CHAPTER FIVE

The Lunar Era:
Participation in Cosmic Soul

My heart is longing for a lost knowledge, slipped down out of the minds of men.

                                            — from the Sanscrit poem “Black Marigolds,” Chaura-panchasika, 1st century AD

My life quest has been a search for lost knowledge—a lost meta-narrative which, like a precious mosaic, lies buried beneath the cultural deposit of centuries. In this quest I took as a talisman the dream about the iron phallic structure rising from the surface of the moon that I described in Chapter One and recall here:

I am traveling in a rocket to the moon and on landing there, see that a huge rusty iron construction shaped like the Eiffel Tower has been built on it, so huge that it towers high above its surface. The moon itself is a dead planet, all vegetation has dried up and wasted away. There are no human beings anywhere and no animals—no life at all. I travel across the moon’s surface in a train, staring out of the window at this desolate landscape that looks as if it had been blasted by a nuclear bomb or shrivelled by a terrible drought. Then I find myself precipitated into a large pool of water.

           This dream led me far back into the past in search of a lost way of relating to the world, one that had long preceded modern industrial culture and the current scientific worldview that regards nature as something to be exploited by man. It soon became apparent to me that the moon and the sun have had an immense influence on the way we perceive reality. The great myths that have arisen from our observation and contemplation of these celestial bodies have shaped whole eras. Because of their influence on us and our fascination with them, there have developed two primary meta-narratives or worldviews—one lunar, the other solar—which, over time-spans of many thousands of years, have structured and sustained great civilizations, East and West and profoundly influenced the way we think.
           We carry within us two different kinds of consciousness—possibly related to the two hemispheres of the brain, two different ways of knowing which gave rise to these meta-narratives or worldviews: an older instinctive “lunar” way of knowing and a more recent “solar” way of knowing, increasingly identified with the conscious ego and the rational mind. Over the course of thousands of years, one way of knowing replaced the other although, for many centuries, and in certain areas, they overlapped.
            This chapter and the next will define the lunar and the solar way of knowing, explore the difference between the lunar and solar eras and explain why the solar worldview gradually eclipsed the lunar one until little memory of the lunar worldview survived. (1) It withdrew, so to speak, into the unconscious. The dream above describes the plight of the lunar way of knowing in relation to the solar way that was superimposed upon it. In order to understand our own time, we need to know something of these two great meta-narratives and the circumstances which led to one replacing the other.
           Why does this matter? Because if we don't know the influences that have formed our way of thinking, we cannot step out of the frame and see what we need to do to change our beliefs and modify our behaviour nor can we reconnect with a living part of ourselves that has for too long been denied expression. A different experience of reality has been excluded from our vision.

