created, 2025-02-13 & modified, =this.modified
rel: River and Death
Why I am reading
Looking for information connecting rivers and death.
I do fear this might be too light but maybe will have some points to branch off from.
Egg
In many creation myths the universe is hatched from an egg. In Orphism, sable-winged Night laid her egg in the abyss of Tartarus, and from it shining Phanes or “whirlwind Love” is born.
In Egypt, the great cackler (a celestial goose) or an ibis-form of Thoth lay a cosmic egg containing Re, the solar bird who creates the world.
Breath
Everything breathes, think of the wood on a spring day with the susurration of leaves and rippling grasses, the trembling of dappled light.
The Sanskrit prana “breathing forth” refers to the source and force of life and the vibratory energy of all manifestation.
Star
Egyptian Nut, the goddess of the night sky, was depicted as giving birth to the stars and taking them up against her dark belly, the way unconsciousness gives birth to consciousness and the darkly encompasses the luster of its individual spark. In the Pyramid texts the deceased were directed to become an “imperishable star” so as to live forever.
Sun
Loveliest of what I leave behind is the sunlight…
- Praxilla of Sicyon
Moon
Because the moon spins on its own axis in the identical time it takes to orbit the Earth, its lighted “near side” is always turned earthward, just as its per- perpetually dark “far side” is always turned away. “Everyone is a moon,” wrote Mark Twain, “and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”
Ocean
Ancient and primal, the ocean is our mother of mothers, The Great Roundwithin whose fluid containment life began and from whose fertile precincts the first bold pioneers scuttled out upon the sand.
River
rel:River and Death
The rivers have been the abode of immortals who have offered these many gifts as well as the gifts of purity, cleansing, grace and a mythic passage to the “other shore.” The river speaks of life as flow, freedom, movement, dangerous currents, drowning, running ever along, running its course, flooding, also as confinement, direction, holding, channeling.
We can never rise above our source, all rivers flow downhill from their source, finally terminating in the sea or confluence.
Alongside the image of rebirth is the river crossing, an age-old symbol of crossing over to the other shore, the land of the dead. Crossing is a transition and a metaphor for the possibility of traveling between the mind’s two shores, the conscious and familiar shore and the unconscious farther shore.
Whirlpool
Maelstrom is Dutch for “whirling stream.”
A Cherokee myth details the adventures of two tribesmen on a canoe at the mouth of Suck Creek. One was seized by a fish and never seen again. The other was saved after he “reached the narrowest circle of the maelstrom.” Here the water opens and as if looking down through the roof beam of a house, he can see at the bottom of the river a great company, which beckons to him, but before they can seize him the swift current catches him up out of their reach
Edgar Allen Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom” is based on the whirlpools located near the Lofoten Islands off the coast of Norway. Poe de- scribes a state of calm intelligibility at the heart of the funnel, a transition from dread to hope, discovering in the gulf a “narrow and tottering bridge which … is the only pathway between Time and Eternity.”
Flood
In some myths, a deluge routinely marks the end of immenhse intervals of time. The waters have no form in themselves, but give birth to multiple forms, which, once separated from the source, are vulnerable to aging, change and decay and in time must be renewed; thus the flood represents cosmic ablution and a new beginning
Night
An Orphie myth depicts Night as she who was “in the beginning,” a black-winged bird with awe-inspiring oracular powers. The goddess conceived of wind, and she laid a silver egg in the immense lap of Darkness. - From this egg, Eros, the golden-winged god of love, was born (Kerényi, 16-7). Just so does Night birth in the soul an oceanic feeling of kinship, not only with the lover with whom one sleeps “while the dark earth spins with the living and the dead” (Pablo Neruda, “Night on the Island,” 24-5), but with ancient ancestors and future descendants, universes seen and unseen, gods and creatures of time and eternity.
Cave
By providing a passage between this world and the underworld, or between life and the land of the dead, caves evoke the primordial functions of the earth mother as both womb and tomb.
When the insulted Japanese sun-goddess Amaterasu withdrew into a cavern, she plunged the world into darkness. She was cajoled out only when the gods aroused her curiosity by holding a mirror at the cave’s entrance to reflect her own brilliance.
Forest
Any human being is rendered small and young by a great forest, seemingly endless and eternal.
The forest, with its exotic forces, is “outside” the inhabited precincts of consciousness, as village, city, household or castle. But the boundaries are often depicted as tenuous; many tales begin with the protagonist living “at the edge of a forest,” just as, inevitably, the worlds of typical and archetypal impinge upon each other.
Many spiritual and psychological journeys begin, as Dante’s did in the Divine Comedy, by entering the “dark wood” of psychic wilderness. And because the forest has a “mysterious impenetrability … things suddenly appear and disappear, and there are no paths, anything is possible”
One can disappear into the forest, escaping life. The Hindu vanaprastha or “forest dweller” is part of the human life span once the responsibility of house holding is over.
