LECTURE 18

I want to spend a little longer on lunar culture because it reflects the primordial matrix or foundation out of which our present kind of consciousness has...See more » I want to spend a little longer on lunar culture because it reflects the primordial matrix or foundation out of which our present kind of consciousness has evolved. In the greatest civilisations of the ancient world there was a stairway between the human and the divine. The earth and the cosmos were addressed as “Thou”, not “it.” People felt they participated in a great cosmic Mystery to which they belonged. People experienced the divine as immanent in the material world, present in the temples they built to worship their goddesses and gods. Nature and cosmos were ensouled with divine presence and were imagined as a Great Mother, the source or womb of All. I will use just one example to illustrate this fact. Hera was originally a moon goddess and the greatest female deity in Greece - addressed as Panthon Genethla - the origin of all things. She is not the Hera we know from the Iliad - but the Great Goddess whose temple presided over the plain of Argos. Hera’s temple was to the Greeks of 1000 BC what the temple at Jerusalem was to the people of Israel – it was the temple, the sanctuary for the whole land. Ceremonies like those at Eleusis strengthened the sense of participation in a divine reality and gave initiates an experience of the immortality of the soul. People communicated with gods and goddesses in dream and vision and entered into dialogue with them as they do in the Odyssey. Birds were recognised as messengers of that dimension, very possibly because people dreamed about them in this role: we may remember Athena taking the form of a sea-eagle or swallow as she guided Odysseus home to Penelope. Oracles like those at Delphi and Dodona were consulted as a way of listening to the guidance of an unseen reality. Rites of incubation and healing were practised in many sanctuaries such as that of Epidauros. Dreams and visions were of great importance in the diagnosis and healing of disease. Music was used to heighten receptivity to the presence of that invisible dimension, a world that was considered to be the foundation of this world and as real as this one. In lunar culture, the visionary imagination was nourished and developed. Everything was connected, everything was sacred. The idea of relationship was supremely important. In the sixth century bce the greatest of the Pre-Socratic philosophers – in my view Pythagoras and Parmenides - kept alive this lunar consciousness and were the last protagonists of it. The original role of the philosopher was to travel through the veil of our "normal" consciousness to the invisible dimension that underlies the visible world and bring back what was seen and heard in that encounter to teach the human community how to align ts life with the sacred life of the cosmos. This experience was their most important legacy. Many of you will know that Parmenides wrote an extraordinary poem that describes his journey into the Underworld – riding in a chariot drawn by mares through great gates that stretched from earth to heaven, and his encounter with one whom he calls simply "Goddess" although we know that her name was Persephone. He was her messenger – bringing back into this world the wisdom she taught him in another. (1)See less »