Did the double axe of the Minoans depict a stylised bee / goddess?"In 1958 an obscure but scholarly book, Apiculture in the Prehistoric Aegean, suggested that the double axe of the Minoans was actually a stylised bee. This resonates with my own research, which has revealed that archeologists in the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük, Turkey, observed that the double axes they were excavating resembled butterflies, images of which are easily mistaken for bees. (Çatalhöyük contains a wealth of bee symbolism, which I have chronicled in my research and which I discuss in my lectures.)

In other words, the double axes of both cultures appear to have been veiled in similar, if not identical, symbolism. This is intriguing, for DNA has revealed that the people of Çatalhöyük migrated to Minoan Crete. What’s more, the word labrys, derives from the ancient Turkish (Lydian) word for ‘double axe’, and Knossos, the capital of Minoan Crete, was known as the ‘Palace of the Double Axe’. Given that the double axe represents a stylised bee and/or goddess, this renders Knossos not the ‘Palace of the Double Axe’, but rather the ‘Palace of THE BEE (Goddess)’.

This realisation also demands that we re-examine the notion of the ‘Labyrinth’ at Knossos (which I discuss in my lectures), as this word also derives from labrys. Linguistics aside, even on the most cursory of levels the bee’s significance in Knossos is hard to refute. Take, for example, the account of King Minos, whose son drowned in a vat of honey, an illuminating fact whose implications have been largely overlooked." --Andrew Gough
http://andrewgough.co.uk/the-fleur-de-lis-and-the-bee/

"The Minotaur, the beast that lives at the heart of the labyrinth and
feeds off young men and women, was named Asterion. Star.
The luminosity to be found in a dark night is not the sun,
not ordinary light, but a special radiance that doesn’t undo the night."
--Thomas Moore, Dark Night of the Soul

Bellicose: demonstrating aggression and willingness to fight.
Synonyms: belligerent, aggressive, hostile, warlike, warmongering, antagonistic, pugnacious, truculent, confrontational, contentious, militant, combative

Man Myth & Magic; Cirlot Dictionary of Symbols
"Going into the Labyrinthos Caves at Gortyn it's easy to feel that this is a dark and dangerous place where it is easy to get lost. Evans' hypothesis that the palace of Knossos is also the Labyrinth must be treated skeptically."
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/architecture/has-the-original-labyrinth-been-found-1803638.html

Map of the Labyrinth Cave near Gortyn, Crete.
Minotaur: A flesh-eating monster, half man half bull, son of Pasiphae (wife of Minos) by a bull.

DEEP IN THE CHAMBER OF STARS
"As long as an individual does not function out of substance, as long as he or she does not demonstrate material weight but exists as a kind of flimsy, wispy, transparent, indefinite entity, there’ll be no shadow. And shadow is what is attached to all that is evil and reprehensible—nobody wants to be associated with a shadow because it means carrying guilt. Yet the only way to avoid casting a real shadow is not to have any materiality.… If one is going to have weight and substance and be definite, one will drag a shadow along at the same time." --Edward F. Edinger

The Transparent Labyrinth
In Guardians of the Galaxy 2, the hero Quill travels the universe learning more about his true parentage. A figure, curiously named Ego, reveals himself as his unknown father. Ego explains he is one of the god-like Celestials, and exists as the planet on which they are standing.

He projected a human guise to travel the universe, eventually falling in love with Quill's mother. Quill learns to manipulate their Celestial power. Ego planted seedlings on thousands of worlds which he can terraform into new extensions of himself from the sub-soil or substrate of the collective unconscious.

The process symbolized here is intra-psychic. An autonomous split-off complex takes center stage in the inner cosmos and is projected on others. Traumatic emotion splits off into the unconscious where it functions as a dissociated, autonomous complex. The split protects us from our own unconscious identification.

These split-off (ignored, repressed), not yet mentalized psychic parts and experiences are atemporal. This living thing is an autonomous complex split-off from consciousness, experienced as emotionally distant, intrusive, or chaotic.

We can lose contact with the soul of the world, creating an inflation where the ego which imagines itself as its own creator. Ego then projects itself onto the world through power and domination. The result is our alienation from inner and outer nature.

Only narcissists don't relate to others as independent beings, but as pawns to be used as means to their own selfish ends. The monstrous ever-expanding empire of rigid patriarchy is morally insane and abuses power simply because it can.

Transpersonal Evil
Mental disorders range across a spectrum of 'delusional styles.' This is a portrait of malignant egophrenia, all-consuming toxic narcissism, the split-off separate self gone wild, gone murderously socio- and psychopathic. Cut off from nature we are cut off from psyche. This descent into the realm of death and shadows is a conflation of the shadow and Self archetypes, which function as networks of synchronistic meaning.

That shadow knows about our death and 'knowing no more.' The archetype of evil emits its toxic radioactivity underground through the shared unconscious of collective heritage. It manifests collectively as gaming the system with destructive and unecological psychic epidemics. James Hillman advised that our own harmony with our deep self requires a journey through the interior, recognizing our purpose (character; daemon, genius), and harmonizing with the environmental world.

Hillman dubs ego a "myth of inflation", not the secret key to the development of consciousness, but a source of fallacies, defining its literal fantasies as reality. In A Blue Fire (pg. 34), he suggests, "placing in abeyance such metaphors as: choice and light, problem solving and reality testing, strengthening, developing, controlling, progressing." He condemns new age insistence on transformation - sloughing off the old self and interpretive schemes for an idealization that is essentially another self-delusion.

The false-ego is a delusional system, a defensive facade, driven by a need for external validation of the inflated, fantastic, and grandiose self-image masking a core pain negative belief system. The negative core belief is unconscious but intensely painful, so repressed. Emotional distractions include melancholy, depression, jealousy, envy, abandonment, rage, and betrayal. Jung reminds us that, "The sin to be repented, of course, is unconsciousness." (Aion, Pages 191-192).

Narcissism is a self-devouring operating system that leaves nothing unmolested by primitive desires and emotions. This labyrinth is an abyssal faultline through character and conscience. They refuse to see the harm they impose on others, since it injures their overly-positive, inflated narcissistic self-image, which protects them from consciously feeling their shame and guilt.

Entangling Structure
Narcissists are trapped inside themselves and cannot see the world outside themselves because as imposters they do not believe in their own existence. Without the mirror of others constantly reflecting back their own worth they see themselves and the world around them as a movie; reality is a lie. They spend their energy fooling themselves, hiding the fact that they are always pretending. Even the trusted mirror sends back a distorted image of the one who is looking to validate their own existence from the outside.

Demonizing the ‘other' seemingly protects us from feeling our vulnerability and pain. Soul murderers continually recreate the on-going process of killing their own soul and are reflexively compelled to do this to others. They are governed by the twisted, self-perpetuating logic of fear and paranoia. Those taken over by the personality disorder fear that if they don't attack and rule over others, they are in danger of being attacked and ruled over themselves.

Drama is dysfunctional social interaction. Intimidation is an aggressive defense strategy. Intimidators engage in unconscious control dramas to gain power or energy from another person, and to "get their way." Such predators 'hunt' the energy of others. They justify domineering beliefs and behaviors.

They threaten, manipulate, and steal the energy of others. They get high fighting and watching the pain they inflict. They use others addictively, forcing them to pay attention and react so they feel fulfilled and get charged up with narcissistic fuel to feed the false ego.

Our hero fights back against this all-consuming force and narcissism, with the help of his anima and animal allies. The hero Quill's toxic father showed him the empire of light at the center of planet Ego is actually an empire of death and destruction -- 'dead matter.' Like the hero, we are forced toward the evolutionary responsibility to come to terms with the evil within our own hearts.

The reunited Guardians reach Ego's brain at planet Ego's labyrinthine core, because if they can blast the center the monster will die. The battle ensues, the bomb explodes, and kills Ego and his planet of death, and our heroes are reborn with new self-knowledge and a new sense of autonomous vitality, shifting the ratio of latent potential to manifest capacity.

Sound familiar? Yes, it is a variation on the archaic labyrinth tale and slaying the Minotaur, a lower uncontrolled level of personality and emotions, incapable of moral judgment. Wounding can be gradual or acute. The morphology of the adventure, character roles involved, and the victories gained exhibit little variation.

Pushed to our limits we are dragged in, dismembered, and devoured by the collective unconscious or dropped into a dark expense of space. We dissolve because the mind is without support; body and mind have separated.

We descend into the chaotic structure of our own mind. The descent describes the sinking of the vanished value into the unconscious. "By conquering the power of darkness, it establishes a new order, and then rises up to heaven again, that is attains supreme clarity of consciousness,” (Jung, Psychology and Religion, CW 11, cited in Storr, 249).

Symbolic Acts
But, self-discovery has become a contemporary art form. Awareness of the biological roots of our minds, conscious and subconscious, can empower our own lives of discovery. This confrontation with the contrary pre- or proto-psychic elements begins with a Descent and an encounter with the Shadow where we seem to loose our own footing. We sense something dead but still alive.

In his memoir MDR, Jung noted that in order "to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them, as it were. I felt not only violent resistance to this, but a distinct fear." He let himself drop with trepidation: "Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged down into dark depths. I could not fend off a feeling of panic,” (MDR, 170-179).

We create from our experience. Sublimation is an autonomous instinct to create. If we want to create, we must be willing to destroy our own illusions. Creativity means embracing that deep desire and bringing it to life so it arises from the dark depths. Imagery couples with the details of our lives.

Verisimilitude
To live yourself, you must create yourself with forethought, not just mimic or parrot the collective hero or passive salvation. You have to begin with the worst and the deepest, and confess your longing for what you truly desire. To succeed at anything we first have to deal with denial, resistance, and difficulty -- the power of gut reactions.

This heroic stage does not go on indefinitely. Questing fades into the background when one becomes familiarized with the imaginal realm. Both processes, questing for and participating in the imaginal realm, require attention, effort, and creativity. We take on the trope to give it new life with authentic gestures.

Oceanic creativity translates across modalities. When we are on fire we don't try to conceal it, but throw off all convention for invention. Creativity takes us into new territory with an uncompromising statement. It represents an important change with a simple enough gesture, that is symbolically important. But knowledge and healing are not always synonymous. Creative attempts at psychic healing may be closely analogous.

Nested Infinities
We retain an emotional unconscious identity with natural phenomena. Dreams are a more diffuse imagistic portrayal. We carry our past with us as an intensified shadow hiding our inferiority. Affirmations of life are simultaneous acknowledgement of death. But Joseph Campbell says, "When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness."

Our nervous system is like a map of our reality. Conflict fires the emotions; energy is tied up in emotional disturbance and psychophysical effects. Its fear/contraction structure holds the imprint of all of our human experiences in our body through structure, memory and metaphor -- memory architecture.

Each psychological and emotional imprint has its own life span within our biology, so we cannot rush or force our own healing. Ritualizing a myth into a ceremony makes it less cerebral. Myth reveals objective and subjective meanings in psychic events.

The living meaning emerges from experiencing it in and through ourselves. We deepen and validate that throughout our lifetimes in knowledge of the heart and dreams. Jung thought that what we haven't lived stays with us all the time, demanding satisfaction.

Myths reveal sacred history, a paradoxical divine reality with primitive effectiveness. Myths are real and psychological stories of the supreme reality representing the paths of different evolutionary processes. The psychology of the unconscious reveals the dynamic unconscious psyche. Our innate divinity is undistracted presence of mind -- primordial awareness. The innate demon is frightful phenomena -- our present tendency for ignorance, doubt and hesitation.

"The universal hero myth always refers to a powerful man or god-man who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons, serpents, monsters, demons, and so on, and who liberates his people from destruction and death. The narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies, and the worship of such a figure with dances, music, hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, grip the audience with numinous emotions and exalt the individual to an identification with the hero." ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 68.

 “Minotaur and Wounded Horse,” Picasso, April 17, 1935;
detail; pen and brush and black inks, graphite, and colored crayons, with smudging, over incising, on cream laid paper; signed recto, lower right, in graphite: “Picasso” (underlined); inscribed upper right, in graphite: “Boisgeloup–17 Avril XXXV; The Art Institute of Chicago.

(c) Iona Miller, 2017

"When an individual has been swept up into the world of symbolic mysteries, nothing comes of it; nothing can come of it, unless it has been associated with the earth, unless it has occurred when that individual was in the body…. Only if you first return to your body, to your earth, can individuation take place; only then does the thing become true." --C. G. Jung

“When I began to navigate psychospace ... I realized that before we were conscious, seemingly self-propelled human beings, many tapes and corridors had been created in our minds and reflexes which were not of our own making. These patterns and tapes laid down in our consciousness are walled off from each other. I see it as a vast labyrinth with high walls sealing off the many directives created by our personal history."
--Nick Sand, 2001, Mind States Conference, Berkeley, California

http://www.labyrinthos.net/photopage01.html

In Appendix A of  Jung's Red Book is a large circular design resembling a concentric labyrinth or bullseye maze. SYSTEMA MUNDITOTIUS (System of all the World) is a diagram illustrating the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead).

Today's labyrinth, embedded in our technological environment, embodies the clash of enculturation and individual psyche. It echoes the conflict and push/pull of Culture and Nature, society and biology, the civilized and natural worlds.

Technologies and media have massive pre-conscious psychological effects shaping attitudes and behaviors of those habitually using them since childhood. So do persistent archaic fusions of Nature and religion. One such effect is seen in creative lifestyles -- underground.

New Paradigms for Old?
Our ambitions are largely collective, acquisitive, materialistic. Yet, there is a growing impotence in the economic image. The progressive approach includes an integrative, inclusive perspective, ecological ethic, and self-realization ethic.

It is multi-dimensional, multi-faceted, and integrative, balancing and coordinating satisfactions along many dimensions. The new steady state includes normal open-ended change and growth, open-ended experimentation. Digital life has shifted us from sensate to ideational supersystems.

Ultimately, life comes from us, not things. We must make a descent into the emptiness at our core. To individuate, we must go down into our own darkness and imagistic, pictorial, or correlative thinking. In this highly-interactive descent, our own serpentine path, the subconscious hidden world is revealed, not generated. The underworld has its own ghostly reality. Corrective impulses arise in the healing language of the unconscious.

Working Assumptions
We tend to hide our interiority, even from ourselves. World and self-perceptions are strongly conditioned by familial and social learning, as well as by personal needs and motives. Unconscious processes comprise a major portion of significant human experience (perceiving, learning, thinking). Basic attitudes and beliefs (self and world views) conscious and unconscious, tend to be self-fulfilling.