Lunar Culture and a Living Cosmos
           Once upon a time, in a past so distant that we have no memory of it, the invisible and visible dimensions of life were imagined and instinctively experienced as a sacred unity. In the far distant eras which have become accessible to us only in the last century through the discoveries of archaeologists and anthropologists, the whole cosmos was envisioned as a living being and the manifest world was seen as an epiphany or showing forth of an unseen source which breathed it into being, animating and sustaining it. The air itself was experienced as the invisible emissary of that world—an “awesome mystery joining the human and extra-human worlds.” (2) It is difficult for us to imagine today what it was like to live in a time where the night sky was of supreme significance, where people studied the position and course of the stars in order to harmonize their lives with the life of the cosmos. They deduced that just as the stars emerged each night from the darkness of the night sky, so the visible universe was born from the dark mystery of the invisible. Everything - plants, trees, animals and birds as well as moon, sun and stars - was sacred, infused with divinity because each and all were part of a living, breathing, connecting web of life.
           Although this way of knowing was once experienced in many different places (and still survives today in certain indigenous cultures), Egypt has bequeathed to us one of the clearest images of this ancient worldview. The mythological imagery associated with two goddesses is of paramount significance for an understanding of the concept of the cosmos as a living maternal entity: Hathor - often interchangeable with Isis - and Nut. Hathor was Egypt’s oldest goddess, imagined as the nurturing Mother of the universe and as the creative impulse which flowed from the cosmic immensity of her being. It was she who endowed Pharoah with the divine power to rule Egypt. More specifically, Hathor was imagined as the Milky Way, whose milk nourished all life, yet she was also immanent within the forms of life, immanent in the statues that stood in her temples and in the beautiful blue lotus that was daily laid at her feet. (3) As Divine Mother, Hathor received the souls of the dead at the entrance to her sacred mountain, thought to be located behind the magnificent temple at Deir-el-Bahri that Queen Hatshepsut (1505-1484 BC) built to honor and house the goddess. Goddesses and gods were, at that time, believed to inhabit their temples. The Milky Way itself, in Egyptian as well as many other ancient cultures, East and West, was looked upon not only as the great stellar causeway that souls took as they entered and left this world but as the Great Mother, Source of All.
           The goddess Nut was the night sky, whose vast cosmic body was home to all the stars. When the Egyptians looked up at the night sky, they saw the body of this goddess, sparkling with the light of the stars. The sun god “died” into her body on his nightly descent into the underworld and was reborn from her at the dawn of a new day. Nut’s image was painted on the inside of coffin lids and sometimes on the base as well, as if to enfold the soul entrusted to her care in her cosmic embrace. There is a moving inscription to her on a fragment of stone in the Louvre:

O my mother Nut, stretch your wings over me;
Let me become like the imperishable stars,
like the indefatigable stars.
O Great Being who is in the world of the Dead,
At whose feet is Eternity, in whose hand is the Always,
O Great Divine Beloved Soul
Who is in the mysterious abyss, come to me.

           Presided over by the Great Mother, this era was characterised by a consciousness which participated, in the deepest imaginative sense, with the life of the cosmos and the life of the earth. It was a totally different way of perceiving and relating to life than the one we have now. I am not speaking here of a social system such as matriarchy nor of an imagined Golden Age or Garden of Eden. Life was as much a struggle for survival then as it is today in many parts of the world but then it was set in the context of a participatory way of living and being that was deliberately attuned to the rhythms of earth and cosmos and was grounded in a close observation of both. This way of living could be said to be the main characteristic of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic eras yet it is still alive and recognizable in a modern culture such as India's — not in the cities but in the places where people still maintain their ancient relationship with the spirits of the earth and with their goddesses and gods.
          Today we look back on this remote past with some arrogance and disdain as “superstitious,” congratulating ourselves that we have long outgrown its “magical” approach to life and not realizing that our present consciousness has developed out of this far more ancient and instinctive way of knowing which could be described as lunar because the moon was of supreme importance in that distant time. Jules Cashford’s extraordinary and detailed study of the moon and worldwide lunar culture—The Moon: Myth and Image, has helped me to understand the immense age, range of influence and significance of lunar culture. As she explains,

The essential myth of the moon is the myth of transformation. Early people perceived the Moon’s waxing and waning as the growing and dying of a celestial being, whose death was followed by its own resurrection as the New Moon. The perpetual drama of the Moon’s phases became a model for contemplating a pattern in human, animal and vegetable life, including the idea of life beyond death. It seemed that the Moon carried the image of eternity for early people, as well as the image of time. (4)

