THE WILD PSYCHE

SOBEK, THE WILD PSYCHE

The Temple of Sobek, the Crocodile God
"The bottom of the temple hierarchy is composed of ordinary  priests who are called Pure Ones. They  perform most of the mundane activities involved with running the temple. Members of the next rank are known as Servants of the Gods. These men are assistants to the next rank – Fathers of the Gods – who make most of the more important decisions. Commanding them all is the High Priest, who is the pharaoh’s appointed representative. He performs the most important rituals and acts as chief administrator. All priests take great care to maintain  their  purity.  This  involves  bathing  twice  each  day and twice each night using water from the Sacred Lake and shaving off all bodily hair once every three days.  

"Every day, offerings are made to Sobek, represented by a statue of a man with the head of a crocodile. The life-sized statue is located in the temple sanctuary in a shrine called a naos. The idol itself is not worshiped; it is used as a means of channeling prayers and offerings to  the  god,  after  being  first consecrated  via  a  ritual called “Opening the Eyes and Mouth” A larger statue of the god stands out in the courtyard,  and  it  is  to  this  statue  that  the  common  people make their offerings. Supplicants are screened in the inner colonnade. Some wait quietly  for  their  turn  to  approach  the  altar  in  the  courtyard, where an accompanying priest interprets the god’s response to their  prayers. Some  altars  are  hollow;  according  to  archeologists’ theories, a priest could hide inside such an altar before the supplicants entered, which would allow him to pretend to be Sobek and speak directly to the supplicants. Other statues have mechanics for moving the statue’s arms or mouth. Before anyone can make a devotion, however, he must first be purified.

"Usually, the person was anointed with oil and cleansed with water from the Sacred Lake. Some supplicants are permitted to sleep in the temple  in the hope that Sobek will visit them in a dream. This process of “sleeping in” was common in many ancient religions and was called enkoimesis or incubatio by the Greeks. Supplicants sleep on the floor of the temple; when they  awake, they describe their dreams to a priest who would offer an interpretation. Anyone killed by a crocodile is considered sacred  to Sobek, and nobody is permitted to touch the body except for Sobek’s priests. The body is treated reverently; it is bathed and anointed, then mummified and buried. Relatives and loved ones take no part in the ritual  but can participate in the burial." (S.E. Mortimer)

There, in every place one crocodile is kept, trained to be tame; they put ornaments of glass and gold on its ears and bracelets on its forefeet, provide for it special food and offerings, and give the creatures the best of treatment while they live; after death the crocodiles are embalmed and buried in sacred coffins. — Herodotus, II.69


"Thus, I established among ye the Mysteries so that the Secrets may always be found. Aye, though man may fall into darkness, always the Light will shine as a guide. Hidden in darkness, veiled in symbols, always the way to the portal will be found. Man in the future will deny the mysteries but always the way the seeker will find." --Emerald Tablet

May the powers of Sobek, wisdom of Thoth, guidance of Horus, love of Hathor,
protection of Isis, and the eternally rising Phoenix guide your way!

Non-Conscious Primordial Awareness: Unconsciousness , Unthought, and Not Thinkable: The experience of the unborn and undying nature of luminous awareness; awareness…of your awareness which is awareness itself. The 'natural man' is immersed in primeval unconsciousness. The initiate transforms into a god-man, with primordial awareness -- enlightenment.

We consciously and unconsciously mourn the loss of the sacred in our lives to the abyss of evolution and our primordial relationship with Mother Earth, the animated earth. We've forgotten our connection to the dark animal orobouric Great Mother. Mother Nature may be the oldest motif but it is the underlying pattern of symbol-formation that is inherited. That something missing in the lives of so many people isn't found in another's form, it's found in the dark of the unconscious.

Jung thought the "primordial images" are those expressed in the earliest life-history of the human species. They grow out of the rudimentary nature of the psyche in its pre-conscious form. These basic layers of the psyche spontaneously recur in modern psychic phenomena in ever-new forms that vary around certain deeply rooted motifs at the base of consciousness. The generic structural nature of the psyche is unrestricted to collective or group phenomena.

