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#being that of the egg: “eggs symbolize rebirth and renewal. which makes them perfect for celebrating the story of jesus’ resurrection.”

centerspirited · 1 year

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#IFTTT #centerspirited.com

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timelesslords · 3 years

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So Under Freezing Stars is finally done 😭I’m incredibly sad it's over but also so happy with the finished product and with the response it's gotten over the past few months <3

I thought it might be fun to compile some little details about the fic- easter eggs and callbacks to the original books, little thematic details and symbols I included, chapter parallels, stuff like that! Everything is below the cut to avoid spoilers, but hopefully y’all find it fun and it’s an interesting way to top everything off :’)

Symbolism/Theme

the first time Annabeth drinks nectar, she can’t put a taste to it. This is because she’s in a transitional period with her identity, where she hasn’t quite solidified a sense of home. When she wakes up after being given nectar for the second time, her mouth tastes like apples because her and Perseus had split one together back on the ship. It’s the first food they shared together after she starts associating him with the concept of home, so the nectar takes on that taste. also apples are a sacred fruit of aphrodite so, ya know ;)

Water plays a big role thematically. There’s the obvious connection to Perseus (whenever Annabeth is looking out into the sea during an unrelated conversation, it’s sort of supposed to indicate that he’s on her mind) but also the more traditional symbolic meanings of water— washing someone/something clean, renewal, rebirth, etc. all of which are themes of the book anyways so it worked out!! Chapters to watch for water symbolism would be 18 and 32 in particular but really anytime there’s an emphasis on the sea

the quote I chose for the epigraph (”Understand this if you understand nothing: it is a powerful thing to be seen”) is from Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, one of my favorite books! In the context of Freshwater, this quote is when the main character (spoiler) meets someone from their culture who helps them realize they’re a god. It just felt like a particularly perfect way to start off the story, given how many parallels there are to that moment in Freshwater to the entirety UFS. Even without context it frames the story of one of self discovery, but particularly self discovery in tandem with another, which is exactly what I think UFS is about at its core. Freshwater is an incredible book that I owe so much to in terms of inspiring UFS thematically and I def recommend it, though please look up TWs for it beforehand bc it does contain a lot of triggering content.

another more obvious meta thing, the chapter titles switch from Latin to Greek after Annabeth realizes she’s Greek and not Roman

Chapter Parallels

ch20 is called divinity because Annabeth views the sex as akin to a religious awakening— sleeping with her lover is both an act of worship and a revelatory experience wherein she comes to terms with the godly side of her identity. But chapter 33 is called mortal because the thing that makes them special together isn’t necessarily their parentage or their godliness, it’s their humanity. Gods can’t bare their souls to one another because they don’t have one. But mortals— vulnerable and breakable as they are— have that advantage, and when they sleep together the second time Annabeth is fully cognizant and appreciative of that fact.

The drooling in sleep thing is obviously a callback to the OG books (it’s such an iconic first line I had to include it somehow lol) but it also has a thematic parallel (one that Annabeth actually points out within the narrative). That was one of the first moments she recognized he was human and not some unattainable figure, so it comes back to her later in ch33 when she's thinking about their mortality

In ch14, Piper offers to fix Annabeth’s hair as a peace offering. In ch33, Perseus untangles her hair for her because the idea of doing it herself is overwhelming for her. I just really like the idea of caring for someone else’s hair being an act of love towards that person :’)

Easter Eggs/OG Book Callbacks

Blackjack asking for fried dough at the end of chapter 4 is a reference to him always asking for donuts in the original books (yes I did google “did they have donuts in ancient rome” for that lol)

The way they fight the hellhound in ch6 (Percy distracting in the front and Annabeth sneaking around the back) is their go-to fighting strategy in the books, which Percy comments on in BOTL

Obviously Jason passing out every 30 seconds is a reference to Jason getting knocked out like 3x a book in HOO (#brason)

Fai turning into a lizard in the Athens chapter is a callback to Frank the Iguana from MOA

the masthead of the ship being a dragon is meant to be reminiscent of Festus

Other stuff!

Chapter 16 is named calm and chapter 17 is named storm bc 16 is the calm before the (literal) storm

Annabeth saying “is your head full of kelp” to percy in ch13 is the closest I could feasibly get to her calling him seaweed brain lol. I think in chapter 15 she also comments to herself that she feels like his brain is made of seaweed sometimes <3

When Annabeth decides to let Jason and Piper wake up on their own instead of waking them up herself in ch32, it’s sort of a callback to previous comments she’s made about Jason not being a morning person. She’s still scared that he’ll be mad at her, and she doesn’t want to exacerbate that by waking him up early because she knows he’s in a worse mood in the morning.

In the final conversation with Jason, Annabeth says “you’re always too hard on yourself” which is kind of a play on her last words to Luke in the original books (“you always pushed yourself too hard”). I don’t know why but I’ve always really liked that line, it feels very Annabeth, so I wanted to include it somehow. Jason isn’t dying but she does love him like a brother so that felt like a good place for it to go.

something to generally look out for is how reliable or not reliable Annabeth’s narration is. She’s not like a Holden Caufield where she straight up lies to the audience, but her thoughts and observations are not always the most true version of what’s going on. This is probably most obvious in the Luke conflict (particularly chapters 21 and 23) but also when she has to read other people’s emotions and make assumptions about what they’re thinking based on that. A lot of times she’s straight up wrong and just doesn’t realize it (this is particularly relevant in ch14 lol)

another general thing to look at is chapter titles, particularly in the second half of the book. A lot of times the title of the chapter is one of the main themes of the story and that chapter is either an important plot point for that theme or a resolution of it!

That’s all I can think of right now! I might update this later if I remember more but this is already stupidly long lol. I would apologize for turning my fic into an English assignment but if you made it this far you probably thought it was at least a little interesting, so 😂

thank you guys again for reading <3 love you all!

#UFS #percabeth #don't read this until you read the ending!#i just had to post it now so I could link it lol #last chapter is coming in 2 minutes!

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the-witch-with-red-hair · 3 years

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Another Magical Monday!

Good morning, my witches and warlocks! 'Tis I, Zinnia, bringing you another Magical Monday blog post! Today, we are going to be looking at one of the eight sabbats - Ostara!

Ostara, also known as Eostre, is the Spring Equinox which occurs every year around March 21st. It is the turning point from winter to spring, where life begins to reawaken. Night and day are of equal length and in perfect equilibrium - dark and light, masculine and feminine, inner and outer, in balance. The natural world is coming alive, the Sun is gaining in strength and the days are becoming longer and warmer.

Ostara takes its name after the Germanic goddess, Eostre/Ostara, who was traditionally honoured in the month of April with festivals to celebrate fertility, renewal, and rebirth. Some Pagans/Witches still choose to celebrate this Sabbat even today in honor of what it symbolizes in nature, following the yearly cycle.

Symbols of Ostara

As you might have guessed, the symbols for this sabbat are the hare and the egg. In Celtic tradition, the hare is sacred to the Goddess and is the totem animal of lunar goddesses such as Hecate, Freyja, and Holda. The goddess most closely associated with the Hare is Eostre, or Ostara. The nocturnal hare, so closely associated with the moon which dies every morning and is resurrected every evening, also represents the rebirth of nature in Spring. Both the moon and the hare were believed to die daily in order to be reborn - thus the Hare is a symbol of immortality. It is also a major symbol for fertility and abundance.

