Uranus / Ouranos /
Prometheus
And we: spectators: R.M. Rilke. From, Duino Elegies: The Eighth Elegy. A. Poulin, Jr., translator. Boston, 2005.
"thick now": K. Barad, "Troubling Time/s, Undoing the Future." Aarhus University, Denmark, June 2, 2016.
Prometheus scoops up: D. Koehn, "John Meiwether and the Promethean Hero: A Cautionary Tale in Financial Ethics." Teaching Business Ethics 6, 2002.
overarching dome: "Uranus was scarcely regarded as anthropomorphic, aside from the genitalia in the castration myth. He was simply the sky, which was conceived by the ancients as an overarching dome or roof of bronze, held in place (or turned on an axis) by the Titan Atlas." http://www.crystalinks.com/UranusMythology.htmlthe mammoth fire: The Thomas Fire, begun December 4, 2017, named for St. Thomas College, in Santa Paula, CA., was the largest fire in California history.In was finally fully contained of January 12, 2018, after burning 281,893 acres (440 square mines) in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.
Mud slid through: With vegetation burned off, on January 9, 2018, after a heavy rainstorm, mud and rocks destroyed dozens of homes and buried at least 18 people in Montecito, CA., Santa Barbara Co.
a terrible grinding roar: A resident of Montecito, CA. In, N. Gallgaher, "Southern Californians Know: Climate Change is Real, It is Deadly and It is Here." The Guardian, March 3, 2018.
solitude: R. Bly. From, "Six Winter Privacy Poems."the mythological Ouranos: R. Tarnas, Prometheus the Awakener. Woodstock, CT, 1995. "Although I am persuaded that the figure of Prometheus (at least as the principle is defined by (Richard) Tarnas: '...the pre-eminent mythic personification of rebellion, revolution, technological and cultural innovation, and the striving for freedom and change, more adequately captures the Uranus archetype than Ouranos,' I acknowledge that the myth of Ouranos also illuminates something of the Uranus archetype, and therefore the synchronicity of its naming still stands. ( Nevertheless, Tarnas' argument that the name 'Uranus' was simply a logical inference -- since Ouranos was the father of Kronos who was the father of Zeus -- remains persuasive)." G. Goddard, "Uranus, Prometheus, or just plain Herschel?" http://www.islandastrology.net/herschel.html
the people: "Some 15,000 to 25,000 years ago, people wandered from Asia to North America across a now-submerged land called Beringia, which once connected Siberia and Alaska...Now, the oldest full genome to be sequenced from the Americas suggests that some settlers stayed in Beringia while another group headed south and formed the population from which all living Native Americans descend...The genome comes from an 11,500-year-old infant found in 2013 at the site of Upward Sun River in central Alaska's Tanana River Basin, a part of Beringia that's still above sea level." M. Price, "Ancient Americans arrived in a single wave, Alaskan infant's genome suggests." Science, Jan 8, 2018.no clapper: Perhaps this refers to Cronus's castration of Uranus (Ouranos). "Then from his ambush his son reached out his left hand and with his right he took the gigantic sickle, long and jagged-toothed, and from his very own father he swiftly lopped the genitals, and threw them behind him..." Hesiod, Theogony (178-81).
an Indian saint: Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836-1886). On his cathartic vision of the goddess Kali, Ramakrishna reported, "... houses, doors, temples and everything else vanished altogether; as if there was nothing anywhere! And what I saw was an infinite shoreless sea of light; a sea that was consciousness. However far and in whatever direction I looked, I saw shining waves, one after another, coming towards me." C. Isherwood, Ramakrishna and his Disciples. Hollywood, CA., 1980.
survived the fire: In the myth of Prometheus, he stole fire from this fellow gods and gave it to humankind, and in doing so, "taking upon himself the lot of man: to suffer and to suffer injustice." C. Kereyi, Prometheus: Archetypal Image of Human Existence. Princeton, NJ, 1997.twisted tongue: "The only established discourse about this realm is that of mythology. The creation myths which tell how, out of the original chaotic flux of the 'time of dawning,' the things of this world came to be, are not simply regarded by (Yaminahua) shamans as tales of some distant past." G. Townsley, "'Twisted Language,' A Technique for Knowing." In, J. Narby & F. Huxley, eds., Shamans Through Time. New York, 2001.
