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From: Kristina-Delicious Agony Progressive Rock Radio
Date: 15 Oct 2002
Time: 12:51:56 -0400
Remote Name: 64.12.96.47
I'm hoping that some of you will be interested in sharing thoughts on what the series means to you. I take the time to rustle through all this I'm going to type because I'm hoping to find some clarity myself, some discussion started that will give us things to pick up along our path. I've been reading the Griffin & Sabine series for years now, and quite often meditated on what it is about the books that is so enthralling. At different times I've come away with different ideas of what is happening, different emotions stirred, but *always* it includes a disturbed feeling, an unexplainable twitching sense of off-kilteredness, a really strong sense that I'm on the edge, that we're on the edge - that things are very much not at all as they seem. Since reading the first Griffin & Sabine back in the early '90s (the same time I read Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions"), the series has opened the door to an incredible amount of things for me, subjects that I researched in depth and take great interest in. Each of those things, of course, led me to another, and so on. At first it was Egyptology, which left me saying "Eh?!" Too much fact, it made no sense! At some point I decided to take the Celestine Prophecy sort of route and just follow my intuition, trust it or not, and seek out things that were simply on my mind or that seemed coincidental. Over time, I came to find that I don't really even have to seek out these things, they miraculously become available to me if I'm aware enough to see them, if I'm focused on what I want for myself rather than what others want for me. This is the one thing that continually seems to work. It was writings about Hermes that finally laid down some pieces of a puzzle for me, sort of scattering all the other pieces on the table, upside down, rightside up, turned at angles, askew but at least there! Hermes led to Thoth, to Mercury, to alchemy, to The Hermetica, to Yeats, to the Masons, to Buddhism, to Gnosticism, to the Gospel of Thomas, to Carl Jung, to Stephen Hawking, to Joseph Campbell, to Herman Hesse, to nature, to Christianity, to mythology, to everything. Most of these things and people I had felt I already knew a good deal about, but in new states of awareness I found completely different meanings and ideas. Where I had always related to everything as being separate from me, a gap began to slowly decrease. I also began to see a whole heck of a lot of this: outboard motors that no longer worked. I see Frolatti as representing the practical, the shadow, the archetype, the material, the one who wants to know what is engraved on the emerald more than he wants to hold it, the underworld, the masculine, (as Griffin was without Sabine). He's the villain that we all try not to see in ourselves. I see Sabine as the mythological, the light, the wanderer, the spiritual, the desire for completeness, the overworld, the feminine. I see Griffin and Sabine's union at the Golden Mean as a coming together of the opposites, a recognition, an acceptance, and a knowledge that the inside must be like the outside and the outside must be like the inside, that there is no separation, only differences in degrees. I see that as their complete oneness, their atonement to self. Jesus said, "When you make the one into two, and the two into three, there you will find the kingdom." When we see all our sides and can merge them, then we will truly begin to love. With Matthew and Isabella, I sense a bigger picture, a real spiritus mundi. The story about the traveler from the East, the traveler from the West, raising the precious stone, makes me think of our planet's dilemma. It's going to take the East and the West coming together for the sake of our precious rock we live on, and a new dawn won't be achieved overnight. It's going to take more than two travelers to reach atonement in our society, which is now so webbed together that the village has become the earth. Thoth (Egyptian), depicted as either a baboon or an ibis was Lord of the Sacred Word, and supposedly erected the Great Pyramid over the entrance to the Great Halls of Amenti where he stored and hid his books of magic and wisdom. The Great Halls of Amenti eventually became known as the underworld where the gods lived and where our wonderful Judgement Day is held. It's much like the Gnostic's "Uncreated" who hid the spark of light within each of us. It's right there if we dare to face the darkness in the Halls to get to it. The beautiful thing about the pyramid is, of course, that each of the four sides faces a different direction, N E S W, and then is capped off on top with the merging into one point. To Isabella from Griffin, "Frolatti's angels are hardly liable to try to close your eyes - after all, without you, we would all be turning and turning in circles. Consider again your last dream. What shape was the beak of the bird that burrows towards the lion - long and slender or short and hooked?" The ibis has a long and thin beak, one of Thoth's images, and Thoth was called the son of Ra, the sun god. The dream Isabella had, that Griffin was asking her about, was "A bird drops like a stone from the sun, past a silvery fogged-in moon, beyond pyramids of blazing scrolls, plunging downward into the desert. It pierces the sand's skin. Still diving, tunneling vertically, it burrows towards a great slumbering lion. The cat twists in his sleep, rubbing his nose with the back of his paw, unaware of the bird's approach. The earth holds her breath. It has turned cold and I hear grass rustling in the night wind." I think the lion is the collective soul, the soul of the world, the spiritus mundi, wisdom. The whole series is so reflective of Yeats' "The Second Coming" to me. With flight and technology, our world is now connected, even to the sleeper. Our reasoning, however, hasn't evolved to accompany this. We can't hear our falconer, we aren't listening to our guide. From the best I can tell, the world hasn't changed that much. Humans have been fighting with one another, judging themselves, judging others, participating in war with whatever means of weaponry they have since when, forever? We do with other people what we do with ourselves. What we have on the inside will absolutely manifest itself on the outside. So to me, this "second coming" represents the moment of every awakening. There is no single "second coming", no single "judgement day". It is mythological, symbolic of the inner struggle to merge our personal opposites and then realize that we are all of the same One. The second coming and judgement day are here, they have always been here. I'm unsure why Yeats related the drop into stony sleep to the birth of Jesus twenty centuries ago, because I don't think there was any one event that brought it on. Perhaps he was using the birth of Jesus to represent the birth of each of us, the death of each of us. I can vouch for this fact, though, it is definitely a rough beast that chooses rebirth. Hermes (Greek) is one of the three incarnations of Thoth, the messenger. Some schools of thought claim that Hermes is a messenger that we have access to, that he can counsel us, that he is objective. He's tricky, though, he's seen as the same thing as the Christian's Satan, only not all bad. Cracking through the symbols, he's our inner self, someone we should listen to. One of the Gnostic writings, "Either they are involved in inflicting blows, or they themselves receive bruises. Either they are falling from high places, or they fly off through the air, though they have no wings at all. Other times, it is as if certain people were trying to kill them, even though there is no one pursuing them; or, they themselves are killing those beside them, for they are stained by their blood." This is fragmentation. It is when we are experiencing neither and when we are experiencing both, that our eyes are open. "They're coming aren't they? Both of them." Hermes and Thoth? I'd love to go through the books, discussing specific lines at a time, sharing our thoughts. Anyone up for it? And now I see that Nick is talking about the courage to love. Wow, no subject could bring me more pain and more healing. I'm looking forward to this! I'll post to that soon. -- Kris -- www.deliciousagony.com -- [email protected] & [email protected]