TERRA
INCOGNITA / HEKATE
once the black: J. Hillman, Alchemical Blue." Alchemical Psychology. Putnam CT, 2010.
the white: D.H. Lawrence, "Cezanne." In, J.D. McClatcy, Poets on Painters. Berkeley, 1988. The white area was in the north. One meaning of Hekate is from the Greek, meaning "the far-off one." She is hardly mentioned until the latter period of Grecian mythology, and It is believed that she originated among the Teutonic tribes in the North.
Pandora's box: "(Jane) Harrison sees the contents of Pandora's box as 'Keres, souls which are freed to mingle among the living...' To her, Keres, like personified bacilli, engendered the imagination of corruption and pollution." G. Thomas, Healing Pandora. Berkeley, 2009.
original contamination: As (Stephen) Hawking describes it, the universe 'would be neither created nor destroyed. It would just BE.' Such notions as existence and being in the absence of time are not fathomable within our limited human experience. We don’t even have language to describe them. Nearly every sentence we utter has some notion of 'before' and 'after.'" A. Lightman, "What Came Before the Big Bang?" Harpers, January 2016.pain: Mythic tradition tells that (Hekate) was purified in the river Acheron, whose name is derived from achos, meaning pain." D.L. Miller, Three Faces of God, Philadelphia, 1986.
the incommensurable: M. Leiris, Manhood. London, UK, 1968.
abyss: "In essence, a wriiter enters Hekate country by necessity. On whom might we call when descending? Who reigns over lost regions, the gaps, secrets, dark spaces, and borderlands of forgotten interior landscapers?" J. Feather, "Re-Imaging Hekate: Muse for Memoir." Psychological Perspectives, Vol. 54 Issue 1, 2011.
to be a ghost: “As in the notion of the Christian Trinity, in the stories of Hekate the ghost is the factor that connects, that makes the triangle whirl.” D.L. Miller, The Three Faces of God. Philadelphia, 1986.She is the guardian: A. Barring and J. Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess. New York, 1993.
three crossings: "This uncanny Greek mythic figure combined the characteristics of moon (lunar sky), earth, and underworld." D.L. Miller, The Three Faces of God. New Orleans, 2005.
moonlight: It was only from the fifth-century onward that poets and artists connected Hekate with the moon.Maine boots: J. Hillman, "Puer Wounds and Odysseus's Scar. In, Senex & Puer. G. Slater, ed., Putnam, CT., 2013.
ritualizations and magic: “Hekate becomes a witch whose power is magic rather than realization, and the passing of the phases or psychological states into each other is accomplished---if at all---by use of too many ‘aids’ (seeds, brew, grass, chemical), rendering the experience inaccessible and antipodal to consciousness. Hekate can poison as well as intoxicate, turn ecstasy into madness, and cause death where incubation---or a short journey---was intended.” N. Hall, The Moon and The Virgin. London, 1991.A corpse: T. Hijikata. Quoted in C. MaGee, "Criminal Dance: The Early Films of Butoh Master Tatsumi Hijikata." Midnight Eye. 30 Sept 2010. This is one of many definitions Hijikata had for Butoh, the "Dance of Death."
moon: “It is as if the dark moon has now split off from its original unity and has taken on a separate personality as a Hekate, in common with the Iron Age tendency for the dark aspect to separate from the cyclical pattern and come to stand against the light.” A. Barring and J. Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess. New York, 1993.
chthonian depths: "The polytheistic perspective is grounded in the chthonic depths of the soul." J. Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld. New York, 1975.