Hidden Book: M-A Ouaknin, The Burnt Book. Princeton, NJ, 1995.
across the current: "...Uranus symbolizes the urge for freedom from the paradigm, a breaking through into a new or different paradigm, an evolutionary (vertical) development or transformation.” G. Goddard, “Uranus, Prometheus or Just Plain Herschel?” http://www.islandastrology.net/herschel.htmla cry went out: J. Hillman, "Nature Alive." In, T. Moore, Editor, A Blue Fire. New York, 1991.
an open fire: "...the conclusion (that Hesiod's narrative of the Prometheus myth), that it indeed concerns a volcano is strengthened by volcano myths around the world." E. Wayland & P.T. Wayland, When They Severed Earth From Sky. Princeton, NJ, 2004.Ouranos: "Okeanos fears not Zeus and will not attend his councils—and why? Because he himself is not Ocean but the stream of Ouranos, high heaven itself, an earlier unhumanized Zeus. Okeanos, says the Etymologicum Magnum, is a title of Ouranos." J. Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. London, 1989.
a city: San Francisco, CA.
the principle: R. Tarnas, Prometheus the Awakener. Woodstock, CT, 1995. (See above: 12.)
hungry ghost: "The inhabitants of the Hungry Ghost Realm are depicted as creatures with scrawny necks, small mouths, emaciated limbs and large, bloated, empty bellies. This is the domain of addiction, where we constantly seek something outside ourselves to curb an insatiable yearning for relief or fulfillment. The aching emptiness is perpetual because the substances, objects or pursuits we hope will soothe it are not what we really need. We don’t know what we need, and so long as we stay in the hungry ghost mode, we’ll never know. We haunt our lives without being fully present." G. Maté, "The the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts." https://drgabormate.com/preview/in-the-realm-of-hungry-ghosts-introduction/
There it was: W. Stevens. From, “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain.”spiraling patterns: "The spiral in psychology means that when you make a spiral you always come over the same point where you have been before, but never the same, it is above or below, inside or outside, so it means growth." C.G. Jung, Dream Analysis, Parts II & III. (Seminar Notes, privately printed.) Zurich, 1929.
a style of old age: "The 'style of old age' is not always a product of the years; it is a gift implanted along with is other gifts in the artist, ripening, it may be, with time, often blossoming before its season under the foreshadow of death, or unfolding of itself even before the approach of age or death..." H. Broch, "The Style of the Mythical Age." In, R. Bespaloff, On the Iliad. New York, 1947.
having finally: E.W. Said, On Late Style. New York, 2006.
children to conceive: Uranus, the sky, is the son of Gaia, the earth. Mating with his mother, the Titans were born.
Who would: Ovid, Metamorphosis 1its motivation gone: "Beside clouds of methane crystals low in the atmosphere, smog, composed of methane (the same product that can provide fuel for automobiles), is also present high in (Uranus') atmosphere." https://www.windows2universe.org/?page=/uranus/lower_atmosphere.html
What saint: T. Roethke. From, "Cuttings."
the bones: The great Chinese Buddhist monk. Hsuan Tsang, traveled to India and viewed "two teeth, a fragment of the Buddha's skullbone, and, at the place of the great enlightenment, bits of both bone and flesh." However, "These practices have been commonly viewed as an anomaly within the Buddhist tradition, for they seem to evoke a continuing presence of the Master who, according to orthodox Buddhist teaching, was completely and permanently absent from the world." N. Falk, "To Gaze on Sacred Traces." History of Religions. May, 1977.
humans are more: "In order for one to profit from the psychological impact of the image of Prometheus his figure must be read as corresponding to a need for transcendent being. Prometheus is in this way more than human." G. Bachelard, Fragments of a Poetics of Fire. Dallas, 1990.
