Wilhelm Reich's ponderings about energies are closely connected with much older discourse that claims that man has meaningful bonds to earth. "Man" is here a non-gender description. The bond with earth reveals energy source: rituals repeat the birth from earth, the wish to be earth, and man's return to earth. The Great Clash in the culture of the Old Europe, the emergence of patriarchal power and its victory over matrilinear succession of property, severed us from the beliefs that had in focus the life circuit and the bond to earth. More airy, more heady and abstract beliefs came into power; the earth lost its meaning altogether which is easily recognizable in new ways of thinking, e.g. we consider earth (and nature in general) for reserve for human needs or for waste basket for things we don't need anymore. What began with great love to earth, cultivation of wheat and other domestication of nature with respect, that ended up in unnatural exploitation of resources, both earthty and human.
For reasons not entirely clear community of archeologists resists the application of the idea that the burst of Indo-European peoples toward West in the mid of third millennia, coming from the steppes around Black Sea, was a significant factor in the change of deities and beliefs. Men with horses, new languages and semi-nomadic ways of life were intruders that for a longer period of time stirred the Old Europe, partly assimilating, partly destroying the peoples of Old Europe. The intruders behaved like intruders usually do: they declared - with violent acts first, then by manipulating the beliefs - old deities bad, evil and monstruous, and gave their own deities instead. For peoples who ride, live semi-nomadic life, and have a mythology where deities have lost their touch to earth and live like people, the chtonic belief was irrational. Indo-Europeans had gods and goddesses whose interests were in quarrelling like old wives, in domestic intrigues, and in issues more abstract than earth. We have, however, lost information of the beliefs of Old Europe mainly because we are able to read its remnants only through Indo-European legacy.
There is, anyhow, much to be read anew. In Finno-Ugric mythology the clash between matrilinear culture and patriarchal ways of life is depicted well in the war between the Lady (Hag) of the North and the New Finns. Finns are not Indo-European people but lived aside of them north to the Black Sea, near Volga river basin. Lady of the North is described as a hag, birdlike creature, quite alike to Gorgon. Finnish national epos, Kalevala, gives a vivid story of the war between Finns and the Lady of the North. Practically none of the lectures found scientifically sound admits that this war might be a description of the clash between an indigenous people and an intruder warmonger herd. On the contrary, much ink has used only to put it clear that all engaged in war are Finns, have same background, and don't have dissimilar beliefs.
Such hypocrisy is common too in interpretations of wars with Etruscans, with Basques people, with Cretans, with Maltese people, etc. The allover denial of differences between Old Europe people and Indo-Europeans may be justifiable for reasons that include shame, cultural discrepancy that cannot say its depth, or simply lack of knowledge and evidence. With denial we loose day after day proofs that are still amongst us, in our European culture, that tells a tale quite different from that of Indo-Europeans.
Amidst of pollution, lack of water, threat of pandemias we may think all this anew. Our religious tradition has lost its proof: most Christian morals and tales are used against people, against love and joy of life. Not many of us know why to live. Continuation of generations seems to lack reason. All in all, Indo-European life-style - rationality, mind-centered thinking, heterosexism, exploitation of nature, aggressive assimilation of everything different - has already shown its weak points: non-sustainability in relation to earth, water, air, animal kingdom and human moral. From the point of view of Old Europe one might ask why has it been so important to get rid off earth?
Wilhelm Reich was much impressed by the book of Bachofen (Das Mutterrecht; the matriachy). Bachofen's theses have been commonly contested, and the book belongs to non-items of sociology, therefore also to "forbidden" books of archaeology. Reich, however, looks at Bachofen's theses from another angle: Reich's lecture is critical towards the ecomical reality we have created. He anticipates Michel Foucault by articulating the liaison of patriarchy, its abstract thinking, its sexual suppression, to the ecomical slavery needed as a tool for a society that is not any more bound to earth, to any particular place. The earth itself must be degraded, articulated as non-thing. The slavery the people can take with them wherever they go, in case it is called forth in the mid of their most weakened part, weakened when it has been denied its renewal in the rituals that empower the seriality, cycle-nature, the chtonic cord of human being. Indo-Europeans learned with time a very aggressive way to make everyone a slave for their economic growth: they used here ideas of common responsibility, the good of nation, the religion with male powers, the indirect moral of power structures, sexual repression, individuality, shame and nuclear family. These are all devastating creatures if seen from the point of Old Europe tradition.
In common politics the earth bound problems are still most acute: oil, water, man-made pollution, erosion, epidemias, animal illnesses and infertility of soil. How high the abstraction level may rise in Western thinking, all the same we tumble over to the earth, to its bounty, to its want. We have serious problems with concepts that should open up for us the operative approach toward earth: the rituals are lacking, therefore we don't have any approach.