Access to unconscious processes is facilitated by attention to feelings, emotions, and imaginal thought (visual imagery) in contrast to verbal-associative thought. The breadth and magnitude of human capacities and resources far exceed present levels of actualization within persons or societies.

There are hints about the internal process within the word. Etymology says the English noun maze was abstracted from the verb amaze, rather than being its original stem. Maze meant a place of utter confusion, so amazed reflected the sense “confuses, perplexed” rather than “surprised.” The inner form of sur–prise is over–take.

A marvel of ambiguity, the word labyrinth also has obscure origins, lost between archaeology, etymology, and symbology. Its derivation remains controversial. The labyrinth represents both the earth and the human body as sources of life.  Ovid associated the winding structure with the verb labor, "to glide" or "to flow," associating it with toil and struggle and intricate navigation. To defeat the Minotaur is to penetrate the winding halls of Hades.

The etymology for both labyrinth and labrys is the Greek labyrinthos, ‘a network of intricate passage ways.’ At the same time it is well to bear in mind that many learned scholars have seen great difficulty in accepting the labrys derivation of "labyrinth" for lack of etymological evidence. How curious some part of its origin remains obscured and unconscious.

The circuitous path conceals digressions, detours and delays. The quest and the labyrinth are the motifs used to describe spiritual journeys. This self-referential mechanism, a strange loop, describes the unique property of minds. A strange loop is a cyclic system, a road we go down to go somewhere else, that eventually returns to where it started.

What we learn in our journey does not assure success in reaching the center or escaping the labyrinth. Instead of disclosing an answer, the labyrinth-maze has a remarkable resemblance to the world. Experience in the labyrinth parallels life itself -- both the external world and the self.

Excavations
Everything remains murky, ambiguous with torturous entanglements inside the labyrinth. However, whether we are mindful of our deep material or not, part of it escapes the labyrinth every time unconscious fantasies bring the inside to the outside. It reveals what was formerly inaccessible and is currently relevant -- images of things that were and things to be from the matrix of the mind.

Jung suggests, the externalized conflict, to be healed must return to the psyche of the individual, where it was unconsciously born. "Who wants to come out victorious from this decline should celebrate a holy dinner with himself, eat and drink your own flesh and blood, to be able to recognize the other present in him and accept it "(Mysterium Coniunctionis 14/2,pp. 370-71).

The labyrinth metaphor and imagery focuses on caves, shadows, circuitous paths, entrapment, and moral choices. Classic authors used the word "labyrinth" metaphorically; Renaissance and medieval writers followed suit. We fall into the depths unsure if we will find the right path. We trip, stumble, and fall. Any easy way out of the labyrinth is bound to have serious consequences.

The Animal & the Anima at the Core
There's something about caves that draws us in past the portal of light and dark to enter a subterranean world -- the realm of disintegration where we leave the soul behind. Such galleries of stone are the womb of earth. The pattern is new every moment.

There are earthy smells, hushed silence, hellish webs, snares of tension, blind twisted corners, a heightened sense of some otherness in the depths -- the spirit of the depths. As we make our descent, something begins to 'sink in,' as we follow our instincts.

Instinct and image are poles of the same vector. The vast caverns of our mind have innumerable paths that twist and turn on one another, folding back on themselves, endlessly self-referential. For example, the road to recovery from a childhood without a mother’s love, support, emotional availability, and attunement is long and complicated.

Unmet needs for The Feminine and its mysteries exist alongside core conflicts in the unconscious. We are connected to images by the bridge of emotion. The depth of the core conflict is a tug-of-war that challenges our connectivity, the connective thread by which we find our way in life, our way out. Anima drives us toward creativity. It can also destroy us if we ignore it.

Anima Mundi is an Earth-sized psyche. Jung extended the notion of soul outside the body, encompassing all of nature. Jung considered psyche and nature as one and the same seen from different perspectives. What is psyche seen from within is nature seen from without. Therefore, we cannot touch the earth without touching spirit or soul. Soul exists beyond human nature. Therefore, we are walking through the soul of the world.

Anima is first projected onto the mother and always mixed with the mother archetype, perhaps when we confront and integrate shadow. She is an autonomous personality-fragment we project and confuse with the external reality. When we read dreams directly, without a mediator, we learn to accept whatever surfaces from the unconscious. Then she vanishes into the unconscious as the collective contents are constellated. Anima seems immortal until she "brings forth" and "dies".

The eternal feminine as redemptive element -- the continuity of life cycles, care of the living and dead, and nature's regenerative powers -- draws us on, draws us to the top, as Goethe suggests in Faust. The Mothers represent the feminine creative principle, the creative matrix of all things. But, O'Brien notes, Goethe`s Eternal Feminine has a dark side to it and therefore the world -- her creation, also has a darker side.

"The dark side of the creation is not necessarily evil and as such the imperfection in creation also has a right to existence.... Mephisto is also part of the integral cosmic whole. Even death...is no more than a necessary phase in the eternal creative, life-giving cycle. The Eternal Feminine, or Nature, destroys her creatures to make them into something new." (O'Brien)

Faust descends into the world of Mothers or ideal forms for regeneration, a spiritual rebirth. His salvation is assured by the pre-Christian Eternal Feminine, a search for life's meaning and redemption from suffering and evil. This mighty power -- perfect beauty, fruitful Nature, sublimated sexual energy and perfect social ideal -- is a continuous process of creation, shaping, destroying, then recreating and reshaping.

Plato explains the higher spiritual reality and the mystery of the universe by giving special attention to the Feminine principle. His idea of the Eternal Feminine was a product of both intellectual contemplation and his observations of what he saw as an imperfect world around him.

German mystic Jakob Böhme saw a personal mystical encounter personified by a powerful vision that gave rise to philosophical thought. (O'Brien, 2012) Böhme brings Sophia the irrational into the Divine, making the unexplainable, the bottomless abyss, the inexhaustible source of all life, of all creativity.

Salvation is not found by rejecting the darker side of creation, but in the eternal equilibrium of the harmony of the opposites. This harmony can be perceived by the curious eye as a beauty which is self-evident in all nature, innate creativity, genius intuition, as well as in the human-made beauty found in art.

Psychic Labyrinth
Our psyche or soul is our own psychophysical labyrinth. The body is an outward structural and dynamic manifestation of our inward archaic and personal memory. Percepts are as important as concepts, which also contain living feeling. Emotions follow archetypal instinctual patterns.

Memory becomes a crucial ingredient of perception, as much or more than the external senses and the dry concept of 'matter'. Figure and ground tend to disappear or meld into imagination when we cannot remember our deep connections. The 'ground' of cultural evolution is technology shaping perception, leading to new cultural forms and dynamics.

The terrifying central mystery is that at the center of our being is only fear, grief, and delusion, cloaking nothing.  The sacred center is the eye of the storm or whirlwind, the nucleus of meaning. Our personal realization of the myth deepens our recognition and understanding. Our own informative mythic pattern is its personal dimension attuned to the universal, the buried strata. We discover the connective thread -- the myth-creating function.

As for the virgin in the labyrinth, the antidote to evil, Jung noted this primitive sense of soul: "The anima comes out of an emotional act, taking place in darkness ...the anima is the compensating element that must be extracted from matter." (Jung-Ostrowski, Page 32). But, we have to grapple with the endless proliferation of mythological fantasies.

The Beast Within
The symbolic presence of evil, a Minotaur is two beings in the same hybridized, dualistic body, created by fear, biological tyranny, and lack of resolution. Jung said supernatural forces spring from the fusion of two opposite biologically different entities. Sacred space holds the paradoxical tension of positive and negative.

The labyrinth symbol, like all universal symbols, carries different meanings attached to symbols reflecting the world-views and needs of those who use them. The same symbol can be interpreted in a positive way during one period of history or culture and another negatively. Symbols, including the labyrinth center, hold multiple and even paradoxical meanings simultaneously.

The center can be an empty place (symbolic fullness), or one of positivity or radical negativity of an all-powerful malevolent creature with the ability to destroy and dismember. These symbols possess a disturbing numinous character. Accumulative primordial images of fossilized memory and collective input have a life of their own, independent of personality. Without the animal kingdom we are completely out of balance.

In The Mermaid and the Minotaur, Dorothy Dinnerstein notes: "Myth-images of half-human beast like the mermaid and the Minotaur express an old, fundamental, very slowly clarifying communal insight: that our species' nature is internally inconsistent, that our continuities with, and our differences from, the earth's other animals are mysterious and profound; and in these continuities, and these differences, lie both  a sense of strangeness on earth and the possible key to a way of feeling at home here."

Psychobiology
The unconscious is active vestiges of our reptilian and paleo-mammalian (purely instinctive) heritage and brains. They still find expression in symbols and dreams. The original chalice is a circle with the red cross in it. It may be that the archaic route or root through the labyrinth also had to do with bloodline genealogical descent.

Astroblemes are the scars left on Earth's surface by the high velocity impacts. We see prototypes or echoes today of concentric figures in bullseye astrobleme impact craters that are older than mankind, and their younger cousins. The most archaic cultures and antic memory refer to them as places where the sky and earth mated.

Our bodies are not just full of ourselves, but full of myths and stories of primordial mankind that constitute a subtle body, an imaginal body. Jung said, "There is another possibility, that of the subtle body, a fine material veil of the soul, which cannot exist so to speak without a body. This is the "corpus glorificationis" (glorified body), the transfigured body, which is our future portion. (ETH, Lecture XIV, Page 115).

Myths make the most sense when related to human physiology and psychology. The Minotaur is the sum of all ancient fears and ferocious impulses. It is our primal fear of the unconscious, archetypal fear and innate dread of the unknown, instinctive fear of death in encountering our own unconscious, of entering the dark, lonely labyrinth and meeting the Minotaur.

The Minotaur has to do with primordial images, meaning, and connections. If we split off our instinctual roots, inevitably, some inflated personal and collective psychic elements coalesce into an almost autonomous "splinter personality". Uncontrolled, unrecognized impulses are bestial forces of the unconscious, unseen by the unaware person.

We have to dig down to get to what we don't know. Once we realize this we can begin the real descent into the underworld -- integrational with animal and female principles. Since the way of descent into the underworld (unconscious) is the way of human frailty, what is weakness to the hero is the support-system of the clown.

The labyrinth is our deepest interiority because there is no outside to the collective psyche. The labyrinth is our narrow confinement in the self that forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious. In such awareness we experience our paradoxical nature as both limited and eternal, as both the one and the other. Self-confrontation means facing our basic animal nature in all its paradox: creature and human, rational and irrational, spiritual and instinctual, deity and demon, good and evil.

We might dream of bullies, red flags, full fights, or hitting the bullseye. Instinctual urges include lust and desire, anger, parental love and protectiveness, and aggressive bullishness. It is an earthy, basic or sexual approach as well as strength, obstinacy and power -- a constant metamorphosis of human and animal qualities, the two-sidedness of soul and instinct. Aggressive frustration arises from thwarting basic drives.

The Minotaur is the embodiment of our biological fate, daimonic nature, and psychological destiny, as well as our ferocity, bestial nature, rage, aggression, sexuality, and mortality. Death anxiety and fear of nothingness are synonymous. We fear the meaninglessness of our own existence.

Victory over the bull is integration of instinctual or reactive forces influencing consciousness. It leads to a rebirth of consciousness. We retain a certain moldable or self-organizing chaos within us that is the seed of creativity.

The archetypal state abolishes space and time. Superconsciousness is the transformation of mundane perception after death-in-life. The verticality of the unconscious does not depend on just trauma and complexes. Womb and tomb are mutually supporting  routes to higher knowledge. But neither religion nor science can make the unknowable known.

Anxiety, doubt, insecurity and other symptoms persist, even as intuition heightens perception. We accede to something else, deeper and more real wisdom realities. These are all those esoteric, occult, and suprasensible experiences in the deepest mythology that the culture and the official religion try to hide as the Minotaur was hidden.

There was a surrealist magazine called Minotaure. Picasso repeatedly used the bull as symbolic mascot for phallic aggression, sexual voracity and guilt, self-torment, self-aggrandizement, rigid emotional power, and tragic uncontrollable instinct. Images of his Minotaur shadow and multiple light and dark anima figures pervade his works with pictorial links about transformation and renewal of creativity through chaotic feelings.

These unconscious manifestations draw instructive visionary and transmutative experiences. They have their own inherent danger for unbalanced people. Picasso's personal attempts to reconnect with the primitive had a collective effect on culture, as well.

His work helps us explore whether this half-animal, instinctive underworld being who is constantly clutching himself can be redeemed and acquire a human soul beyond its addictive narcissism. Fellini used drawing and doodling as "a way out of the labyrinth." Aristotle said, "The soul never thinks without a picture." Every psychic process is an image.

In art, the primal and instinctual reveals its earthbound creativity. Animal symbolism, the root of our vitality, is evolutionary bedrock. The Minotaur with its mask-like head personifies our internal conflict with that animal nature, the corruption of nature, even genetic manipulation.

The labyrinth is a 'bull's-eye' with the heart in the center, the core of the cherished myths. 5,000 years ago the vernal equinox was close to Aldebaran. The enormous bright star Aldebaran is the eye of Taurus the Bull, called the Cor Tauri, or Heart of the Bull in the Middle Ages. , reflecting their artistic desire for penetrating the unknown.

We live in a potentially dangerous universe. To enter the labyrinth you have to get inside that which is in you where time never penetrates. The path leading toward the place between worlds, the Otherworld, doesn't just go one direction, but winds in all directions at once. It takes courage, strength, and assimilation or digestion of the experience. Finding yourself is the experience of symbolic reality. Integrating it is self-knowledge.

Foundational Story
The soul dives into the depths for its own sake. The Nekyia or descent to the underworld is a creative act of passion and calling, even obsession. It often is imposed by life passages, tragic circumstances, random misfortune, or the monsters of chaos. We face the core terrors of our existence and mortality. Who knows, perhaps the original labyrinths were formed of the catastrophic remains of ancient meteor impact craters.

Myth, dream, and ritual meet in sacred psychology. This infinitely expanded and extraordinary consciousness introduces us to a culture of the depths, a larger framework of reality. This transformative experience is substantively real, and has consequences in daily life. It is the source of poetry, music, science, and art which we can tap for inspiration, sanctuary, or healing.
<http://www.kuriositas.com/2011/03/richat-structure-earths-bulls-eye.html>

 Atavistic Propensities
Monsters have primeval origins in the theology of nature. The serpent, dragon, and crocodile all represent the same reptilian energies. The spelunkers of the soul may encounter a torturous abyss, a whirling vortex of suffering, the fog of confusion, disabling depressions, and black holes of fragmentation or disintegration.

