Eros and Strife ~ Garden of Worm

CHAPTER TWELVE

~ In the Wake of Poseidon ~

- chapter index -
pg. 1 - Eros and Strife | pg. 2 - Peace: A Beginning | pg. 3 - Pictures of a City
pg. 4 - Cadence and Cascade | pg. 5 - In the Wake of Poseidon I | pg. 6 - In the Wake of Poseidon II
pg. 7 - Cat Food | pg. 8 - The Devil's Triangle | pg. 9 - Garden of Worm
pg. 10 - Peace: An End

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Garden of Worm

"According to legend, Asmodeus, the mischeivous fallen but not unkindly angel who helped Solomon, gave the king the mysterious magical worm, the Shamir, a puzzle to all Jewish commentators, for it cut the necessary stones for the entire temple by magic."

- The Ancient Secret
Flavia Anderson
(p. 108)

"In the opinion of medieval authors, Rashi, Maimonides and others Shamir was a living creature, a worm."

- Shamir

"Frederick was introduced to the works of Maimonides, who died in 1205, by another scholar, Moses ben Salomon from Salerno, who had written a commentary on the Guide of the Perplexed. Other works of this great Aristotelian were known to the Emperor, and some of his conversations prove that he knew them intimately."

- Frederick II by Ernst Kantorowicz (p. 344)

"An old source. The Testament of Solomon, a work written in Greek, probably in the early third century of the present era, refers to Shamir as a “green stone.” But how could a greenish stone cut the hardest of diamonds with its glance?"

- Shamir

In Garden of Worm , the "Higher Logos" of Merday Morn begins to reassert itself.

"But Marduk the wargod of Babylon rises in rebellion against the Old Hag & her Chaos-monsters, chthonic totems--Worm, Female Ogre, Great Lion, Mad Dog, Scorpion Man, Howling Storm--dragons wearing their glory like gods--& Tiamat herself a great sea-serpent."

- Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontologoical Anarchism

"From the muck and mud of the great flood, a snake monster Python was born at the foot of Mount Parnassus. The evil dragon lay over several acres of land at the opening of the Temple of the Delphic Oracle--the source of earth's wisdom and ethics.

The Temple had been built by the god Apollo at the center of the world and was marked with a white stone tied with a red ribbon representing the earth's navel and umbilical cord. The wisdom and truth of the Delphic Oracle was available to all persons of goodwill. It was from the Delphic Oracle that civilization learned the wise dicta: "Know thyself", "Nothing in excess" and the enigmatic motto "IF."

With the Python living at the gates of the Temple, people could not visit the Oracle. So its truth, wisdom and morals were lost to civilization as long as the Python lived. For many years while Prometheus was chained in the mountains and the Python blocked access to the Delphic Oracle, people were deprived of foresight, truth, wisdom and morals. They had only the hope released from Pandora's box by her daughter Pyrrha.

For many years, Apollo--the god of the silver bow--fought to remove the Python from Mount Parnassus. But to no avail. Thousands of arrows wounded it. None killed it. Only when Apollo dipped an arrow into the Python's poisonous blood and shot it into the monstous snake did it die of it's own venom."

- The Rise and Fall of the Python

As the final movement begins, we hear a metronome, a mechanism representing Order or the Logos (Higher Eros) as an adjusting/tempering force upon blind instinct, Fallen Eros. The sound represents a cadence (Order) being imposed on the cascade (Chaos). As the movement continues we hear a sound collage further representing thought tempering feeling.

"The child mixes water and wine, for the ability to achieve a proper balance between the two was considered in ancient times a sign of temperance (only an intemperate person drank undiluted wine). Since wine is a symbol of fire and spirit, the child becomes the alchemist who knows how to mix fire and water to create the quintessence, the "damp-fiery-cold spirit" (Jung, MC 44-51). Only the child, who is Sophia, Divine Wisdom (Sophrosune), has the experience and patience to balance the ingredients. (Thus, Crowley calls this trump "Art.") Psychologically, the child mixes feeling with reason, the fiery spirit with divine wisdom.