In Marija Gimbutas's research on Old Europe beliefs the matriarchate plays an important role. She does write on -archate but -linear in order not to upset her male colleagues whose testicles are shrinking out of fear when they hear the word "matri-archate". In Indo-European common beliefs a woman is a nut-eater, a gelding female who only want to disgrace or desacrate man. This irrational fear is so strong that it is hard to see how behind that fear there is the historical clash where feminine, earth-bound deities were to be demolished in order to create a new, patriarchal order. Gimbutas gives graphic descriptions on how Old Europe belief practically, operatively and life-worldly taught the measures man must follow in man's needs so that both earth as a life-giver and man as a living being deserve each other.
Chtonic power is a description used by New Age "religions" in California and other sites of searching. In Western hemisphäre chtonic power may be in enclosure. Chtonic power, however, belongs to the traditions of most people in West, too. It is energy form that man is dependent on, even addicted on. It is energy that is always present - in gravity, in birth and death, in food, love, hate, nature, in one's own body, in addictions - and always for use. We dance for it, we lay down for it, we pray for it, we curse for it. Its real nature is hidden for us since we are still suffering from the hard blow of the clash between Old Europe culture and Indo-European nomads. We still don't have a shared agreement to see our earlier tradition, within us, inside our mixed culture, agreement to let the Old Europe disclose itself in us.
JV
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The myth of Aphrodite and Adonis as a symbolic description of cyclic energy of man and nature
The last two essays in the blog of Ontological clinic arouse a motive to reflect the wide world of energy through ancient myths. We can read in the “Another point of view: chtonic energy”, that Wilhelm Reich’s elaborations of energies are closely connected with much older discourse with claims about man’s meaningful bonds to the earth. In some earlier blog was told, that Reich was interested in the connections between human bioenergical processes and atmospheric phenomena. He could point out connections between weather conditions and physical as well as emotional and mental states in human beings.
Throughout man’s long history people have felt the need to create sets of myths and legends to explain, and interpret the meaning of nature’s mysteries and to understand the forces behind life: from atmospheric phenomena to the source of spring, from the infinite variety and shades of plant life to the destructive fury of an earthquake, to the hidden subtlettes of the human psyche and spirit. The fervid and creative imagination of the people of the Old Greece, constantly enriched by cultural exchange and open to the influx of stimuli from the entire Mediterranean area, developed a rationalized and detailed corpus of myths that followed in logical progression from the ancient narrated sagas and was organized by clearly delineated genealogies. Yet it must remembered that this system is in no way unequivocal. There exist many versions of the same myths, conditioned by the geographical area in which they developed, by the period in which they were created, and by the cultural milieus in which they were refined.
We must neither forget that even in ancient times the same myth could take on different shades of meaning and relative weights according to place. No wonder that we fail to see today any connection between them and our emotional attitudes or dramatic events of today. And yet we can think for instance like Jung, that the godlike figures in myths or in the art handling those stories are in fact symbolic representatives of the whole psyche, in a larger scale even for understanding the whole universe, the connections between the earth, nature and human being.
Depending on where is the origin of the myth about Afrodite there are different variations about her birth, life, her character and the different aspects of her love life. However, the worship of Aphrodite was widely extended around the Mediterranean lands as that of any other Hellenic divinity. In Cyprus, for instance, there are a lot of places and memorials reminding about her life, mainly near Paphos, and even today they have in the country many festivals and other symbolic things showing the vivid meaning of the goddess of love for the modern man. It will be interesting just to keep in mind Reich’s theory about orgon both in human being and the atmosphere, when we hear the story about Afrodite.
Hesiod’s description of Afrodite’s birth, in the 4th century, was only one of the many competing theories, although by the later classical period it came to be the dominate one. He tells concerning Aphrodite’s birth, how Gaia (or Mother Earth, born out of Chaos, the unbounded emptiness of the universe) helped her son Cronos to escape the fate of his brothers and sisters, the Titans, who as soon as they were born were confined by their father Uranus, to the infernal regions, because he feared they would usurp his position as the ‘Ruler of the Skies’. When Cronos grew up he witnessed his mother and father making love among the planets. Seizing his opportunity, Cronos mutilated his father, castrating him. Falling to earth, the severed organs floated for a long time in the ocean and white foam gathered around them, and the foam was fertilized by the sperm. Out of the strange froth sprang the beautiful goddess. At first the winds carried her towards Cythera, but the West Wind, took command and guided her to the Cyprian shore, to the site of Paphos, where she was welcomed by the Seasons and Eros, by the winged god of love. Whenever her feet touched the ground, there bloomed all manner of flowering plants. Accompanied by Eros and Pothos, the god of longing, she journeyed to Olympus in order to take her place among the assembly of gods. There she was named Aphrodite, because she was born of the sea-foam, and Cyprus was the land where she first appeared. Her great beauty aroused the envy of the other goddesses, but the gods greeted her with enthusiasm and many tried to gain her affection.