But it is a way to access the knowledge of initiation by journeying through the psychic history of mankind, awakening and restoring the memories in the blood. The serpentine way leads back to the beginning but in a deeper way. Meaning isn't stable and be collective or idiosyncratic. Some kinds of meaning remain consistent for long periods, while others change. We don't get more revelatory information from context or mythical ideals.

Proto-Imagery
Concentric circles are a naturally arising pattern and an entopic image produced within the eye. Such phosphenes are the intrinsic archaic language of our own nervous system. Rok art has many figures with concentric circles for a head. Human-animal combinations is another entopic image seen in rock art. Shamans experienced such repeated geometric shapes accompanied by sensations of sinking, flying floating, falling, and distortion or dismemberment of limbs.

Trance metaphors include death, swimming, flying, bleeding. The sexual act and organs are also metaphors of trance and transformation. Bodily experience is abstracted into concepts in myths, symbols, and metaphor.

Some of the world's most ancient literature tells about the descents of the goddess Inanna and king Gilgamesh in epic poems.

The Cretan Ariadne, Mistress of the Universe, is a flowing connection between life and death. She shared heavenly qualities and titles with Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Sekmet, Neith (Lybia), Asherah (Hittite),Anat (Assyria), and Morgana (Grail). Her symbols are the thread, serpent, and bull.

She is the High Priestess, a serpent oracle, who inhabits the inner sanctuary at the center of the labyrinth, the center of the Self. There are connotations of death, and of sacrifice. The spiral often indicates the sense of life-in-death transcendence that is a perennial archetype associated with the serpent -- the dance of winding and unwinding.

Ariadne is the goddess of fertility connected to Ishtar (Astarte), but her father Minos is King of the Dead. She may have arisen in oral tradition as a humanized version of the Goddess. In Greece, Astarte became Aphrodite. Some scholars claim that the cult of the Minoan snake goddess who is identified with Ariadne, the "utterly pure", was similar to the cult of Astarte. Hathor personified the Milky Way as a celestial cow.

Neolithic snake cults were universal. The snake shedding its skin symbolizes renewal of primal life force energy: death and rebirth, transformation, immortality, and healing. The dark center is the kundalini root of all, where energy is inert and consciousness coiled asleep; potential life lies motionless. It ruthlessly destroys all that is not our true individuality or appropriate life path. 

Aprodite-Ariadne has been associated with Inanna, Astarte and the Minoan Snake Goddess. As Astarte, she was the goddess of fertility and sexuality and her worship was orgiastic. Her temples had serpentine motifs. Some myths of creation refer to snakes as the reborn dead.

Our ancestors thought this descent experience the most worthy of recounting. Historically there were 'lunar' descents featuring females; later 'solar' descents were made by culture heroes. Such heroic tales, all arcs in a primordial pattern, came down through history in myriad forms, including that of Odysseus in Hades, and Theseus and the Minotaur (correlated with Baal Moloch). In Crete in the era of the great goddess, bulls were sacrificed in underground ceremonies to renew the fertility of the earth.

There is a higher meaning in this journey to wholeness through the polarities of human nature in the lower world. Walking the labyrinth, we walk with death. Any quest for immortality, symbolic or otherwise, requires descent to the Underworld. Yet any such a quest for infinite extension in space and time cannot mean immortality, which really is neither.

Beneath the Surface
What you practice grows stronger. We're like the hero suddenly caught in digital space, trying to grasp the space and escape the labyrinth. Our moment-to-moment multi-dimensional status in the meme-associated, meme-defined world resonates or not with others in our online  community, including the hidden hand of the labyrinthine internet -- the critical infrastructure of cybersecurity and the deep web, not to mention the underground dark web.

In the mind-space, as online, specialized associative technologies (including search engines) create competing memory-spaces. Each do meme-memory-association in completely different ways, supporting competing collective intelligences, including archetypes and complexes. Our associations evolve over time with others generated from our surrounding environment.

Endless metaphors of such subterranean currents can be unpacked from the relative 'truths' of individual context. The oldest known labyrinth patterns were found in Paleolithic art, petroglyphs, and shamanic carvings. Perhaps the bulls of Lascaux, not just icons but celestial symbols, are the most well-known. Dream paths pervade the landscape like an invisible net. The force that guides the stars guides you, too.

Metaphysical Gravity
The latent worth of an experience is in its deeper meaning. A myth isn't a continuous sequence and must be apprehended in a nonlinear way, as a totality. Its meaning is not sequential, but associative and relational in different forms and multiple reiterations. It's not abstract deduction, but more of a fugue of imagery. If the conscious mind is on top, the unconscious shadow, hardship, and pain is underneath.

The labyrinth is a shamanic device, a chthonic rite. Neolithic cultures collectively buried their dead in enclosed passage graves. Ariadne was a goddess of the underworld, like Persephone and Melusine. She essentially leads Theseus to the center of the labyrinth and the Grail.  The winding dance ritual still calls Theseus and Ariadne to the mystical marriage, the eternal cycle of life and death, mystic union with the Feminine powers of procreation, the lady of life.

The ancients thought a labyrinth could both catch a soul in one location and create a void with no outside spiritual influences. The labyrinth represents the dominion of empty form over substance. So the center of a labyrinth is a point outside of time, like a sensory deprivation chamber enabling the collapse into our own presence and consciousness, finding our own space, our own self-revelation, our silence/eternity.

Many ancient subterranean chambers triggered altered states by disorientation and sometimes noxious gas emissions. A sacred space  creates a gateway for contacting the divine -- gods, ancestors, and consciousness. As we walk the labyrinth we walk on and leave indelible footprints. It took all of those who came before to make you. You join them creating the future.

As wisdom lore says, "Yesterday is history, and tomorrow is mystery." Humans will always go on their great quests, whether they get what they want or not. Along the way we must confront the great fact of human life, which is death.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the first psycho-spiritual biography, describing, an allegory about the conquest and mastery of one's animal nature in the labyrinthian "forest" of incarnated life. In Tablet VI, Gilgamesh slays the Bull of Heaven.  He had to pass through a foreboding tunnel under the sacred Mount Mashu in order to find the immortal Utnapishtim. After his ordeals, his emergence back into the light in the Garden of the Gods is a rebirth experience.

So, the twin peaked Mount Mashu was home of the gods and the underworld. Gilgamesh travels the entire length of the treacherous hot passage, suffocating in complete darkness for an entire day. He encounters inescapable solitude. Like Theseus, he entered the winding underworld darkness which leads inevitably to the hungry Humbaba, who guarded the mountain of the gods which had underworld characteristics.

Mount Mashu

Underworld/Paradise Paradox
The monster's insatiable appetitive nature tried to devour Gilgamesh. Demons multiply humaan misery. Humbaba's mask had windings like a labyrinth of bowels, the "fortress of the intestines". The labyrinth of bowels implies the underworld realm of the dead and existential threat. The Mesopotamians read oracles from the entrails of animals. They read its insides to see if it resembled Humbaba.

The Babylonians called the underworld the Palace of the Bowels. The hero's unconscious drive for a higher purpose appears as irresistible ambitions for immortality it became his destiny to face. Personal immortality eluded him, but the the impersonal epic has become immortal. The end of the epic brings us back to the beginning, but transformed. Gilgamesh restored the rites of the cosmos through knowledge from before the flood.

As inhabitant and lord of the labyrinth, he is the predecessor of the Minotaur. It is a short historical step from Humbaba to the Minotaur, the repressed Chronos or negative father-spirit. The paradoxical opposites of life and death are undifferentiated in the world of the mother who gives and takes life.

The cord Theseus took into the labyrinth was his shamanic silver-cord, a sort of umbilicus that connects us to the core of regression to the great mother. It remains connected to the body while the spirit is in the Otherworld or Land of the Dead.

The oldest classical seven-fold labyrinth art is found in the Polyphemous Cave in Sicily, dated 3000 BC. The rites were likely for spiritual rebirth and the pleasure of the soul after facing shamanic dangers and death in the labyrinth -- a psychological apotheosis. Campbell says that apotheosis is the expansion of consciousness that the hero experiences after defeating his foe.

"Troy Stones" were used by wise women to induce trance by finger-tracing their patterns over and over again. Processionals of spiral dances, such as the crane dance, had a ceremonial significance going back to shamanic times. Some versions speak of gods-as-bulls, or the labyrinth contains a young woman to be rescued -- The Feminine or Anima Mundi, sometimes called Helen of Troy -- she who re-enchants the world.

Here we explore, reclaim, and reveal the images from the depths of the subconscious, beyond our ordinary de-animated or over-animated world. We get down to who we truly are. We take responsibility for the suffering of deep contact with the soul, the fascinating and terrible psyche that drives us on.

Like many other things, the labyrinth looks a lot different from the inside than outside. How we perceive the labyrinth and our re-sacralization and re=enchantment depends largely on our worldviews of space and time and our place in them. Such a place is a place between, not located in spacetime, an initiatory realm where confrontation with death and rebirth processes occurs.

The same mythic domain that lives in the body extends into the body of the myth and the imaginal body, beyond the realm of sensory perception. We struggle for comprehension. Thomas Mann called myth "the foundation of life." Their illusions are our potential realities. They operate in our psyches beyond our awareness of probabilistic energy potential.

Myths are honest, poetic, and metaphorical attempts to explain mysteries, which can be known if not told. Thus, sacred history is made of psychological truth. Where do we find the oracular today? Where do we try to make coherence of the incoherence and narcotic quality of media or technologies? Narcissism is the narcosis of the digital age and plutocracy is its underworld shadow.

Like the Web, some mediums extend space while others collapse it in dynamic concepts of experience and effect. We have more and more encounters with old fragmentary procedures. Multiple streams of images, text, and other information impinge on us in a fragmentary way, altering our patterns of sensory perception.

We cannot pause to reflect or to understand more fully without missing another part of the action, nor can we go back or forward. The Minotaur of past centuries was a mechanical "bull," then electric; now its challenge is digital. There are lines of force in structure and media.

We enter the labyrinth with intuitive probes where experience trumps understanding. What might a nonlinear labyrinth look like in today's terms where media is an extension of ourselves? The extension of our nervous systems is into the whole psychic and social complex that compels participation. If events seem senseless, do we need to dig even deeper? If we are cut off at the root, everything is infected with illusion. Mental breakdown originates in uprooting and inundation with endless new patterns of information that shift attention to the total field.

Electric and digital technology have collapsed global space and time as we extend our bodies and consciousness in space. Opposites are compressed together. Like the oracles of old, every image is a psychic enigma, more than 'this or that' at the same time. If myths are the domain of perception, images are the imaginal skin of the soul. But can the personal unknown become a primary, secondary, or tertiary level of evidence or even information?

Culture is an extension of inner consciousness colliding with the technological environment. Perhaps its significance is an inward explosion of shared consciousness, collective knowing. Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, collapsing complex processes into understandable, simplified forms. Wars of archetypes reduce to wars of icons and ideologies. All media are active metaphors that translate experience into new forms.

As in the past, myth helps us explain and understand our reality. The first diviner was Gaia, the earth mother herself, followed by her daughters, the Pythias, named after the python who guarded Gaia's oracles in the cave at Delphi, "the navel of the world." The Oracle of Delphi warns, "Heed these words, You who wish to probe the depths of nature: If you do not find within yourself that which you seek, neither will you find it outside. In you is hidden the treasure of treasures. Know Thyself and you will know the Universe and the Gods."

Carl Jung's own labyrinth was his RED BOOK, describing how he met his demons, his own Oracle, and his Wise Old Man. This is where Jung, himself, 'went to ground,' where he plumbed the depths of his own psyche with intuition. The idiom means that if you go to ground, you hide somewhere where you cannot easily be found, pulled away from ordinary life. This journey formed the experiential basis of most of his later work and ideas. We lose ourselves to find ourselves in the archetypal patterns of the labyrinth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minotaur

"Wheel of Spirits" or "Wheel of Ghosts"
Valcomonica Cave, Sicily http://www.sevensistersmysteryschool.com/docs/The%20Oldest%20Labyrinth%20in%20the%20World.pdf

No. Italy http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/italyvalcamonica.htm

Ariadne's Clue: A Guide to the Symbols of Humankind By Anthony Stevens

Minoan Honey http://www.biroz.net/words/minoan7.htm

O'Brien, Elena P., Eternal Feminine
THE MEANING OF THE ETERNAL FEMININE IN GOETHE`S DRAMA FAUST
http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/object/fsu:183043/datastream/PDF/view

Labyrinthos Journal http://www.labyrinthos.net/Caerdroia%2044%20HR.pdf

Gilgal Refaim: "Wheel of Spirits" or "Wheel of Ghosts"
Golan Heights, dated by archaeologists to the Early Bronze Age II period (3000–2700 BCE)

Epidarus, Tholon, Basement Labyrinth
"You ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head,
Nor the head without the body,
So neither ought you attempt to cure the body without the soul
for the part can never be well unless the whole is well."
--Plato: Charmides, 156e

"In some ways, the Minotaur, as with all mythical monsters, including the Devil, may be understood as but one image arising from and lending concrete form to the nothingness of not knowing. As the proverbial wisdom suggests, it is always preferable to deal with the devil one knows than one which is unknown. Death anxiety can be seen as the self's will to continue, to survive, to persevere, to prosper and multiply in a world which makes this difficult--and finally, impossible. The classic images of death--the corpse, crucifix, sarcophagus, coffin, grave, ghost, tombstone, skull, skeleton, demon, dragon, the Devil, Grim Reaper, Kali, Medusa, Minotaur, etc.-- hold symbolic, spiritual, and psychological significance in addition to the obvious physical implications.  Lastly, the Minotaur represents our basic nature: a complex mixture of animal, god, and human. Indeed, as mentioned in my prior post, the Minotaur was spawned from the liaison of a woman and a bull, and symbolizes this coincidentia oppositorum (meeting of opposites) of feminine and masculine, creature and human, rational and irrational, spiritual and instinctual, deity and demon, good and evil. The Minotaur also embodies both fate (our biological nature) and destiny (our freedom) and the integral interrelationship between the two. But why do we find it such a dreadful image? Because to confront the Minotaur in the dark labyrinth is to confront ourselves: our fears of the unknown, our ferocious, beastly nature, our rage, aggression, sexuality, mortality, the daimonic.  This self-confrontation is successfully accomplished by proceeding carefully yet courageously along one's own Ariadnean thread. The secret is that, metaphorically, we each have been given this thread to follow and lead us to our destiny-- but only if we are brave enough to do so."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evil-deeds/200912/why-myths-still-matter-part-four-facing-your-inner-minotaur-and-following

COSMIC LABYRINTH
A visual and poetic journey
http://ancestorsandarchetypes.weebly.com
Video and text by Iona Miller, 2017

"This complex of motifs is a labyrinth in itself, an indescribable tangle of problems."
--Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 295-296.