Note: After I wrote this, Mark Kelly, Research Librarian at Pacifica Graduate Institute, told me about Otherkin. “Most Otherkin believe they have non-human aspects that are either spiritual or philosophical in nature. Some claim that they are human in a physical sense but non-human ('other') in a mental or spiritual one. Many Otherkin attribute this discrepancy to reincarnation or a ‘misplaced’ soul." P. M. Parker, "Spiritualities: Webster’s Quotations, Facts, and Phrases." Icon Group International, San Diego, CA, 2008At ground level: Bakersfield, CA.
small mammals: "During the late Triassic, 220 million years ago, the first true mammals appeared, like Eozostrodon. Some scientists believe that mammals evolved from a group of extinct mammal-like reptiles, Theriodontia, which were Therapsids. These primitive mammals were tiny and are thought to have been nocturnal." http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/mesozoic/Triassic.html
giant saurian feet: To the best our current knowledge, huge colonies of microscopic-sized single-celled bacteria about three billion years ago sunk to the bottom of the sea. As sediments built up, pressures increased, and the biomass that is today's oil reserves was cooked and created. But to a dinosaur, its ancestor's heavy feet would have been the cause: saurian ancestor worship.
fox spirits: P. Lamantia. From, “Meadowlark West.” In China, fox spirits, or huli jing, are mythological creatures known for their manipulative tactics. In Japan, they are kitsune, supernatural beings who can shape-shift from fox into human form. In other words, foxes were seen as tricksters. Hesiod's poems, Theogony and Works and Days "present Prometheus as a trickster figure and offer powerful testimony to the ways in which his myth helped the Greeks of the archaic period think about the nature of the human condition in all its complexity and ambiguity." C. Dougherty, Prometheus. London, 2006.
"Every invention of Prometheus brings new misery upon mankind...when, after stealing the fire (to give to mankind), Prometheus himself is snatched away from mortals to suffer punishment. Epimetheus (Prometheus' brother) is left behind as their representative: craftiness is replaced by stupidity...Prometheus the Forethinker, Epimetheus the belated Afterthinker." P Radin, The Trickster. New York, 1972.
speeding machine: "The products of technology (Hephaestean) are what disclose the limits to technological cunning (Promethean). The more we freely create to help ourselves, the more we are enchained and suffer. Thinking that we can do whatever we please, we use force and violence in an effort to bend others to our will. We devise ever more powerful weapons and means to inflict harm and suffering on our brethren." D. Koehin, "John Meriwether and the Promethean Hero: A Cautionary Tale in Financial Ethics." Teaching Business Ethics 6, 2002.Kyosei asked: Blue Cliff Record, Case 46. "The Sound of Rain.” In, J.D. Loori, The Mountain Record. Mt. Temper, NY, 1992.
Shouts and his words: T. Hughes. From, "Prometheus On His Crag."
stole a bag: Although Prometheus famously stole fire, Bachelard likens what he calls the "Prometheus complex" to "the problem of clever disobedience." G Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Boston, 1964.
unpredictable wind: Keeper of the Winds, Aeolus (Aiolos) kept the winds locked inside the cavernous interior of his island. (Homer's wind-god Aiolos resembles Hesiod's Ouranos. [Uranus].) In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus visited Aiolos and was given the bag of winds in order to ensure a speedy trip home to Ithaka. However, his crew opened the bag, thinking it contained gold, and their ship was blown back to Aiolos.
