A private world. He'll have the chance to win
New freedom from confining rules. Rejoice
The madness! For it brings another choice.
Now let the Saturnalia begin!"
- verse accompanying the Fool tarot card
"I became an adept at simple hallucination: in place of a factory I really saw a mosque, a school of drummers led by angels, carriages on the highways of the sky, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries; the tide of melodrama would raise horrors before me. Then I would explain my magic sophism with the hallucination of words! Finally I came to regard the disorder of my mind as sacred."
-- Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat
- chapter index -
pg. 1 - Lizard
pg. 2 - Cirkus | pg. 3 - Megaphonium Fanfare
pg. 4 - 'Worship!' Cried the Clown | pg. 5 - Entry of the Chameleons
pg. 6 - Indoor Games | pg. 7 - Happy Family
pg. 8 - Lady of the Dancing Water
- page index -
A Horse | Face the East
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As explained in the previous two chapters, the "night sounds" that introduce Twenty First Century Schizoid Man and Peace: A Beginning represent womb images. To begin the third King Crimson album, Peter Sinfield again employs this motif. In the opening soliloquy of Cirkus the divine child, now freed from dualistic thinking, looks up into the "sable dome" of the cosmic womb, the sheltering womb of rebirth.
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"Night: her sable dome scattered with diamonds,"
"Many are the names in the ancient literatures which have been given to the Womb of Being from which all issues, in which all forever is, and into the spiritual and divine reaches of which all ultimately returns, whether infinitesimal entity or macrocosmic spacial unit." - Fountain Source of Occultism: Section 3 "Outwardly it is one . . . with the Night of Orpheus : O Night you black wet-nurse of the golden stars! From this darkness all things that are in this world have come as from its spring or womb." - Philalethes pseudonym of Thomas Vaughan Magia adamica, London 1650 "Nyx, the Spirit of the Night, was spawned from the primordial Chaos... she gave birth to Doom (Moros), Death (Thanatos), Sleep (Hypnos), the Fates, and Nemesis. Her power is said to be great, overwhelming even Zeus. She lives in the palace of Tartarus and goes forth onto the world each night, traversing the heavens until daybreak." - Nyx, Night Goddess The subsequent lines describe a gestation period. "Fused my dust from a light year, Squeezed me to her breast, sowed me with carbon, Strung my warp across time" The references to time and space ("light year", "warp across time") refer to the divine child's transcendence of duality. He is no longer "here" or "there", he is here and there. "The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are there." - Yasutani Roshi "It is the realization of the Universal Consciousness of which we are all manifestations, a particularized ray of it, and so in that sense, you and the other are one. The Experience of Separateness is only secondary experience within the Priory Frame in space and time.The sense of space and time is the separating principle. In the essence of the one Universal, this Sense of Separateness is an illusion, it is Maya." - Kundalini Yoga Within the framework of Kundalini Yoga, the womb of the mother cosmos corresponds to the first chakra or energy center of the human body. "Briefly, there are seven separate chakras, or energy centres, each relating to different manifestations of energy in the human organism. They are located in the base of the spine, the genital area, the solar plexus, the heart, the throat, the 'third eye' (between the eyebrows) and in the crown of the skull. Each is related, due to its location, to different forces in human life, e.g. the base of the spine is associated with basic survival instincts, and the 'third eye' is associated with psychic perceptions." - Life's Middle Name Initiatory Fear and Spontaneous Ego-Death Misperceived as Biological Death by Gyrus First Chakra: "Night: her sable dome..." "This is the womb or the sex-organ of the mother cosmos, the Divine Mother. We are within her womb. She is the time, space, including the priory forms of sensibilities, and of the categories of knowledge, within her womb." - Kundalini Yoga The goal of the yogi is to progressively activate each of the chakras (energy centers) in the human body, in effect, making the journey from a life dominated by the psychological function of Sensation to that of one fully informed by Intuition. The 'third eye' is the eye of Intuition as opposed to Sensation. And in the Orphic cosmology: "Night, then, is the Mother of the Gods, or, as Orpheus says, 'the Nurse of the Gods is immortal Night' (Proc., in Crat., p. 57). Just as Mâyâ is the consort and power of Mâyi, or Ishvara (the Logos, or ideal Creative Cause) of the Upanishads, and thus all Gods and all men are under her sway, so Phanes hands over his sceptre to his consort Night. As Proclus tells us (ibid.): 'Night receives the sceptre from the willing hands of Phanes--"he placed his far-famed sceptre in the hands of Goddess Night, that she might have queenly honour".' To her was given the highest art of divination, for Mâyâ is the creative power of the Deity, the means whereby he 'imagines' the universe, or thinks it into being. Thus she, his spouse, is in the secret of his thoughts, and thus presides over the highest divination. So Hermias (Phædr., p. 145): 'Orpheus, speaking of Night, tells us that 'he [Phanes] gave her the mantic [i.e., pertaining to divination] art that never fails, to have and hold in every way'." - The Orphic Theogony site index