"How many times I was almost lost, gone astray in this labyrinth where I risked being killed." --Eliade, No Souvenirs

“And why wander in these labyrinths? Once more, for aesthetic reasons; because this present infinity, these "vertiginous symmetries," have their tragic beauty. The form is more important than the content.” --André Maurois, in Borge, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

"Man is a very paradoxical structure with two main trends, namely the biological and animal instincts of propagation and the cultural instinct of psychic development."
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 454-456

ABSTRACT: Mankind has always been fascinated with caves, mines, and labyrinths. Caves were the original entrance into the underworld -- sometimes a refuge, sometimes a danger, sometimes a Mystery, like the passage grave or a sealed crypt, or monumental stone circles.

The ground of our being is our original self. Our form is a structure of preserved memories of a specific human behavioral form embodying experience. We come to grips with that which is bigger than our personal self. The Great Being forms all of us in its image, the self-creating realities of the meaning of its own processes.

To know the meaning of life, we have to explore the meaning of our own life -- our interpretation of our particular reality and psychospiritual development. Everything has a pattern including the core patterns of creation. The labyrinth is the shape of mankind's paradoxical nature. The psychophysical body shapes itself over time, through all of life's stages to form a future and personal self.

Myth is grounded in the human body and has existential consequences. Consequential experiences enrich life by preparing new action patterns and understandings of embodied life and how we make choices that affect our life. We integrate personal and cultural myths with the polarities of life. Aliveness is a complex multi-dimensional pattern of voluntary and involuntary possibilities that is entangled, interconnected throughout the whole organismic structure.

The sybils and prophets tell us we can't escape the shape that is imprinted on us. The house of our flesh is our labyrinthine being. As in the past, myth helps us explain and understand our reality. We lose ourselves to find ourselves in the archetypal patterns of the labyrinth.

Character develops in darkness, in the struggle with the one-sided and repressed shadow.  Beyond instinct and intellect, the ground is the changeless basis of phenomena, of all things. It is always open, infinite, ungraspable, uncontainable. So the earliest hominids placed their dead back in the fissures of the earth, back in the maternal uterus to fulfill the cycle.

The ground abides unconditioned by the ordinary habit field -- habitual reflexes and psychodynamics, the potential for integrative subjectivity. It is an unborn and substanceless paradox that is inherently luminous. Phenomena abide in the paradox. Non-existence appears symbolically as a multi-layered labyrinth.

In the transcendent mind paradigm, consciousness is fundamental and potentially in contact with wisdom, and all other people and events in the past, present, and future. It can not only obtain knowledge of these events but also influence them as well. In the hero's journey there are clear patterns in life to guide us such as birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood and death. We all struggle with inner conflicts, and finally succeed in uncovering our demons.

Then we step over thresholds. We finally arrive. This is the self-organizing creative edge of the existential abyss, beyond mental constructs. The mind has a solidifying habit at the root of reality and knowingness. Therefore, immortality means 'knowing' the everlasting lives within us. Our inner journey will take us down many fruitful and blind alleys and dead ends.

 oOo
The labyrinth is a symbol of the world we live in and the experiential path to gnostic awakening and apprehension. Like any coiled serpent, the labyrinth image is universally evocative, an elementary motif from prehistory, the threshold between twin worlds.

As our myth contains our destiny it enfolds valuable knowledge and images of our destination, our rite of passage. The only difference between cure and curse is that serpentine letter echoing and writhing hypnotically within us at the core.

By its very nature, the labyrinth is a liminal environment -- a bifurcating chaos, rather than a garden of forking paths. Successive bifurcations are irregular and unpredictable events, abrupt qualitative changes, and even new solutions in nonlinear systems as transformed copies of the whole.

Far-from-equilibrium systems leave labyrinthine structural forms in their wake, fractal expressions of reiterated themes and motifs, psychologically indistinguishable from Jung's archetypes and complexes. Iteration has been called the "heartbeat of chaos."  In therapy, iteration equates with memory.  Imagery processing equates with memory processing.  The key is the self referential repetition of the process, over and over, for example, by iterating dream images or using culminating symbols as resources for a period of time.

At its most fundamental level it suggests movement, mystery, and transformation. It explores elemental movement and somatic integration. The internal subjective experience of the body as 'aliveness' is full experience of self as a living body, from symptom to celebration.

Somatic orientation is a way of making place and making self in the interactive field of massive pre-conscious psychological effects and conditioning technological influences. The way we are wired includes such unremitting and invisible forces, which have the effect of body-fear paranoia and the baroque spirals which create the need for a new kind of psychology, sociology and pattern-recognition.

We live in a new landscape or context of the mutating warehouse of digital omni-directional media. 'Slaying the beast' becomes an anthropomorphic feeling that we retain power against it in the face of metaphysical challenge, confusion, and engagement with its autonomous effects. A fake Nature has turned into a replay of a nature hologram via synthetic telepathy that gives us a false sense of voluntary ESP.

Immaterial Substance
Virtual reality is inverted nature and monolithic corporateness. We no longer know what it is that we are. We don't know what our full body is. Every culture maps it and says 'this is what our body is', but ongoing evolution has other ideas. Our First Nature body is mimicked by the screen body as second nature, as generations of video maze players learned. Maze is a game genre where the entire playing field is labyrinthine. All media extends deeply into the family and collective. No territory is worth owning in a world made of virtual space.

We become the interval or gap between two Eshcher-style pathways -- the liminal state that includes both overliminal and subliminal. Having extended that liminal state, we're now getting back into our bodies, another image of ourselves. We get trapped inside a brain-cage. Unsupported speculation conspires with solid theory and observational constraint, spewing oxymorons such as 'fake news'. We seek new ways of navigating the labyrinth of affect and defenses that inform our traumatized bodies. Life is traumatic, even without blatant traumatizing events.

Meanwhile, the metaphorical ascenders take the radically opposite pathway to what they imagine as spirit, whether New Age or traditional religion. The archetypal battle of Western civilization has been described as one between Ascenders and Descenders, each accusing the other of evil, fractured insanity, and worshiping private sensations (Wilber).

Preferring higher stages over deeper stages of transpersonal consciousness is a fallacy. Balancing the two currents of transcendence and ecological spirituality leaves us present now, not enraptured in an infantile way with premature escapist philosophies.

We can't save our soul through possession by the spirit. We remain ambivalent about the real suffering necessary to come into being as whole persons in our own century, not a replay of medieval times or other by-gone eras and contexts. We are still the process, but we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it. We share the same primordial energy as the universe.

Sensory Balance in the New Labyrinth
In descent, as in jazz riffs wafting from old jazz dives, we lose our way to find our way. We need to consciously understand the patterns being constructed in the human pre-conscious mind, including effects of technology and Media -- how our tools shape us. The 'digital typhoon' introduced enhanced Memory, for example. The new "paradigm" is caused by our experiences with digital Memory (Stahlman).

Today's web is so pervasive it has become the invisible ground of our metaphorical labyrinth. This 'radiant' technology, produced on images of blinking lights experienced as memory, not illusions, comes with services and disservices that make us different people. Using digital technology does not make you 'digital'. What matters are the psychological effects of the habitual use of technology, including searchable, indexable, sharable memory.

Imagination and memory are 'internal senses' that generate our perceptions and attempt to balance the external senses and collective consciousness, including the digital commons. To do so we have to dig down, to dive deep into ourselves, our somatic and digital memories to seek more meaning. Then we need to rein ourselves in before perceiving or confabulating erroneous patterns in randomness. Our desire for meaning must spring from more than exclusion, memes, entrenched thinking, and behavior effects of media.

The way through the labyrinth is the path of authenticity. Outwardly we are living bodies, but inwardly we are living images, reflecting our vital processes. Such magical and transformative associations may be why prehistoric and megalithic caves and passage tombs were festooned with shamanic art.

Works of art help us view the soul. It is a way to 'mind the gap' between conscious and unconscious. Jung suggested, for example, that music expresses in sounds what fantasies and visions express visually. So, "music represents the movement, development and transformation of motifs of the collective unconscious." (Letters Vol. 1, Page 542).

How do we cultivate human skills of adaptation, empathy, consideration for another’s perspective, and the ability to work together and communicate across differences? We need both the technical literacy to understand machines as well as the soft skills that maintain the human-to-human interface within our tech world. Some suggest, we need to double down on the liberal arts, social and natural sciences where we question our assumptions and refine our curiosity. This give us the context with which we apply the new tools and our human advantage.

We remember and recapitulate the basis of our civilization -- East, West, and Digital spheres. It challenges us to find new ways to relate to the profoundly 'other' and techno-dystopianism. 'Remembering' is the ground of our daily experience in the digital paradigm. There are no historic parallels as one sphere cannot conquer another with such ephemeral boundaries. But the digital sphere has inter-penetrated the human sphere, creating a new paradigm and novel effects to which we are challenged to adapt. Soon AI will upload and access our memories.

Each searcher behind symbols of meaning becomes a living symbol. Reality is symbolic, not objective or subjective. We enter the labyrinth to apprehend the nature of soul -- to access, explore, and integrate the unconscious. Confrontation with the unconscious changes our perspective. There is a shift in consciousness expressed in the symbol and the self-regulating functions of the psyche -- coherence.

"The "SYMBOL" always contains the deep matrix of "SACRIFICIUM", as opening to "SACRO". The symbol is the ontological code of the sacred and always includes a "surplus of meaning". As such, we have the profound oscillations of meanings on the one hand, and on the other hand, through the dynamic tension between opposites, suggests a new relationship, a comparison, a limitation with the "WASTE" that we anthropologically identify in the very "sacrifice". The sacrifice is therefore the understanding of this "waste" that is not necessarily what must be "eliminated", but not what is to be emptied from the enclosures that hide it, to be restored to its intrinsic significance. Scrap is also "revelation" that can be announced, received, and then "re-veiled", veiled again, then internalized. The transformative power of the symbol works in this matrix." (Eldo Stellucci)

'Here I am,' 'Here I find myself,' or 'It's me here', as presence in each movement of return to myself, to the internal senses of imagination and memory. This is the human ground. It's about lived experience, not categories and concepts. We walk the way of uncertainty, a tension of oscillating opposites. Contradictory programs generate inner conflict. The soul will never be quiet (quiescence and insight) until it finds its root and destiny.

Ritual Field
Earth is the principle of structure and materialization. We have to think very carefully about what matters and then pursue it. Earth transforms into a living soul; moved by that the soul unites into the body.

Anima Mundi is the Wisdom of the Earth and intimacy with the natural world. The center of the earth (VITRIOL), hence the center of the labyrinth, corresponds with the Philosopher's Stone. Beauty is the one idea that presents itself through the senses. Only ways of living make aesthetic principles clear.

'Alchemical earth' is an allegorical exploration of the  journey of the human soul, transforming the body as experienced within, creating a higher resolution body image, expanding the body movement repertoire -- matter-psyche.

Ancient labyrinth dances were moving meditations. Corbin poetically linked spiritual body and celestial earth, the eternal world of rich earth we build stone by stone, earth that retains the spirit, movement by movement, without the tyranny of conscious thought. Art is one means of doing so, as is active imagination.

The arts encapsulate the forces of esoteric speculation as an activity of making and cognition, rather than metaphysics. All gods retain the root of their archaic madness and the split with sacred and rational way of being. Linking to the larger self, artists reach back to primordial images which correct such one-sidedness.

Psychologically, matter-psyche means accessing and expressing aspects of self through movement and improvisational movement and fluidity when encountering challenges in life. Physiological repatterning facilitates non-verbal psychological and emotional expression changing the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Fields are domains of influence. Storytelling describes a deep field of myth and archetype. Elements are woven together by narrative, metaphor and illustration. A semantic field is a set of words grouped by meaning referring to a specific subject, much like symbols are held in the subtle net of an image.

Noetics, direct knowing, is the connection between mind and the physical universe – how the ‘inner cosmos’ of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) relates to the ‘outer cosmos’ of the physical world – the somatic field of our psychophysical being. A noetic field consists of all mutually interdependent facts and symbols. All are components of the Ritual Field of mythic sensibility and collapse the imaginal and the real.

The mythic field is the realm of the unconscious. The form of myth emerges as patterns from the field of the Collective Unconscious. Pattern is a language, using fields to describe dynamic relationships and energetics. Each pattern is a field. The field of myth is emotional — emergent, resonant, challenging — inviting ritual enactment to animate and embody it. Thus, we recognize and develop our own style of mythic consciousness, stepping in to join with others, daring to live our larger lives within the field of historic life. Such journeys are rites of passage.

Components of the unconscious emerge in conscious life. Personal myth, (a biochemically-coded internal model of reality and a field of information), shapes individual behavior as cultural myths influence social behavior.

Symbolic content is a mythic field. Shift the field, change the myth. Rituals shift the field. Transcendence parallels the emergence of myth as new life experience. Jung described the transcendent function as a reconciliation of conscious and unconscious elements, remapping our boundaries.

Earthworks
Life correlates with mazy windings and sinuous paths of artificial and natural design. A nearly inextricable labyrinth includes blind passages, recess within recess, room within room, turning within turning. It's associated with ceremonials games and dances (Crane Dance, Dance of Troy).

Both classical and medieval writers used the term metaphorically for the difficulties of life and vagaries of love. Stories of the lost soul in a daunting forest also share the same theme. Many labyrinths share the qualities of complexity, branched and unbranched paths, balance and harmony, visual, astronomical, and mathematical symmetry,

We find Egyptian and Cretan labyrinths, turf and earth-mazes, stone labyrinths, church labyrinths, concentric labyrinths, pavement, tile, and mosaic labyrinths, architectural labyrinths, dodecagonal and swastika labyrinths, mirror mazes, floral, herbal, hedge and verdant labyrinths, closed, spiral, basement and subterranean labyrinths.

They have colorful names: 'Walls of Troy,' 'Troy Town,' 'City of Troy,' 'Solomon's Prison' or the 'Labyrinth of Solomon,' 'Houses of Daedalus,' 'shepherd's labyrinth', 'the Gardener's Labyrinth,' 'Coil of Rope Walk,' even 'Pigs in Clover.'

Under the Step Pyramid of Djoser, Egypt's Stairway to Heaven, there is a labyrinth of tunneled chambers and galleries nearly 3 1/2 miles long.