The Significance of the Moon
           The moon was our earliest teacher and the inspiration of some of the greatest myths of the ancient world: the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris, the Sumerian myth of the goddess Inanna’s descent to and ascent from the Underworld, the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece, and the later Christian myth of the birth, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, all carry the lunar theme of death and rebirth or regeneration. In the Christian calendar the date of Easter is still fixed in relation to the full moon nearest to the spring equinox. The moon for millennia has symbolized the mysteries of an invisible world, the mysteries of the goddess and the mysteries of the soul. The moon was the light shining in the darkness, the symbol of our own human consciousness which longs to understand the mystery of life.
           The moon gave us an image of sequence, duration and recurrence. It gave us an image of a law of life which was immutable, and a cyclical pattern of death and regeneration which governed all aspects of life. Because of its movement through its four phases, the moon carried the image of wholeness or completeness as well as sequence. The emergence of the crescent moon from the three days of darkness that preceded it gave us the image of the visible world emerging from an invisible one, a time-bound world from an eternal one, each connected to the other. The moon nourished the creative imagination, teaching us to observe and to wonder, helping us to understand the relationship between the Above (the invisible world associated with the starry cosmos) and the Below (the visible world)—a theme that, much later, was carried through into Hermetic philosophy, Kabbalah and Alchemy.
           Today, when we look up at the night sky, we are connected to the hundreds of generations of people who watched the circumpolar movement of the stars and the changing yet stable course of the luminous moon. Over thousands of years, they observed the connection between the cyclical rhythm of the four phases of the moon’s life and the rhythm of growth, maturation, death and regeneration in the life of the crops. As Alexander Marshack has shown in his book The Roots of Civilization, lunar notations in the Palaeolithic era were widespread and the earliest ones in Africa date to 40,000 BC. (5)
           People experienced the phases of their own lives—youth, maturity, old age, death and rebirth as woven into the rhythm and fabric of that greater life as well as the life of the earth. With the passage of countless millennia, people came to trust in the reappearance of the crescent moon, and to recognize that darkness was a time of transition between an old and a new phase of life. They came to apply this insight to themselves and to believe that, with death, they would be taken back into the womb of the Great Mother and reborn like the crescent moon. So the constant return of the crescent moon after the three days of darkness laid the foundation for trust in the survival of the soul and hope in the renewal of life after apparent death, and may have been the original inspiration of the belief in reincarnation. The life of the Great Mother was eternal, like the moon; the life of earth and all creatures and plants waxed and waned like the phases of the moon. As this lunar pattern was constantly repeated through aeons of time, it spoke to our imagination, giving rise to myths which endured for thousands of years. We began to perceive birth and death as a rite of passage for the soul as it journeyed between the visible and invisible dimensions of life, a journey that followed a path through the labyrinth of the starry cosmos. The ancestors were not lost to the living but were close by, available — through shamanic mediation — to counsel and guide. In lunar culture there was no final demarcation line between life and death or between death and rebirth.
           The constant rhythm of the moon's waxing and waning taught us to perceive light and darkness in relation to each other. It held them in balance rather than in opposition because the totality of the moon’s cycle embraced both light and dark phases and, therefore, symbolically included both life and death. Light and darkness were not polarized as they were later to become in solar culture, but were phases of the total cycle, so that there was always an image of a unifying whole which included both polarities. Out of this long lunar experience evolved the inexhaustible creativity of humanity. The mythology, astronomy, mathematics and the principle of divine law acctive in all life, which reached such brilliant expression in the Bronze Age, may have arisen out of this primordial observation of the moon.
           Over countless thousands of years, shamanic rituals and myths kept alive the sense of connection between this world and the other invisible world whose symbol, initially, may have been the mysterious dark phase of the moon. Out of that darkness the crescent was continually reborn—symbolically associated with the regeneration of the earth’s life and, as in India, with cosmic cycles lasting hundreds of thousands of years. Poets, artists, philosophers and musicians received their inspiration and their calling from the invisible world that the Egyptians called the “Duat” and the Greeks “The Immortal Realm”. The words spoken, the music heard, the dreams and visions seen came not from “inside” us, but from the cosmos, from goddesses and gods, from daemonic beings and the spirits of animals, trees, mountains and rivers as well as from the ancestors who were never thought of as ‘dead’ but who formed a continuous line of connection with the living. No one has described this invisible realm of soul better than Patrick Harpur in his book Daemonic Reality. (6)            At a heightened level of perception, the natural world was perceived as luminous and beautiful, almost transparent to that other world—a theophany or showing forth of it. Everything was alive. Everything had the ability to communicate—a stone as much as an animal, a tree or a spring gushing out of a crevice in the rock. In other words, nature was held to be intelligent and able to communicate with man. The invisible world had the potential to reveal itself in the flight of a bird, the stirring of the leaves of an oak tree, the ripples on a lake. Shamanic wisdom and ways of accessing the invisible dimension were passed from teacher to pupil for hundreds and even thousands of years. One modern book which describes this extraordinary transmission in relation to the world of the bee is Simon Buxton's The Shamanic Way of the Bee: Ancient Wisdom and Healing Practices of the Bee Masters. It tells the story of his initiation into this very ancient lineage.
           Today, the Maori shamans of New Zealand still believe that everything has its own life force: the stone has the life force of the earth itself, the bone the life force of all living things, the shell the life force of the energy of the sea. In carving these elements of life with the patterns they observe in nature, they carry this insight into their work so that it might bring healing power to the wearer and the community. The “life” of the stone, bone or shell is never lost. Its energy lives on in the wearer of the carving and is transmitted to the observer.
            It is now known that the builders of the megalithic culture whose splendid monuments are strewn all over Europe and throughout the world studied the yearly movements of the constellations and specific planets and stars as well as the course of the moon and the sun. They developed precise mathematical and astronomical skills to a remarkable degree, siting their sacred buildings in relation to the position of the sun and moon as well as to a specific constellation such as Cygnus, which was believed to be the destination or ‘cosmic home’ for the souls of the dead. Avebury, for example, was thought to have been originally oriented on Cygnus. (7) The role of these shaman-astronomers was to align the life of their communities with the movements of the heavenly bodies, even to create giant earthworks testifying to astonishing skills of engineering which maintained a world-wide grid connecting the magnetic fields of the earth with those of the cosmos. The network of ley lines in England and France, the Nazca formations in Peru, the dragon lines in China and many other examples which are now coming to light, bear witness to an astonishing capacity of ancient peoples in different places to create these networks of connection and to communicate with each other through telepathic abilities that we have lost. For countless thousands of years, these shamans journeyed into the Otherworld, bringing back what was seen and heard to help the human community to harmonize its life with the life of the earth and the life of the cosmos. (8)