The egg contains 'all potential', full of promise and new life. It symbolizes the rebirth of nature, the fertility of the Earth and all creation. In many traditions, the egg is a symbol for the whole universe. The 'cosmic' egg contains a balance of male nad female, light and dark, in the egg yolk adn egg white. The golden orb of the yolk represents the Sun God enfolded by the White Goddess, perfect balance.

Ostara Correspondences

Symbolism: rebirth, new life, new beginnings, resurrection, fertility, balance, youth.

Symbols: rabbits, bunnies, eggs, chicks, daffodils, tulips, baskets, sprouts, lambs, ribbons, butterflies, bees.

Colors: pastel green, yellow, pink, gold, grass green, robin's egg blue, red.

Food/Drinks: hard-boiled eggs, deviled eggs, honey cakes, dairy, leafy green vegetables, flower dishes, sprouts, fish, hot cross buns, sweet bread, milk, chocolate, jelly beans/eggs, lemonade, fresh fruit.

Herbs: acorn, celandine, crocus, daffodil, dogwood, easter lily, ginger, hyssop, linden, honeysuckle, iris, jasmine, narcissus, peony, rose, violets, woodruff, forsythia, spring flowers.

Deities: Eostre, Ostara, Aphrodite, Athena, Cybele, Gaia, Isis, Persephone, Venus, Maiden, Pan, Cernunnos, Green Man, Adonis, Mars, Osiris, Thoth.

Crystals/Gemstones: amethyst, aquamarine, rose quartz, moonstone, bloodstone, red jasper.

Animals: rabbits, hares, chicks, robins, lambs, snakes, unicorns, dragons.

Magic: Ostara is the sabbat of new beginnings and life. Fertility magic and garden/seed blessings are commonly performed during this time. Use this Sabbat to perform magic to break away barriers, start new projects or inventions, and breathe new life into your home/garden. This is also a great time to celebrate balance. You can also use colored eggs to attract different things such as love, fertility, wealth, and prosperity.

10 Fun Ostara Activities

1. Dye eggs! It is always a fun activity - try dyeing them with natural food colorings. Using beets will color your eggs pink/red. Onion peel will color your eggs orange. Turmeric will color your egg yellow. Hibiscus will color your egg dark green. Purple cabbage will color your egg sea blue.

2. Make Ostara baskets!

3. Hide eggs and do an egg hunt!

4. Go outside and look at all the baby animals and blossoms. See life in nature being reborn and springing to life!

5. Grow grass in pots. Start preparing your garden by planting seeds inside and watch them grow!

6. Decorate your house for spring! Hang up flower wreaths, place decorative eggs around, hang up pastel colored ribbons, etc.!

7. Read up on the history and lore surrounding Ostara.

8. Talk about new beginnings. What would you like to start new?

9. Make some Ostara art! Draw a spring field, bunnies, etc.

10. Honor the birds. Leave some seed out for them, go birdwatching on a hike, etc.

Wrapping Up

There are so many wonderful ways you can celebrate Ostara. Even if you don't have much to offer, you can still take part by simply lighting a pink candle on your altar or write down on a piece of paper what spring means for you.

I hope you all have fun this upcoming Ostara. Until tomorrow!

May the Sun guide your way at day and the Moon guard you as you sleep. Blessed be!

_____

References:

Eostre - Wikipedia [en.wikipedia.org]; Ostara | The Goddess and the Greenman [goddessandgreenman.co.uk/ostara/]; Flying the Hedge [flyingthehedge.com/2016/03/ostara-correspondences]

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lsmithart · 3 years

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Key quotes from theory research

301 Key research quotes:

The Book of Symbols: Archetypes by Ronnberg and Martin

Flower: Renewal, awakening and rebirth. Ephemeral blossoms have associated flowers with all the brilliant forms that quickly fade. Represents pollination, of the sperm and egg – therefore of the body, of the earth. Emblems of eros, beauty, perfection, purity, fertility, joy and resurrection. The flower’s hermaphroditic qualities suggest the joining of opposites in self becoming. Visible above, yet rooted in the invisible below, the flower symbolically bridges the manifest and unseen worlds, realms of latency and potentiality and those of active generation. It is emblem of the hidden “seeding place” within ourselves, supported by multiple participating energies.

Crack: Can be an opening into the world of imagination, while the crack in a teacup make it a leaky container, no longer safe. Cracks evoke dryness- the dry lips of fever or a house no longer cared for. Our voice cracks in a moment of insecurity, whilst the splitting experience of mental illness is often felt as if one’s whole world is breaking apart. Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything / that is how the light gets in”. When something falls between the cracks it is forgotten or lost.

Rose: Evoke the evanescence of innocence and youth, memory. Above all, roses signify love, what or who we love in the present, the one we loved and have lost, and the longing for something nameless.

In alchemy, the crossed branches of the white and red rose not only allude to the love affair and marriage of opposite natures, and to the albedo and rubedo as understanding and realisation of psychic processes, but also to the silence necessary to the interior nature of the work and to the womb or rose within whose petalled folds the self is secretly conceived.

The prickles or thorns of roses are protective, dissuading predators from making a banquet of their delectable blooms. Thorns may represent a prickly defensiveness that precludes intimacy.

T. S. Eliot captures the mute eloquence of both the Queen of Heaven and the Queen of Flowers:

Lady of silence

Calm and distressed

Torn and most whole

Rose of memory

Rose of forgetfulness

Exhausted and life-giving

Worried reposeful

The single Rose

Is now the Garden

Where all loves end

Thistle: Inherently discriminating. They discourage touch, yet the flower attracts flies, insects, bees and birds. Evokes one who is barbed but has a soft heart, the thistle prickliness is associated with self-protection, impenetrability, austerity and resilience. Farmers regard the thistle as a plague, in popular belief it is seen as a gift of the devil. It also conveys love that endures suffering and labour that endures hardship. Associated with the worldly love of Aphrodite and the Virgin Mary, has been attributed to properties of healing, cleansing and longevity. Thistle roots are said to dispel melancholy.

Egg: Contains the phenomenal world; the golden womb; luminous incubator. Breath/spirit moving with the waters of life; light emerging, making form visible; the opening of an eye. In many creation myths, the universe is hatched from an egg which has everything within itself and is needful only of brooding. Just as life gestates in the egg, in ancient healing rituals people withdraw into a dark cave or hole to “incubate” until a healing dream released them reborn into the upper world, in the same way the chick crawls out of the egg. The egg evokes the beginning, the simple, the source. It is the mysterious centre around which unconscious energies move in spiral like evolutions, gradually bringing the vital substance to light. It is the creative fire-point within ourselves, the soul in the midpoint of the heart.

Skin: Associated with everything from the wonders of touch to racial profiling. Sensual, erotic, inspires standards of beauty and the poaching of rare animals. Skin is a responsive tactile boundary between self and other, and the inside and outside of the individual. It is the geography of where two can meet. It allows us to perceive via pressure, temperature and pain. Represents contact and touch.