The oldest Grail Quest is in the early Welsh poem "Preiddeu Annwfn" from The Book of Taliesin, where Arthur visits the Celtic Otherworld and his adventures closely parallel those of the cauldron-seeking god, Bran the Blessed. Annwfn is the land of the old gods in the deeps below the earth, who can bestow gifts.

King Arthur's Minotaur was the dark Wagnerian magician Klingsor. No one ever saw him; he was known only by his magic castle and magic powers. He was a mistakenly sincere seeker filled with good intentions, who despite self-mutilation was unable to kill the sinful, raging lust within himself. Other seekers were imprisoned in his castle, seduced and entrapped by their own impure carnal desires.

Theseus reaches the heart of the labyrinth with purity of heart. He confronts the power source and foundation of his own self-delusion with clarity and singleness of purpose.

Some labyrinths are placed on walls for finger tracing instead of on floors. Some are called 'the path or road to Jerusalem', a symbolic pilgrimage to the center of the holy city, like a mandala. Some made the journey on their knees or in processionals when it became a simile for the Christian life. The temptation-labyrinth of the way through this world needs the divine grace symbolized by the guiding thread. A modern correlate of the labyrinth might be subculture lifestyles, a way of life wending through unknown territory.

There are snake motifs in Gobekli Tepe, the world's oldest temple. There we find the procursors of core symbols, ancestral knowledge, and of a creation tradition quasi-mythical ancestor gods of later cosmologies. There is an architectural labyrinth, a basement or foundation labyrinth associated with healing serpents under the Tholos, a circular Asklepian temple at Epidarus, with an ornate astronomical floor design. A tholos is a beehive or domed tomb.

The symbol appeared on the robes of Roman Emperors, according to the MS, "Graphia Aurea Urbis Romae." It says, "Let there be represented on it a labyrinth of gold and pearls, in which is the Minotaur made of emerald, holding his finger to his mouth, thus signifying that, just as none may know the secret of the labyrinth, so none may reveal the monarch's counsel."

Like the bowels of the earth, the labyrinth is a place to metabolize the archetypal material we all have to digest. Myths still matter and the psychology of the maze, an archaic structural metaphor, remains relevant. Analogous to the mind's structure and echoing our own anatomy, the labyrinth is a symbol of fertility and birth, as well as one of archaic danger and death. This lost or hidden way is a gnostic journey symbolized by the Grail.

The labyrinth harks back to primitive serpent cult initiations. It has psychological, religious and meditative importance stimulating states of consciousness from trance to the identity-free groundstate of being. The substrate of consciousness is primordial awareness equivalent to cosmic consciousness.

Life, Connection, Renewal
Each of us is a living labyrinth. Indigenous people recognize the maze as the essential icon for the cycles of human life, birth and rebirth that conveys relationships, including the physical mother (feminine archetype), Mother Earth, and Cosmic Mother. The bewildering and confusing unconscious is symbolically feminine.

The labyrinth is the feminine face of the divine, the more dimly lit world of the divine, an interactive field joining conscious and unconscious. Its walls may be masculine but it points to the feminine foundation which is always underground. The soul-image is a bridge to the unconscious. The poetic cave was a symbol of the metaphysical level of reality, an element of ontological vision and an epistemological metaphor that helps us 'to know how we know what we know.'

Hidden Stone Age Underground World
The oldest rock art found to date is in South Africa at Blombos Cave, dated to between 70,000 and 100,000 years old. Archaeologists have uncovered thousands of Stone Age underground tunnels dated around 12,000 years ago, stretching across Europe. Caves are linked to creation and survival stories in global myths and legends as well as stellar, lunar and solar worldviews.

Subterranean labyrinths are chthonic. Neolithic passage tombs had a narrow passage of large stones with petroglyphs. Sacred burial chambers were covered in earth or stone. Some doubled as telescopes to view the stars, detect them at twilight, track eclipse patterns and the cycles of the sun and moon. Aeons of observations preceded Vedic, Egyptian, and Sumerian astronomy. Caves were terrestrial representatives of the celestial Milky Way.

Even viewing the Milky Way with its central rift from a cave entrance highlights their similarity in a single vision through the opening. It may be the prototype of perfectly round soul-holes (Seelenloch), "oracular hole," or cosmic portholes of later monuments. The Dark Rift was seen as an entrance and exit to the other world.

This mythic Double Cave looks like one continuous passage from earth to stars, reflected in shamanic practices. It was referenced in spiral symbols. Perhaps they even watched out for orbits of cometary debris and meteor showers. The later is another reason they were driven underground into the earth's protection.

The center of the Milky Way is near the central edge of the dark-rift. Underground passages are symbolically connected to astrotheology and sidereal mythology. They appear again in the Egyptian mythology of the Duat, realm of endless time and eternity, entered at death.

Its 12 gates marked the way of the resurrection of Osiris and the pharaohs, the Nile flood and new year. The Nile was the terrestrial Milky Way. The Nabta culture and Dynastic Egyptians consecrated elaborate megalithic tombs to the burial of bulls.

The mummified Osiris entered the tail of a serpent and was reborn through its mouth. As if being drawn through the body of a giant serpent, symbolically, one descended into the Duat in the Nile delta and journeyed to the "Island of the Double Cave" at its source near Lake Victoria, coming forth in regenerated spiritual form. After Osiris enters the mysterious cave his heart is revived and he is met by the goddess Nut, the Great Mother, "with hands stretched forth to receive him." We still see the Milky Way in our souls.

This most sacred cave is the place of ascending after passing the ordeals of the twelve divisions. It was only in the Double Cave or Mysterious Cave of the Ritual that the heart of the deceased god was revived into spiritual life and born anew. The soul exclaims, "The tunnels of the earth have given me birth." The Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man: the Evolution of Religious Doctrines ...By Albert Churchward

The gates are drawn into the eternal circle of the Zodiac which is a portal to immortal afterlife and spirits of dead ancestors. This is an archetypal magic circle, related to Ages of mankind through Precession cycles. It is symbolically repeated in the masonic Egyptian Ritual. There is a legend of a giant underground pre-dynastic labyrinth at Hawara, Egypt. Zoroaster's Cave is another religious and initiatory example with symbolic features. There were many cave cults, cave oracles, and chamber shrines with altars to chthonic gods.

Death in the sky was conflated with death from the sky. The spatial representation of the dark passage fills the gap between conscious and unconscious, the profane and the sacred, the personal and the collective which hold the secret key to unconscious totality. The labyrinth is shaped by the unconscious, just as we are. The core of the personal unconscious is darkness, so because life is complicated  with unbearable emotions we can find ourselves 'hitting the wall.'

Life Comes from Death
We want to have control but we do not. No one is impervious to change, suffering, and dissatisfaction. Pre-and post- trauma life is stressful and so are those persistent explicit and implicit memories. But the ordinary self, wrapped in all its turmoil is precious, too.

Trouble and cure are most often grounded in relatedness, symbolized in the interrupted circle. Alive to our feelings, we can learn to hold primitive agonies (offending and threatening feelings are buried) without collapse. When trauma and fear conditioning is acknowledged, the way out is 'through.'

The labyrinth implies the vast, creative depth dimension of the unconscious directly linked to darkness and light and a mind composed of layers that can lead to the lost core of the self. It portrays its own meaning. Collective patterns organize deep layers of psyche as a symbolic matrix. That imagery rises to the surface in mytho-poetic impersonal dreams, symbols, and metaphor rather than painful explicit memory. 

Labyrinth Psychology
The pathway of intuitive imagination is expressed in metaphors, like the underground passage, transitional space, and interrupted space. The spiritual world is recruited by early trauma survivors for defensive purposes. The labyrinth creates the distance from disorganized and destructive patterns. A self-woven phantasmagorical story displaces authentic self-esteem with borderline phenomena creating a false self, daimonic identity, between archetypal and human.

Defenses include self-soothing rituals, addictions, and repetition compulsions, projections, and conversions into physical symptoms. Suffering is a universal aspect of human existence. Dissociation splits and cracks open the psyche, opening the underworld between illusion and reality. Dramatic stories from the archetypal repertoire of the ancient psyche arise  with universal features.

Soul comes to presence in the in the space between matter and spirit. Archetypal energies are humanized in the transitional space. Trauma closes transitional space. Descent is through the obstacles of our defenses and conditioning. This potential space grounds the mytho-poetic process with embodied relationships and life-saving encounters with the numinous.

Earth is the endlessly supportive containing ground and foundation of consciousness. A self-opening in the earth is shelter and concealing. This primitive metaphor of consciousness and instinctual energies is a manifold of meaningful related symbolism in myth, dreams and ordinary life. It also pertains to the psyche as both a constituting power and a phenomenal world.

Meaning is given within the metaphors through which the world speaks. Primordial experience and patterns of behavior express as images, symbols, and metaphor. The spatial metaphor and descent may be a forgotten presence, an intimate pre-personal, pre-reflective structure and understanding of the world -- a cognitive map.

As a circle of self-understanding, it maps onto the body and the subtle body of psychological life in our many convolutions. It features death as an intrinsic and inescapable dimension within human life itself. Metaphor intensifies reality and gives structural unity to the world and our consciousness. Things of the world are transmuted and situated in imagination.

Some images are more universal or elementary than others. The labyrinth is a primordial, cultural and geometrical symbol from the borderlands of archaic human existence, a parable of light and dark, vision and blindness, mystical and liminal, awesome and fearsome, healing and trauma. It links ambiguous notions of world, temple, and psyche in the imaginal light of consciousness.

Jung suggested that archetypes, primordial images, combine two aspects in a single form (double-figures). They are paradoxical, spontaneously generated, autonomous, and cross-cultural. Cave/labyrinth is a dual figure inherent in our lived world that we can spatialize and interiorize in our heads, bodies, or environment.

Through it, we participate in a process older than history, even older than humanity. Psyche is a precondition of mankind, symbolized in the cave and labyrinth. Here, metaphor remains grounded in existential density between the 'the thickness of being' and the 'unwonted transparency' of the void ...', an aesthetic quality that is the essential feel of complex emotions. Yet, even affect is simultaneously real and a mirage.

Primordial Metaphorical Reality
Plato's philosophical cave metaphor was of virtual prisoners subject to their own illusions, suggesting an imagery-based approach to the nature of reality -- being 'kept in the dark.' Jung made a similar suggestion: “Whether he understands them or not, man must remain conscious of the world of the archetypes, because in it he is still a part of Nature and is connected with his own roots. A view of the world or a social order that cuts him off from the primordial images of life not only is no culture at all but, in increasing degree, is a prison or a stable.”

The primeval underground passage is within us, like the primordial "sea," the "secret fire," and the "cosmos." Caves were the primal labyrinths. The labyrinth is the more dimly lit world and feminine face of the divine. Linked to our inner world, they were considered homes of the ancestor spirits. They are specific forms and pictorial relationships, which appear consistently in all ages and places, as well as in individual dreams, fantasies, visions and ideas.

We do our groundwork in the labyrinth, a scene in our narrative quest. The alchemist mining or going inside the earth is the first step in the alchemical process. The earth is the body or oneself. Going inside the earth is equal to going into your inner self. Thus we are invited to descend into the earth, into the underworld, or the unconscious into the cosmic labyrinth of the mind.

We enter at the threshold of materiality and psyche. We speak of labyrinthine structures, the labyrinth of deep thought, the imaginal penetration of the depths of our being, or a chart of the cosmos. Our psychophysical being is composed of metaphorical labyrinths within labyrinths, embedded at different scales of psychophysical being. Metaphors psychologize known objects into general concepts of ordinary life, giving rise to organic paradigms. Memory represents original experience as a mental image.

The labyrinth is sort of a geography of memory and genetic memory trauma, which translates as epistemological metaphors connecting mind and body, "how we know what we know." In this sense human emotion shapes physical realities through imagery-based procedures.

Imagery has always been central to approaches aimed at physical healing. Insights or intentions may be incidental to engaging the experience in a relatively direct manner in the process, circumventing defense mechanisms, ambivalent motives, or depth of insight.

You might ask yourself about your most recent significant dream, vision, or fantasy. Perhaps you've witnessed your own ancestral myths, symbols, or archetypal dramas. Maybe you seek new means of arousing and experiencing the archaic field of psychoactive imagination. Once the metaphor is engaged, movement in imagination through time or space is encouraged, processing painful or traumatic experience, causing symptoms, experiential stuckness, and functional impairment.

Experience are self-organizing flows of information over time and space or topological organization, within and among biological (HPA axis), psychological (self-relations), and social systems (interpersonal relations). Such flows are emotion-laden metaphoric images, with temporal-spatial features , such as location, size, and shape. That flow can be blocked so that information disintegrates in broader flows of information. Isolating that information leads to rigid and unhealthy dynamics. Integration moves the information within the metaphors around within time and information-space.

Both scientific and philosophical memory terminology is metaphorical. In some literal sense our memory is present, not past. It remains significant, informative, and open to recognition and discovery. Healing metaphors connect deep imagery with painful symptoms. Trance and hypnosis are automatic responses to traumas that encode and embed them in deeper levels of psychophysical existence.

The labyrinth quest or journey relates us to wholeness and purpose. We could say the cosmic labyrinth is the nonlocal correlation of consciousness and primeval unconscious (innate behavioral patterns) in our self-conception. Consciousness is made of atoms, too, uniting psyche and substance. The link between conscious and unconscious life is a material or neurophysiological and neuroanatomical link.

Hence, the Delphic Oracle instructs, "Heed these words, You who wish to probe the depths of nature: If you do not find within yourself that which you seek, neither will you find it outside. In you is hidden the treasure of treasures. Know Thyself and you will know the Universe and the Gods."

Implicit & Unconscious Memory
Memory, the unconscious traces of Nature and our nature, is a labyrinth. Paradoxically, our deepest human self seems to harbor atavisms and vestiges of a non-human intelligence (reflexive, noncognitive, and procedural memory). In ancient neolithic times, the sacred bulls were kept in a circle in the center of the village.

The far more neurophysiological effects of past experiences, of ancient animal and phylogenetic memory is intimated in ancient Cretan legends of the raging Minotaur (unseen forces; our primal fear of the unconscious, the unknown), which has been repressed and imprisoned as memory traces and the interrelated whole of the peripheral and central nervous system.

Monsters are a class of concepts. We create a monster by calling it so with our neurotic reaction. The ego's tendency is to kill it, but it is impossible to kill the non-ego image, the monsters that emerge from the unconscious. That amounts to a moralistic killing of the mythological unconscious, imagination, and creativity.