Symbol & Sacrament

Hermetic philosophy crosses all those boundaries. Our exploration is one of Nature and our own deep nature -- our origins, being, and relationships with self, others, and cosmos. We use analogy to discuss the 'ground', as even logic only works sometimes for 'figures'. The ultimate ground is the substrate of the cosmos, analogous to the collective unconscious.

This substrate of our consciousness is the 'god of the gaps' present in each moment in the gaps between breaths and the space between thoughts, where all the wisdom in the world is located. The quiescent mind relaxes unforced into the ground of ordinary mind -- substrate consciousness. A quiet mind abides in the realization of substrate consciousness, more fundamental than the archetypal representation of all phenomena.

How the world works is analogous to how we work, classically expressed in the axiom, "as above, so below." The unconscious contains great wisdom and great folly expressed in uncanny extensions of ordinary consciousness, from dissociation and trance to at-One-ment. Yet the unknowable numinous moves as it will and moves our own egoic will with its effects, initiating and transforming us on the deepest levels. Psychologically, a virtual death precedes 'rebirth.'

Water is the cosmogonic element by which the self sinks into involuntary immersion in the dimensional abysses. Our pre-historical ancestors have sunk in the Atlantis of the waters of the unconscious, in a pre-diluvial disaster. This may be more than symbolic as we now know humanity has gone through a few local and global catastrophic events.

Life is a thread interwoven with hidden archetypes which remain entangled in our eternal present. We're already in our phenomenological graves. If we can embrace the ancient soul of our ancestors soulfully and creatively, we may engage and  fall in love with the sacred again. Wisdom is recognizing patterns in life.

Ervin Laszlo’s Akasha Paradigm is an entangled dynamic cosmos not limited to the here and now. We can connect and feel into each other. Laszlo shows the cosmos of the Akasha as a self-actualizing, self-organizing whole. Each part is in coherence with all others and all parts together create the conditions for the emergence of life and consciousness. 

Meaning Matters
Our bodies are simply connected with an intuitive sense of meaning, in all its implications and possibilities. Our structure encodes the recent and deep past. The physical and its significance are in no way separate but two aspects of a non-dual reality. They may appear in the pre-sensory, sensory elements and images in our dreams.

Jung implies we cannot get rid of the unconscious and its intuitions, which are rooted in our instinctual, reflexive, and parasympathetic systems. But we can go from being 'herd' to being heard. We can engage in intentional multisensory dialogue with our depths.

Like ripples in water, in The Emerald Tablet, Thoth says, "Send through thy body a wave of vibration, irregular first and regular second, repeating time after time until free. Start the wave force in thy brain center. Direct it in waves from thine head to thy foot."

A passage in “Hermetica” contains an important information about a crocodiles’ beach which existed in the “Libyan Desert” near to “Asklepieion” (= Imhotep temple to the west of Memphis) lying on “The Libyan Mount” [see: W. Scott,  Hermetica,I, 358-9; III, 221, 223-4]. It is worth mentioning that the “Libyan Desert” is a term denoting -in ancient times- the Saqqara region and all the desert extending to the west of the Nile’s Valley, known today as “Western Desert” 40.If the “crocodiles’ beach” was described as lying beside the “Asklepieion”, it gives us reasons to understand that it is located somewhere near “Zoser’s Mortuary Complex” and the “Serapeum”. (el-Sharkawy)

"Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age." William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"


Roman crocodile suit parade armor for cult processions.




"I am Sobek, who dwelleth amid his terrors.
I am Sobek, and I seize my prey like a ravening beast.
I am the great Fish which is in Kamui.
I am the lord to whom bowings and prostrations are made in Sekhem.
And the Osiris Ani is the lord to whom bowings and prostrations are made in Sekhem."
–The Book of the Dead; The Book of Coming Out into the Light



