our beliefs
Explode
From the seismic waves
Seizing the body
Rising you up
From the cosmic waters
Raging under Bow Briddge
Your destiny and his
Forged together

The Libra mirror cracked
In the shape of the Yod
Finger of God
Pointing to a mutual seed
Gemini generated nupiital
Ceremony
Wedding of Opposites
Heaven & Earth

The cracked mirror
Guided by Justice
Broken into a Yod
Shape of destiny
Guiding a mutual surrender
With Saturn’s rise
From Underground

He trades places
Enters the Underworld
As you rise
To luminosity
With Mars in the sign
Of Superstar
Ruling this cycle
Of the Pentagram

Into the most fertile form
Of Completion
The Hexagram
Shaped by our own
Individual paths
Merged from common purpose

A perfect hexagram
Makes for the best possible outcome
Of this Alchemical Experiment
And together you find it
On Beltane Eve
Mercurius guides you

To the Fifth Chakra
The Heart of Central Park
Toth with his golden loincloth
In the temple of the four seasons
On Beltane Eve

In perfect timing
Quetzalcoatl who catalyzed you
On this path
Appears before you
In the flesh

A perfect mirror met
In the Hermaphrodite
Inanna migrating in Persephone
As you rise to the distant arc
The land with no mirrors
But for you Beloved

Who joins you from Underground
To unite in the perfect marriage
Foretold by the Hermaphrodite
Performing the cosmic myth
In the Masked Gallery
As above, so below

Having passed through
Fire, Water, Earth and Air
To reach the Hieros Gamos
The icon sought through your 27-year passage
Of Venus & Luna passage
in the Crescent boat
Rising under Jupiter’s bow
Raised on stage
By Kristi Inanna

Philosopher’s Stone
Polished in the rim
Of the alchemical marriage
Sol & Venus
Marked by birth
Forged into destiny
By Saturn, the timekeeper

The Lovers’ bodies fused
By the Sun
Testimony to the Great Work
Where all opposites are one
In the great mirror of cosmos and psych
As above, so below

Thursday, February 7, 2008

EVOLVER: WAKE UP & DREAM


"Flight of Fancy": C. Eule Dance


"Infinity"
Waterfall Couture: Selma Karaca (www.selmakaraca.com)
Video: John Knowles (www.rogersmithnews.com)


Hoop Dancers


Flight of Fancy: C. Eule Dance (ceuledance.org)


Aero Dancers


The magnificent art of Michael Robinson


Bill Kennedy's Dream Geese


Daniel Pinchbeck


Avante-Garde Critic & Poet Valery Gallery & Ruth


Michael Brownstein reading "World on Fire" in Communion Square Cafe

HIEROS GAMOS: EPILOGUE




THE AUTHOR IN BLISS

Saturday, January 26, 2008

HIEROS GAMOS: DESCENT OF THE GODDESS


CONSCIOUSNESS IN TIME & SPACE


EVOKING MERCURY-NEPTUNE


INFNITY


ENTERING INFINITY


PASSAGE BETWEEN WORLDS


THE DARK WOMAN ARRIVES


THE HIEROS GAMOS


DESCENT OF THE GODDESS


GROUNDING THE ENERGY


FACE FORWARD


WINGS UNFURLING


FLIGHT