Rather than killing, we need differentiation of the imagination. The monster is the threatening aspect of the repressed and neglected unconscious. Our Minotaur is the devalued animal within, dissociated traumatic memories, our neuroses. The non-ego image is a neurotic defense. The minotaur makes the abstract concept distinct, with its own essential nature as an automated dissociated process.

Accepting the neglected thing allows it to emerge in consciousness. This helps us ascertain the implicit memory in the image, define its characteristics, and how it is acquired and used unconsciously, affecting thoughts and behaviors. One of its most common forms is procedural memory ("autopilot"), which helps us perform certain tasks without conscious awareness of these previous experiences.

Implicit memory underlies the illusion-of-truth effect, which suggests that we are more likely to rate as true those statements that we have already heard, regardless of their truthfulness. This may relate to the spectrum of self-delusion and gnosis wisdom. It isn't the cognitive content but the feeling load that drives the certainty.

Kalsched says that severe trauma survivors often overvalue inner reality and identify with the mysteries as a defense against unbearable interpersonal feelings. They must relinquish their celestial scaffolding and reconnect with life 'on the ground.' Their early story is more mythological than personal.

The psychoid level is aroused; psychoid processes set in where instinct dominates where unconscious elements are incapable of rising to consciousness. The psychoid aura gives rise to autonomous images.

A sacred story holds the pain in an imaginal matrix. Defenses are actual shutdowns of electrical circuitry encoded in the limbic system in the brain. If they stay undifferentiated, they accrue non-ordinary reality, archaic, and archetypal enhancements before they can be integrated as personal memories.

Heredity is memory, reproductive potency, and neuroatomic structural changes. Memory (epigenetic, retentive and transmissive) and structure preserve the effects of experiences across generations. The sub-cellular level works on the germplasm of future generations and is inherited at the protoplasmic level. Specific stimuli elicit instinctive responses.

Memory is a vital process of living beings, even a throwback to our pre-mammalian development. The animal does not remember anything. Accelerated reflex and conditioned reactions are not cognitive knowledge. We can't remember what we don't know, but vestigial imagery arises in therapy and is widely reported in psychedelic experience (Grof, Tart).  Species development is expressed in instinctive behavior and may be holographically encoded in DNA structure.

A labyrinth is a symbolic journey, a map of the imaginal realm we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world, inner and outer. The safe kind of labyrinth we walk for contemplation evolved from ancient dance patterns. It is a walking meditation, an open-air path of prayer and an archetypal blueprint where psyche meets Spirit. Many societies see the mouth as the way the spirits enter and leave the body.

The sacred walk circles the center with only one path that leads from the outer edge to the center and back. That cycle represents the involution and evolution of the universe, the birth and passing of an individual, and the quest or journey into the center of our own being, wholeness, and the subsequent return to divine source.

Personal autobiographical memory (retention and retrieval) is a source of knowledge, because it is self-awareness. Our entire autobiographical evolution, genetic, epigenetic, and deep memories are encoded as images, emotional and condition reflexes, survival responses, and reaction to painful stimulation.

Paradoxical States
The prayer labyrinth is countered by dark and foreboding underground labyrinths that echo the real dangers of caves and imprisoned monstrous creatures that challenge our exit. This labyrinth is a maze: a confusing, intricate combination of torturous paths or passages. A bewildering complex makes it difficult to find the way or reach the exit. Such metaphors become psychosomatic or literal disease, as metaphorical mirrors of repressed unconscious processes. Jung said, "the gods have become diseases."

The prayer and ordeal labyrinths are paradoxical opposites. They bridge the domain of spirit and death, the magic and healing of the uncanny. The later may show incised ritual protection marks near entry points or potential points of danger.

Protection marks were placed there in an attempt to prevent something of supernatural origin coming out of the depths of the cave or mine and frightening superstitious visitors. The folk practice repeated efforts to confine evil spirits to the underground with concealed and revealed protection marks. They marked cold drafts, leaded or arsenic water, and other real and imagined dangers.

Both labyrinths are metaphors of a greater reality, divine light and dark night. Perhaps the original enclosure was metaphorically and literally that of the simple magic circle. The serpent that bites it own tail remembers its meandering nature is akin to cosmic cycles.

Metaphors and meanings are conveyed spatially in the labyrinth symbol. Its center reproduces the universe, where we are one with the cosmos, connecting back to the age-old forces of life. The object of a labyrinth remains to defend a 'center' of access to the sacred, to immortality, to absolute reality. Initiation teaches how to enter the domain of death without getting lost. We are too busy in this world to evoke an endless regress. There are processes here to which we have no access. It is a mystery opaque to total blackness.

The unconscious conceals the missing link of our soul's journey, from which we resurrect ideas and wisdom. It has a different relationship to death. We don't know how its understanding arises. Ancient mankind had to fight its way out the irrational and unexpected -- out of the primeval unconscious, the ancient basic ground of the drives and imagination -- the moon in our flesh, and the sun in our blood that flows thicker in the collective unconscious.

Does that archaic awareness, which is older than language, still view evolutionary systems and pure reason with suspicion and antagonism? The two-million year old archaic within us has always gotten along without it, favoring the picture-story method, which emerge in metaphors and parables. Some people have a combination of factors in their psychological, existential and cognitive constitutions that allow them to play certain cultural roles.

Always with us, it usually reveals itself in instincts, archetypes, our dreams and dramas. We cannot ignore its role in our lives. Our oldest dreams may be silent and trouble, purely graphic and difficult to unravel, triggering our reflections. Even consciousness contains information, deep pattern recognition, and the coding of space and time, that has disappeared along the way.

The journey to the center is an attempt at self-integration. All animals have an unconscious that autonomously governs their mechanics. The unconscious operates the animal. Even our thinking is largely unconscious. It converts senses and facts into narratives.

No hidden unconscious and covert manifestations, no latent potentialities. We have almost always known that one thing follows another thing. Every school of psychology has its own theory of the unconscious, which the labyrinth supersedes through imposing direct experience, visions, and dreams.

This is the cycle of life-death-rebirth, and eternity. This is where we play hide-and-seek with God (the god-image) and our deeper selves (embodied mind,"embedded mind", enactive mind). The labyrinth is the context that gives shape and meaning to experience, behavior, and action.

The Universe is a labyrinth made of labyrinths, each leading to another. The symbol of the cosmic archetype brings many visions to mind. The womb-tomb is the plenum or infinity of potential creativity and a means of accessing anomalous knowledge. As a model and mode of observation, it opens the possibility of inquiry and insight.

Like raw nature, its numinous quality evokes fascination, awe, and fear. The secret of our healing kinship with the divine is in our mortality. But we experience it in the wrenching suffering imposed by contradictions and literalization of what should be carried symbolically. Suffering, doing wrong and having bad things happen to you is universal. That's the problem, but the reaction is not.

"Unfortunately very few people can remember these primeval pictures, many people become ill because they have lost them and only get well when they find them again." (Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XII, 1Feb1935, Pages 179.)

We anticipate complications and difficulties. Our red thread to find the way out gets tangled in the web of our defensive nature. The labyrinth doesn't promise the emergence of consciousness from the unconscious, immortality or transcendence; it connects the flesh and death.

The labyrinth imprisons and conceals the archaic god-monster of passionate decomposing rage, a mythic delirium of self-inflicted wounds and shame, of death within life. What we imagine we are doing often has the exact opposite effect, perpetuating the illusion, dysfunction, and stuckness by confusing content and context.

Repulsion & Attraction
Despite its tortuous nature, we like to imagine the labyrinth always offers a way out that mirrors the way in. But the way out is never a certainty. The gap is between "the certain" and "the impossible." The sense of limitation needs resizing by the paths we invent between the certainty of physical death and longing for the life of the soul and its Mysteries. Then we turn the archetypal journey into our own personal existence. The raw feeling of perceptions is suffused with private subjectivity, transcendent mind, and non-conscious cognitive processes.

The labyrinth is a metaphor of the way of working through the psyche, through autonomous complexes and universal archetypes to clarity and coherence. It is a realm of deep time, rather than apparent time. Ritual repetition creates an intimacy with the Mystery, a deep relationship with personal and cultural meaning.

Monstrous Commotion
The treasures of the feminine soul are there as well as the monsters of our repressed instincts. Its conceptual framework can be a hidden way through, a way of working with the psyche, or a trap or tangent. It encapsulates feelings of being stuck and going nowhere, being blocked, imprisoned, or at a dead end without meaningful direction or a way out.

Therefore, it arouses the therapeutic power of possibilities between spiritual purity and the corruption of the tomb. Symbolic or literal "death" and decay on one hand contrasts with the potential of renewed life and aliveness -- psyche's potential for self-realization and the life-quickening effects of relationship.

Perception Management
The labyrinth reveals the prison of our defenses and resistance -- negative traps and assumptions, corrosive voices, addiction to failure, the pain of lost potential, life's impossibilities, lack of motivation. The helpless and hopeless stuck in the labyrinth may be masked by denial and addictions, including mood-altering with people, pets, and attention- and validation-seeking behavior.

The labyrinth is the chronic depression that masks anger and rage that masks the vulnerability of fear and pain. This is a perception management coping mechanism. In this realm of deep time, persistent traumatic disorder is always happening and accruing. We may wonder why the labyrinth brought us here, but of course it brings us where we least want to be. The trick is not in finding the exit or navigating the convolutions, but in not being tempted into the futile state to begin with.

Displaced anger covers up hurt and self-soothes inner tension which might otherwise be felt as cognitive dissonance, the torture of oscillating between opposing extremes. It masks fear of emotional intimacy and is a smokescreen for self-consciousness, a parody of self-empowerment, hiding sadness and grief. One quality, trait or gift is elevated publically above others, as part of a personal 'sales-pitch'.

Masked depression is anger turned inward or against the self. The reasons we claim for our anger may not actually be true. Assaults to principles, beliefs, and needs and wishes are the basis for psychologically defensive anger, now. And, we protect that identity as strongly as if defending our rights to food, shelter, water or land. Maslow noted that "concealing motivations and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication."

Sad, Angry, Lonely, Scared
The mask is the false persona, a thin veneer of social armoring, including denial, justification, even lies reflecting maimed factuality, desperation, and secret consolations. Shame and embarrassment go with fear of being exposed. Because they are out of control, some feel a great pressure to defend themselves because they are over-invested emotionally in a compensatory belief or way of being. Losing faith in ourselves, we seek it elsewhere since it is outwardly projected.

Negative energy turned inward goes into the labyrinth. When it is too risky to relax, it takes a vast amount of energy and willpower keep natural feelings and reactions bottled up. The defensive self can be a self-protective dissociation for the unscathed parts of a traumatically wounded self. We can lament with Shakespeare's Coriolanus: "I have some wounds upon me, and they smart ... To hear themselves rememb’red."

Painful emotional history can break through to consciousness with the shock of recognition that begins the process of recovery. These possibilities and impossibilities of the person are conditioned by situations, history, biology, memory, and experience. A self-imposed spell of blood and madness is a liminality of paradoxical contradiction, a double bind of attraction and repulsion. Lifestyles and worldviews are ways of psychological exploration.

The incurably flawed identify with the never-healing wound, becoming a living death image, still walking as a union without unity in a perverse complicity with death. The self-delusion is a necrophilic compulsion toward identification with affliction and forces that oppose, corrupt, and seek to freeze and destroy life -- an affliction-attention complex. The tarnished mortal flesh is just never quite dead enough.

These are the enclosing defensive walls of the labyrinth. We only have to risk failure in the face of the seemingly impossible. Possibilities require risk, not the denial of limits, or premature transcendental escapism. When limits are consciously confronted they often yield to other potentials, eventually.

But tragically, this core is persistently retraumatized and addicted to a painful past that is keeping it demoralized and cut off from risk. Benign regression can turn malignant. The labyrinth of survival defenses mobilize against and close in on the defended person -- their motives, functions, self-regulation, religion, fantasies, delusions, dreams, and games are hypo- or hyper-activated. It isn't so much confrontation with the unconscious that is needed as the rebirth of the ego from the very origin of unconditioned and undifferentiated primordial consciousness.

Finding our way through the labyrinth is a mystical, mental, and spiritual enigma full of an infinite variety of metaphysical and archetypal patterns. We meet our gods and ghosts and recognize their true nature. If it is our fate, the transcendental ego or true self emerges from the ordeal through the crystallization or metamorphosis of the radiant body.

Primordial symbols have multiple layers of meaning. The labyrinth can be serpentine, concentric, spiral, the squared-spiral or cross. It echoes the nomadic era of humanity as hunter-gatherers, as that which is hidden in the earth, in the groundstate of our being. The thread and the knot are about memory and initiation, or liberation through intricate detours in the journey of the soul.

Winding & Unwinding
The labyrinth is a visceral palace in the bowels of the earth. It symbolizes a descent into the deepest layers of the unconscious psyche, which is also a regressive or initiatory return to the womb of the Great Mother of the life-giving depths, and a nekyia to the underworld of the dead or ancestors with monsters and wisdom figures.

The monsters are knotty problems -- the repressed pre-rational parts of our being as well as direct instinctive contact with the spirits of nature -- a hidden source of our energy and power. Its about the power of light and darkness, catharsis and ascent, and its reversal in liberating flight. Some seek to escape it rather than be lost in the maze of contradictions. The mystical wanderer in the labyrinth confronts god through the incomprehensible danger of the ravenous monster. God waits to devour those who have lost their way by identifying with the god.

Labyrinths encode a wealth of analogical associations that remain relevant in contemporary life with its existential dilemmas and aimless wandering. The temenos or enclosed space is sacred. The labyrinth defended some magico-religious space from the uncalled, the uninitiated. Lost in the bowels of a great devouring pit, we are confronted with terror, death, and the slim hope of a way out. Trials and tributlations reveal our pain, fears and hopes. Significant reversals in the labyrinth can be tragic or ironic.

Not all labyrinths are structures. Some are highly intricate drawings, spirals, or patterns seen from prehistoric to modern art. Their symbolic and mythical meanings include the long and difficult path of life, through which we try to find our way without guidance, or any kind of complexity from which we cannot extricate ourselves.

As a rite of passage, we can enter but never quite leave the experience behind because of its nonlocal contagion. Death as our mortality is always at the heart of human existence. So, the point isn't to dwell in it, escape or overcome it, but appreciate its nuanced joys in a concrete reality rendered sacred through conscious conflict, suffering, and ecstasy. Focused awareness without distraction is the opposite of affliction, which shatters attention.