HYMN TO SOBEK-
[from the Ramesseum papyrus 6, sheet 1-4]
“Hail to You, Who arose from the Primeval Waters,
Lord of the low-lying lands,
Ruler of the desert edge … Who crosses the back-waters,
Mighty God Whose seizing cannot be seen,
Who lives by plunder, Who fares downstream by His beauty,
Who fares upstream having completed a multitude of times,
Twin of Ra, Great Luminary Who came forth from the flood. Welcome in peace, Lord of peace!
Drive off Your wrath, let pass Your raging … ,
cut short Your mourning, let Your beauty come, … exist … ,
the One without His second,
Ruler of the rivers,
Governor of the winds,
rutting Bull,
Lord of Love,
Lord of spirits,
He Who offers to Himself,
hairy one,
He Who loves taking,
Great of terror,
Lord of Ra-sahui,
Lord of Lakeland,
cleaver of Ra-henet,
Who comes summoned as the Flourishing Horus,
Great of power in Herakleopolis,
Lord of fear Who is in Hebenu,
Lord of Ahet, rejoicing in His sceptre, Chief in Ta-sety.
Hail to You in Ramuha, in the flood from which You came,
Begetter of the ram in the midst of the pool,
Lord of Thebes, Great in Semenu, the One Who rests in Cynopolis,
Beautiful of coming in Anty, great of appearances in Rawakh,
the son of Neith in Abydos,
…in Iunesha, acclaimed with praise.
(Incense on the flame!)
High be your soul, who presents the God with what He loves!
Raise yourself and fight for your body, so that the God shall exist!
Rutting bull, savage lion, great of strength, beautiful of shape, Ruler of the foreign countries,
Lord of incense in the midst of rituals,
High of heart,
Star which is in the fields,
King Amenemhat has given this Your beautiful face, with which You look at Your mother Neith,
and with which You are gracious to the Gods.
(Incense on the flame!)
This is for Sobek the Shedtite, Horus Who is in Shedet, Lord of myrrh.
Speaking words: praising Sobek
“Hail to Sobek of Shedet (Crocodilopolis, the region of the Lake Moeris)!
Open be the face of Rahes the gracious, Horus who is in the midst of Shedet!
O appear Horus upon the rivers!
Rise high, Sobek Who is in Shedet, Ra-Horus, Mighty God!
Hail to You Sobek of Shedet!
Hail to You, Who rise from the Flood, Horus Lord of the Two Lands, Bull of Bulls, Great Male, Lord of the island-lands!
Geb has provided You with Your sight, He has united You with Your eyes.
Strong one, Your strength is Great!
May You go through the Lake-land (the Lake Moeris), traverse the Great-Green (the Mediterranean Sea), and seek out Your father Osiris.
Now You have found Him, and made Him live, and said: This cleans the mouth of His father in His name of Sokar!
You have commanded Your children to proceed and care for Your father – that is, Him (Sokar) – in their name of ‘Carers of Sokar’; You have pressed upon the mouth of Your father Osiris; You have opened His mouth for Him.
You are His Beloved Son; You have saved Your father Osiris; You have protected  …. in His name of Ptah,
He has brought to You Your Eye,
He has filled Your Eye for You with ointment,
Your Eye has been given to You, whole, in the socket,
You having appeared as Dual King,
the hearts of the Gods fearing You,
the King’s food reverting to You,
You have protected Your father Osiris,
and reckons for Him the hearts of the Gods, having become Anubis.
O Sobek the Shedtite (Krokodilopolis in the Paym Oasis, the region of the Mer-Ur/Moeris Lake),
the Gods have come to rest at Your feet in Your name of ‘Restful of Feet’,
You have joined Them with Your limbs – Their strength and Their magic.
O Hard One, great is Your strength;
Your father Osiris has said of You .… in Your name of Sobek;
You have brought the Gods at once, without exception among Them, in ….
Sobek the Shedtite,
Great of the chase,
Phallus of the Gods,
Cruel of attack,
Great of ….,
Watchful,
Runner
with sharp teeth,
Who seizes by His might,
Powerful in His manifestation,
the Primeval Water goes about for You within the great channel, Isis conducts You to the Horizon,
to …. waters …. so that Sobek the Shedtite rises in the region of the Horizon …. the meals of Truth,
pure …. Horus become …. great.
Come Sobek, son of Neith”