Hair: Incredibly potent – its root follicles fed by tiny blood vessels lie invisibly under the skin, associating hair with interior, involuntary fantasies, thoughts and longings. Hair carries DNA, it continues to grow after death. Represents beauty, fertility, seduction, creativity, spiritedness and grace. Can also signify loss and remembrance.

Clay: Reminds us of the earthenware aspect of our being, its divine spark and the psychological tension between them. Magically elemental – the human hands kneading the earth, remembering themselves being shaped by nature; the interaction between earth, water, air and fire.

Thread: Lines of narrative. Threads are lines of orientation in the labyrinths of psyche and invisible conductors of light, sound, emotion and memory. They knot, evoking the interweaving of relationships and dependencies. Knots are looping’s that seem to have no beginning and no end, suggesting evolution, reverberation and the force of destiny. Knots conjoin but also entangle. Psychic process often involves both unknotting and knotting as analysis and synthesis of the threads of the personality. Threads of natural fibres and even metal, wire and plastic get twisted or braided into rope, which in religious imagery sometimes functions as a demarcation between the sacred and the profane, or as a path between them.

Weaving: Became an image for the mystery of existence. It is the crossing of time and space, where the visible and invisible worlds are woven together, each created form becoming a thread in the great tapestry of life. It is the crossing of the sexual union, and where the tissues of the child’s body are woven in the womb of the mother. Means to create, to make something out of one’s own substance. Cloth resembles language in many ways; text and textile share a common root: meaning to weave. Thread, like time, stretches – everything ruled by time is subject to change and thus fate.

Home: Essence of house is containment and shelter; a house is embodiment of home – a feeling state of belonging, safety and containment. Physically, our earliest home is the maternal womb in which we are gestated, and like the animals who instinctively make their homes in nest, burrows in the earth, hollows of trees, caves, clefts, many of the first homes of our devising were intimate, encompassing womblike structures. Mud huts in parts of Africa are still fashioned in the form of the female torso, with vagina-like slits as doors. Home is the sacraments and rituals of relationship, conjunction, solitude and nakedness, enacted in the house’s kitchen, bedroom, bathroom. In dreams, psyche is often depicted as a house. One is homebound or a homebody. In house and home are domestic harmony and domestic violence. It can represent the nurturing of the self and also its violation.

Nets/web: How can something so slight be so strong? They symbolise capture, entrapment, entanglement, ensnaring, binding. In some forms of Buddhism, physical existence itself is thought of as a net entrapping the human soul. Depth psychology sees us as bound by nets made up of our past experiences and our unconscious complexes, and by our instincts and inborn patterns of perception, all of which limit our freedom of choice. This situation was envisioned by the ancient Greeks as Fate, and by the Roman Stoics as Heimarmene: the inexorable rule of the stars over human life. The stretched-out net has been seen as an image of the physical universe, or of nature, or modern physics of “the fabric of space, warped and stretched by gravitational force”. The interconnectedness of the net comes into symbolic play here – relates to network. The net is an organising power that contains and transforms conflicting energies.

Lamp/candle: Lamp is derived from the Greek root meaning to give light, shine, beam, be bright, brilliant, radiation. Lamp embodies the ability to strike a spark and keep it burning. Circumscribing its illumination of darkness, lamp has been associated with consciousness and its capacity to sustain the flame of life, hope, freedom, creativity the sacred and the divine. Flames suggest the continuity of life, death and rebirth. Release from the cycle of rebirths, achieving Nirvana, is the blowing out of the lamp. In the Berber culture of North Africa, when a child was born women would light a lamp and place it near the baby’s head, the lamp’s clay signifying the body, and the flame the divine spirit that glows within. The Tarot figure of the hermit: lantern signifies the solitary, dedicated seeking of one’s authentic path and luminous wisdom of introspection.

Mirror: A reflective container whose source of power is light. The eternal, the never ending. Before the use of metal, mirrors were the reflections on the waters collected in the earth’s indentations. Early people believed that in reflections, the soul element could be perceived and even today, the fantasy persists that the mirror can steal one’s soul. Personifying the unconscious and its compelling capacity to reflect the unknown and potential. To reflect means to bend back or around, suggesting a linking. Attuned mirroring of the infant and young child contributes to the bringing of their substance into being.

Metamorphosis: A powerful symbol of transformation, reflects one aspect of psyche’s encounter with its development: radical changes in form, function, character and state of being. Usually evoking the notion of soul or psyche’s liberation or true incarnation, the symbol of itself rests on an ancient vision of the essential unity of being, reflected in the multiplicity of form and structure that psyche and matter can assume. While shape-shifting expresses the fluid, temporary, Protean aspect of this vision, metamorphosis reflects the differentiated, permanent, prophetic qualities that arise. Metamorphosis often takes place hidden from sight, attesting to unconscious dynamics at work. E.g. under a cloak of invisibility, at night under the influence of unsettling dreams, or wrapped up in a cocoon. Our scientific understanding of metamorphosis as part of a normal developmental process reflecting the progressive unfolding of inherent, genetic, potentials and structures. E.g. caterpillar and butterfly, tadpole and frog.

Barbed wire: produces a kind of shock when it is used to enclose people, shaking their certitude that they are human. It confirms their fate: like beasts, they are to be worked or slaughtered.” Barbed wire excludes and includes, magnifying “differences between the inside and the outside”. Barbed wire has long been connected to crimes against humanity. Invented in the 1860s and mass produced in the US from the 1870s, barbed wire’s first victims were the roaming tribes of the Great Plains, after the 1887 Dawes Act handed over vast tracts of indigenous land to white farmers. Barbed wire, often electrified, was an essential feature of Nazi concentration and death camps. Accounts by survivors rarely omit a mention of the deadly wire, which has become inextricably linked in memory with the extermination process.

References:

Ronnberg, A., and Martin, K., (2010). The book of symbols. Taschen Cologne. Available at https://aras.org/sites/default/files/docs/00040Ronnberg.pdf.

Rowlands, D. T., (no date). Barbed wire: a symbol of oppression. [Online]. Available at https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/barbed-wire-symbol-oppression. [Accessed on 08/10/2021].

Lecture: Warren Seelig: Materiality and Meaning:

Materiality is born out of a need to connect with the physical world.

We trust instinct in our physical world

Instinct is fundamental to our shared experience.

We make art that is biologically driven.

Artists have a need to connect to the physical world in order to fully understand it.

“Knowledge comes to us through touch”.

Attempts at re-embodiment.

“There is a separation between thinking and doing”. Physically embodying this through the ownership and creation of objects which are informed by these thoughts (an invisible entity) is what makes the objects so important to us. It connects our spiritual being to the physical world; giving us a sense of purpose and meaning.

References:

American Craft Council, (2012). Warren Seelig: Materiality and Meaning. Youtube. [Online]. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq8LK83Shbk. [Accessed on 20/05/2020].

The Object by Antony Hudek:

Page 14: Jacques Lacan – the thing resists and stands outside of language and consciousness

“Objects define us because they come first, by commanding our attention, even our respect; they exist before us, possibly without us”

Page 20: ‘Transforming the Duchampian readymade into something dubious and obsolete was a widespread preoccupation in the 1960s and 70s, as the post-war euphoria at the potentially infinite multiplication of consumable objects turned into doubt.