Cosmic Morphology
Like any sacred space it transports us from ordinary time and space to an eternity structured by timeless paradigms and unchanging archetypes. It can also be a dangerous if exhilerating temporal flow, time's destructive force allied with death. If we try to escape profane time, some part of us remains within the labyrinth, destroying the profane illusions of immortality. The experience lingers as uncanny dis-ease, psychopathy, or ecstatic turmoil -- terrifying ecstatic dissolution.

Labyrinths arise from symbolic, artistic, and architectural creative impulses -- our buried and long-forgotten spiritual history. It structures the symbolism of the unexplored path to the center, our winding internal structure, with transcendental capacities like a primordial mandala or celestial city.

The perceived center is not always salvific but can dissolve into many centers as illusions come and go, sometimes rendering us lost, aimless, or devoid of goals. It is a return to or reiteration of the mortal germ in itinerent wandering. The metaphor of the mortal germ signifies the deadliness of the sacred, as well as its fruitful and fecund images of birth and rebirth. We know the seed requires burial to grow and we bury our dead in consecrated ground, acknowledging the mystery of opposites and transformation.

The labyrinth forms a cornerstone for extended contemplation and recognition of the need for meaning in human existence. It can be a maze of contradictions, lostness, or unsolvable conundrums. Their expressive power and cultural significance has not decreased throughout history. It may have concentric or parallel levels which cannot be separated from the notion of the center, sometimes identified with the cosmic pole or tree.

This is the domain of death on the mythical quest. We yearn for rejuvenation, but death haunts our most vital hours with its unshakeable presence. It is death that is resurrected, time and again, in a series of insults to ego and body through our lifetimes. The liminal state is the boundary of life and death, purity and corruption. Fervent piety masks rebellion, ambition, a need for attention and validation. Pilgrimage degrades into tourism, devotion to obsession and repetition compulsion.

There are historical examples from Babylonia, Indonesia, Polynesia, Australia, Normandy. They are Roman, Scandinavian, Finnish, English, German, Irish, Celtic, and medieval and Greek labyrinth traditions. Those who seek cosmic powers find them guarded by obstacles and monsters. Eliade notes the terrible aspect of the sacred attracts and repels, is useful and dangerous, and brings death as well as immortality.

We all face monstrous impediments on the road of life. So labyrinth rituals are initiatory, a radically dangerous mythical promise of access to the sacred, immortality, and absolute reality. Reaching its center, we find a radically different order. The ordinary mingles with the unordinary, the uncanny, the mystifying. We can only see obliquely in the tunnels of the labyrinth.

Topological Structure
Traditionally, most labyrinths are symmetrical, in a form of a system of concentric squares or its octagonal or circular topological variations. It concealed a complex mathematical puzzle, a Hamiltonian path. Today we might compare it to the non-random path of strange attractor orbits. Endless video games have exploited 3-D labyrinths.

The meander is a natural linear form of labyrinth; unicursal mazes were called meanders in Medieval times. The history of design may have begun with the concept of a meander. We can mathematically compute open meander permutations. The meander symbol was used in
Ancient Greece to symbolize infinity or the eternal flow of things.

Many temples and objects were decorated with this motif. It is also possible to make a connection of meanders with labyrinths since some labyrinths can be drawn using the Greek key. The Greek key motif is an aesthetic graphic representation. The word ”labyrinth” is derived from the Latin word labris , meaning a two-sided axe, the Cretan motif related to the Minos palace in Knossos. Their ”dancing pattern” used the shape of a double axe.

The primordial image with the decisive turn at its center is generally encountered in imaginal descent into the underworld. Its precursors are false trails, deceptions, perils, ordeals. The endless circles and confusing meanders amplify the symbolic narrative meaning of this path to the underworld . We interpret the structures as the existential connection between life and death, between the oblivion of the dead and the return of the eternal living.

Jung associated it with the skein motif (coiling serpents, meanders, etc.) and the coniunctio, which produces the Homunculus. Kerenyi introduced three interrelated aspects: 1) labyrinth as a mythical construction; 2) as a meander-like patttern spiral path dancers followed in ritual (the syrtos); and 3) as a structure that was represented by a spiral line.

The return to the starting point is a rebirth. Socrates said, ”the labyrinth is a confusing path, hard to follow without a thread, but, provided one is not devoured at the mid-point, it leads surely, despite twists and turns, back to the beginning.” Eliade wrote a book about Ordeal by Labyrinth.

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 subterranean Hypogeum of Malta, and later the world navel Delphi, whose root is δελφύς delphys, "womb".  A world navel is the symbolic center of a system.

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.”

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.

The mythic and symbolic image of the labyrinth is a model describing the human personal life. We all wander through the labyrinth of life passages with its trials and ordeals. It includes the symbolic structures of initiation.

It is a mystery to live and die. Self is grounded in embodiment. Embodiment and experience is the root of culture and self, the intersection of culture and nature. It provides orientation and engagement in terms of interwoven threads of psychocultural themes and the cultural constitution of the sacred self. Mind and body, psyche and soma, are indistinguishable at the level of perception. Our attentional habits create our experience.

In primordial experience we are present and living. Undifferentiated unconscious process is an indeterminate capacity that precedes cognitive and evaluative structures, compulsions, and revulsions. Obviously, the body is in the world from the beginning. The process is specified in the cultural context as our orientation and situation in a pre-reflective bodily experience.

The cultural self is grounded in embodied phenomenology, modulating the relationships with self, others, and cosmos, linking behavior to the objective world. We have perceptual senses, but also a sense of necessity, a sense of reality, meaning, balance, beauty, the sacred, responsibility, humor, absurdity, morality, practicality, etc. They are synchronized and attuned through the body. Body image, identity, and claims of identity have broader parameters than the skin boundary.

Self processes include perception, imagination, memory, language, and emotion -- narratives of alienation and reconciliation centering on the quality and content of experience. The self encompasses symptoms, disorders, symbolic meaning, social relationships, and orientation to the world. Traditionally, healing is evoked through therapeutic trance, imagery processes, catharsis, placebo effect, insight and suggestion. Such acts, existential encounters with self, Other and the limits of our coherence, establish long-standing moods and motivations.

What is being healed in the imaginal dimension? That depends on the manner in which we define its goals. The healing paradigm and structural hypothesis depend on the inherent power of correspondences. There are analogies or homologues between metaphors, symbolic acts, and cosmological structure with behavior, emotions, thoughts, and diseases.

Embodied experiences are transformable. The body is more, genealogically and ethnographically, than what it has come to mean. We embody deep history. Existence is taken up and transforms situations. Transformative meaning is taken up in the healing experience.

We can capture our existential beginnings through healing in moments of unconditioned being. Transcendence is where perception, objectification, and conceptualization begin. Integrative transformation is not mystical but is grounded in the world. The same universal and personal symbols are brought into different relations.

Experiential commentary reveals the emotional self. When the healing impulse becomes interpretive, it becomes reflexive, giving voice to "the other." The imaginal performance of healing processes is related to trauma, revelatory experience, and internal object relations with spontaneity, intimacy, and control.

Biology, psychology, and culture interact to help make sense of human capacities. Bodily experience is the root of therapeutic efficacy. The self is the product of dialogue with concrete phenomena, instantiating the empirical phenomena at hand. Even our problems are symbols or revelatory imagery. Bodily experience is the existential ground of culture and the sacred. The earth is the symbol of physical humanity. Its ground is our existential ground. Another dimension beneath the ground is the cosmos because the Earth is suspended in the cosmos.

As we become conscious of this inner world, attention is directed inwards, and a whole new world opens, including embodied imagery and experiential specificity. We make ourselves more human through creativity, healing systems, and the sacred self. In alchemy, the entrance into the unconscious is represented by the entrance into caves, by reports of shamanic or initiatory travels to the underworld or strange parts of the world.

The labyrinth is initiatory, and temporarily disturbs rational conscious, opening us to chaos. The inner mind is aware of a new cosmic dimension, a pilgrimage through the flow of cosmic manifestation and absorption in the Absolute. The labyrinth is an opened form of the circle where knowledge (gnosis) resonates at a deep and often unconscious level. It metaphorically captures the mysteries of life and serves as a cosmic symbol. Entering the cave is entering holy ground.

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 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.

REFERENCES

Biles, Jeremy, Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form

Eliade, Mircea, Ordeal by Labyrinth; Univ of Chicago Pr (Tx); First edition edition, August, 1982.

On Soul, Character and Calling:A Conversation with James Hillman By Scott London http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/hillman.html

Jones, Lindsay, Editor, (2005), Encyclopedia of Religion, "Labyrinth", Thomson Gale, http://emp.byui.edu/SatterfieldB/Rel390R/Fur%20Further%20Study/labyrinth.pdf

Kalsched, D. E. (1998). Archetypal affect, anxiety and defence in patients who have
suffered early trauma. In A. Casement (Ed.), Post-Jungians Today: Key Papers in
Contemporary Analytical Psychology (pp. 83-102). London: Routledge.

Kalsched, D. (2013). Trauma and the Soul: A Psycho-Spiritual Approach to
Human Development and its Interruption, London Routledge.

K. Kerenyi, Labyrinth-Studien. Labyrinthos als Linienreflex einer mythologischen Idee, In: Humanistische Seelenforschung. Langen M ̈uller - M ̈unchen, Wien, 1966.

K. Kerenyi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, Ralph Manheim trans., Princeton University Press, 1976.

Giorgio Tricarico, The Labyrinth of Possibility: A Therapeutic Factor in Analytical Practice

W.H. Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths, Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1922.

Kasabova, Anita, On Autobiographical Memory

Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents

grove http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=psychology_articles

THE ALCHEMY OF TRAUMA, Rashin DʼAngelo
http://www.depthpsychologytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/The-Alchemy-of-Trauma.pdf

metaphor brain
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3951481/

Irrational Perceptive Identity

The domain of elemental chaos includes mobilization of somatic, sensory, and phenomenal activity without boundaries in a virtual timelessness like the pictographic nature of dreams, spontaneous sensory-perceptual  happenings.

The mind tries to process the instinctual tension of somatic and emotional experience without archetype, symbol, or metaphors but through delusional displacement, excitation discharge, affect, instinct, and anxiety in reactionary discharge and acting out automatically without reality testing.

Ancient mind experiences and expresses itself in a way qualitatively different from thought. A primary process of mental activity, non-thoughtful mind has its own epistemology, revealed through the Primordials and Titans concrete but undifferentiated and unintrgrated multi-sensory phenomena of primary process.

This primitive and primordial psyche of our ancestors erupts with suprapersonal force and overwhelming intensity of emotional flooding and disturbed imagination. Our ancestors struggled between two worlds with undifferentiated titanic aggression, incest, and destructive collective forces, yearning for death and dissolution with Titanic contempt for mortality.

Our primitive origins are a world of deeply instinctual drives and visceral reactions, whose destructive powers have been suppressed. We have a universal regressive urge to reunite in our original fusion with the cosmic mother. Parareception swings the doors of perception wide open with telepathic confusion, primitive possession, and life-threatening, unregulated neuroception. Psychic rape, suffocating parent imagos, hysteria, infernal repetition are primitive archetypes. Madness comes from the most primitive complexes.

Myth resides in this multidimensional primordial unconscious of universal psychic history, a deeply rooted liminal world of fragmentation, dissociation, and monstrosities -- the hidden reality beneath all cultures. Flooded with all-encompassing phenomenawe become so engrossed in something that we "merge" with it, losing track of time and feeling our own boundaries soften and begin to blur with immersion.

The Titans are the pre-human or animalistic realm of disintegration and incestuous tendencies arsing from the undifferentiated fusion of self and others -- an oceanic intrapsychic phenomena, not simply an interpersonal process. When a personal experience corresponds to a latent primordial image, an archetype is activated.

The Olympians are a realm of psychosocial being, integration and kinship libido, the genomic level that lies between us and the other. In both tangible and mysterious ways, we are all interconnected, and any one of us can have a profound effect on the whole.

The Titans, a residual substrate of primal mind, were reduced to monsters and demons from the bottom of psyche's Abyss in the Olympian world. Only Dionysisan fragmentation ecstasy and Aphroditic rapture found a place in the Olympian order. But all gods retain the root of their archaic madness and the split with sacred and rational way of being. Linking to the larger self, artists reach back to primordial images which correct such one-sidedness.

Hesiod’s Theogony starts with goddess Gaia and ends to the polytheistic reign of the Olympian gods.Uranus surrounds Gaia and fertilizes her. They deified Mother Earth as the sustaining ground of life and death. The original parent represents the source of all life prior to the distinctions of actual mother and father.

The birth of the gods parallels nature’s elements. Primordial waters give birth to new creation. The original "chaos" or "sea" constitutes all matter. Cronus metaphorically symbolizes Time, Rhea the flux, and Hera (an anagram of Aer) air. Helios is a fiery flash of numinosity in that dark world of nonordinary phenomena.

The sun (Helios) was the divine king of the sky for the Greeks. According to the “Homeric Hymn” of Helios: The sun shines his light on both men and immortal gods by driving his four-horse “golden-yoked” chariot across the sky from east to west. Helios brought the warmth and light of the sun and ripened their crops. It illumined the moon's reflection. The son of Zeus, as Apollo, was god of light, healing, music, archery and prophecy.

The Dorian Greeks worshiped Helios as the rising of the sun. Plato also explained that the name of Selene came from selas (bright light) and phos (light). The third or fourth century novelist Heliodoros considered himself “of the line of the descendants of Helios.” He worshipped Helios and Selene: “the purest and brightest of the gods.”

The light-giving Helios, the Sun, is the source of every life form on Earth. He was eternal witnesses of human acts and the natural avengers of cheatings. The rays of the Sun falling on Mother Earth after the rain-sperm of the Sky created the first living creatures.

Of astronomical importance is The Celestial Dome is of astronomical importance. The all-seeing Helios reigns in daytime, and at night the stars and the pale figure of Selene-Moon are observed. The Sun and Moon were crucial for the invention of the religious calendar systems of ancient people.

The dark or chthonic form of Helios was the pythios, or sepent, as seen in the cult of Delphi. Python was variously described as a male or female Drakon, or dragon, the wild ungovernable animal mind which breaks through, even psychotic upheaval, undifferentiated dark determining forces. The shadow is forced into the light. Wild kundalini serpent energy can be destructive, as well as enlightening.