SOBEK & THE DRAGON BLOODLINE
A New Myth of Bloodline Transformation for an Ancient God

by Iona Miller, 2018
https://ionamiller2017.weebly.com/

"Spell 991: To become Sobek. I am the seed which issued from the encircling wrapping. I am he who broke the teeth of him who cut away the iron. I am the Lord of strength and might who took crocodile-shape. I am the Lord of wrong who lives on woe. I am that crocodile whose tongue was cut out because of the mutilation of Osiris. I am he who puts fear whom the Ennead fear. I am that god who rises in the East and sets in the West, to whom the Niles are given. I am that god whom the eight row. I am Sobek, the rebel who is among you [the gods]; you cannot do anything against me, you spirits or you dead, for I have taken possession of the sky and have taken possession of the earth." 
--Coffin Text, adapted freely from THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN COFFIN TEXTS  Volume III Spells 788-1185 & Indexes  R. 0. Faulkner, D.Lit., F.S.A.  ARIS & PHILLIPS LTD., Warminster, England. 




Origin of the Dragon - https://aratta.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/the-origin-of-the-dragon-cult/ 

"Magic is a Way of Living."
--Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 314-315

"The ancients devised magic to compel fate. They needed it to determine outer fate. We need it to determine inner fate and to find the way that we are unable to conceive." --Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311.

INTRODUCTION: NON-LOCAL CONSCIOUSNESS

This essay is a deep dive into the Dark Waters of the human unconscious embodied in the dual nature of Sobek. The self-generated sacred crocodile deity of primal originating force is both celestial and chthonic forces of nature. The archetype is an ideational as well as celestial constellation. This dark journey into a dangerous place of unfathomable infinity is a necessary process. It provides a journey of descent and renewal. 

So, like the ancients we appeal to the soul  and to myth for coherence, for order, for assurance the terrors of suffering and history are not blind, arbitrary or meaningless. The depths of soul become a void. While still felt deeply, we are stripped of our capacity to truly know and differentiate the other. Reactions are experienced only subjectively.

Mythologies perform their functions through symbols. The focal point provided by image and symbol holds the mind to truth. The ultimate is, of course, unknowable. Therefore, the images themselves are not "the truth." For us, a journey into the unconscious provides the vital meanings and relatedness to the cosmic order that myths once gave us. It is a return to the source. Meaning is inherent in conscious experience of archetypal processes.  

We see the soul at work both in its symbolic activity at the heart of our world and mythic distortions. We all remain vulnerable to the ferocious devouring spirit of the numinous. It can seize us and drag us under when we least expect it, confronting us with the mystery of death/rebirth. Subjective emotional experience is objectified as a god or demon when soul is experienced as a separate entity. 

The theme of the Nile, a 600 mile long oasis, is inundation and emergence. Prior to distinguishing soul from world, mythical consciousness was an undifferentiated boundaryless fluidity. By repeatedly diving deep and then re-surfacing, we bring into the daylight world important experiential material focused around the very core of our being. 

Chances are we have not come to grips with the chthonic aspect of our psyche  -- that portion through which the psyche is attached to nature and the body's relation to the subjective sphere. A frightened ego, in danger of drowning in deep waters, will quickly regress to the natural standpoint, otherwise unaffected by its contact with the numinous. The mythical is inextricably bound to physical material existence. Creative instinct is rooted in biologically determined instinct. 

Terence McKenna reminds us that, "Riverine metaphors are endlessly applicable. They represent the flowing of forces over landscapes, the pressure of chaos on the imagination to create creatively. . .The key is surrender and dissolution of boundaries, dissolution of the ego."  

When we immerse ourselves in that creative energy, we find healing on many levels of our being. It may feel tingly or effervescent, or like streaming energy. Direct experience of this level brings a true sense of oneness with all that exists, the seamless fabric of existence. It opens us to re-patterning by the whole  -- a re-construction or re-patterning of personality through holistic change at the most fundamental level.  Immersion in the oceanic experience of universal consciousness is a life-changing experience. It is experience of the web of life, the biological life flow, an ineffable current.

If there is no avoiding a mythically determined self, there is a possibility of identifying or aligning with an archetypal pattern that encourages soul to come to fruition, and that is what the ancients did. The archetypal cannot be evaded or destroyed. Sobek is the embodied mythical self -- unassimilable experience. We can't overcome the mythical determination of the subjective, but we can fervently embrace this archaic template of the soul, the mythopoetic foundation of the world.