Aphrodite’s most common surnames were Urania (which means heavenly) and Pandemos (universal). There was a common belief that in the first place she was the goddess of spiritual love and for the second of sexual pleasures. On the other hand in some temples, like in those of Corinth and Paphos, while being dedicated to Aphrodite Urania, were in fact centers of sexual activity. Aphrodite became the favorite goddess of prostitutes who celebrated her festivals with orgies and used their fortunes to build monuments and temples in which Aphrodite was represented as wanton. On the other hand, the more spiritual or nature-like part of her divinity was to be the goddess of beauty, of joy and laughter; the queen of all aspects of love, the guardian of young girls and the governess of the fertility of animals and plants. With this latter attribute in mind a number of prolific creatures were held as her sacred symbols, including rabbits, sparrows and goats, and fruits such as the pomegranate and apple. (Her priests would give consecrated apples to women who wished to become pregnant.)
As it was said earlier there is a lot of versions about the same myth depending on the time, cultural context etc. This is very true also if we try to catch a picture about Aphrodite’s own love affairs. Stass Paraskos, for instance, describes the Cypriot mythology concerning the goddess of love. Although she was, in addition to those roles told above, the guardian of married life, too, she herself was not a faithful wife of Hephaestus, the god of fire and the patron of all craftsmen and those who worked in the field of metal. The myth has very many details about Aphrodite’s lovers and children with them, as well as the conflicts arousing because of her rich love life. We can try to understand Aphrodite’s myth in the Jungian sense mentioned earlier that the godlike figures are symbolic representatives of the whole psyche, she then representing the energy or emotion of love as a whole. Because love is always a relation between, we also need the other, the lover, the person we can love, or, with whom to make love.
Before going deeper in one detail in Aphrodite’s amour, understanding it in the context of this entry of the blog, repetition of Reich’s orgon theory is needed: he discovered a biological energy that seemed to be everywhere: in human body and the social and cultural world of human being. But this was not enough. In the summer of 1940, during camping trip to New England, Reich discovered the beautiful Rangeley Lakes region. While staying in a small cabin on one lake, Reich’s observations of the night skies verified the existence of orgonic energy in the atmosphere, too. It has been written, that the biggest thrust forward his research was just in this discovery of atmospheric orgon. Could we think, even today, that this kind of understanding about the connections of human and nature energy life are told in a “safer” way in the hidden forms of arts, sagas and myths; and that godlike myths could be insightful symbolic ways to tell about the human psyche, about “dangerous” emotions like hate, aggression, anxiety, pleasure and love, especially sexual love, in some oneness also with the rhythm or cycle of the nature and atmosphere. Could we think about the whole divine mythology actually as a sort of structural theory of emotions? It is time to tell the love-story of Aphrodite and Adonis as one symbolic way to reach the importance of joyful love (parasymphatetic state of body and mind), which however, is always threaded by the opposite state of energy life: aggression (symphatetic).
In infancy Adonis had been dedicated to Aphrodite and placed under the care of the priestesses in the temple. His conception was incestuous and parallels the cross-fertilization of plants and, his legend symbolizes the life cycle of plants that germinate in spring, grow throughout the summer, suffer temporary death in winter and come into life again with the return of spring. As soon as he was strong enough to carry a spear, he began to hunt the wild animals in the forests of Paphos. Aphrodite used to amuse herself by watching him stalking his prey. She felt proud of his exceptional skill, but at the same time she was concerned about his total absorption in this activity and decided to teach the adventurous youth the art of love. Disguising herself as a forest nymph, she intercepted him while he was out hunting and by sighs and maidenly blushes drew him to her. The ground beneath was deep in moss and lichen and when they laid down, it blossomed in profusion of violets.
Later she revealed her true identity and from that moment they were inseparable. Together they roamed the woods and ridges of Paphos, accompanied by their hunting dogs, in pursuit of game. Aphrodite kept clear of dangerous animals such as boars and wolves and advised Adonis to do the same. When they had caught as much game as they wanted they lied down and made love. They played and had joyful life together, which scandalized the more austere deities. Soon their malicious gossip was half way around the world, and aroused the jealousy of her former lovers. Among them, Ares, the God of War, was especially envious and he swore to take revenge on the young mortal. He took the shape of a wild boar and terrorizing the district of Paphos, killing and maiming the inhabitants with brutal savagery. Adonis could not resist this challenge: his hunting instincts fully aroused, and ignoring Aphrodite’s forbidding, he took up shield and spear. He took his way to the hillside where the boar was known to dwell and were beheld a terrible sight of field full of mutilated bodies. Perhaps for the first time in his life Adonis was frightened because he had never seen such destruction, but taking his courage he walked boldly towards the largest clear space he could find. There he roared out his challenge to the boar. Ares, hidden in the shape of the boar, had carefully observed the brave young hunter, and calculated the distance between him and Adonis and having formed carefully his strategy, wounded him mortally.
