Islands ~ Tanit

Chapter Sixteen

ISLANDS

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He has not yet directly encountered the Formentera Lady but he has heard her song and found evidence of (intuited) her presence.

2. Suddenly Seeing Tracks

"He finds evidence of the ox. The struggle is difficult and success seems far away, however, a murmur of achievement is heard faintly."

- Ten Oxherding Pictures

"...I learn that, just as many utensils are made from one metal, so too are myriad entities made of the fabric of self. Unless I discriminate, how will I perceive the true from the untrue? Not yet having entered the gate, nevertheless I have discerned the path."

- Kakuan's Commentary on the Oxherding Pictures

Also note that the setting (in the song) has changed from day to night.

"With intuition what is being recognized may be unclear. Sensation mostly recognizes things we have experienced before although it does respond to images that are more fundamental. For example in a child entering adolescence a sexually attractive body stirs feelings that have deeper origins than life experience. In youth the recognition of a pattern in such images leads to feelings and then experience. The recognition does not have an origin in experience. It is not personal. It has an archetypal character

With intuition far more of the search for patterns is concerned with archetypal rather than personal experience. Little in our lives is fundamentally original. Almost every situation we encounter is similar to an immense number of previous situations."

- Einstein's Revenge by Paul P. Budnik Jr

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"Here Odysseus charmed for dark Circe fell
Still the perfume lingers, still the spell."

"The first thing to be understood is what ego is. A child is born. A child is born without any knowledge, any consciousness of his own self. And when a child is born the first thing he becomes aware of is not himself; the first thing he becomes aware of is the other."

- Ego - The False Center
by Osho

And here we find ourselves back in the realm of Circe. The "spell" is the same "sequin spell" which "fell" in Cadence and Cascade , the spell of Maya, the World, the Cirkus.

"Odysseus remains with Circe for a full year, against the advice of his comrades. At first, Eurylochus says to him, "Why are you tempting fate? Why stumble blindly down to Circe's halls?" But not until a year later, when his men exclaim, "Captain, this is madness! High time you thought on your home at last," does he awaken from her "spell".
Is it Circe who casts a spell over him, or a part of himself that is possessed by his own desire for sexual union with an alluring and powerful woman? Is she, like Calypso, an expression of his inner feminine, the anima, which he needs to integrate?
Odysseus' lower self may be succumbing to desire and physical pleasure, but his higher self is also being awakened by Circe. As Jean Houston wrote in The Hero and the Goddess, Circe is the "initiator as Temptress - she who lures men to experience the mystique of regression in the service of transformation."

-My Odyssey Journal Part Two: Books Nine-Ten Informal Reflections and Questions
by Torrey Philemon

"...it is important not to forget that the body of analytical psychology developed by Carl Gustav Jung in the 20th century introduced to the arch-conservative medical establishment the concept of the Anima, the Wondrous/Wicked Woman, who is the Gateway and Gatekeeper of the Heart's Desires for Men. Jung's contribution deserves recognition, because it restores the importance of the feminine principle to the health of the psyche for both men and women alike."

- The Mystery of Sacred Prostitution Yesterday and Today
by Roseanne Lopes, PhD

"Of the many beings, both mortal and immortal, dead and alive, monstrous and human who populate the surreal landscape of The Odyssey, perhaps the most beguiling and consistently evocative forces which act upon Odysseus are manifest in what Jung would call the epic's primary anima figures: Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa and Penelope. Each in her specific way exemplifies an aspect of the anima archetype, for..."

the anima is bipolar and can therefore appear positive one moment and negative the next; now young, now old; now mother, now maiden; now a good fairy, now a witch; now a saint, now a whore. (Jung 9,i: 356)

- Longing for Self: the Voyage as Soul-Making
by Mark Greene

"Time's grey hand won't catch me while the sun shine down
Untie and unlatch me while the stars shine."