Page 30: Theodor W Adorno (1969) “Everything that is in the subject can be attributed to the object; whatever in it is not object semantically bursts open the ‘is’.

Universal and particular – neither one can exist without the other. The particular only as determined and thus universal, the universal only as the determination of a particular and thus itself particular.

References:

Hudek, A., (2014). Documents of Contemporary Art: The Object. London: Whitechapel Gallery, The MIT Press. pp. 14, 15, 20, 22, 23, 24, 30, 32, 40, 42, 43, 94, 97.

Adrian Piper ‘Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography’ of an Art Object (1970-73):

Page 32: As an artist separate from my art, I saw the effect of my existence in the existence of the work. The work changed the world for me by adding something new that wasn’t there before. Thus, in the existence of the work, I saw my effect on the world at large.

References:

Piper, A., (1970-73), extract from Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object in Out of Order, Out of Sight, vol. I: Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968-1992. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996). pp. 34-36.

Marcus Steinweg ‘What is an Object?’ (2011):

Page 42: Fascination digs a trench between subject and object. The subject is faced with an object that opens a distance not easily bridged. Difference or trench, rupture, chasm or distance – in any case there is a gap that gives way to an absence and a disappearance, a non-identity and un unstable presence. The objectivity of the object cannot be compared to a constant entity. It is characterised by all manner of fractures and what it presents is this fragility, this instability and contingency.

In the possibility of self-objectification, the subject transcends its status as object and moves toward its status as subject.

Page 43: The tear in the present means precisely this: that there is always something missing or absent, that every present is permeated by a non-present.

References:

Steinweg, M., (2011), extract from What is an Object? in Majewski, A., (ed), The World of Gimel. How to Make Objects Talk. Berlin and New York: Steinberg Press. pp. 218-20.

The Present Body, the Absent Body and the Formless by Uros Cvoro:

Page 55: ‘The questions that House raised about the articulation of memory as a displacement of past into present, the tracing of absence, and the dialogue between the viewer’s body and the materialist of the object remain as pertinent as ever for any serious study of sculpture and memory. It is in this context that I propose to revisit House, with the hope of productively reopening some of these questions.’

‘There is a conceptual potential of House to dislocate the oppositions of work/beholder, text/reader, and object/subject.

Page 60: Nick Kaye, (2000) Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation, London and New York: Routledge, page 3: ‘The displacement of the static environment it entails likens it to an event “in which the environment is problematised”.

“The event comes between sign and object.” Whiteread’s art practice identifies the logic of materials as catalysts for processes of transformation and change, aligning the nature of materials with notions of event and performance.’ – Links to memory, materialising a memory through object.

Richard Shone – ‘In House, every spatial interval, every material mark can be final, and yet each of these “moments” retains a memory of the trace of the process of which it is part in the material. Thus, its materiality simultaneously suggests the processes of solidity of materials, historicity and memory, a phenomenological experience of the world, and at the same time a negation of all of these.’

‘Intersection between historical and memorial processes, a swinging motion that levitates between materials and events.’

Page 62: ‘Home is the “mythical point of origin” that represents a crucial component in the constitution of identity.’ (Bird, Dulce Domum, page 122) – Familiarity and empathy through shared identity.

“The psychopathology that lies beneath the everyday; the repressed fears, desires, prohibitions that lurk within social routines as the uncanny stalks the familiar, and the inanimate threatens to come alive.” (Vidler, A Dark Space, page 71)

‘Whiteread thus denied all chances of the nostalgic return to the womb by refusing access to domestic familiarity, even banishing the uncanny itself. If nostalgia marks a primal desire to return to the womb, then House was decidedly and extremely anti-nostalgic; it was a past to which one could not return.’

‘Souvenirs are the traces that replace the event with narrative, and the desire for them arises from the impression of unrepeatability of the event, or longing for the vanished original.’

References:

Cvoro, U., (2002). ‘The Present Body, the Absent Body, and the Formless’. Art Journal. pp. 54-63. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/778151.

Phantom Bodies: The Human Aura in Art

Page 1: “Loss, remembrance and the hope for a residual force that transcends the body have been subjects of art throughout history. In his Natural History (77-79 CE), Pliny the Elder writes of the daughter of a potter in Corinth who traced the shadow of her departing lover onto the wall as a way of remembering him. Art historian Victor Stoichita notes that her purpose was to turn the shadow “into a mnemonic aid; of making the absent become present”. Symbolically, to depict the one who has gone keeps him home, if only in a soulless semblance. But the very emptiness of the image inspires yearning and pain, causing tears for the artist and for viewers who may re-enact their own experiences of loss through this image.”

Page 2: “Painful absence – whether it is of God, or grace, or just presence itself – is a fundamental reason people cry in front of paintings. It is the negative and opposite of painful presence.” “A flow of emotions that merges the viewer and the viewed”. – Through empathy and an auratic energy.

Page 3: Walter Benjamin’s essay: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction explores various dimensions and meanings of art’s aura. In Hal Foster’s book Compulsive Beauty (about Surrealism), he breaks down Benjamin’s considerations of aura into 3 principals: The natural aura - “an empathic moment of human connection to material things… the surrealists were sensitive to this aura of found natural objects, which they often exhibited”; the cultural and historical aura – “cultic works of art and artisanal objects where the traces of the practiced hand are still evident”; aura connected to the “memory of a primal relationship to the body” which is attributed to a longing for a return to the maternal body, but may indicate a broader desire to reclaim the sense of wellbeing once felt in the presence of a protective loved one.” - (Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 195-96).

Page 3-4 : “A number of the featured artists present or depict objects to posit, like the Surrealists, a special connection to an absent user. The sense of aura rises when we imagine the experience of the missing through knowledge of the artifact’s history. That sense is intensified when the history is traumatic. Hal Foster cites the French Surrealist Andre Breton, who linked aura to trauma in his discussion of Cezanne’s painting ‘The House of the Hanged Man (1873)’. For Breton, “aura is somehow involved in trauma, more precisely with the involuntary memory of a traumatic event or repressed condition. This often occurs through the agency of the haunted object or its stand-in.”- (Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 199) E.g. Christian Boltanski – Untitled (Reserve) – images of lost children from the Holocaust with items of clothing folded beneath. Doris Salcedo – Atrabiliaros – shoes of victims of war behind animal membranes.

References:

Foster, H., (1993) cited in Scala, M. W., (2015). Phantom Bodies. The Human Aura in Art. Vanderbilt University Press. p.3.

Breton, A., (1937). cited in Foster, H., (1993) Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press. p. 199.

Scala, M. W., (2015). Phantom Bodies. The Human Aura in Art. Vanderbilt University Press. pp.1-4.

The Trace and the Body by Susan Best

Page 175: “In Doris Salcedo’s sculptural works we are confronted by very fundamental homely substances – concrete, wood, steel. These cheap and ready-to-hand, everyday materials are the usual building blocks of the contemporary home, the means of our enclosure and protection from the elements, the housing for our bodies and their needs.”

Page 176: Tenderness is evoked by a kind of memorialisation of the simple, everyday interactions of bodies with domestic furniture. The marks or erosions of day-to-day wear and tear, from opening, closing, touching and rubbing, are brought to life and made substantial.”