- The Pythagorean Tarot by John Opsopaus

Art or Temerance Trump Card, Thoth Tarot

The final confirmation of this process comes at the conclusion of Garden of Worm with the unambiguous return of the Crimson King , as the title theme from the first album, representing the transcendent function.

Transcendent function.

"The reconciling "third" which emerges from the unconscious (in the form of a symbol or a new attitude) after conflicting opposites have been consciously differentiated, and the tension between them held."

- C. G. Jung, Analytical Psychology and Culture

"The transcendent function, which is distinctly different from the other four functions, comes into play when ...profound personality transformation ...begins to occur in the individual. It performs a '...transformation of the opposites into a third term, a higher synthesis', which is precisely what equilateral triangles (such as the one in the center of the Enneagram) depict in Gurdjieff's system, according to Ouspensky."

- Revisiting the Relationship Between the MBTI and the Enneagram

detail from Nine Dragon Scroll by Ch'en Jung, dated 1244, Sung Dynasty

The Dragon of Order amidst the swirling Chaos of the Abyss (Rawson et. al.)

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But immediately upon the king's return we hear sounds suggestive of a descent into the depths of the sea.

"The Empress can be terrifying, for she is the Queen who must devour her mate, the Old King, reducing him to primary matter, raw material for her desire to mold and reshape, and so beget the Young King. She is the all-consuming side of Nature, who destroys so that she may create anew."

"Balance will be achieved when each consumes the other's substance." (Jung, MC 308-10, 331, 357-9)

- The Pythagorean Tarot by John Opsopaus

"Eros, the power of conjunction, an agent or alter-ego of the Magician, brings about the sacred marriage of the opposites. Here we see the Sun and Moon, representing the masculine and feminine unconscious, greeting each other, stripped of all deception. This is not a conscious decision, for Eros pierces the unconscious of both the man and the woman, so that each is compelled to acknowledge the other. In this way all the opposites are unified: male and female, conscious and unconscious, thought and feeling, intuition and sensation.

This is no ordinary marriage, but an alchemical conjunction of brother and sister. Upon its consummation the masculine poles (consciousness, thought, intuition) will be destroyed, dissolved in the subconscious mother sea; this represents the dissolution that must precede the rejuvenation of the masculine elements. The divine child will consume the mother's substance while it grows in her womb, and she will die in birth, thus obliterating the feminine poles (unconsciousness, feeling, sensation). The child, however, will survive, and manifest a well-tempered balance of all oppositions, thus reincarnating both parents (cf. VIII.Temperance).

Eros brings the High Priest..."

( In the Court of the CrimsonKing )

"...and High Priestess..."

( In the Wake of Poseidon )

"...together in Love, virgin no more. He is the middle term in the Pythagorean Triad, joining (harmozein) the extremes. (cf. Nichols 136) This Hieros Gamos (Sacred Marriage) must be incestuous, for it represents "a combination of things which are related but of unlike nature" (Jung, Mys. Con. 466). In fact, they are really the two sides of one unity, like the uroboros serpent which in the twilight of consciousness appears as two individuals; indeed, the bride and groom are both disguises of Mercury (the Magician). This marriage is the first unification of the Yin and Yang in the Tao. As Wei Po-yang says, "The Way [Tao] is long and obscurely mystical, at the end of which the Ch'ien [Father = II.Emperor] and K'un [Mother = III.Empress] come together." (Jung, MC 294-5, 304, 359-60) VI.Love represents the marriage of IV.High Priestess and V.High Priest; that is, it is the Alchemical Wedding between the silver Queen of the Night..."

(The "Midnight Queen" of In the Wake of Poseidon )

"...and the golden King of the Day...,"

(The Crimson King)

"...for the anima wants a man and the animus wants a woman; they yearn for the coniunctio. The King and Queen are at the ends of their reigns; the King is becoming senile and the Queen has put aside her green gown and donned the livid purple, which portends the immanent Love-death of the couple. Hermes appears in the form of Eros; they both throw the dart and are called "archers who shoot without bowstrings." He is Mercury, which unites the Sulphur and Salt, and presides over this Hermetic Marriage by which the light of Moon is emptied into the Sun, and the light of the Sun is emptied into the Moon, and from them both light fills the World.

