LABYRINTH
The Labyrinth & the Grail Maiden
The Grail is light, just as woman is light, and both are the light of the 'Sun'. Transcendent consciousness, (symbolized on the Tree of Life by Tiphareth, the solar Sphere), is embodied in the ancient 'Great Rite' of the Dragon families. The 'hierosgamos' is a symbolic and psychophysical act with neurological, epigenetic, and meta-genetic effects.
Discovered in the paleolithic era, shamanic sexuality is the legacy of the Great Goddess cultures.
Rock womb-tombs were memorialized as megalithic monuments from the 11,000 year old labyrinth of the stars, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, to the neolithic subterreanean Hypogeum of Malta, and later the world navel Delphi, whose root is δελφύς delphys, "womb". Vagina-shaped ritual caves are found globally. Kashmir has a sanctuary called Garbhagriha, the house of the womb, where regeneration is effected and the higher self of the devotee is reborn. At Mycenæ, so-called “beehive” tombs were constructed as wombs of stone to receive the dead. The Sumerian word sal, means “vulva,” “womb,” and “woman.” Also, the Latin matrix carries the meanings “female cavity,” “womb,” “matron,” and “mother.”
Fire in the Belly
Nenkovo, a vagina-shaped ritual cave in Bulgaria illustrates the central Mystery. At noon the sun penetrates into the cave through an opening in the ceiling creating a phallus of light on the floor. It progressively grows longer, reaching toward the womb altar. In Winter, with the sun low on the horizon, the phallus elongates to reach the altar and symbolically fertilizes the womb. The Hawara labyrinth in Egypt was decorated with reliefs of the Dragon god Sobek. The womb temple is a place for rebirth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ni4g8yzMbs
The circle of life and the circle of breath are related through "womb breathing." Universal energy underlies the process of transformation, as the basis of life. For the Chaldeans, fire was the life-imparting breath and the dazzling, scintillating light of the multiplicity of souls and beings. The Stoics linked pneuma and the pneumatic soul with 'flowers of fire.' Bees drink the nectar of the fire flower - secretum secretorum. The Virgin is the source of the universal medicine -- ethereal light. Through vase breathing we simulate the state of a baby in the womb. The energy body feeds on 'medicine light' which enriches, energizes and stabilizes all parts of the body with fluid consciousness of Heavenly Water.
http://vimeo.com/17011448
Hierogamy & Transcendence
The morganatic "holy marriage" is played out between a symbolic god and goddess as an act that harmonizes the opposites. It doesn't need to be performed in ritual, but enlivens its mythological and alchemical context.
It echoes down the centuries, maintained in the royal Dragon Courts and couched in the secret language of alchemy.
It is a tantric/hermetic transformative generation and regeneration mystery. The couple represents a
paradigm of nature and our nature with its potential genius -- internal union in the marriage of Wisdom.
The mystical path is erotic, with many twists and turns. Melusine was said to conduct her rite in a maze garden.
A fountain at its center emanates pure sacred being.
http://trianglebook.iwarp.com/whats_new_38.html
The etymology of labyrinth has two interlinked variations: 1) derived from labrys, a pre-Hellenic word said to mean ’double headed axe’, 2) derived from the Latin labia meaning ’lips’ or ’folds’. The double-headed axe was sacred to Zeus, the Grecian Thor, whose hammer was a variant of the labrys. The spinning hammer formed the shape of the swastika or Vortex of Anu as it flew through the air, whipping up the whirlwind. This whirlwind and the spiral swastika that symbolized it were the figurative progenitors of the stylized maze, labyrinth or Vortex. Nevertheless the hammer, shaped like two opposed crescent moons was, like the labrys, a female emblem.
At the highest level, the labyrinth symbol works on several different but interconnected levels: The Folds of Time, The Spiral Cosmos, The Folds of Human Self Deceit, The Journey of Life, The Brain and Spinal Column, The Womb. The Tomb or Creachaire, The Vortex or Sumaire. The fire of Prometheus is not the fire of Kundalini going up the spine to the brain, but the fire of wisdom moving down the spinal column to the womb to become Starfire, which when shed is drunk in the royal ’Rite of the Vampire’. Starfire potentiates, amplifies and accelerates a fuller consciousness that turns the void into a pleum of gnosis. The double triangle labrys design, identical with the one found in the labyrinth of Knossos but without the handle, was used up until medieval times to denote the womb. The genital symbolism is therefore quite clear. Whether the word Labyrinth is derived from labrys or labus, it strongly indicates the maze or labyrinth was originally a graphic symbolic representation of the womb and vaginal channel.