The Great Mother
           The meta-narrative of lunar culture was primarily feminine in character—aware of and receptive to the presence of the eternal. The oldest known image of the eternal which presided over the Palaeolithic and Neolithic eras and lasted far into the Bronze Age was the Great Mother and it is her image that is, I believe, the origin of the idea of the soul of the cosmos. Certain forms such as the circle, the oval, the wavy line, the meander and the spiral are, as early as the Palaeolithic era, recognizable as her “signature”. These symbols — particularly the double or triple spiral — are found on the walls of caves, and were later engraved on the stones and dolmens, passage graves and temples of megalithic culture, such as the great temple of Newgrange in Ireland, Gavrinis in Brittany or the many temples of Malta. People identified the Great Mother with the immensity of the cosmos, with the Milky Way, with the moon, and with the life and fertility of the earth. The labyrinth and the spiral became at this early time, symbols of the connecting pathway between this world and the unseen cosmic dimension of the Great Mother's womb.
            These symbolic images tell us that at this time we were already aware of two dimensions of experience—this earthly one and the other invisible one, to which we were connected as if by an umbilical cord. Myth came into being in order to connect this world with that other one and to create a sacred space where the connection with the eternal would be kept alive and honoured through ritual, story-telling and the cultivation of the mythopoeic imagination.
            As Frederick Turner so brilliantly expressed it in his book Beyond Geography, The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness, “the gigantic and general purpose of archaic myth is the celebration of Life.” And, he continues, “Living myth must include and speak of the interlocking cycles of animate and vegetable life, of water, sun, and even the stones, which have their own stories. It must embrace without distinction the phenomenal and the numinous.” (9)