The narrator resolves that "time" will not "untie" or "unlatch" him. He will not become disconnected (untied or unlatched) from his unconscious by relying too heavily on consciousness as evidenced by an increased awareness of "time" (i.e. what time it is, the passage of time).

"We believe that time is passing only because our ordinary consciousness, absorbed in the transiency of material forms, is capable of "illuminating" only one particular moving cross section of space-time at each instant. In other words, form and substance, including the brain and body through which we perceive, are continually changing, and we experience time as passing because each instant of consciousness is different. This is because we are always thinking new thoughts, experiencing and noticing new things, metabolizing new substances; and it is this constant sequential difference of one instant from the last or the next that gives the experience of time passing -- the mind-body relationship drives time into its appearing and disappearing movement. But through meditation techniques, in which perceptions and thoughts are trained to subside, or through Mantra, by which each instant is made, through repetition, to appear the same as every other instant, the sense of the irrevocable movement of time can be arrested, and a "timeless" status of consciousness experienced.
This is, of course, only a very external view of the mechanics of meditation, such as is proposed by the physicist R. B. Rucker in his book Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension."

- Robert Lawler, Ancient Temple Architecture
from Homage to Pythagoras: Rediscovering Sacred Science
edited by Christopher Bamford
pp. 74, 75

Furthermore, he will not be "unlatched" "while the stars shine down" (slip too far into unconscious content and become disorganized). He will not lose his balance (the balance between conscious and unconscious).

"Formentera Lady dance your dance for me
Formentera Lady dark lover."

"Heir apparent to Ishtar the Whore of Babylon, Ashtoreth, and Astarte. Aphrodite is the whore, the lover, and the god of sexual love.
She was born of the sea foam, rising from the sea near the island of Cythera, and from there she went to nearby Cypress. Both islands are her sacred places. Her name means "risen from the foam." In art, Aphrodite has often been depicted on a clam or oyster shell, (eg., the famed painting "Venus on a clamshell"). Aphrodite took Ares, (Roman Mars) as a lover. She was the mother of Eros (the Roman Cupid), who was the son Zeus.
Aphrodite is herself a Triple Goddess, her three forms being: Aphrodite Urania (Heavenly Aphrodite, born of the Sea, Goddess of Love, Uniter of Heaven, Earth, and Sea), Aphrodite Genetrix (Aphrodite, the Goddess of Marraige), and Aphrodite Pandemos (the Goddess of sex, and lust; the mistress of prostitutes).

- Greek Goddesses
by Anthony Orr Clarke, Ph.D.

"Her name is Aphrodite
And she rides a crimson shell
And you know you cannot leave her
For you touch the distant sands."

- Tales of Brave Ulysses
Eric Clapton and Martin Sharp

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Tanit

"The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Vandals, Byzantines, Moors, privateers and pirates, the Catalan Christians and not forgetting Hannibal and his elephants and the restless spirits of the barruguests, fameliar and follet all came here in turn to party with the enigmatic Mother Goddess and protector of love and fertility "Tanit" on her Scorpio island of Ibiza, rich in water and food, taking turns hunting and possibly sheltering in caverns which nearly four thousand years later were used by the free-loving hippies who overran Ibiza at the end of the happy-go-lucky atmosphere days of the 1960�s."

- Live Ibiza

"The effects of the full moon inspired the first hippies to celebrate the moon cult, making meetings in the woods and beaches of Formentera and Ibiza.

Here, the Mother Goddess Phoenician Astarte (the well behaved and demure Aphrodite from the Greeks, or the Roman�s Venus) became Tanit, goddess of fertility, showing a lascivious character. She was also called Asherah, the happy or lucky one."

- Ibiza Night

- Canaanite/Ugaritic Mythology
by Christopher B. Siren
based on John C. L. Gibson's Canaanite Myths and Legends and S. H. Hooke's Middle Eastern Mythology

If you recall from the previous chapter, in early Judaism, Asherah was the wife or consort of Yahweh.