The labyrinth of Chartres Cathedral, built by the Knights Templars in the 13th century, like many ritual mazes, has no blind alleys or fake routes. At its center there is a six petaled "Plantagenet" or wild rose, carved into which there seems to be an M figure reminiscent of the symbol of Virgo, which is the M for "Our Lady", the Virgin Mary Magdalene, to which the Ichthys or Salmon of Wisdom has been appended, denoting the genital nature of the whole glyph itself. This maze in the cathedral dedicated to Notre Dame symbolizes the womb of the Virgin. The Rose Garden symbolism of the core of the labyrinth of Chartres is an echo of the Garden of Solomon and the Rose of Sharon, meaning ’Blood of the Virgin Princess’, and also of the later forest labyrinth of Melusine, with its fountain, mentioned in medieval French literature.
The Labyrinth of Solomon is a medieval alchemical symbol doubtlessly denoting the "scented fountain garden" of Sheba. In the French stories Melusine lies in hiding at the center of her maze garden, waiting to prey on victims returning from the Hundred Years War. She would draw them in and drink their blood. Conversely she also lay at the center of the maze, as the prize of the quester for the Grail. The center of the maze incorporated a cubic stone from which spurted the waters of life, La fonteine de soif, and the blood of the virgin womb. At Chartres the Rose in the center of the maze can be seen bathed in the sanguine light of the sun beaming through a strategically placed pane of red stained glass, making the combined Grail symbolism apparent.
The Chartres Maze was probably based itself on earlier patterns associated with Melusine and Sheba, which themselves were based on the swastika, the pre-eminent glyph of the Vortex or Sumaire, the "sucker-in" and source of life and life’s blood. Associated with this is the concept of the maze as a dance pattern which, similar to the original sacrificial sword dance of the Danes and the Scots, was an echo of the spiraling witches’ dance around the vortex and a celebratory rite of the Wild Hunt. For some, entry into the maze would result in their life being drained away by the virgin occupant, whose repast she would pass on to her kind, as she acted as the fountain of thirst and fed them in turn from her holy blood. In a sense, the Minotaur at Knossos (interchangeable with the Scythian Centaur in classical art), is also representative of the vampire king. Thus at the highest level, as a whirlpool attracting and distributing life and life’s blood, the Labyrinth was both tomb and womb, life taker and life giver.
In England labyrinths have been euphemistically referred to as "fish traps" or Veres (Norse: ’Ver’).
The Dragon Path has much in common with modern Chaos Theory which reflects nature's organic way of balancing chaos and emergent order. The labyrinth is like a Strange Attractor that that does not consist of a simple point, curve or higher dimensional manifold, but contains an infinite complex of manifolds. The vortex mechanism is at the heart of cosmology and creation at all scales.
http://www.uvs-model.com/index.htm
The Dragon is a chaotic Strange Attractor that leads us deep into multiple feedback loops. To 'enter the dragon' we have to be willing to enter that choas and penetrate to the still center of primordial awareness for renewal. It is a complex interaction of fields which forms the attractor and which forms the complex around the structure. It is not a "thing" at the center of a bunch of orbits. Rather, it is a complex infinity of dynamic interaction.
Field interaction may be the strange attractor. This may be hard to understand -- but not the first-hand experience of chaos in our lives affecting our fixations, fascinations, attention, and intentions. Chaos as the Universal Solvent dissolves problems, heals, allows life to flow in new, creative patterns. These new patterns embody the evolutionary dynamic. According to chaos theory, free-flowing energy is capable of self-organization. In consciousness this means that the obstructions to free flowing energy must first be dissolved.
It's O.K. to let go periodically and temporarily become unstructured nothingness, open to holistic re-patterning. Chaos is self-organizing, self-iterating, and self-generating. It is an evolutionary force. The tendency of new forms emerging from chaos is toward a higher degree of adaptation, hence evolution (Kauffmann, 1991). This "recycling" of consciousness leads to a self-referential vortex. Chaotic systems revolve around nexus points, known as strange attractors, because of their unpredictable quality. Rather than being "point-like," they are more like vortices within vortices.