Our darkness tells us that the chthonic is both a constructive and destructive force. When a mortal psyche encounters an archetypal force too intimately, it is destroyed. The chthonic is self-existent natural force. Archetypes flow into instincts prompting automatic reflexive behaviors. A more embodied consciousness brings in the chthonic.

Mythical Soul

Soul is the depth dimension which is human interiority, the unconscious dimension of the psyche. We sense interiority and depth from the way in which we are touched by it. From the infinitely large to the infinitesimally small, the universe is the primordial depth dimension of ourselves, of human interiority. Depth includes not only the downward and the inward, but the depth of "the between."  Depth reverberates with manifolds of significance. We learn tosee through literal meanings, searching for depth in the lost, hidden, and buried.

It consists in the unconscious activation of archetypal psychic forces. Jung says that myths are "the involuntary revelations of a psychic precondition." We recognize the profound archetypal need we have to appease or propitiate the dark forces in the universe. It involves the continual encounter with archetypal forces. We are pervaded and structured by powerful numinous forces and presences that emerge in human imagination as divinized figures and narratives of ancient myth. 

“Animals wake up the imagination….I've found that animal dreams can do this too. They really wake people up. Animal dreams provoke their feelings, get them thinking, interested, and curious. As we get more into imagining, we become more animal-like…more instinctually alive.” (James Hillman, Dream Animals, p. 2).

The chthonic gods represent the primal instincts that come to us directly through nature. The foundation of Egyptian spiritual life is the nature of the unconscious and its processes. The deepest layer of the psyche is chthonic imagery, or the imagery and vocabulary pertaining to darkness. Of course, water and the watery abyss are the main symbols of the unconscious, with its chthonic archetypal forces. 

The time before we become somebody is called “primordial time” in the Buddhist tantras. Nothingness or openness or emptiness or voidness or spaciousness is the ground of primordial awareness, a ground that is no ground at all. The nothingness or openness is light, luminous radiance, is the primordial ground of all that is. Consciousness-at-rest and conscious-energy are the two primary manifestations of the one ultimate, self-contained consciousness.

The Egyptian dragon was a crocodile; an evocative "mythical metaphor" associated the king of Egypt with this mythical creature. Sobek arose at the transition from Predynastic mother-rites to dynastic ruler-Pharaohs in the Egyptian patrilineal transition. Rising out of the depths of pre-civilized primordial existence, the dragon-king archetype reigned as the central icon of Egyptian mytho-cosmology and symbol of power, generativity, and fertility. Renewal arises at the source of meaning and being. The creative instinct unites our being with the transcendental sphere through a mythic alliance of spiritual and material.

Fertile Darkness

Whatever serves as a threshold or gateway is mythical. The fertile darkness means reconnecting with the body of the earth. There is an ontological deepening in Jung's thinking: from the archetypes as behavioral and experiential patterns in the shared world, to archetypes as imaginal possibilities in which both we ourselves and the world are gathered. 

This shift drops the ground of psychological life into the fertile darkness which is the ground of all things. The vibrant and fertile darkness of nature ever renews organisms with new life. In and through darkness lies a fertile resurgence of life into meaning, experience, and significance.

The water of life is within this darkness This fertile darkness is where mystery lives, the great cloud of unknowing. Sobek is the deeper aspects of nature -- the primordial source or active onset of life and nonegoic potentials, buried beneath consciousness. The power of the ground includes biological instincts, emotive potentials, autosymbolic imagination. It is a source of psychic energy, covert impulses, and unconscious projections. 

Our deep past includes archaeo- and paleogenetics. Sobek connects us with the manifest world and the ancestral darkness at the end of all things. Such images were motivated by a crisis in which Cro-Magnon people began to separate the animal out of their about-to-be human heads and to project it onto cave walls. Jung called the primordial ancestor 'the two million year old man,' the instinctive self, rooted in nature, who speaks the forgotten symbolic language of the unconscious. Our unconscious still functions like it did four million years ago. 

The instinctive self is an integrated approach rooting us in both past and present, as a common model for real life and consciousness that foster transgenerational bonds, transformation, and integration. It encompasses the entire history of the human race. Dreams are in a sense feral, sauvage, wild, paleo, directly embedded in nature and pre-history. Jung believed that “most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us”. 