In the marriage of heaven and earth, the King's downward thrust meets the Queen's upward arch, and the newlyweds tangle violently, like fighting lions, dogs, dragons or wolves. Indeed the King must die at the moment of consummation: Some say Cupid's dart, the telum passionis, pierces his heart. Others say the groom's head is bitten off by the Bride-snake. Yet others say he is torn by black dogs of Hecate, as Actaeon was after he feasted on the naked form of Artemis, for such is the fate of whoever is Betrothed to the Moon (Lunae Sponsus). The Bride of the Sun (Soli Sponsa) in turn is fated to die in childbirth, and so the two souls of the parents yield to the one soul of the Child. King Consciousness loses his absolute authority, as in turn does Queen Unconsciousness; with the Child there will be a balance of psychic powers. (Jung, MC 29-34, 295, 304, 360, 380)

VI.Love represents the Triumph of Love, that is, the triumphal procession of Eros. In his Trionfi (Triumphs) Petrarch describes the scene: Cupidus rides in a fiery chariot leading his enslaved captives: emperors and empresses, priests and priestesses, gods and mortals - none are exempt."

- The Pythagorean Tarot by John Opsopaus

"But now the fiery god Mars, whose color is red and who wields the force of Eris (Strife), couples with the sea-born goddess Venus, whose color is green and who wields the force of Eros (Love); from their union Harmonia is born."

- The Enchanted Egg of Naples

"In Bali the highest aspect of divinity is known as Tintya (inspired by the dancing form of Shiva-Natarajah). Tintya is often depicted in sacred paintings as an agile, elvish figure on a chakra (wheel of cosmic energy) - flanked by two dragons (one green, the other red) representing the ida and pingala - or the positive and negative poles of the planet's electromagnetic field.

Now, this is truly significant. The green and the red, the positive and the negative, the yang and the yin, the male and the female, electricity and magnetism.... herein lies the most important clue to the grand mystery of the Dragon's Song."

- Song of the Dragon
by Antares

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"This trump represents the "right order" of the universe, especially balance, whether in the physical world, such as the equilibrium of forces, or in the spiritual world, such as the complementarity of the conscious and unconscious, of reason and emotion, of logic and intuition, and so forth. Achieving such balance is not a simple matter of numerical equality, for fair (just) use of the scales requires a steady hand and a good eye. This skill is finely honed, like the sword, and like the fulcrum of the balance, which must be razor sharp in a sensitive instrument.

True justice tempers measurement with wisdom, and masculine discrimination with feminine compassion: fire with water. Athena achieves this by combining blade, beam and scales: Although the scales are separated and pull in opposite directions, the beam connects them ("love") and converts their "strife" into a higher order of cooperation, which leads to equilibrium ("harmony"). Wisdom constructs such a balance whenever she finds differences, whether in head or heart, or in psyche or society.

The scales show that balance requires both separation and connection...,"

(The "separation" of the Logos in album one and the "connection" of Eros in album two.)

"...for the scales could not function without separate cups, nor could it function without a connection between the cups. We can see that although the cups are opposed, they are not antagonistic, and that their opposition is a deeper form of cooperation. (Nichols 156-7)

- The Pythagorean Tarot

"Opposites can be united only in the form of compromise, or irrationally, some new thing arising between them which, though different from both, yet has the power to take up their energies in equal measure as an expression of both 'and of neither. Such an expression cannot be contrived by reason, it can only be created through living."

- C. G. Jung, Psychological Types

In summary, the process depicted in The Devil's Triangle results in...

"the transcendence of opposites: the passing beyond prejudicial judgments of good and evil, of male and female, of eros and logos, of need and satiation, of conflict and repose. There is no more Yin and Yang. The distinctions are obliterated."

- On Shi Ke's Two Minds In Harmony

"When the nectar resulting from this mixing is reabsorbed, it gathers the spiritual winds into the central channel to engender the Wisdom Wind, which frees us from dualistic thinking (Shaw 161-3)."

- The Pythagorean Tarot by John Opsopaus

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