Gold on the Moon
The Philosopher's Stone is like a psychic lodestone (or vortex). It acts like an inner magnet, ordering the contents of our consciousness around it (through feedback loops) in chaotic, yet meaningful fashion. The Philosopher's Stone may thus be seen as a "strange attractor" in the life of anyone engaged in the quest for transformation. It is an instinctual attraction toward processes which dissolve the ego and liquify consciousness, leading to transpersonal experience after symbolic death/rebirth. Freedom in the exploration of imagery comes from the creative capacity to experience loss. Experientially, it's like being channeled into the swirling mass of interacting symbols, an overwhelming vortex of pure information. We are sucked inexorably into interaction with the self-symbol, sucked into ourselves, like flotsam is pulled into a whirlpool.
This is the vortex of the system, the vortex of self, where all levels cross. It overwhelms or tangles the mental processes, the self-imaging processes that maintain the illusion of stable personality and individual boundaries. In solutio, the body is joined with the soul and spirit. The skin-boundary dissolves into visceral as well as spiritual perception. Awareness of physical processes may be greatly amplified, appearing as impressions, intuitions, sensations, sounds, odors. The body is always speaking silently. Through this raw, physical expression, that which was solid becomes liquified, dissolved, deliteralized.
The concrete image of the body "morphs" into the flow of pure energy, in a variation of Transubstantiation. It is the "rapture" of being seized up into the heavenly realm. The flow of dynamic energy from the deep Self reawakens and activates the body, and also that portion of the unconscious that the body carries. The body not only carries, but is the memory of the entire evolutionary cycle. Consciousness can access any portion of this material memory through creative regression. The body manifests kinesthetic, preverbal, and preconceptual memory of its direct experience. Immersion in the healing creative energy flow is like a spiritual baptism, which facilitates creative reformation of ordinary consciousness, and even the physical body.
Vortex-consciousness is a meta-process of complex feedback and resonance. In an environment that is increasingly in flux and perhaps heading toward an avalanche of societal and environmental change, open-ended experimentation is a valuable way in which, as a community, we might gain, at least, a symbolic and adaptive understanding of our being and the genius of our potential.
The Grail is light, just as woman is light, and both are the light of the 'Sun'. Transcendent consciousness, (symbolized on the Tree of Life by Tiphareth, the solar Sphere), is embodied in the ancient 'Great Rite' of the Dragon families. The 'hierosgamos' is a symbolic and psychophysical act with neurological, epigenetic, and meta-genetic effects.
Discovered in the paleolithic era, shamanic sexuality is the legacy of the Great Goddess cultures.
Rock womb-tombs were memorialized as megalithic monuments from the 11,000 year old labyrinth of the stars, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, to the neolithic subterreanean Hypogeum of Malta, and later the world navel Delphi, whose root is δελφύς delphys, "womb". Vagina-shaped ritual caves are found globally. Kashmir has a sanctuary called Garbhagriha, the house of the womb, where regeneration is effected and the higher self of the devotee is reborn. At Mycenæ, so-called “beehive” tombs were constructed as wombs of stone to receive the dead. The Sumerian word sal, means “vulva,” “womb,” and “woman.” Also, the Latin matrix carries the meanings “female cavity,” “womb,” “matron,” and “mother.”
Fire in the Belly
Nenkovo, a vagina-shaped ritual cave in Bulgaria illustrates the central Mystery. At noon the sun penetrates into the cave through an opening in the ceiling creating a phallus of light on the floor. It progressively grows longer, reaching toward the womb altar. In Winter, with the sun low on the horizon, the phallus elongates to reach the altar and symbolically fertilizes the womb. The Hawara labyrinth in Egypt was decorated with reliefs of the Dragon god Sobek. The womb temple is a place for rebirth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ni4g8yzMbs
The circle of life and the circle of breath are related through "womb breathing." Universal energy underlies the process of transformation, as the basis of life. For the Chaldeans, fire was the life-imparting breath and the dazzling, scintillating light of the multiplicity of souls and beings. The Stoics linked pneuma and the pneumatic soul with 'flowers of fire.' Bees drink the nectar of the fire flower - secretum secretorum. The Virgin is the source of the universal medicine -- ethereal light. Through vase breathing we simulate the state of a baby in the womb. The energy body feeds on 'medicine light' which enriches, energizes and stabilizes all parts of the body with fluid consciousness of Heavenly Water.
http://vimeo.com/17011448
Hierogamy & Transcendence
The morganatic "holy marriage" is played out between a symbolic god and goddess as an act that harmonizes the opposites. It doesn't need to be performed in ritual, but enlivens its mythological and alchemical context.