The Cave
           In Western Europe in the Palaeolithic era when the magnificent paintings we so admire were created, the cave was the most sacred place, the focus of the life of the tribe. Symbolically, it represented the womb of the Great Mother, the secret, hidden source of her regenerative power. It was from such mysterious places as the cave and the later megalithic temple-tomb that she was believed to bring forth the living and receive the souls of the dead back into herself for regeneration and rebirth. The cave may always have been a place where those to be initiated were taken, where rites of incubation were practised and the shamanic experience of death and rebirth evoked. The cave still symbolizes, in vision, dream and mystical experience, the deep, instinctual psychic level which gives access to revelation and communion with levels of consciousness beyond our normal range. People still seek out caves to hold special rituals for healing and communion with an invisible world.
           The approach to the sanctuary in these caves was formidably difficult, a ritual of initiation often requiring hours spent negotiating claustrophobic passageways. Imagine the people of south-western France and northern Spain, crawling and slithering through the entrails of the great caves in this area, gasping for breath with the effort, their only light in the pitch darkness coming from tiny lamps made of hollowed bone and filled with animal fat and juniper twigs. Imagine their fear that their light might go out. If it did go out the blackness was absolute. They had no means other than instinct of orientating themselves in that total darkness. Then, if all was well and they could see their path, they suddenly emerged into a huge cavern. Even now, as one retraces their path into the far recesses of a cave, awed and silenced by the weight of the darkness, one can feel what the people of this ancient time felt—one is inside the womb of the Great Mother, in the utter stillness, the mystery of darkness, at the very heart of life.
            In the furthest reach of the cave, in domed chambers, vast as a cathedral, but sometimes in narrow passages, these people painted and carved the magnificent animals we can see today. Even the image of an owl was included among the rhinoceros, felines, stags and horses in the recently discovered (1996) enormous Chauvet cave system in the Vaucluse area of France, whose date has been put at ca. 32,000 BC, nearly twenty thousand years older than the well-known Lascaux cave. These images show that the mythic imagination was supremely alive and able to find expression in this art form at this early date. The three friends - a woman and two men - who discovered this cave wrote in their book that they were so gripped by emotion that they were unable to utter a single word to each other. They felt as if the tens of thousands of years between themselves and the people who painted the magnificent animals on the cave walls were abolished; awed, they could feel the living presence and spirit of these artists and felt themselves to be intruders. (10)
           The animals, like the people who painted them, were one form of the teeming life of the Great Mother upon which human life depended. The rituals that connected the tribal shaman with the animal spirits beyond this world ensured the return of the animals and, therefore, the survival of the tribe or clan. The painted images of these caves are so remarkable because they suggest a well-developed community surviving over many thousands of years, with a continuity of mythological beliefs, images and rituals, and advanced imaginative and technical skills to express them. As far is now known, it seems that this area of France offers the earliest and most extensive examples of cave painting.
           The paintings of Lascaux were created some twenty thousand years after those in the Chauvet cave. They are now tragically affected by mould and may not long survive. One dramatic scene which may disappear forever because it is not reproduced in the modern replica of the original cave, is painted on one wall of a deep shaft at the far end of the cave, and is dated to ca.14,500 BC. It shows a dying bison transfixed by a spear standing next to a shaman with a bird’s head who lies with his arms outstretched, as if in a trance, his penis erect. His shaman's staff or pole surmounted by a bird, lies beside him. Mario Ruspoli, one of the last people allowed to photograph Lascaux describes his impressions of this mysterious painted sanctuary, eighteen feet below the main cave:

It is impossible for someone who has never descended to this point to imagine the dense, mystic, impressive atmosphere that reigns in a place so charged with occult power. One experiences a sort of metaphysical shock and begins to speak in a hushed voice…while the light travels along the vertical walls and suddenly reveals the famous scene. (11)

           Here, in an extraordinarily eloquent image, we see a man lying in an expanded state of consciousness, making a shamanic journey into another dimension, his bird head and the bird on the pole indicating that he is able to fly there like a bird, perhaps even pointing to a specific stellar destination such as the constellation of Cygnus, the swan. As Jules Cashford and I wrote in The Myth of the Goddess,

