Many-breasted goddess, sculptural image
of the Organic Light. It is next to impossible to represent
the Organic Light in a graphic or visual manner, but this
one supreme attempt to do so survives intact. Those who had "fallen
into milk" would have caught the allusion: the Light
exudes into space like milk seeps from the porous nipples
of a woman's breast.
Various animal-angelic powers displayed on the goddess represent
Aeonic currents, torrents of high animation that can assume
animal faces, recalling the totemic ancestors of the
Egyptians and indigenous
peoples such as the Inuit (Esquimaux), Tlinglit, and many
others who
commemorated such ancestral epiphanies on their "totem
poles." (Roman period, c. 200 CE)
The initiation temple of the Ephesian Artemis
had 117 columns, each over 55 feet tall. As I noted in Not
in His Image (Ch. 9), initiants were led to behold the
Organic Light by looking carefully at white marble pillars,
so that they could detect the substantial porosity of the
Light. Initiation ceremonies at Ephesis were among the most
populous and glamorous of the ancient world. Theatrical performances
(tragedies,
literally "goat-songs," a reference to the popular
habit of calling initiates goats) were staged nearby at the
theater
near the harbor. The long street, the Arkadiane, leading
from harbor to theater was also lined with tall, elegant
columns. Arkadiane means "country procession," but
in esoteric terms
arcadia was the realm of the initiates who served
the Bear Goddess, Artemis, arcas being an archaic
term for bear. (Ruins of the Arkadiane at Ephesus, 200 BCE.)
"A sheaf of wheat in silence reaped." Cut
sheaf engraved on a pediment at Eleusis. "Initiates
who beheld the hierophantic gesture had been carefully prepared
to realize
several things at once. The stalk of wheat containing in
its head the seed to reproduce itself mirrored their experience,
even as they felt its biochemical effect. Standing there
in a group, they realized that their minds were now fertile
with seeds of wisdom to be transmitted to future generations.
The grain in the head of the wheat held its reproductive
power, but also, due to the fungus of ergot, its revelatory
power. The mystai understood the two powers, biological and
mystical, as a unity. They participated in body and mind
in a higher type of generation, the epigenetic transmission
of initiated wisdom" (Not in His Image, Ch.
16.)
NOTE: Epigenetics, “above
genetics,” is a new paradigm in biological science.
It allows for reprogramming of the DNA blueprint through
a molecular mechanism, reverse transcriptase.