“In places the wooden grain of the old cupboards and chairs, worn down through years of handling, is built back up or restored by the stroke of cement.”

“Alongside this gentle action of cement, there is also a muffled sense of gradual suffocation.”

“The furniture is animated by this strange identification. No longer serving a useful function, it has become animate in its own right.”

“The objects enact a slippage between building, furniture, the body: between holding the body – its life, weight, touch – and being bodies themselves.”

“The relation between inside and outside is dynamic and changeable. In this openness to change, then, there remains the possibility of another vision.”

References:

Best, S., (1999). The Trace and the Body. The International Exhibition: Trace. pp. 172-176.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (date). cited in Best, S., (1999). The Trace and the Body. The International Exhibition: Trace. p. 173.

Materiality by Petra Lange-Berndt (Documents of Contemporary Art):

Page 12: Material generally denotes substances that will be further processed, it points to the forces of production at the same time. From a critical perspective, the term ‘material’ describes not prime matter but substances that are always subject to change, be it through handling, interaction with their surroundings, or the dynamic life of their chemical reactions.

References:

Lange-Berndt, P., (2015). Documents of Contemporary Art: Materiality. London: Whitechapel Gallery’. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. p.12.

Tate: The Uncanny

Sigmund Freud's essay The Uncanny (1919) however repositioned the idea as the instance when something can be familiar and yet alien at the same time. He suggested that ‘unheimlich’ was specifically in opposition to ‘heimlich’, which can mean homely and familiar but also secret and concealed or private. ‘Unheimlich’ therefore was not just unknown, but also, he argued, bringing out something that was hidden or repressed. He called it 'that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.'

Artists, including some associated with the surrealist movement drew on this description and made artworks that combined familiar things in unexpected ways to create uncanny feelings.

References:

Tate, (no date D). The Uncanny – Art Term. [Online]. Available at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/t/uncanny. [Accessed on 17/12/2020].

Freud: The Uncanny

Examples of situations that can provoke an uncanny feeling include inanimate objects coming alive, thoughts appearing to have an effect in the real world, seeing your double (the doppelgänger effect), representations of death such as ghosts or spirits, and involuntary repetitions. The uncanny arises when childhood beliefs we have grown out of suddenly seem real. Freud called it ‘the return of the repressed’.

The Uncanny in Art

Waxwork dolls, automata, doubles, ghosts, mirrors, the home and its secrets, madness and severed limbs are mentioned throughout The Uncanny, influencing painters and sculptors to explore these themes and blur the boundaries between animate and inanimate, human and non-human, life and death.

References:

Freud, S., cited in Reurs, J., (2019) The Uncanny. [Online]. Available at https://www.freud.org.uk/2019/09/18/the-uncanny/. [Accessed on 20/10/2020].

The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity by Linda Nochlin

Page 7-8 - The fragmented body os a symbol for irrevocable loss, poignant regret for lost totality, a vanished wholeness. The heroic energy of the past evoked. The artist is not merely ‘overwhelmed’ but is in mourning, mourning a terrible loss, a lost state of felicity and totality which must now be inevitably displaced into the past or the future: nostalgia or utopia.

The fragment, for the French Revolution and its artists, rather than symbolising nostalgia for the past, enacts the deliberate destruction of that past or, at least, a pulverisation of what were perceived to be its repressive traditions.

Page 48 - Abject = destructive?

Page 54 - In postmodernist production, the fragment assumes new, and differently transgressive, forms. In Louise Bourgeois’ sculptures, the part-object serves as the subverter of modernist rationality and formalist abstraction and as the site of a triumphant reintroduction of the abject in the form of infantile desire and gender-binding metamorphosis.

There is a signified power in the fragment.

Abject Visions: Powers of Horror in Art and Visual Culture by Rina Arya and Nicholas Chare

Abjection, Art and Bare Life by John Lechte

Page 16: Anthropologically, abjection has been seen to do with the ambiguity of the borders, in particular, those of the body and its markers (hair of the head, nails, body fluids etc.) and those of transitional states (mensturation, childhood, marriage, death etc.) and things that do not fit in and are excluded from social life (rubbish or filth, out of place food, people who are ‘unclean’ etc.). The abject is what one would prefer not to know about and which, in a sense, one cannot ‘know’.

Ambivalence in relation to abjection emerges with regard to an identity which becomes fragile and ambiguous, especially if this constitutes the blurring of borders between beings. When symbolic forms break down, there is a risk of abjection taking hold.

Abject = what we cannot or do not want to accept.

The Fragmented Body as an Index of Abjection by Rina Arya

Page 114: Fragmenting the body renders it unstable and vulnerable, both for the viewer, who is uncertain how to read it as it subverts conventional understanding, and also because it takes on an indeterminate form with ambiguous boundaries.

Page 115: Kristeva defines the maternal body as the first abject object that the infant must reject before it can become a subject in the symbolic order. This necessitates the imposition of boundaries that denote clearly differentiated limits and render one’s body ‘clean’ and bounded. The subject must disavow part of itself in order to gain a stable self, and this form of refusal marks whatever identity it acquires as provisional, and open to breakdown and instability.

Page 120: According to Kristeva, abjection can be traced back to the first rejection to the separation from the mother helping her baby to establish themselves in the symbolic order. Abjection preserves some of that pre-objectal relationship and some of the ambivalence that is experienced by the subject when it becomes an independent body separated from the mother.

Page 121: To abject is to expel, to separate; to be abject, on the other hand is to be repulsive, stuck, subject enough only to feel this subject hood at risk’.

‘The first is to identify with the abject, to approach it somehow - to probe the wound of trauma, to touch the obscene object-gaze of the real. The second is to represent the condition of abjection in order to provoke its operation - to catch abjection in the act, to make it reflexive, even repellent in its own right.’ - Hal Foster

The abject as a symbol for feelings of loathing and disgust.

Page 124: The skin’s functions of containment, protection and communication are the result of a dual process of interiorisation. Two spatial aspects of the skin need to be internalised. First of all, the subject needs to internalise the interface between the bodies of the child and mothering figure, and second, the mothering environment itself with all its verbal, visual and emotional properties. - The room as skin - relates to 303. This psychoanalytic notion of skin is closely related to Kristeva’s psychoanalytic motion of the abject. They presuppose each other. The skin’s exclusion and abjection of that which threatens the safety of this bodily and psychic envelope.

The condition of the abject is not seen as repulsive, but as a mechanism that is needed for maintaining ‘open borders’ between self and (objected) other. This assessment implies a paradoxical re-evaluation of the abject.

Abjection, melancholia and ambiguity in Catherine Bell

Page 131: Kristeva tells us that abjection is also related to melancholia and that art can act as an assuaging of grief through a commemoration and partial recuperation of the lost object. Indeed, understanding grief as a bridge between melancholia and abjection helps to illuminate the more complex and ambiguous workings of abjection as process.

Page 134: Kristeva explains that abjection is a primary separation from the mother and instantiates psychic demarcations that remain throughout life as precursors of language; the fluctuating expenditure of energy and negativity that are founded on abjection constitute the semiotic or biological dimension of the subject and the materiality of language as it is heard and directly experienced - as process.