Shamans mediated between two worlds of human experience, and their flight into darkness took place, necessarily, in the most secret part of the cave where ordinary limits of perception could be more readily transcended.…The artist and the shaman were probably one and the same, as artists ever since have consistently claimed. Through their magical power to recreate the animal on the walls of the temple caves, they connected the tribe with the source of life that animated both human and animal, becoming themselves vehicles of that source, creators of the living form like the source itself. (12)

           This shamanic scene, the oldest so far discovered, suggests that by this time and possibly far earlier, humans had the ability to enter an expanded state of consciousness, probably with the help of an hallucinogenic plant, such as a specific mushroom but also by developing certain faculties through meditation and focused awareness. In this state, they communicated with the souls of animals and with ancestral spirits as well as with the source of life, as they then conceived it. These practices are now known to have existed at a very early date in Africa as well as Australia, North and South America and the Arctic circle and still exist today in indigenous cultures. Westerners now travel to the Peruvian jungle to participate in shamanic practices which open a door onto other dimensions in order to cure illness in the individual and the community. The idea of an expanded state seems alien and foreign to the consciousness we have today yet it is important that we become aware of it—as with the witness of this ancient image, because it can recall for us an innate capacity of our consciousness that, for most of humanity, has been closed down and forgotten. Anthropologists with an open mind, like Jeremy Narby in his book The Cosmic Serpent, show us what we have lost. (13)
           Apart from the bird’s association with Cygnus — usually the swan or goose — it is possible that certain animals in the Palaeolithic era were associated with specific star formations, or constellations, as they were in later times. In The Cygnus Mystery, Andrew Collins describes a BBC news story in August 2000 reporting that a Dr. Michael Rappenglück of Munich University considered the cave at Lascaux to be nothing less than a prehistoric planetarium with the spread-eagled form of the bird-man described above associated with three specific stars in the constellation of Cygnus. At that time, ca. 5,000-13,000 BC, Deneb, the brightest star in Cygnus, was the pole star. He also suggested that the black dots placed next to a large black aurochs or bull represented the star-group of the Pleiades. The bull itself he thought represented the constellation of Taurus which is close to the Pleiades. (14)
           Because people’s lives were so dependent on the animals, the cave rituals respected the animals, recognizing that the sacrifice of their lives made possible the survival of the humans who hunted them. The breaking of the divine order by the slaying of an animal required a ritual honoring of the animal’s spirit in order to ensure that it would consent to return to be hunted again and this necessitated a journey to the realm of spirit to request the return of the animal.

Lunar Culture and Participatory Experience
           In our modern world, fairy tales like the “Sleeping Beauty” may be the residual fragments of that forgotten participatory experience where forests were inhabited by creatures who would help or hinder us; where spirits of tree and mountain, stream and sacred spring could speak to us; where bears or frogs might be princes in disguise; and where shamans, old women, or old men living in the deep forest might offer us wise counsel, or birds bring us messages, warn us of dangers and act as guides. “Whoever denies the daemons,” wrote Plutarch in a later age, “breaks the chains that links the gods to men.” There are countless tales which describe how the hero or heroine who responds to the mysterious guidance of the animals or who helps them when others have ignored them wins the reward of the treasure and the royal marriage.
           Rituals like those of the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece strengthened the sense of participation in an unseen reality and gave initiates an experience of the immortality of the soul. The poet Pindar said of them: “Blessed are they who have seen these things. They know the end of life and they know the God-given beginnings.” In a culture where visionary experience was validated, people spoke with goddesses and gods in dream and vision. Birds were recognised as messengers of the invisible, very possibly because people dreamed about them in this role or even heard them as a voice speaking inside themselves. Intuitive sensibility and the ability to communicate with the spirits of plants taught people to gather, grind or distil certain herbs and plants for healing illness. Rites of incubation and healing were practised in many sanctuaries. Dreams and visions were of great importance in the diagnosis and healing of disease. Music was used to invoke the presence of an Otherworld that was the foundation of this world, and as real as this one. Everything was connected, everything was sacred. The shaman-healers who guided these cultures were trained to enter a state of utter stillness and to listen and observe what they heard and saw in an altered state of consciousness.