- The Hebrew Goddess
by Raphael Patai

"The symbol of Tanit is a truncated pyramid, topped with a rectangular bar, over which is depicted the Sun and the crescent Moon."

- Carthaginian Religion
by Roy Decker

"Her Punic symbol was a triangle, representing her robe, surmounted by a circle, her head, with a horizontal line between them, her shoulders. Often there is a vertical line rising up from each end of the horizontal bar, as her arms upraised in blessing.

She was also the palm tree, the tree of life in the Mediterranean desert areas."

- The Phoenician Deities
by Lilinah biti-Anat

"Lions and peacocks had associations with Tanit/Caelestis, as did fish."

- Family Values :
Art & Power at Ghirza in the Libya Pre-Desert

"A vertical bar with wavy lines coming from it symbolizes Tanith, the Serpent Lady, as the Tree of Life, with serpents."

- Tanith
by Eileen Holland

"Tanit is a Phoenician goddess and the chief goddess of Carthage. The roots of her name mean Serpent Lady."

- The Phoenician Deities

Asherah

"The Sumerian word for god is dingir, which became tengir, then tani. Tan means serpent. Asherah was also identified with the Sumerian goddess Inanna and the Babylonian Ishtar, whose symbol was the eight-pointed star and crescent preserved by the Sumerians as an old shamanistic symbol for the godhead. Ishtar became Astarte to the Semitic Phoenicians, and later Tanith, the serpent goddess.

As Tanith, Asherah's symbolic pole was represented as a pole with two serpents twisted around it (the caduceus). In the Garden of Asherah, the Serpent of Wisdom taught men how to become immortal like the gods (Aleim, one of the Children of the Gods, which the Jews wrote as Elohim)."

- The Serpent of Wisdom
by Don Cardoza

Faience Snake Goddess

"The Encyclopedia Brittanica states the caduceus was the insignia of Hermes, but this obviously hides the older Earth Mother theology roots.

The pre-Greek roots of the symbolism is the most obvious connection with the old world, but there is more. On the INY-272 location, Mrs. Gloria Farley identified an image of Tanith (Tanit). The stick figure consists of upraised arms, a triangle skirt and a circle for a head. A very similar image is reported from Carthage. This image is somewhat more detailed and by each upraised hand is a serpent. A painted bronze statue recovered from beneath the shrine in the court Palace of King Minos (Knossos, Crete, 1600-1580 BC) demonstrates in detail what was in the uplifted arms of Tanith, serpents."

- The Equinox Project

Demeter

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In Eden, fallen man (fallen into time-ego consciousness) covers his nakedness with a fig leaf. In Formentera Lady he is...

"shadowed by a dragon fig tree's fan."

The shadow and the dragon (the serpent) foreshadow the coming Fall from grace, the differentiation of the four psychological functions.

Like the allegorical tale of man in Eden succumbing to temptation, Formentera Lady depicts the pivotal moment during the creation of the world and each individual human life, a moment repeated endlessly throughout life, the shattering of psychological unity, the beginning of consciousness. The dance represents the eternal cycle of birth, life, death and resurrection.

"...dancing is creation, and in many mythologies a god or goddess dances the universe into existence (as the Kouretes danced Zeus into the world from the womb of Rhea, the Great Mother). So also constant dancing sustains the universe and, when the time comes, dances the cosmos into oblivion."

- The Pythagorean Tarot by John Opsopaus

"A parallel to the Fall from Eden is the dance of Shiva, Lord of Death and Shakti the divine sexual aspect of Kali-ma the Dark Goddess of Destruction and Creation. A central meditative climax of the tantric method is awakening the kundalini, the psycho-sexual force of illumination which ascends the chakras of the spine. In Tantric cosmology, existence is a fall from unity between the genders, where subject and object, mind and body are at first in intimate and divine unity and then begin to separate from their wholeness to become the dance of Maya the physical world and sensory experience which draws us into the world of suffering and mortality, away from the still point of the eternal cosmic mind."

- The Heiros Gamos Part 1
by Chris King

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