Was Prometheus punished: As punishment for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans, Zeus had Prometheus chained to a mountain, where every day an eagle, "the storm bird associated with Zeus," would arrive to feed on his liver; and every night his wound would heal so that he could be "martyred by a bird" again. But was stealing fire his real crime?rocks, stones, pebbles: "Man, he would say, must learn to see again, to manipulate the pebbles, to use pebbles in order to dream, and stones in order to imagine. It is not a question of returning to the stone age, nor of aping primitivism. But man in his totality will have to learn, in some way, to give a proper place to that 'pensee sauvage' Levi-Strauss speaks of." M. Beaujour, "André Breton: The Stone Age." Yale French Studies, No. 31 (1964),
its impression: "All of the planets in the Solar System rotate on their axis, with a tilt that’s similar to the Sun. In many cases, planet’s have an axial tilt, where one of their poles will be inclined slightly towards the Sun....But the axial tilt of Uranus is a staggering 99 degrees! In other words, the planet is rotating on its side. All the planets look a bit like spinning top as they go around the Sun, but Uranus looks more like a ball rolling in a circular pattern." https://www.universetoday.com/19279/10-interesting-facts-about-uranus/Water circulates: "Ever since the time when everything originated from him (Okeanos) has continued to flow to the outermost edge of the earth, flowing back upon himself in a circle." Ibid.
a circle: "When Prometheus transgressed the law of the ancient gods and stole fire for humankind, to teach them civilization and the arts, his punishment was typically brutal. Jupiter (Zeus) had the great Titan chained to the side of Mount Caucasus, where a vulture preyed daily on his liver, which was renewed as quickly as it was devoured. We mere mortals do not possess livers with quite so vigorous a regenerative capacity, but the legend captures well the remarkable potential of the body to rebuild itself." N. Rosenthal, "Prometheus’s Vulture and the Stem-Cell Promise." New England Journal of Medicine, July 17, 2013.it's own: "The features most often mistaken for rock art are those produced through natural geological processes These are created either during the formation of the stone, or through later glacial action or weathering .
Geological formation produces an enormous variety of features depending on the process involved, and the local conditions. Sedimentary structures such as cross-bedding and slumping can give the impression of
man-made design, and metamorphic, igneous an d mineralised structures such as veins, folding, baking or fracturing of the rock can also produce deceptive rock art--like features.." Recognizing Rock Art: www.kilmartin.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Recognising-rock-art.pdf
our images: “If planetary archetypes do in fact correspond in some sense to mythic stories, then they must be likewise complex and composite. But if they are, then it seems odd to insist that there is one and only one possible archetypal story corresponding with Uranus! That the realm of the collective unconscious has been accessed and mythically mapped by ancient imagination and psychic intuition and that the planets have deep archetypal and symbolic meaning in relation to the same dimensions of existence, is generally beyond dispute. But beyond the degree to which the symbols historically evolved together, it is unlikely that there would be exact one-to-one correspondences between the symbol sets." G. Goddard, "Uranus, Prometheus, or just plain Herschel?" http://www.islandastrology.net/herschel.html
what being alive means: “Faced with the question, ‘What is man?’ the Talmudic Masters reply that he is a ‘what?’ a ‘what is it?’” M-A Ouaknin, The Burnt Book. Princeton, NJ, 1995. "What is it?" is also a koan of Korean Zen Buddhism.all night: R. Creeley. From, "The Rain."
concealed: "... and moving of themselves the gates of the sky groaned, which the hours kept, the Hours to whom was entrusted great Ouranos and Olympos, whether to unfold the thick gloom or replace its cover." Homer, The Iliad 8.
the stream of Ouranos: J. Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. London, 1989.last night's rain: "(Prometheus) is clever rogue, bringing important information to humans, and part rebel: above all, he is the master of information, while still moving between the world of gods and men—even while skulking beneath his umbrella." C. Dougherty, Prometheus. London, 2006.
calendrical notations: H. Crosby, "Baja's Murals of Mystery." National Geographic, 1980. No.5.
equations: Plato names Uranus as teaching wisdom through mathematics, transcendence, spacelessness and timelessness.
on blue air: "Thick blue clouds of methane gas obscure the planet, but studies suggest an active lower atmospheric layer of ammonia and water ice clouds circulating around the planet, similar to the Earth’s atmospheric system." http://geology.isu.edu/wapi/Geo_Pgt/Mod13_Uranus/mod13.htmLook: R. Jeffers. From, "Hands."
we were also human: "We are mosaics...I found the animals in me when I stroll in the forest. / I hesitate before a large dragonfly, I step / like a cat in the night, / I have felt something / lift along my neck / when a wolf howls. " L. Eiseley. From, "The Old Ones."
a season: Uranus, like Earth, has four seasons. However, as it takes Uranus about 84 Earth years to orbit the sun, each season lasts 21 of our years.