Alan Watts said, "It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that 'I' cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting go he finds it.”

All our battles are with shadowy decay. The devouring teeth of pain can be a dragon that reduces us to a primal level. Passing through the portal of pain may be medicine itself and death reveals a sort of magic -- rebirth in the fertile darkness. The most powerful thing we can do is to humble ourselves: get down on our knees, surrender our stories, defenses and resistance, and offer all that we are to that immense power.

We will look at deep relationships with autonomous psychic contents to our inner and outer reality, psychophysiology, unconscious, consciousness, soul, and belief systems. The systems around symbolism provide a path to reach that numinous presence or state of being toward which those symbols point. Meaning matters. Having an orientation toward something bigger than the self, starts with identifying our own beliefs and our own values. 

The soul  is a dynamic multiplicity, a cauldron of undifferentiated potential that makes no conscious/unconscious distinctions. Rather than encouraging us to transcend the personal and move toward the light, soul draws us down into the darkness, the ambiguity, linking us with our mortality, the ancestors, and the  inhuman -- our pre-civilized selves. The night-world of dreams is where the lines across the phenomenal field are not so clearly drawn. In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore) says, “soul” is not a thing but rather a dimension of experience. It is related to depth, to substance, and to relationship to the world (Moore, 1992).

The essential feature of a religion is its concern for the relation between humanity and the numinous. “Numinous experience” is divine energy breaking through a veil of familiarity, introducing new possibilities, showing familiar spirituality as only a starting point. Humankind is deeply rooted in the realm of the unconscious.

The monarch was divinized through appeal to numinous legitimacy. Creation of the cosmos by Sobek is the core myth of his cult. The myth functioned as the basis of numinous legitimacy for monarchic rule. Egyptian sovereigns were anointed with intoxicant-infused crocodile fat, creating the Pharaoh as a 'messiah,' or earthly representation of the numen of the reptile. 

The Sobek tradition began when the two realms of spirit and soul, upper and lower Egypt became as one. Egypt made the unconscious manifest in the world. The numinous is the eternal background of everyday existence. The de-centered Presence resides in the depths of the psyche.

Sobek and the Pharaoh could attain a numinous reality from connection with the numinous power represented by the animal god as a self-generating, self-sustaining force. A universal notion of the transcendent, supernatural, or numinous, usually involves entities or deities. A heightened sense of the numinous is an altered state of consciousness. 

We experience it as  the human capacity to move imaginally from one level of reality to another. Soul-like, quasi-soul-like, and soul-formed and psychoid were all ways in which Jung described the archetypes and the collective unconscious itself: "...the collective unconscious... represents a psyche that... cannot be directly perceived or 'represented'.  It has phylogenetic roots and spiritual expression. In itself, it is neither prepersonal or transpersonal.

The psychoid unconscious is the "place", as it were, where the opposites join and are mirror images of one another. The psychoid relates to states of immersion in an undifferentiated unconscious field, called primordial image, material activity into the realm of the unconscious. If the Dynamic Ground is inherently the psychoid unconscious, it is also the deepest level of the repressed unconscious. 

This ground is invisible, lost to consciousness, inherently unfathomable but not disconnected from consciousness. Ideomotor phenomenon is a psychological phenomenon where a subject makes motions unconsciously,, unconscious physical manifestations of mental events. responding; and, most importantly, an access to unconscious processes and material. 

As in reflexive responses to pain, the body sometimes reacts reflexively with an ideomotor effect to ideas alone without the person consciously deciding to take action. Muscular movements, these responses are unconscious, involuntary movements that initiate the processing of unconscious information.

These are not concepts, but deep experiences of archetypal reality by initiates who amplified their reality through myth and enactment. The Pharaoh as archetypal man is the prototype of all individuated initiates who undertake the journey through the unconscious leading while still in this life to a dimension where the profane and mortal mind may be transformed into the numinous and elevated.

A lesser religious state, also called the numinous, results when an intense focus on images causes the free flow of the visual association area of the brain in conjunction with stimulation of the limbic system which regulates emotions, causing fear, exaltation, or awe. 