The shadow of the light is darkness. The Titans symbolized the daemonic and its battle with the gods of the light-world. Primordial nature correlates with primordial unconscious and primordial images of absolute validity.
https://www.academia.edu/13220011/Gaia_Helios_Selene_and_Ouranos_the_three_principal_celestial_bodies_and_the_sky_in_the_ancient_Greek_cosmogony

MINING THE SUBCONSCIOUS

Miners dug into the earth to extract its minerals. But theirs was a sacred task, for metals are born in the womb of Earth. Miner, smelter and smith alike were engaged in the common task of assisting nature to come to fruition.

"VITRIOL" is a prescription to visit the interior of the earth and find the Philosopher's Stone by rectification. It suggest we mine our own depths. This grounding is also a move into manifestation based in spiritual depth. Paradoxically, Vitriol was the most important liquid in alchemy. All other reactions are contained or take place in it.

St. Germain's text suggests we go mining diamonds, gold and silver. The diamond is a symbol of the perfected Self, the higher Self. It is equivalent to the sacred geometry contained in the Diamond Body -- the Merkabah of the Kabbalists. The Rosicrucian motto V.I.T.R.I.O.L. (Visita Interiorem Terrae Rectificandoque / Invenies Occultum Lapidem) is a code that urges us to "Visit the interior of the earth and… you will find the secret stone."

The precious metals, gold and silver represent the alchemical opposites of Sun and Moon, respectively -- archetypal male and female energy. The yang and yin of alchemy. In alchemical terms Sol/Gold stands for Light, Fire, Red, Sulpher, the Red Lion and The King. Luna/Silver is dark, left, water, white, mercury, The Queen and the White Eagle. Luna is the Lesser Work of Alchemy, Sol is the Greater Work. The philosophical Gold, like the Lapis or Stone is a symbol of the goal of alchemical transmutation from mundane Lead.

Thus, we have the injunction to perform the rite when sun, earth and moon are in conjunction, when Sun and Moon are one...or "married" in alchemical terms. It could indicate an eclipse of the Sun or the Moon which occur during such alignment.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287487106_Does_the_Nervous_System_Have_an_Intrinsic_Archaic_Language_Entoptic_Images_and_Phosphenes/figures?lo=1

" The labyrinth has a crookedly hung gate,
Difficult of access:
How far you have to go
To rush in from outside
Leads you that much further again
Through the narrowly winding wandering ways
Inward from the point of the exit.
With its outward-leading passages it spellbinds you day after day,
And its twists and turns play their
contemptuous game with you,
Like a dream with its empty faces;
Until Master Chronos melts away,
And, oh, doer of darkness Death receives you,
And not a chance is left you of reaching the exit. "
--Medieval Labyrinth Poem

THE OVERACHIEVING HEROIC EGO
There is little doubt that the hero carries a double-edged sword in his super-achieving nature.  Like any other tool, it depends largely how it is used whether it is creative or destructive.  Western man has paid a very high price for identification with the hero, including lack of feeling awareness, fear of intimacy, and authority issues.

The cost for men of living up to the old heroic ideal spawned the men's movement, which even transcends the role of the so-called sensitive man for an authentic masculinity that embraces, integrates, and transcends the opposites. The defensive compensations can be let go, reducing the tension between grandiosity and true greatness of the self within. Mature masculinity is not abusive, domineering or grandiose, but generative, creative and empowering of self and others.

Women have encountered the same loss of feminine values entering the workplace. The overachieving superwoman, seeking to have it all, is an over-reactionary caricature of the hero, also. And society has willingly pushed her into this until many men and women have become equally driven by this inner archetype.  Maybe the philosopher, Goethe instigated this drive to be superhuman into our culture--but it is a restatement of myths like Hercules and Prometheus.

The problem seems to come in when this urge or drive for questing and self development is turned outward into the world of daily life. This probably is not inappropriate in the stages of career-building and family rearing, but the emptiness that surfaces in mid-life shows its shortcoming. When the drive is turned inward to the quest for self transformation, it assumes its rightful place in the psyche and functions in a balanced, noble way.

Many post-Jungians, such as Marion Woodman and James Hillman, feel that the myth of the heroic dragon-slaying hero has moved into overkill.  Yes, we must struggle to win our consciousness from the regressive pull of the Great Mother's world.  We cannot escape our spiritual destiny by unconsciously sinking back into her oblivion with our drug or addictive tech of choice.  The Great Work was the ancient name for transformative pursuits.  It requires active conscious effort--work.

But, this transformative urge, taken to excess and misplaced has resulted in the technological rape of the planet, nearly killing Mother Earth. We have "conquered" our horizontal world, rather than the vertical dimension of spirit. Theodore Roszak covered this topic extensively in his works on Eco-Psychology, such as SONG OF THE EARTH. In our misplaced spiritual zeal, we have exploited and ravaged the earth, with our ravenous hunger for resources. The missionary zeal of Colonialism repressed feminine values and cultures.

This tendency of the hero within toward over-achievement -- too much, too soon --is one reason why it is prudent to go slowly in dream healing. For some clients one or two sessions a month are quite sufficient, since they require time to digest and integrate.

Dragon-slaying must be understood as a symbolic process of transformation, then the feminine is not torn asunder from matter.  We are not really free of the mother when we worship her in concrete materialism, consumerism, compulsive behavior, and spiritual materialism.  As we learn to truly honor the feminine and find balance within our own personalities, we learn to stop repressing it and allow it fully into consciousness.

This is one way of nurturing the growth of your own soul and creativity.  The soul is the embodiment of spirit, the receiver of spirit. It is the split between matter and spirit that is the sickness of our modern society. We heal this split by taking a stand against our compulsive appetites, and power drive, according to the Jungians.

The psychological goal of the hero is to train the ego to function at the threshold of the conscious and subconscious worlds effectively. As hero, your first feat is to clarify your psychological difficulties, clear the blocks, voyage to the edge of your own known world, and win the treasure of direct experience and assimilation of the archetypal images. Interaction with these same images was the goal of the mystic arts like magic and alchemy. It takes place in dreamhealing automatically.

We learn the difference between our dream-ego and waking-ego [two different complexes].  Both experience emotions and subjective choice. Both feel like "me," but the dream-ego compensates the waking ego with its inner view.  Both are subject to distorting their perceptions of reality.
Dream life is an ongoing dialogue between the ego and the unconscious mind.  The dream ego, especially in a "waking dream" or dream journey, does have a real-time "impact on the complexes of the unconscious and can alter their structural arrangement," according to James A. Hall.

The waking ego has these complexes for its foundation.  When they change, this is reflected in the waking-ego, especially as alterations in mood. Dreamhealing is therefore a direct alteration of the waking ego itself.  The Self acts through the dream directly on the ego.

This process is not without its dangers, at least in the early stages.  It creates crises and dangers (such as abreaction) which have the potential of destroying the personality as it has been in the past.  When the hero descends into the underworld (unconscious), he must discard the defenses of conscious development, such as intellect.

He gains a mythical type of awareness which allows him to directly experience the paradoxical aspect of the inner world without going insane.  For example, he comes to understand, first hand, that he contains both his parental images as well as the primordial archetypal parental archetypes.  This leads to a true understanding of androgynous nature, which is one form of wholeness as projected by the transcendent function.  It is a way of uniting opposites within oneself, rather than overcoming them through fighting.

The goal of the hero's quest is a higher synthesis of the ego, with access to both conscious and unconscious.  Maturing through the hero means you learn to transform your conflicts into a nobler and more stable personality with deep roots in the sources of life.

As hero, you are involved in a paradoxical process of ordering, which is precisely why you may be susceptible to breakdown and wounding. You are assaulted by the forces of chaos, entropy, and disorder. It is a paradoxical truth that acts of ordering can result in potential weakening of the ego. As hero, you learn to withstand the effects of the disorder which your creative efforts manifest.

You'll have to battle your own personal and historical limitations to obtain the vision of the well-springs of human existence. Then, your second task, of returning to normal life as a transformed example of the way begins.  In the initial stage, you assimilate, then you disseminate.

If a would-be hero does not submit to all the initiatory tests and steals the treasures, the powers of the unconscious are mobilized to blast him from within and without. This can be imagined as crucifixion or eternal torment. And how many of us have our crosses to bear!

One face of the hero is the martyr who must learn how to give up.  However, a self-centered ego can become centered in transpersonal reality.  Then one may emerge as a culture hero or heroine in their own small way by making a truly unique contribution to life on the planet.

Your inner hero-self may at first refuse the call to adventure.  The rough, unfamiliar terrain, the crossroads, and the gauntlet of initiatory barriers mirror the ordeals of the inner quest.  But over time you come to realize that you can overcome your infantile sentimentalities and resentments. You may realize that the good and bad are contained in the law (masculine) and image (feminine) of the nature of being.

The agony of breaking through your personal limitation is the very process that leads to spiritual growth.  To complete your task, however, you must return with the treasure to your mundane life, with an increased sense of integration, no longer merely ego-oriented.

You may seek a path of spiritual or religious devotion in order to continue the deepening process begun in therapy.  The mystic communes directly with the divine, or Higher Power.  Spirituality bears on your integrity, how you conduct yourself in all areas of existence, outer and inner.

 The Dream of Gilgamesh: The First Recorded Dream

Gilgamesh got up and revealed the dream, saying to his mother:
Mother, I had a dream last night.
Stars of the sky appeared, and some kind of meteorite of Anu fell next to me.
I tried to lift it but it was too mighty for me, I tried to turn it over but I could not budge it.
The Land of Uruk was standing around it, the whole land had assembled about it, the populace was thronging around it, the Men clustered about it, and kissed its feet as if it were a little baby.
I loved it and embraced it as a wife.
I laid it down at your feet, and you made it compete with me.

Commentary: Marie Louise Von Franz
This dream is about forty-six hundred years old. Still today we can find modern parallels for the language of the unconscious has changed much less than the language of human consciousness.

So if we interpret this dream from a modern stand-point we could say that up to the moment before the star fell upon Gilgamesh, he fulfilled the collective role of a king. He was the hero-king. He is typical of a man who ambitiously follows a collective pattern.

Nowadays, he might be a great politician or a movie star — a man who has followed up certain collective alleys and reached a goal.
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Looked at from within, such a person reacts in a very collective way fulfilling a collective role of power. They are generally not very individual.

The star, on the contrary, represents his uniqueness — every soul has one star in the heaven.

We can say that up to the appearance of the star Gilgamesh, with all his collective power and achievement, had not done anything unique.

On the contrary, he had only fulfilled the typical pattern of the hero-king. The, probably, about the middle of life (because that is where it most frequently occurs), something changes.
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While he is walking around among his subjects, proud of his own power position, a star falls from the sky onto his back. It turns out to be a very heavy load.

That is the moment when his unique destiny befalls him, literally falls on his back.

That means that just as Christ had to carry his cross, Gilgamesh now has to carry the burden of having to become the unique, chosen individual, a task which he has avoided by being an ambitious, collective man.
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Marie Von Franz, The Way of the Dream, pages 69- 70.

This heroic phase does not go indefinitely. Questing fades in the background when you become familiar with the imaginary realm. Both processes that seek and participate in the imaginary kingdom require attention, effort and creativity. Oceanic creativity translates into modalities. When we are in flames, we do not try to hide it, but we put out any conventions for invention.

Creativity brings us to a new territory with an uncompromising statement. It represents a major change with a fairly simple gesture, which is symbolically important. We deal with an unconscious emotional identity with natural phenomena. Dreams are a widespread imaginary portrait. We carry our past with us as an intense shadow that hides our inferiority. Life's affirmations are the simultaneous recognition of death.

But Joseph Campbell says, "When we leave ourselves thinking above all of ourselves and our self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness."

Our nervous system is like a map of our reality. The conflict shoots the emotions; Energy is related to emotional disturbances and psychophysical effects. Its structure of fear / contraction holds the imprint of all our human experiences in our body through structure, memory, and metaphor - the architecture of memory. Every psychological and emotional impression has its own life in our biology, so we can not run or force our healing. Ritualizing a myth in a ceremony makes it less cerebral.

The living meaning emerges from experimentation through and through us. We will deepen and validate it throughout our lives. Myths reveal sacred history, a divine paradoxical reality with primitive efficacy. Myths are real and psychological stories of the supreme reality that represents the paths of various evolutionary processes. The unconscious psychology reveals the unconscious dynamic psyche.

"The myth of the universal hero always refers to a powerful man or god-god who conquers evil in the form of dragons, snakes, monsters, demons, and so on, and frees his people from destruction and death. Or ritual repetition Sacred texts and ceremonies, and the cult of such a figure with dances, music, hymns, prayers and sacrifices, grasp the audience with numinous emotions and exalt the individual to an identification with the hero. " -Jung; Man and his symbols; Page 68.

Iona Miller is a nonfiction writer for the academic and popular press, clinical hypnotherapist (ACHE) and multimedia artist. Writing itself is a developmental process that creates self-discovery and meaning while integrating learning and experience.

Meaning is a non-material imaginal dimension. Imagination is a vital spiritual function, inseparable from the World Soul. Psyche is soul. Symbols are the currency of consciousness and the connective tissue of the mind-body connection. They are visible in the psychic aspect of symptoms and behavior, involving the reader in a collaborative process mapping the conceptual terrain.

Miller's writing is informed by Jungian, Archetypal, and Transpersonal psychologies. She is interested in creativity, experiential therapy, extraordinary human experiences, and interpretive strategies. Her work is an omni-sensory fusion of depth psychology, personal mythology, dreamwork, science-art, frontier science, symbolism, source mysticism, futuring, digital life, emergent healing and paradigm shift. Her framework is semiotic (image-as-sign) and phenomenological (image-in-consciousness).

She explores psyche, extraordinary human potential, genres of ritual healing, and therapeutic processes. Cultural phenomenology explores existential significance and cultural meaning of phenomena, mind-body-spirit modes of attention, as well as the effects of ancient and modern doctrines of religion, science, psychology, and the arts -- the holistic, participative, contextual and relational.

Iona Miller serves on the Advisory Boards of Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, DNA Decipher Journal, and Scientific God Journal, as well as the Board of Directors of Medigrace, Inc. & Calm Birth; a Miami-based Integral Medicine institute; and the Editorial Board of CRAFT (Community Resilience through Action for Future Transitions).

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Ares (94thgr-gr)  Son of Zeus → Thestius of Aetolia his son → Leda, Queen of Sparta his daughter →
Clytemnestra of Troy, Queen of Mycenae her daughter → Electra her daughter → Dardanus, king of Dardania her son → Erichthonius, King of Dardania his son → Tros, King of Troy his son →
Assaracus, King of Dardania his son → Capys, king of Dardania his son → Anchises his son →
Aeneas, King of Lavinium his son → Ascanius, King of Alba Longa his son → Iulus his son