It echoes down the centuries, maintained in the royal Dragon Courts and couched in the secret language of alchemy.
It is a tantric/hermetic transformative generation and regeneration mystery. The couple represents a
paradigm of nature and our nature with its potential genius -- internal union in the marriage of Wisdom.
The mystical path is erotic, with many twists and turns. Melusine was said to conduct her rite in a maze garden.
A fountain at its center emanates pure sacred being.
http://trianglebook.iwarp.com/whats_new_38.html
The etymology of labyrinth has two interlinked variations: 1) derived from labrys, a pre-Hellenic word said to mean ’double headed axe’, 2) derived from the Latin labia meaning ’lips’ or ’folds’. The double-headed axe was sacred to Zeus, the Grecian Thor, whose hammer was a variant of the labrys. The spinning hammer formed the shape of the swastika or Vortex of Anu as it flew through the air, whipping up the whirlwind. This whirlwind and the spiral swastika that symbolized it were the figurative progenitors of the stylized maze, labyrinth or Vortex. Nevertheless the hammer, shaped like two opposed crescent moons was, like the labrys, a female emblem.
At the highest level, the labyrinth symbol works on several different but interconnected levels: The Folds of Time, The Spiral Cosmos, The Folds of Human Self Deceit, The Journey of Life, The Brain and Spinal Column, The Womb. The Tomb or Creachaire, The Vortex or Sumaire. The fire of Prometheus is not the fire of Kundalini going up the spine to the brain, but the fire of wisdom moving down the spinal column to the womb to become Starfire, which when shed is drunk in the royal ’Rite of the Vampire’. Starfire potentiates, amplifies and accelerates a fuller consciousness that turns the void into a pleum of gnosis. The double triangle labrys design, identical with the one found in the labyrinth of Knossos but without the handle, was used up until medieval times to denote the womb. The genital symbolism is therefore quite clear. Whether the word Labyrinth is derived from labrys or labus, it strongly indicates the maze or labyrinth was originally a graphic symbolic representation of the womb and vaginal channel.
The labyrinth of Chartres Cathedral, built by the Knights Templars in the 13th century, like many ritual mazes, has no blind alleys or fake routes. At its center there is a six petaled "Plantagenet" or wild rose, carved into which there seems to be an M figure reminiscent of the symbol of Virgo, which is the M for "Our Lady", the Virgin Mary Magdalene, to which the Ichthys or Salmon of Wisdom has been appended, denoting the genital nature of the whole glyph itself. This maze in the cathedral dedicated to Notre Dame symbolizes the womb of the Virgin. The Rose Garden symbolism of the core of the labyrinth of Chartres is an echo of the Garden of Solomon and the Rose of Sharon, meaning ’Blood of the Virgin Princess’, and also of the later forest labyrinth of Melusine, with its fountain, mentioned in medieval French literature.
The Labyrinth of Solomon is a medieval alchemical symbol doubtlessly denoting the "scented fountain garden" of Sheba. In the French stories Melusine lies in hiding at the center of her maze garden, waiting to prey on victims returning from the Hundred Years War. She would draw them in and drink their blood. Conversely she also lay at the center of the maze, as the prize of the quester for the Grail. The center of the maze incorporated a cubic stone from which spurted the waters of life, La fonteine de soif, and the blood of the virgin womb. At Chartres the Rose in the center of the maze can be seen bathed in the sanguine light of the sun beaming through a strategically placed pane of red stained glass, making the combined Grail symbolism apparent.
The Chartres Maze was probably based itself on earlier patterns associated with Melusine and Sheba, which themselves were based on the swastika, the pre-eminent glyph of the Vortex or Sumaire, the "sucker-in" and source of life and life’s blood. Associated with this is the concept of the maze as a dance pattern which, similar to the original sacrificial sword dance of the Danes and the Scots, was an echo of the spiraling witches’ dance around the vortex and a celebratory rite of the Wild Hunt. For some, entry into the maze would result in their life being drained away by the virgin occupant, whose repast she would pass on to her kind, as she acted as the fountain of thirst and fed them in turn from her holy blood. In a sense, the Minotaur at Knossos (interchangeable with the Scythian Centaur in classical art), is also representative of the vampire king. Thus at the highest level, as a whirlpool attracting and distributing life and life’s blood, the Labyrinth was both tomb and womb, life taker and life giver.