A much bigger mystery is that it gives special importance to the  depiction of therianthropic entities, part human, part beast, for which no model exists, or has ever existed,  in the natural world. These, therefore, are depictions of supernatural beings. Truth is contained in archetypal facts that come in many divine incarnations, including the archetype of the immortal, directly inspired in certain initiates -- nonmaterial but existent experience, symbolic rather than literal truths.

Relations to various animals and plants are both numinous and real in a mythic environment. The numinous “truth” is conveyed by forms which then lead  to still deeper, numinous meanings. Direct encounter is revelatory insight. We are surrounded by an immeasurable abyss of darkness and splendor of the transcendent imagination that makes a powerful and numinous impact on any human who encounters it. The mysteries of all priest-kings are informed by the same archetype.

Passage to the next world begins in total darkness, so we can come back to the light in rebirth, absorbed into wisdom -- holistic interconnectedness and light-filled realms of spirit. The dark matrix is the concealed splendor or the undifferentiated Feminine numen, the world soul, the labyrinthine inner recesses of our own subconscious and consciousness minds where we are less aware. Spiritualized, the feminine depths are the Goddess of Wisdom, Isis or the Gnostic Sophia.

The dark as the subconscious is an entrance into the collective unconscious—that transpersonal repository or inner pool of the collective mind.  This is the abyss of our own being. Consciousness of the abyss seems to threaten to devour us. Because of the nature of our consciousness, the Abyss lies latent within all of us.  Visions light the way. It reveals the other reality of spirit and soul emerging from the collective unconscious, and reveals our interaction with it. The creative spirit descend to do its work behind the world of matter in the collective unconscious. Transformation simply moves energy from the unconscious to consciousness.

The dark is a portal into celestial and inner space itself — the space between subatomic particles of matter itself. The unconscious itself initiates the process of renewal. There is only one reality and it is inherently conscious, a consciousness in the unconscious -- paradoxically preconscious and superconscious. We attempt to find the sacred in our science as the Egyptians did with their science of the sacred. 

Sacred space and sacred  place differ through perceptual geography that includes coherence of aesthetics built on and out of homeland where the numinous transcends the profane, moving land into the sacred realm, thus becoming a landscape of the sacred. Without connection to some such lexicon of religious sensibility, no space earns the adjectival empowerment of ‘sacred’.”

Notions about the interface of psyche and matter also serve a symbolic function. If the unconscious is a magical powerhouse that speaks in symbols, our notion of the unconscious is also a symbol of the power of the primal field. Consciousness defines our existence and reality, which “emerges” as a novel property of complex interactions.

Nonlocal consciousness is not confined to specific points in space, including brains or bodies nor the present moment. It is an ordering principle that can inject information into disorganized or random systems. It can operate beyond mere awareness, unconsciously, drawing on individual and collective consciousness, as well as the world or environment. 

The psychoid realm is an intensely felt psycho-physical level of consciousness beyond the collective unconscious. When psyche and matter intersect, we see glimpses of a unitary reality, including the physical/metaphysical body.

"The archetypes are the numinous, structural elements of the psyche and possess a certain autonomy and specific energy which enables them to attract, out of the conscious mind, those contents which are best suited to themselves." (Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 344)

Coherence or resonance may be expressed as compassion, empathy, love, unity, oneness, and connectedness. Consciousness affects or informs human and nonhuman or inanimate forms alike. Psychoid meaning somehow essentially involves both psyche and matter. Psychoid functions are not capable of consciousnesss; we have only indirect knowledge. Jung's concept of quasi-psychic or psychoid archetypes offers a profoundly interconnected vision of reality. 

When we stand in the mystery of creation and look up at the skies or over the waters, we sense that our knowledge is but a pale reflection. Yet, as a unique reflection of cosmos, of all that is, we already have all we seek, already are more than we can imagine. The darkness of unknowing is a plenum of information.  When we fully embrace the world each and every given moment, the unknown comes and stands beside us. Lightning illuminates our path. The way to keep a path alive is to walk on it.

When we empty ourselves of the contents of our consciousness, we find the mystery of our own incarnation. We are alive in awe and wonder, in the sacred waters of dreaming, without unnecessary mystification, tolerating ambiguity and the Unknown. We enter a wildness without maps which opens a wildness within. Our passions and creativity live in our primal and loving relations with others. We are left to describe and experience how the archaic form Sobek can be both material and transcendent, mortal and divine, earthly and cosmic. 