Good God!: W. Wordsworth, From, "The World is Too Much With Us." (Slightly altered.)Yet we are falling: R. Bly. From, "Summer, 1060, Minnesota." In, Silence in the Snowy Fields. Middletown, CT., 1962.
darkness: One title of Hekate is Queen of the Night. "In dark moments between sleep and waking, works of art and language take form in the minds of artists and dreamers now as with prehistoric cave painters forty thousand years ago." N. Hall, The Moon and the Virgin. London,1991,dark matter: P. Ball, Invisible. London, 2015.
devout: "Of all the pious demoniacs cited in thirteenth-century pastoral literature, among the most tantalizing are the demon preachers: laypeople, including women, who were said to preach devout and orthodox sermons while possessed, with evident approval from the clergy." B. Newman, "Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century." Speculum, July 1998.
birth of art: This refers to Homo sapiens, that is, fully human beings, as 1.8 million years ago, in the Syrian desert, Homo erectus or early Homo ergestar made cupules "by pecking traces of which are still clearly visible...This is our earliest evidence of the discreet but unquestionable emergence of the long tradition of a form of 'art' that was soon to spread throughout the landscape..." M. Lorblanchet and P. Bahn, The First Artists. London, 2017.
I met him: "Alienation was the cultural hallmark of Japan in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and Nakagawa Soen grew up as a poet among its disaffected artists and intellectuals." P. Besserman & M. Steger, Crazy Clouds: Zen Radicals, Rebels & Reformers. Boston, 1991.
tones of gray: Hekate, the three-minded one, who lives on the threshold, the third, between the underworld's darkness and the moon's silvery light, and who haunts the crossroads, would think in shades of gray.dense with philosophy: "The writing in the rock is the signature of time itself, captured as Valéryan forms in movement, displaying their growth and articulation over eons in the stilled swirls of their inner core, the camouflage stripes and fault-lines of their structure, their veins and cells; it is possible to see clearly, vertiginously, in these sections through a pebble or a rock the flow of organic matter as it took shape and petrified." M. Warner, "The Writing of Stones." http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/29/warner.php
history declines: "It is human to want to know ourselves from the past, but History's perspective narrows that identity to portraits, ideology, and abstractions to which nation states committed human purpose. True ancestors are absent." Ibid.
summer grasses: "Summer grass— / all that remains / of warriors' dreams." M. Basho, "The Narrow Road to the Deep North." D.L. Bamhill, trans.
one third of her own: "Hekate knows the depth of this insight, for in her dark underworldly way of soul, she is called angelos, which also may be why she can be called triprosopos, 'three faces' of one goddess." D.L. Miller, Three Faces of God. New Orleans, 2005.The poet: L.R. Farnell, “Hekate’s Cult.” In, S. Roam, ed. The Goddess Hekate. Hastings, UK, 1992.
in the dark: J. Donohue, Sensei. New York, 2004.
It was only: H.D. From, "The Master."
toward the sea: "The idea of a material that flows forever back to its own source constitutes a major innovation in the perception of water, a transubstantiation of its 'stuff.'" I Illich, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness. Dallas, 1985.ear-whispered: Metaphor for how Zen Masers transmit esoteric teaching to their disciples.
broomsticks: “In Rome, the broomstick was a symbol of Hekate’s priestess-midwife, who swept the threshold of a home after each birth to clean it of evil spirits that might harm the child.” J.S. Bolen, Goddesses in Older Women. New York, 2002. Not native to California, Scotch Broom, Cytisus scoparius, was "naturalized in the wild."a name: Hekate's name possibly comes from a Greek word meaning distant, or, far off. "Or a different principle may have been at work, one we associate with the psyche of the primitive world: when the creatures came before him, Adam comprehended the essence of each and gave to it its true name, a name as substantial as the creature itself, a name that not only contained its essential nature but was its nature, not just a substitute for it. For this Adam, name,
nature and reality were one." D. Weiss, "Refusing to Name the Animals." Gettysburg Review, Winter 1990.
the wild: "Before we begin, before we utter a word about our human situation, its soul's dilemmas and prospects, we must recall that we raise these questions in a terrain of animals, the aboriginal inhabitants of this earth, this air, these waters— that we are their guests, even if continually their conquerors and executioners, sometimes their protectors." J. Hillman, "Culture and the Animal Soul."
http://www.malintzin.org/attachments/029_Hillman%20-%20Culture%20and%20the%20Animal%20Soul.pdfmoon in mind: "It is the Moon which discloses par excellence the flow, passage, waxing and waning, birth, death and rebirth, in short the cosmic rhythms, the eternal becoming of things, Time." M. Elaide, "The Symbolism of Shadows in Archaic Religions." In, Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts. New York, 1990. Hekate is the goddess of the Dark Moon.