Vānaprastha
Literally “way of the forest” or “forest road” - when a person hands over household responsibilities to the next generation, takes an advisory role, and gradually withdraws from the world.
Ascent
Ascent evokes tree, ladder, mountain, sky and outer space, as well as elevators and stairs. It suggests gradual, step-by-step progression to the heights, a climbing to the summit or a more rocketlike “taking off.” It depicts soaring thoughts and intuitions, and leaps of imagination. The other side of the coin is gid- diness, disembodiment or inflation. One can live in the head, neglecting other sources of wisdom, or ascend to excessive heights and lose touch with reality, the humility, or “humus” that gives us a firm foothold in our earthy ground.
Descent
The Greek Persephone is abducted into Hades, found by mother Demeter, the goddess of the grain, and ever after moves between two worlds. Jesus descends into the death of crucifixion and the harrowing of Hell and then rises into eternal life. The alchemical savior ascends from matter into spirit, unites the opposites and once again descends to earth as the reanimating elixir. In a Chey- enne Indian myth, a coot swims down to the bottom of the primordial lake, and resurfaces with a ball of mud from which the earth is made.
Weaving and Spinning
*The warp was woven at noon the woof in the house of dawn The rest in the hall of the sun
Golden gown woven for the moon, Shimmering veil for the little sun.
- Estonian Song*
In many cultures the upper crossbeam of the loom is called “beam of heaven”, the bottom representing earth as if between the world is being woven into creation.
rel:Survey of Text Etymology, Connections to Fiber, Body
IxChel
In early myth IxChel was a a spider, drawing the thread from her own body, and it was from her humans learned the craft of weaving.
IxChel herself is an accomplished weaver. Wearing a snake headdress, the goddess is often depicted at a loom, and Mayan mythology sometimes describes the movement of her drop spindle as the force at the centre of the perpetual motion of the universe.
For centuries, Maya women’s weaving has been a form of resistance. Spanish priests and authorities colonizing the land that is now Guatemala burned Maya books and destroyed cultural artefacts. Using a hidden language of symbols and colors, Maya women documented and preserved stories and culture in their textiles. Weavers were essential for the survival of Maya culture.
Today, wearing indumentaria maya(traditional handwoven Maya clothing) can still be an act of resistance. Maya women may face discrimination when they wear indumentaria, especially in professional spaces, but their choice is an expression of pride in Maya identity.
Arachne
And immediately at the touch of this dark poison, Arachne’s hair fell out. With it went her nose and ears, her head shrank to the smallest size, and her whole body became tiny. Her slender fingers stuck to her sides as legs, the rest is belly, from which she still spins a thread, and, as a spider, weaves her ancient web.
rel:Survey of Text Etymology, Connections to Fiber, Body
Cloth resembles language in many ways. The words form syntax similar to how threads produce fabric. “Text” and “textile” share a common root, meaning “to weave” (OED). In Dogon myth, weaving and speech are poetically combined to form a coherent cosmology. The mouth and the vocal cords of their ancestor figures Nommo were a loom from which not only words issued but also cloth. The Dogon people refer to the loom as “secret speech,” and say “to be nude is to be without words” (Ginzberg, 261; Peek, 454). The designs woven into fabric are a form of storytelling where weaving, like song, imparts immortality. The women in the Odyssey acquire their voice through weaving. Helen, “she of the golden spindle,” weaves the scenes of the Trojan war, turning her tapestry into an epic poem. Penelope defies her suitors by weaving dissent as she unwinds at night what she had woven in the day. When their households eventually return to order, these weavers become spinners, producing the thread for other women to weave their own stories
Stranger
Old French estranger meaning foreigner or alien. Latin is hostis meaning both guest and host, and the root of hospitality.
The image of a stranger as an angel or God in disguise arises in the Old Testament. Abraham welcomes and feeds the strangers who are bringing prophetic information to the tribe
Psychologically, a stranger is the perfect screen for catching the projections of unknown parts of our- selves. When these strange parts of ourselves are left in the world as projections we are split apart, and this can be the making of prejudices and wars of all sorts. However, when we integrate these foreign parts, we are then more able to respect difference and otherness out- side of ourselves
Francis Bacon said, “If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them”
Unicorn
How is it that the beast that never was (Rilke) has such an place in our imagination.
Eco, “The Unicorn… is like a footprint. If the print exists, there must have existed somewhere something whose print it is.. it is the print of an idea.”
Labyrinth
rel: Survey of Being Lost
The themes of weaving and spinning, evident in the image of the creator god Siuhu’s house, whose protectively surrounding labyrinth is woven, weblike, directly into the pattern of the basket it adorns, are congruent with the idea of the fateful unfolding of life’s twists and turns.
In the Upanishads, the thread (sutra) is described as linking “this world to the other world and all beings”
The purpose of the labyrinth’s frequent inclusion in initiatery rites is to temporarily disturb consciousness to the point that the initiate becomes confused and symbolically loses his way, or his rational, linear frame of orientation.