The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry

Chapter 3: Pain and Imagining

Page 161-162: The object is an extension of, an expression of, the state. E.g. rain = longing, berries = hunger, night = fear. However nothing expresses the physical pain. Therefore, pain becomes something that must be materialised by the individual. In art terms therefore, subconscious processing of trauma through material output becomes the object associated with pain.

Page 163: “As an embodied imaginer capable of picturing, making present an absent friend, that same imaginer is also capable of inventing both the idea and the materialised form. This demonstrates a mechanism for transforming the condition of absence into presence.”

Page 164: Physical pain is an intentional state without an intentional object; imagining is an intentional object without an experienceable intentional state. Thus is may be that in some peculiar way it is appropriate to think of pain as the imagination’s intentional state, and to identity the imagination as pain’s intentional object. In isolation, pain ‘intends’ nothing’ it is wholly passive; it is ‘suffered’ rather than willed or directed. To be more precise, one can say that pain only becomes an intentional state once it is brought into relation with the objectifying power of the imagination: through that relation, pain will be transformed from a wholly passive and helpless occurrence into a self-modifying and self-eliminating one.

Physical pain and imagining could belong to one another as each other’s missing intentional counterpart.

Non-object transferred into object through a process of imagining, feeling and actioning.

Chapter 5: The Interior Structure of the Artefact

Page 282: The womb is materialised as dwelling-places and shelters.

The printing press, the institutionalised convention of written history, photographs, libraries, films, tape recordings and Xerox machines are all materialisations of the embodied capacity for memory. They together make a relatively ahistorical creature into an individual one, one whose memory extends far back beyond the opening of its own individual lived experience, one who anticipates being remembered beyond the close of its own individual lived experience, and one who accomplishes all this without elevating each day its awakened brain to rehearsals and recitations of all information it needs to keep available to itself.

Page 284: The human being has an outside surface and an inside surface, and creating may be expressed as a reversing of these two bodily linings. There exists both verbal artefacts (e.g. the scriptures) and material artefacts (e.g. the altar) that objectify the act of believing, imaging, or creating as a sometimes graphically represented turning of the body inside-out. But what is expressed in terms of body part it, as those cited contexts themselves make clear, more accurately formulated as the endowing of interior sensory events with a metaphysical referent. The interchange of inside and outside surfaces requires not the literal reversal of bodily linings but the making of what is originally interior and private into something exterior and shareable, and conversely, the reabsorption of what is now exterior and shareable into the intimate recesses of individual consciousness.

Page 285: The reversal of inside and outside surfaces ultimately suggests that by transporting the external object world into the sentient interior, that interior gains some small share of the blissful immunity of intert inanimate object hood; and conversely, by transporting pain out onto the external world, that external environment is deprived of its immunity to, unmindfulness of, and indifference toward the problems of sentience.

Page 286: The habit of poets and ancient dreamers to project their own aliveness onto non alive things itself suffuses that it is the basic work of creation to bring about this very projection of aliveness; in other words, while the poet pretends or wishes that the inert external external world had his or her own capacity for sentient awareness, civilisation works to make this so.

Page 288: A chair, as though it were itself put in pain, as though it knew from the inside the problem of body weight, will only then accommodate and eliminate the problem. A woven blanket or solid wall internalise within their design the recognition of the instability of body temperature and the precariousness of nakedness, and only by absorbing the knowledge of these conditions into themselves (by, as it were, being themselves subject to these forms of distress), absorb them out of the human body.

Page 289-290: A material or verbal artefact is not an alive, sentient, percipient creature, and thus can neither itself experience discomfort nor recognise discomfort in others. But though it cannot be sentiently aware of pain, it is in the essential fact of itself the objectification of that awareness; itself incapable of the act of perceiving, its design, its structure, is the structure of a perception. So, for example, the chair can - if projection is being formulated in terms of body part - be recognised as mimetic of the spine; it can instead be recognised as mimetic of body weight; and it can finally, and most accurately, be recognised as mimetic of sentient awareness. If one human acknowledges another human in pain and wishes it gone, this is an invisible, complex percipient event happening somewhere between the eyes and the brain and engaging the entire psyche. If this could process of imaging unreality and acknowledging the reality of pain could be made visible and lifted out of the body, endowed with an external shape - that shape would be the shape of a chair (or, depending on the circumstance, a lightbulb, a coat, an ingestible form of willow bark). The shape of a chair is a shape of perceived-pain-wished-gone. The chair is therefore the materialised structure of a perception; it is sentient awareness materialised into a freestanding design.

Page 290-291: Two levels of projection are transformations: first from an invisible aspect of consciousness to a visible but disappearing action ; second, from a disappearing action to an enduring material form. Thus in work, a perception is danced; in the chair, a danced-perception is sculpted. Each stage of transformation sustains and amplifies the artifice that was present at the beginning. Even in the interior of consciousness, pain is ‘remade’ by being wished away; in the external action, the private wish is made sharable; finally in the artefact, the shared wish comes true. For it the chair is a ‘successful’ object, it will relieve her of the distress of her weight far better than did the dance.

Points of Trauma by Oliver Guy-Watkins

Page 9: In his essay ‘Forgetting Things’, Freud discusses how a person’s mind will block locations, people and events that are links to traumatic experiences. E.g. you may block out the location of a shop as someone you fell out with lives nearby. Artist’s work can act similarly - the creation of work can replicate the function of the mind by compartmentalising trauma. Instead of locking it away to be forgotten it chews it up into pieces and presents it as a new entity - released from the individual artist.

Page 17 & 18: Briony Campbell used photography to say goodbye to her father in ‘The Dad Project’. She uses subtle photographs, in conjunction with simple and delicate captions to guide us through her journey. E.g. the first photo in the series is a shot of a building engulfed by the rays of the setting sun, with the caption ‘the sunlight supported me this year’. The sun as healing power. Campbell found a way to keep the memory of her father alive, as well as to overcome her own grief.

Louise Bourgeois - used symbols and prompts from past memories in her later work. E.g. she recalled a memory of how her father created a model of her from a tangerine skin and made disparaging remarks as a phallus emerged from inside. Years later she posed with a phallus of her own making for Robert Mappelthorpe.

Bourgeois often stated that to be an artist was a guarantee to your fellow humans that life’s harsh reality would not make you a murderer. Her statement echoes an underlying truth that art can channel the emotions of its makers and offer them some form of release from captivity.

Page 24-28: When the public’s desire for backstory and gossip is coupled with the artist desire to create we find an area in which stories are told regardless of intent. The Polish filmmaker, Krzystztof Keilowski, said that his life and its influences should always be present in his work but that the viewer should never be able to notice it.

Louise Bourgeois did not reveal her history until her husband's death, whereupon she gained a level of notoriety that revolved around her life story her critical appreciation began when the viewer was told what to think. Similarly, Tracey Emin has always confronted her personal history directly in the public eye through her practice. In her work everyone I have ever slept with Emin’s story was there in the title the work and even the exhibition guide. Her collaboration with Bourgeois again highlights Emin’s desire of the story.