In England labyrinths have been euphemistically referred to as "fish traps" or Veres (Norse: ’Ver’).
The Dragon Path has much in common with modern Chaos Theory which reflects nature's organic way of balancing chaos and emergent order. The labyrinth is like a Strange Attractor that that does not consist of a simple point, curve or higher dimensional manifold, but contains an infinite complex of manifolds. The vortex mechanism is at the heart of cosmology and creation at all scales.
http://www.uvs-model.com/index.htm
The Dragon is a chaotic Strange Attractor that leads us deep into multiple feedback loops. To 'enter the dragon' we have to be willing to enter that choas and penetrate to the still center of primordial awareness for renewal. It is a complex interaction of fields which forms the attractor and which forms the complex around the structure. It is not a "thing" at the center of a bunch of orbits. Rather, it is a complex infinity of dynamic interaction.
Field interaction may be the strange attractor. This may be hard to understand -- but not the first-hand experience of chaos in our lives affecting our fixations, fascinations, attention, and intentions. Chaos as the Universal Solvent dissolves problems, heals, allows life to flow in new, creative patterns. These new patterns embody the evolutionary dynamic. According to chaos theory, free-flowing energy is capable of self-organization. In consciousness this means that the obstructions to free flowing energy must first be dissolved.
It's O.K. to let go periodically and temporarily become unstructured nothingness, open to holistic re-patterning. Chaos is self-organizing, self-iterating, and self-generating. It is an evolutionary force. The tendency of new forms emerging from chaos is toward a higher degree of adaptation, hence evolution (Kauffmann, 1991). This "recycling" of consciousness leads to a self-referential vortex. Chaotic systems revolve around nexus points, known as strange attractors, because of their unpredictable quality. Rather than being "point-like," they are more like vortices within vortices.
Gold on the Moon
The Philosopher's Stone is like a psychic lodestone (or vortex). It acts like an inner magnet, ordering the contents of our consciousness around it (through feedback loops) in chaotic, yet meaningful fashion. The Philosopher's Stone may thus be seen as a "strange attractor" in the life of anyone engaged in the quest for transformation. It is an instinctual attraction toward processes which dissolve the ego and liquify consciousness, leading to transpersonal experience after symbolic death/rebirth. Freedom in the exploration of imagery comes from the creative capacity to experience loss. Experientially, it's like being channeled into the swirling mass of interacting symbols, an overwhelming vortex of pure information. We are sucked inexorably into interaction with the self-symbol, sucked into ourselves, like flotsam is pulled into a whirlpool.
This is the vortex of the system, the vortex of self, where all levels cross. It overwhelms or tangles the mental processes, the self-imaging processes that maintain the illusion of stable personality and individual boundaries. In solutio, the body is joined with the soul and spirit. The skin-boundary dissolves into visceral as well as spiritual perception. Awareness of physical processes may be greatly amplified, appearing as impressions, intuitions, sensations, sounds, odors. The body is always speaking silently. Through this raw, physical expression, that which was solid becomes liquified, dissolved, deliteralized.
The concrete image of the body "morphs" into the flow of pure energy, in a variation of Transubstantiation. It is the "rapture" of being seized up into the heavenly realm. The flow of dynamic energy from the deep Self reawakens and activates the body, and also that portion of the unconscious that the body carries. The body not only carries, but is the memory of the entire evolutionary cycle. Consciousness can access any portion of this material memory through creative regression. The body manifests kinesthetic, preverbal, and preconceptual memory of its direct experience. Immersion in the healing creative energy flow is like a spiritual baptism, which facilitates creative reformation of ordinary consciousness, and even the physical body.
Vortex-consciousness is a meta-process of complex feedback and resonance. In an environment that is increasingly in flux and perhaps heading toward an avalanche of societal and environmental change, open-ended experimentation is a valuable way in which, as a community, we might gain, at least, a symbolic and adaptive understanding of our being and the genius of our potential.