 The horse represents the narrator's ability to move forward on his spiritual journey. "To a Mongolian shaman the horse was a dual being: warrior's steed and psycho- pomp (soul guide),or spirit mount, which he rode on celestial journeys and which carried the souls of the dead into other worlds." - A Map of Meanings  Prince Siddhartha's "Great Departure" occurs when Kantaka, his white horse, jumps across a great river, symbolizing the prince's leaving from the world of the body. "Wilt thou ride hence and let the rich world slip Out of thy grasp, to hold a beggar's bowl? Wilt thou go forth into the friendless waste That hast this Paradise of pleasures here?" The Prince made answer, "Unto this I came, And not for thrones: the kingdom that I crave Is more than many realms -- and all things pass To change and death. Bring me forth Kantaka!" "Be still, White Kantaka! be still, and bear me now The farthest journey ever rider rode; For this night take I horse to find the truth, And where my quest will end yet know I not, Save that it shall not end until I find." - The Light of Asia Similarly... "The "Night Journey", or Mi'raj; the ascension of Muhammad to the "Lote tree of the uttermost limit," the nearest proximity allowed to being in the presence of God, was accomplished by his riding a fantastic horse-like being with wings called al-Buraq. In India, al-Buraq is depicted with the face of a woman and the tail of a peacock..." - al-Kimia, the Sacred Art by John Eberly The online archives of The Philosophers of Nature   One last curious point about the mystical horse: it seems to have been obtained "In the Wake of Poseidon". "Pegasus was the son of the great sea god, Poseidon, and the Gorgon Medusa. (He was horselike because Poseidon had been in the shape of a horse at the time of the seduction). When Perseus cut off Medusa's head, Pegasus, whose name means the 'Springs of Ocean' was born from the blood which fell into the sea." Perseus' defeat of Medusa recalls Apollo's defeat of Python and Osiris (in the guise of the divine child Horus) prevailing over Typhon. "The White Horse is an ancient symbol especially embodied in Pegasus. Though definitely an emblem of Poseidon-Hippios and of mare-headed Demeter as Leukippe, the white horse was not limited to the Greeks since it was featured in the pantheons of many other cultures, particularly among the ancient Celts. It probably pre-dates the Great Deluge (Flood) where priests must have attempted anything to placate the seagods as they observed the ever rising waters. Trismegistic teachings tell that the white horse symbolizes purified passion, which, like other Poseidonic signs, relates to our conscious efforts to gain some control over the often turgid waters of the deep unconscious." - Pegasus Poseidon's symbolism  "Riding his chariot across the sea Poseidon embodies the two age-old symbols of the unconscious…. horses and water. The horse personifies in its primitive potency the instinctive drives of our own raw nature. We have reined the horse, we have controlled or submerged our instincts, but the longing is in us to be united with our life giving power remains unquenchable. We are all wearing the horse's head. All reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean hooved on to a whole new track of being we only suspect is there. We can't see it, because our average, educated head is being held at the wrong angle. We can't jump because the bit forbids it, and our own basic force …our horsepower if you like…is too little. Our horsepower becomes too little when our cultured, educated heads reject the unconscious powers over which Poseidon rules." - Neptune The sunrise is the dawn of a new awareness. The graveyard symbolizes death. Night, as the mother of Thanatos, also suggests death. return to page index site index "Bid me face the east closed me in questions Built the sky for my dawn . . ." "Beyond the connections with mathematics, astronomy, astrology and science, Castel del Monte is oriented eastwards, with the main entrance and the so-called Throne room oriented towards the sun's rise." - Altamura and Castel del Monte: the exception and the rule "East represents the place of beginnings, as in the dawn of a new day, the dawn of humanity, or the dawn of individual human birth. In every mythology that produces symbols related to the four directions, the East is related to the function of intuition and intuitive knowledge." - The Genesis Model by Gerry Anne Lenhart To face the east is to heed intuition. In order to follow intuition, images from the outside world (intrusive sensory stimuli) must be held to a minimum. The Garden of Eden (the womb) is also found in the east. "Yahweh God," the account begins, "planted a garden in Eden which is in the East." Symbolically East points to an inner, non-physical level of reality. With this one word we are alerted to the symbolic meaning of the story. It is where the journey towards wholeness begins." - Return to the Whole A Study of the Landscape Symbolism of the Bible by Ann K. Elliot |
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