In discussing not becoming a mother, Emin has stated that she sees her paintings as her children, and describes the feeling of failure that engulfed her as being sued by seeing her work exhibited. By telling you who they are and why they came, do the artists open doors for further interpretation, or do they close them? If an artist can drive a viewer to a specific thought pattern, then there is a greater chance of success in achieving transferences of an exact attitude.

Page 47: “Up until this point I had undertaken a largely relational practice, asking others to contribute their words to my work. I thought it more important to portray their emotions than mine in order to connect. Yet, as a backbone to each project I used my own backstory. My own struggles. As if I was afraid to confront myself directly. As if my own identity was easier to find in the words of others. Maybe I just didn’t want to feel like I had been alone. Maybe I just wanted validity.”

Page 50: Wolfgang Tillmans is a massive installation at the Tate modern as part of his 2017 retrospective featured a number of projected screens displaying extracts of his video work, whilst a constructed soundtrack played and white spotlights rotated across the bare concrete. Occasionally blinded by light, or overpowered by music, your eyes and ears remain active, searching the darkness for the next movement, waiting for a video to begin and wondering which screen it may appear on. In between the films, in the time you wait and as your eyes adjust to the light, you search the actions of others. You wonder which anxiety or fear stop them from becoming a must, and even what the initial cause of that feeling was. Tilmans creates a space where we are drawn into a natural instinct of voyeurism, a characteristic of his work as a whole. - A thinking point for my 303 installation idea.

Page 56: Freud continued on to say in his essay that painful memories are easily hidden for good reasons. It seems to me that there is an obvious similarities within the practice of certain artists to vary their own personal traumas within the work they create. Where the conversation dilutes is the point at which an artist confronts trauma on a collective scale. An artists job is to conceal the trauma in such a way that it is revealed to the viewer.

#301

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tipsycad147 · 4 years

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Aries March Méan Earraigh – Vernal Equinox

By shirleytwofeathers

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, And in green underworld and cover blossom by blossom the spring begins. ~Algernon Charles Swinburne

Méan Earraigh marks the spring equinox, when night and day are of equal length and spring officially begins. Birds begin their nesting and egg-laying, and eggs–symbolic of rebirth, fertility, and immortality–are tossed into fresh furrows or eaten by ploughmen. They are also carried by those engaged in spring planting.

A charming custom is painting eggs with symbols and pictures of what one wishes to manifest in the coming year. The eggs can then be buried in the Earth Mother, who hears the cries and dreams of her children. In some communities, eggs are hidden in the stores of seed grain and left there all season to bless the sowing and encourage the seeds to sprout. Dressed as mummers, “pace-eggers” go from house to house and demand eggs and coins in return for a short performance. Men and women exchange clothing for the show.

The eggs given to the pace-eggers have been wrapped in leaves, roots, flowers, and bark before boiling, to impart colour. Later the eggs are used in games, such as attempting to strike an opponent’s legs. The eggs might be hidden or rolled down hillsides, after which they are eaten. Blood, ashes from sacred fires, fistfuls of salt, or handfuls of soil from a high mountaintop are scattered on the newly sown fields.

Offerings of food and milk are left for the faeries and other spirits who live in and around rocks and are responsible for the fertility of the land. A few fruits from the previous year’s harvest are left for the nature spirits. Sacred hilltops are visited, and picnics of figs, fig cakes, cider and ale are enjoyed. The figs are symbolic of fertility, the leaf being the male element and the fruit the female.

You can also celebrate the arrival of spring with flowers. Bring them into your own home and give them to others. You do not have to spend a lot of money – one or two blooms given for no other reason than ‘spring is here’ can often bring a smile to even the most gloomy face.

A traditional Vernal Equinox pastime is to go to a field and randomly collect wildflowers (thank the flowers for their sacrifice before picking them). Or, buy some from a florist, taking one or two of those that appeal to you. Then bring them home and divine their Magickal meanings by the use of books, your own intuition, a pendulum, this post on the Magickal Meanings of Flowers, or by other means. The flowers you’ve chosen reveal your inner thoughts and emotions.

In the druidic tradition, Aengus Og is the male deity of the occasion. Son of In Dagda and Boand, he was conceived and born while Elcmar, Boand’s husband, was under enchantment. When three days old, Aengus was removed to be fostered by Midir, god of the Otherworld mound at Bri Leith, with his three hostile cranes. These birds guarded the mound and prevented the approach of travellers, and were said to cause even warriors to turn and flee.

Make an Altar to Ostara.

Ostara, the ancient German Virgin Goddess of Spring, loves bright colours. The light pastels of spring are perfect offerings for Ostara. To represent earth on your altar, choose bright or pastel coloured stones like Rose Quartz, Amethyst, or any of the Calcites (blue, red, yellow, or green). If you have some Citrine, be sure to include it. Citrine has long been an aid for mental clarity.

By including an offering of coloured eggs on your altar, you will be taking part in an ancient tradition (still performed!) by the Germanic people. Ostara has been honoured this time of year with painted eggs for centuries.

To symbolise fertility, in addition to the eggs, you can include seeds or rice on your altar. I like to use rice as a symbol for fertility on my altars.

Incense and feathers are perfect symbols for air on your altar. It is important for Ostara’s altar that you include a symbol for air because Ostara herself is the living symbol for Air. (This must be the way Ostara and Easter became associated with birds, i.e. chickens) Be sure to burn incense at your altar when you are dedicating it to bring in the energy and vibrational qualities of Ostara.

The perfect time to dedicate your altar is at dawn. Choose a day, then plan to dedicate your altar to Ostara at dawn’s first light by lighting incense and repeating an invocation to her as well as a prayer of thanksgiving for all that Ostara symbolises in your life:

A clear mind.

New beginnings.

Personal renewal.

Fertility, either for the purpose of bearing a child or for creativity such as arts and crafts, writing, or decorating.

You can include anything you like on your altar to Ostara. You will know by how you feel if an item is appropriate or not. I believe it is important to include symbols for the four elements on my altars. The four elements are Fire, Earth, Air, and Water. The four Calcites on my altar (red/fire, green/earth, yellow/air, and blue/water) represent Mother Earth and the four elements. I have added feathers and other items that symbolise Ostara to my altar as offerings to her.

Last, but not least, it might be nice to include a figure of a rabbit. The rabbit is Ostara’s power animal. I am sure this is because of their propensity for fertility.

Sources:

Goddess Vision

A Druid’s Herbal for the Sacred Earth Year

Kate West

shirleytwofeathers.com/The_Blog/pagancalendar/category/march/page/3/

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tipsycad147 · 5 years

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Butterfly Medicine

The butterfly is an archetypal symbol of transformation, transmutation, and magic in world mythology and religion. Virtually all cultures have marvelled at the magical process that transforms an ungraceful caterpillar into a magnificent fluttering butterfly. According to Hindu mythology, Brahma became filled with deep calm while observing a caterpillar’s transformation and was convinced to achieve perfection through rebirth. In China the butterfly was a symbol of conjugal bliss and joy. In the Hopi tradition unmarried girls of the Butterfly Clan wore their hair in the shape of butterfly wings. In many traditions, this most exquisite yet fragile creature was a symbol of the soul. Many cultures around the world believe that butterflies are the spirits of the deceased communing again with the earth.