Cosmic Soul in Pre-Socratic Greece
           If we listen to the Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers of the sixth century BC we find that they carry forward the legacy of this lunar participatory experience and cannot be understood except in relation to it. For example, the words of Heraclitus, when he suggests that the soul is of unfathomable depth, retain the essence of that ancient perception. Thales of Miletus speaks of the “All” as being alive and full of daemons who are the agents of the one soul-substance. Anaximenes says that humanity and nature are fundamentally inseparable because both participate in the same underlying “substance” which he calls soul. (15) Pythagoras, after he was exiled to Crotona on the east coast of southern Italy, having spent forty years with the astronomer-priests of Egypt and Babylon, defined the mathematical laws which to him, embodied the intelligence, wisdom and mathematical harmony of the cosmos. He left these words to encourage us: “Take heart, for the human race is divine.” A few decades later, Parmenides (ca. 515 – ca. 450 BC), living at Velia, in southern Italy, describes his shamanic journey into the Underworld of the Goddess who takes his right hand in hers, telling him to transmit her teaching to the world of mortals. Parmenides had a great influence on his contemporaries and a long line of shaman teachers whose names are recorded on stone for over five hundred years is now known to have descended from him. (16)
           In the West, this shamanic view of reality was most highly developed in Egypt, from whence it was transmitted to Greece through the Greek philosophers, many of whom spent years studying with the astronomer-priests of Egypt. But if we look towards the East, we find the same idea of a universal cosmic ground in the Vedic texts of India and the Taoist philosophy of China, where it is specifically associated with the image of a Mother. In Greece, Plato (429-347 BC), in his Timaeus, was the first to give a name to the image of an all-embracing cosmic entity. It was surely from the participatory experience of an earlier age that he drew his concept of the soul of the world or soul of the cosmos, which he named psyche tou kosmou and describes as a “single Living Creature that encompasses all the living creatures that are within it.”            
           He speaks of a great golden chain of being as a hierarchy of participations, connecting the deepest level of reality with its physical manifestation, where every particle of life is a manifestation of the divine ground. However, Plato stands at the junction of two eras. In his philosophy there is a noticeable distancing of the phenomenal world from the world of spiritual or archetypal forms. There is a fading of the feeling of participation in an ensouled world, a disjunction between rational mind and sensory experience, an objective definition of soul and an emphasis on rational discourse rather than the numinous experience that was so intrinsic to shamanic cultures and, above all, to Egypt.
            Plotinus (204-70 AD, who was steeped in Platonic thought, developed further the concept of a universal soul that he called All-Soul or Soul of the All (anima-mundi), but in his philosophy also there is the idea that this material world is the lowest level in the hierarchy of divine emanation. (17) Implicit in his immensely influential definition of reality is the idea that nature is “lower” than spirit, body “lower” than mind, and that animals and plants are “lower” on the scale of being than humans even though all were an expression of the divine.
            This effectively broke the immediacy of the communion between the invisible and the visible worlds because it became associated with the idea of a hierarchical descent rather than the idea of the co-inherence of the divine and the natural worlds. With this disjunction in later Greek thought, body began to be split off from mind and soul; sensory from spiritual experience. The Egyptians held the body to be sacred and never despised it. What culturally-imposed belief or personal trauma could have led Plato to write in his Phaedrus, “Pure was the light and pure were we from the pollution of the walking sepulchre which we call a body, to which we are bound like an oyster to its shell.” Sadly, this idea greatly influenced the later formulators of Christian theology and was transmitted to Western civilization which was to develop on the foundation of a radical dissociation between spirit and nature, mind and body.
           Aristotle (384-322 BC) took this distinction further, defining matter as something inanimate — separate and distinct from spirit and soul — leading eventually to the modern idea that matter is “dead”. While Plato and Plotinus had a strong influence on the development of Christian doctrine, the mainstream teaching of Western philosophy and science followed Aristotle. His philosophy had a powerful influence on Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages. Aristotle draws a clear demarcation line between an ancient way of knowing and a new way whose emphasis is on the need for the rational human mind to distance itself from what it is observing rather than to participate empathically in the life of what is being observed. The increasing separation between these two ways of knowing was henceforth profoundly to influence the development of the philosophy, religion and science of the West. It was one of the primary factors which led to the loss of the lunar, participatory way of knowing and the formation of a new solar worldview.
           However, although the focus of later Christian culture was directed away from the earth and towards heaven, the sense of living within an ensouled cosmos survived until the end of the Middle Ages. St. Francis (1181-1226), on the night before he wrote his famous Canticle of the Sun, had a vision of the earth as a glowing golden orb. In this canticle, there is the recognition that the great luminaries — the moon and the sun — and the great hierarchy of the angelic and archangelic orders, as well as and the life of the animals and the birds, all belong to the sacredness of the life of the cosmos. This was the time which saw the great pilgrimages to the sites of the Black Madonna and the building of the soaring glory of the gothic cathedrals, dedicated to the Virgin Mary and designed to reflect the perfect mathematical harmony of a divinely created cosmos interacting with this world.
            In the twelfth century, the new and sensationally different four-part polyphonic music emanating from the School of Nôtre Dame, in Paris, filled the vast interiors of these cathedrals with the mantra-like sounds of praise and adoration offered to God. The Bishop of Chartres, listening to this new music for the first time, marvelled at the beauty of its intricate harmonies and observed, “It transports the soul to the society of angels.” For the builders and composers of this time their highest calling was the praise of God and their sublime creative gifts were offered in His service.
           With the Renaissance, this ensouled worldview found new expression in fifteenth century Florence when Marsilio Ficino translated Plato and the texts of the Egyptian Hermetic tradition but, with the coming of the Protestant Reformation, the older vision of a sacred earth and an ensouled cosmos slowly faded, accelerated by the growing fascination with science. What was increasingly lost was the visionary imagination although this was re-animated by the Romantics in the late eighteenth century, and by Goethe in the nineteenth and is reflected in the words of the poet and artist William Blake, “Everything that lives is Holy.”