From afar: C.Deziel, "What Geologic Activity Does Uranus Have?" https://sciencing.com/geologic-activity-uranus-have-19034.html
sky-blue color: Blue "transforms the other colors into possibilities of imagination, into psychological events, that come to life because of blue." J. Hillman, "Alchemical Blue." Alchemical Psychology, Putnam CT, 2010.
has not yet healed: Here I'm suggesting that the story of Parsifal and the Fisher King's "wound that would not heal," is related to that of the story of Ouranos, whose genitals were severed by his son, Cronos, who later was overthrown by Zeus. Robert Johnson explains that the Fisher King “has naively blundered into something that is too big for him. (“C. Kerenyi suggests that ‘the Titans had overreached themselves in their foolhardiness by attempting to perform a great work.’” G. Thomas, Healing Pandora, Berkeley, 2009.). He proceeds halfway through his masculine development and then drops it as being too hot. Often a certain bitterness arises, because, like the Fisher King, he can neither live with the new consciousness he has touched nor can he entirely drop it.” R. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology. New York, 1989.mountain's switchback: "It is well known that mountains have been viewed widely as an axis mundi, as the dwelling place of gods, as the meeting place between humans and gods...But traditionally these high places have been the dwelling place of both benevolent and malevolent supernatural beings." P. Bishop, Dreams of Power: Tibetian Buddhism and the Western Imagination. London,1993.
The Old Ones: According to H.P Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, "Quantum mnemonics was known to be the language of the Old Ones, as they represented physical laws of the Universe that preceded the current one." http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Great_Old_One. But there many Old Ones, such as the Anasazi of the American Southwest, the Australian Aboriginal Ancestors of the Dreamtime, or the Presocratic philosopher poets of Ancient Greece.
lung-gom-pa: "The first eyewitness account of a lung-gom-pa that reached the West is probably the graphic description which Alexandra David-Neel gave in her famous book With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet. One day while crossing a wide table land, she noticed in the distance a moving black spot...Her field glasses revealed the moving object to be a man, who 'proceeded at an unusual gait and especially with an extraordinary swiftness,' When he came nearer she 'could see his perfectly calm impassive face and wide-open eyes with their gaze fixed on some invisible far-distant object situated somewhere high up in space. The man did not run. He seemed to lift himself from the ground, proceeding by leaps...'" Lung "signifies both the elementary state of 'air' as well as the subtle vital energy or psychic force.." Gom "means meditation, contemplation, concentration of mind and soul upon a certain object, as well as a gradual emptying of the mind of all subject-object relationship, until a complete identification of subject and object has taken place." L.A. Govinda, The Way of the White Clouds: A Buddhist Pilgrim in Tibet. Berkeley, 1966.
fantasy: "Significantly, we lack a proper history of the imagination, which might provide answers to such questions as: At what point did fantasy begin to acquire its modern association with unreality and subjectivity? And when do notions of a 'self' with a private and interior hinterland expressed in fantasy begin to emerge?" D. Maclagan, "Fantasy and the Figurative." In, A. Gilroy and T. Dalley, Editors, Pictures at an Exhibition. London, 1989.
The hag: "As late as the Middle Ages, the witch was still the hagazussa, a being that sat on the Hag, the fence, which passed behind the gardens and separated the village from the wilderness." H.P. Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization. Oxford, UK, 1085. Addressing ideologies, Duerr writes, "But these same ideologies always tend to take away the real character of this 'other part of ourselves' and to represent it as an 'illusionary projection'. The reason is that they arose at a time when the hedge on which the hagazussa once sat had solidified into a wall that also represented the boundary of reality."
beauty's wavy hair: Aphrodite was born in the water from Ouranos' severed genitals which fell into the sea.
the residue...scorched: J. Gernet. Quoted in G. Lane, “Thief in the Studio: Genet and Giacometti.” Inventory, February 1996.