Articles #Cybele

https://5efa4d9bb68ea.site123.me/ I am the Triple Mother of Life, the mistress of all of the elements, the original Being, the Sovereign of Light and Darkness, the Queen of the Dead, to whom no God is not subject. I rule the starry skies. the boisterous green seas, the many--colored earth with all its peoples, the dark subterrene caves. I have names innumerable. In Phrygia I am Cybele; in Phoenicia, Ashtaroth; in Egypt, Isis; in Crete Rhea; in Athens Athena; in the Caucasus 'The Bird-Headed Mother'...Agdistis, Mariamne, Hekate, Hera. --Graves, The Golden Fleece Wild Darkness Kybele gives voices to mute places, a marriage of trees, rocks, and starry sky. Narrative gives a grounded sense of self. The margins are the center of the imagination. Reflecting her own cavernous interiority, she transforms inhospitable, harsh terrains into inviting primordial parks and riverbeds flowing with the imaginal. We yearn to float downstream; reverie moves us forward. Landscape is a provocateur. To see the beauty we must stop, breathe and absorb into the moment, the only reality we all really have. Some cultures create zoomorphic figures and geometric patterns to transform the vast land into a highly symbolic, ritual and social-cultural landscape. She speaks for their unspeakable immensity that reminds us we are truly small. Liminal places connect outside with inside across all experiential domains. Wandering off the path of hypermodernity, we are arrested, trapped in her magically woven web of poetic resonance. There is a synergetic relation between landscape, instinct and imagination that rekindles all as a unified field that is the mycelial root of sacred places of heart and mind. Relationships are the poetry of life and connecting with the land. Kybele is the earth from which we grow, our connection to dreams, the animal realm, our ancestors, and deep unconscious. She is the dust under our feet beyond those areas of origin that can be mapped, giving place a face in the present. What is this invisible ground whose image we carry in our souls where spiritual ideals merge with worldly realities? Isn’t it always right here, right now everywhere always, forever? The contextual background, the invisible environment, is the fundamental ground from which both mind and matter emerge, the luminous absolute space of reality beyond the mere absence of energy/matter. The radiant ground is the fundamental source. Psyche expresses the nature of things, including our own nature. Jung claimed, "every soil has its secret, of which we carry an unconscious image in our souls: a relationship of spirit to body and of body to earth." - CW XVIII Jung said, "The body is the original animal condition, we are all animals in body, and so we have to have an animal psychology in order to be able to live in it. […] Since we have a body it is indispensable that we exist also as an animal.” The animal is the instinctual level of the psyche. Hillman notes, "Our dreams recover what the world forgets. Forgotten pagan polytheism breeds in animal forms. In those animals are the ancient Gods:... The old Gods are still there in our dreams... The animals may go on like Gods, alive and well and unforgotten, in the ikons of our dreams and in the vital obsessions of complexes and symptoms..." The animal within is a guide. Dream animals behave in unusual ways and can even talk as they do in fairy tales. The path, track, or trail of an animal can be followed. They may appear at crucial 'soul junctures,' validating our direction, choices, and path. According to Jungian analyst Dennis L. Merritt: "To be truly human, Jung believed, and to reach our unique potential, we have to be in relationship to animals. This is both an outer relationship to animals and an intimate relationship with the collective unconscious, coming to terms with the animal in our inheritance." We can respond consciously to such animal spirits as we do to land, weather, and seasons of the soul. This bedrock of archaic psyche is the germinal image of images, a generative matrix, personification and inflection of deep universal principles. https://ionamiller2020.weebly.com/cybele.html