Notes:

1.The Myth of the Goddess, Viking 1991 and Penguin Books, London and New York, 1993
2. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 250, Vintage Books, New York 1996
3. Alison Roberts, Hathor Rising, The Serpent Power of Ancient Egypt, Northgate Publishers. For poems to Hathor and Nut see Andrew Harvey and Anne Baring, The Divine Feminine, Conari Press 1996
4 . Jules Cashford, The Moon: Myth and Image, Cassell Illustrated, London 2003, p. 8
5. Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilisation, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1972
6. Patrick Harpur, Daemonic Reality, Arkana, London, 1994
7 . Andrew Collins, The Cygnus Mystery, Watkins Publishing, London, 2006
8 . see John Michell, The View Over Atlantis, Sago Press, 1969 and Drunvalo Melchizedek, Serpent of Light, Weiser Books, San Francisco, 2007
9 . Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography, The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness, Rutgers University Press, 1983 and 1992, P. 16 &19
10 . Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel Deschamps, Christian Hillaire, Chauvet Cave: The Discovery of the World’s Oldest Paintings, Thames and Hudson, London, 1996, p. 42
110 . Mario Ruspoli, The Cave of Lascaux, The Final Photographic Record, Thames and Hudson, London, 1987
12. The Myth of the Goddess, Penguin Arkana, London and New York, 1992, p. 38
13. Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent; DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, Victor Gollanz, London 1998 and Orion Press (Phoenix), London 1999
14. Andrew Collins, The Cygnus Mystery, p. 202
15. Gertrude Levy, The Gate of Horn, pp. 301-3, Faber & Faber, London 1958
16. Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom; see also his Reality, Golden Sufi Press, California, 1999 & 2003
17. Plotinus, The Enneads, transl. Stephen MacKenna, Faber and Faber, London, 1956 and 1969

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