I love to commune with the fluttering butterflies I encounter in my earth walk. They are dancing spirits made of colour and joy. Many butterfly encounters have been powerful spiritual experiences in my life, like the monarch butterfly that landed on my nose the day after a loved one passed on. When I encounter one of these remarkable beings, I stop and observe them carefully. I have learned to trust these endearing spirit guides. Butterflies have brought me messages from my ancestors and guided me to specific places of power in the web of life on many occasions.

Sacred Power Places Earth, human, and solar processes are interwoven through a vibrational resonant network around the planet. At the intersection points of the planet’s energy web exist holy places, power spots, or acupuncture points. According to the Hopi, the world would fall apart without these nodes of concentrated vitality. These sacred places are like nerve centres that distribute vital energy throughout the surrounding natural systems. When a human being goes to a power place, the attention of the Earth Mother is drawn to that area, and energy begins to flow to that spot because our bodies, like hers, are electromagnetic. Like acupuncture needles, humans are capable of maintaining the harmonious flow of the planetary energy meridians by making an Earth connection at power places.

There are special energy fields at power places that facilitate healing and transformation. Natural ionisation occurs at power sites and ionised air is known to affect hormone levels, brain function, and consciousness. Air ions are charged molecules of common gaseous elements in the air, which form when uncharged stable molecules lose or gain an electron due to some disruption. Negative air ions carry an extra electron, producing a negative electrical charge. In nature, the catalysts of negative ions include waterfalls, ocean breakers, evergreen forests, caves, the summits of mountains, and the presence of unusually strong electromagnetic fields at power spots. An abundance of negative air ions invigorates us, reduces fatigue, stimulates the immune system, and helps open the portals of the mind to alternate realities. The spirits that inhabit power points are ready and willing to communicate their energies to those who come in gratitude, openness, and humility. Butterfly Medicine protects sacred power places and facilitates transformation.

The Cycle of Transformation Butterfly Medicine is all about transformations, the element of Air, and mental powers. Butterfly can bring clarity to your mental process, help you organise the project you are undertaking, and assist you in finding the next step in your career or life path. The power that Butterfly brings to us is akin to the air. It is the mind, and the ability to know the mind or to change it. It is the art of transformation. Butterflies teach us by example about self-transformation. Scientific research has shown that the butterfly is the only living being capable of completely changing its genetic structure. During the process of transformation, the caterpillar's DNA totally changes into that of a butterfly. Thus, it is the symbol of the never-ending cycle of transformation.

To use Butterfly Medicine, you must determine your position in the cycle of self-transformation or transmutation. Like Butterfly, you are always at a certain station in your life activities. You may be at the egg stage, which is the beginning of all things. This is the stage at which an idea is born, but has not yet become a reality. To bring an intended pattern into being, you must first undergo a self-transformation. Make a clean sweep of negative, limiting, or otherwise outmoded patterns, and then start anew. The larva stage is the point at which you decide to create the idea in the physical world. The cocoon stage involves going within; doing or developing your idea or project. You must listen to your inner voice. The final stage of transformation or transmutation is the leaving of the chrysalis and birth. The last step involves sharing the colours and joy of your creation with the world.

The Rhythm of Transformation

This linear image is Hexagram 50 from the I Ching, the ancient Chinese oracle and "book of change." It is known as Transformation. This hexagram image symbolises the transforming power of intent (wind) when aligned with the clarity and flow of intuitive mind (fire). It implies that you must rely on your intuition to guide you toward your intended objective. Following the intuitive sense connects you to the guiding forces of the cosmos. When you renew the flow of intuitive mind, synchronous activity appears within consciousness as the most natural thing to do. Whatever it is, it will carry you to what you need to do next in order to embody your idea in the material world. Just as a caterpillar emerges as a beautiful butterfly from the cocoon, so this cycle of transformation will give wings to your vision.

More importantly, this hexagram image depicts a particular drum pattern that renders the essence of the hexagram into sound (see my book I Ching: The Tao of Drumming). The pattern image or six-line configuration is the visual representation of an archetypal condition. The I Ching is a codebook of archetypal patterns, in which the hexagrams counsel appropriate action in the moment for a given set of circumstances. While the pattern image symbolises a particular condition, the drum pattern pulsates a particular resonance, which stimulates, works with, and informs the body, mind, and spirit in the most optimal manner for effecting change or harmonising with change. A solid yang line _____ symbolises consolidated, unified energy moving upward or forward and represents one beat. A broken yin line __ __ symbolises collective, cooperative energy pressing downward and represents two beats or one heartbeat. All I Ching hexagrams are read or played from bottom to top.

The rhythmic pattern of Hexagram 50, Transformation is depicted below. To play the rhythm of Transformation, you simply drum a heartbeat, followed by three single beats, followed by a heartbeat, ending with one final beat, and then pause before beginning the cycle again. Follow your inner sense of timing as to both the tempo and time span to drum. Trust your inner timing. It connects you to the resonances affecting you at this moment in time.

Line 6 _____ drum

Line 5 __ __ drum —drum

Line 4 _____ drum

Line 3 _____ drum

Line 2 _____ drum

Line 1 __ __ drum—drum

While drumming, you should have a receptive attitude of calm, positive expectation. Such resonant receptivity allows whatever factors or forces are present to fully penetrate your senses. Any attempt to analyse or conceptualise the experience will only fragment the resonant field. The key is still the mind and focus your attention on the hexagram image. As the drumming progresses and your inner image of the hexagram becomes clearer, close your eyes and feel yourself being carried away by the rhythm, as if going on a journey into yourself. With time and patience, the rhythm archetype will begin to release a rush of intuitive ideas. Inspiration and insight regarding the unfolding pattern of your destiny may flow into your awareness. However, it is not essential that you become cognisant or consciously aware of any particular insight or guidance. Simply resonate in sync with the vibrational pattern of the hexagram.

The qualities needed to transform a personal vision into a reality will interpenetrate every aspect of your being. These qualities will be engendered in you and resonate out to influence all aspects of your experience in the same manner.

After drumming the hexagram, repose in the sonic afterglow of physical and spiritual well being. When the final drumbeat fades into silence, an inaudible, yet perceptible pulsation persists for a brief period. This silent pulse is ever present within each of us, but our awareness is rarely in sync with it. Sense this silent pulse resonating within your body. You may experience the sensation of every particle in your body pulsing in sync with the rhythm you just played. This inner pulse entrains to the rhythmic pattern as soon as you begin to drum. This synchrony of inner pulse with the appropriate hexagram rhythm brings you into accord with the dynamics of change.

The Opportunity for Transformation Butterfly Medicine reminds us that we need to allow ourselves to adapt to changes taking place either within us or surrounding us. We should make necessary changes when the opportunities present themselves. Change is inevitable, but Butterfly teaches us that it does not have to be traumatic. Butterfly teaches us that growth and change can be as gentle, sweet, and joyful as we wish. We should emulate the magical butterfly by moving out of the caterpillar stage, cocooning ourselves within the opportunity for transformation and waiting with seeds of patience for our final manifestation. Watch out! When you encounter Butterfly Medicine, be prepared to undergo some form of transformation or internal growth.

Posted by Michael Drake

https://shamanicdrumming.blogspot.com/2013/09/butterfly-medicine.html

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