Tag: Orpheus
The esoteric Rilke of the "Sonnets to Orpheus"
Composed in February 1922 as a funeral monument to Wera Ouckama Knoop, a young woman who passed away at the premature age of nineteen, the "Sonnets a Orpheus" by the Austrian poet of Bohemian origin Rainer Maria Rilke still speak to us today, after a century, in the "Language of eternity in which the dead make themselves a gift by nourishing the earth", revealing to us the indissoluble intertwining between death and life.
The Puer and the Kore for Kรกroly Kerรฉnyi: uncertainty, origin and foundation
From the analysis of the two mythological figures of Puer Aeternus and Kore in the demetric mysteries of Eleusis, in the studies of the Hungarian historian of religions Kรกroly Kerรฉnyi and in the comments on these by Carl Gustav Jung, the importance of the "original" and "founding" character emerges "Of the Greek myth, the enigmatic link between being and non-being, the one between life, love and death that allow us to express through symbolic relationships a cosmic process in which man's existence is close to reality.
Apollo the Destroyer: "coincidentia oppositorum" in hyperborean mysticism and eschatology
Although mostly considered in his "luminous" and "uranic" meaning, in the archaic tradition Apollo combines the most extreme dichotomies in his mystical and eschatology: the bow and the lyre, wisdom and "mania", depth and elevation, the catabasis and the journey in spirit to the White Island, the "Fall" of Being and the return of the Golden Age. Starting from ancient sources, we can find similar concepts not only to those of North Asian shamanism and Celtic spirituality, but even to the sacred vision of some modern poets โ like Blake, Shelley and Yeats - whose Apollonian chrism will appear clearer to us if we analyze their โWeltanschauungโ in the light of the Platonic and Heraclitean doctrines.
Parmenides, priest of Apollo: the "incubatio" and sacred healing
In an extract previously published on the site [cf. Ioan P. Culianu: the hyperborean shamanism of ancient Greece] we illustrated the retrospective of the Romanian religious historian Culianu on the existence of a Hyperborean shamanism in the ancient Mediterranean area: a "technique of ecstasy" attributable to the divine figure of Apollo Hyperborean of which the major interpreters, called "iatromanti", were the ancient scholars and philosophers. We focus here on one of these "enlightened": Parmenides of Elea (IV - V century BC), born in Elea / Velia (today Ascea, in the province of Salerno), where he founded the Eleatic School together with Zeno.
The archaeological findings of Velia allow us to reconstruct the "Apollonian Way" of Parmenides, pre-Socratic philosopher, Apollo's iatromancer and healer
Cernunno, Odin, Dionysus and other deities of the 'Winter Sun'
It would seem, indeed, that all these numinous powers, as well as a certain chthonic-telluric and chaotic-wild aspect of nature, are also symbolically connected to the Winter Sun, or rather to the "Dying Sun" in the coinciding final days of the Year. with the "solstitial crisis", during which the heliacal star reaches its annual nadir.
di Marco Maculotti
cover: Hermann Hendrich, "Wotan", 1913
[follows from: Cosmic cycles and time regeneration: immolation rites of the 'King of the Old Year'].
In the previous publication we had the opportunity to analyze the ritual complex, recognizable everywhere among the ancient Indo-European populations, centered on theimmolation (real or symbolic) of the "King of the Old Year" (eg. Roman Saturnalia), as a symbolic representation of the "Dying Year" that must be sacrificed to ensure that the Cosmos (= the order of things), reinvigorated by this ceremonial action, grants the regeneration of Time and of the 'World' (in the Pythagorean meaning of Kosmos like interconnected unit) in the new year to come; year which, in this sense, becomes a micro-representation of the Aeon and, therefore, of the entire cyclical nature of the Cosmos. Let's now proceed toanalysis of some divinities intimately connected with the "solstitial crisis", to the point of rising to mythical representatives of the "Winter Sun" and, in full, of the "King of the Waning Year": Cernunno, the 'horned god' par excellence, as far as the Celtic area is concerned; Odin and the 'wild hunt' for the Scandinavian one and Dionysus for the Mediterranean area.