With such a theme: .W. Wordsworth. From, "The Prelude of 1850."
She left me: W. Witherup. From, "Charma." (1988.)
flesh has remained: V.M. Fóti, "The Gravity and (In)visibility of Flesh Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, Derrida." Vision’s Invisibles: Philosophical Explorations. Albany, NY, 2003.
I too am wild: P. Shepard, "A Post-Historic Primitivism." In, M. Oelschlaeger, ed., The Wilderness Condition. San Francisco, 1992.
95% unknown: It is theorized that 68% of the universe consists of dark energy, and about 27% of dark matter. That is, the universe is 95% unknown.Perhaps poetry: C.Rovelli, The Order of Time. New York, 2018.
like an egg: "Who will teach us to read those 'scribings scrawled on eggs,' those tracings of ancient gods?" N. Hall, The Moon and the Virgin. New York, 1980.
We are born: https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(18)30117-4
scaffolding: “If there was no dark matter then the galaxies that we can see in the Universe wouldn’t be distributed in the clumps and filaments that we observe today. It’s the underlying cosmic web of dark matter that provides the scaffolding upon which the visible universe is built.” C. Heymans, The Dark Universe. Bristol UK, 2017.Wings flutter: “Hekate!
Wise old woman!
Owl-eyed healing woman!
Hoo-hoo! Hoo-hoo!
She who sees clearly in the darkness
the web that connects all of life.”
D. Wilshire, Virgin Mother Crone: Myths & Mysteries of the Triple Goddess. Rochester, VT. 1994.
Hekate can: N. Hall, The Moon and the Virgin. New York, 1980.obscured: “Metaphorically and mythologically (Hekate) is dimly seen.” J.S. Bolen, Goddesses in Older Women. New York, 2002.
in and out: “But for a naturalistic metaphysician, these observations of constant biotic flux point to the need for an overhaul in how we see the world. Instead of searching for things with fixed essences based on form and function, naturalistic metaphysics suggests that we need to move to a picture that’s much more dynamic – in which any ‘thingness’ is strictly temporary.” J. Dupré, “Metaphysics of Metamorphosis.” https://aeon.co/essays/science-and-metaphysics-must-work-together-to-answer-lifes-deepest-questionsaura: "While the loss of the aura for (Walter) Benjamin represented new possibilities, what was forfeited in this process were the 'aura' and the authority of the object containing within it the values of cultural heritage and tradition." S. Hazan, "The Virtual Aura — Is There Space for Enchantment in a Technological World?" https://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2001/papers/hazan/hazan.html
Giacometti: "(Jean) Genet talks of (Giacometti's sculptures) emerging from the flames of the oven, 'residue of a terrible firing'. Could they be phoenixes, rising from their own consummation? or something else, figures (goddesses) of a terrible
serenity, scorched, corroded, yet incorruptible. Perhaps this is the source of their uncanny terror, a familiarity so hard to actually identify, to reach from within the self to draw out." G. Lazare, "The Thief in the Studio: Genet and Giacometti." Inventory. Vol 2. No. 3, 1996.
tall on ashes: “Looking ahead, our model simulations show that grasslands store more carbon than forests because they are impacted less by droughts and wildfires. This doesn’t even include the potential benefits of good land management to help boost soil health and increase carbon stocks in rangelands.” P. Dass. Quoted in, "Californian grasslands set to store carbon more reliably than forests." Physics World, 16 July 2018.
pushed to the limit: “The underworld displays itself in hiding…It has its own heroes and villains, its own honor and dishonor, and these are celebrated by legends, stories, daily performances. They are scenes, created on the spur of the moment, in which people play themselves, pushed to the limit.” J. Berger, And Our Faces, My heart, Brief as Photos. New York, 1991.