Aphrodite heard the dying groans and rushed to the scene. She could recognize the voice of Adonis from a distance and turned her chariot, drawn by giant swans, in that direction. She could saw him lying lifeless in the field. It was too late to stem the flow of blood. She laid him on her bed of lettuce and exerted all her divine strength and knowledge to revive him but all was in vain. As soon as his spirit left his body, in sympathy, the fields dried up, the grass turned pale and the trees shed their leaves and ripening fruits. Aphrodite promised that Adonis will be remembered forever. As lasting memorial to her lover Aphrodite sprinkled Adonis’ blood with nectar and at the touch of this liquid the blood gathered and contracted into the shape of the flower, we now call Anemone. The name comes from the Greek word for ‘wind’, because its life is short and its petals easily shaken off by a breeze. There are a number of other flowers, like white rose, associated with the legend of Adonis.
Aphrodite was desperate, she wept for many days and nights so that even the sternest of the gods were moved and tried to comfort her. Se decided to ask Zeus for the return of her lover. He being acquainted with her sorrow promised to ask Persephone, the queen of the underworld, if she was willing to release the young Adonis. When Zeus saw how deeply they both loved this mortal, he wisely ruled that for four months of the year Adonis could live where he pleased provided he divided the rest of his time between the two goddesses. So it was done: Perspehone had him for four months, and Aphrodite eight because he preferred to spend his free time with the Goddess of Love.
The votaries of Aphrodite staged the death and resurrection of Adonis at an annual festival held on 25 and 26 March in Paphos and most other Cypriot towns. It was mainly a festival for women who made wooden and wax images of Adonis and Aphrodite, adorned them with aromatic plants and surrounded them with figurines of Eros, birds and other animals, and with cakes which ancient Cypriots used to make for the dead. We can easily see similarities with the preparations for Easter by the Greek Orthodox church.
Some aspects of the cult of Aphrodite as the goddess of nature have never ceased to be a part of the religion of Cyprus. Among those is the three or plant worship, or beliefs on their healing power. Many of the flowers which ancient Cypriots used to dedicate to Aphrodite are now associated with the Virgin Mary. Several of them, like the Lithospermon and Sityrium go under the name of Tears of Virgin Mary because, after the death of Jesus, it is believed that the heart broken Mother wandered in the countryside in a crazed condition looking for her son, much as Aphrodite looked for the dead Adonis. White flowers grew out of her tears and red ones out of the blood of Jesus (Adonis). The rosebush of Aphrodite is still a symbol of beauty and love, the half-opened bud representing the beginning of romantic feeling and the fully blown flower the maturity of perfect love. The medicinal and aphrodisiac qualities of rose water – Aphrodite’s favorite flower - is still recognized but the rose today is on the conscious level dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Rosewater is sometimes used by women to rouse their husbands whose sexual appetites are low. It is also used to flavor various dishes and in some villages they invite guests to a wedding by sprinkling rose water in their hands.
One of the best known festivals in Cyprus takes place on Whitsunday and its origin seems to be rooted in the Aphrodisia, a festival celebrating the union of the goddess with her lover Adonis. This is held in all costal towns and includes competitions of song, dance and swimming. On the Calendar of the Orthodox Church it is marked down as the Festival of Deluge. There is no doubt, however, writes Stass Paraskos, that the Cypriots are more or less consciously celebrating the birth of Aphrodite rather than a Biblical event.
As we all know, many other Christian festivals owe their origin, or are heavily influenced by pagan traditions. Few historians today will argue against the view that the festival of Christmas was borrowed from Roman religion and has its origin in the celebration of the Winter Solstice. Celebrations on the 25th of December were held throughout the Middle East. The virgin has given the birth, the light begins to wax. The Cypriots, like Egyptians and other Middle Eastern people believed that the Sun was born from the goddess called ‘Heavenly Virgin’, which was one of the titles of Aphrodite – Astarte. So, in all, Aphrodite, to goddess of love, was also the goddess of light – giving birth to the sun. The amount of light increases every day, the spring will come, and the new coming of Adonis. The rhythm or cycle of nature is everlasting and repeated.
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