A 'pregnant darkness' is the presence of the divine hand at work in our psyche. We cope with our darkest hours by fostering a connection with deeper currents of life. Those psyche-matter mysteries give life form and meaning that breaths new life into us through heart-felt openings. Reconciliation of our shadow darkness and conflicts of opposites ushers in a softer illumination and renewed shining.


The dark-adapted eye of the soul deconstructs or displaces our everyday modes with rich and sensuous ways of seeing and illuminates our blind spots. We must work with both paradoxical aspects of nature and of ourselves, symbolical and experiential, to accomplish true transformation.

In The Pregnant Darkness, Wikman writes: “The mental work and understanding feeds another mystery, the mystery of the heart, where the being of light resides” (p. 161). Our work changes the way we live with ourselves, with others, with the divine and the world around us. Process transformation brings up the ethical consideration of how to live from the perspective of the wisdom revealed from the deep psyche.

As the necessary death before transformation and rebirth, this is the dark heart of the entire process -- the black light of psyche. Marlan says the Black Sun (Sol Niger) was one of the best-kept secrets in alchemy and intrinsic to nature of the psyche and subtle-body experiences.

Considered a source of great transformational power, it is basically a symbol of unconscious energy. To realize our true selves, we traverse the depths of our souls, ensnared in darkness, and come back. The landscapes of the soul are the psycho-cosmic domains of imaginal geography. Creating helps us dissolve the hardened defenses we build into ourselves.


The Nature of Embodiment

Nature Is. Pure being. Sheer essence. And the great human paradox is that we are too; we exist. The ancient Egyptians memorialized embodiment. The Pharaohs as Sobek Dragons were a cosmic link to the celestial realm. Every mundane action had a corresponding cosmic act, including cosmic consciousness. 

The self never experiences matter directly, but only experiences only phenomenal presentations to consciousness. Only by means of a hermeneutical circle involving the interpretation of entities in terms of pre-existent, categorial frameworks that we acquire the means by which we may develop new frameworks. Nature is not dead or inert, but pregnant with information.

Every image is a kind of knowledge and wisdom that opens the play of ontological models. Plotinus taught each god comes only from the whole and is part and whole at once.... This life is wisdom, wisdom not acquired by reasonings, because it was always all present” (ibid. V.8.4). We see in Plotinus a final collapse between the material and the ideal worlds. True wisdom  is a substance, and the true substance is wisdom.

The core myth is rooted in our central nervous system. Somatic reality is the myth. The body is a given and the myth is given by the body, as the basic truth of the impulse of the cycle of existence. The psychoid, a deep, inaccessible level of the collective unconscious is where the archetypes not only emanate from the psyche, but from the physical as well. Synchronicities suggest that archetypes of meaning erupt into what the conscious mind apprehends as time and momentarily connects psyche and physis through a meaningful symbol. Instinct and spirit are psychic and extrapsychic (psychoid). 

The structure of the world is intuitively informing us all the time as an instinct of imagination. The psychoid strata can be equated with a generative yet undifferentiated source that undergirds the collective unconscious. When archetypes are experienced by an individual they are often expressed through dreams and fantasies or through a conscious process. 

Physicist David Bohm's multi-dimensional model of reality treats the whole of existence, including matter and consciousness, as an unbroken whole: Neither wholly physical (soma) nor psychic, it transcends both. Bohm introduced the word, 'soma-significance', to replace 'psychosomatic'. He suggests it implies a false dualism, two separate entities -- mind and body -- which interact. Energy can become matter and matter can become energy.

Soma-significance emphasizes the holistic unity of body and significance or meaning. Bohm envisions an imminent unified field theory of reality. Human consciousness is prior to the definable forms of thoughts and ideas. We can see them form and dissolve in the flux, like ripples, waves and vortices in a flowing stream. We have no control over the collective psyche, the dynamic totality of all conscious and unconscious psychic processes. It is a self-organizing process with its own structure and flow (archetypes and dynamics).

Bohm describes the flow of meaning:  just as water naturally tends to flow towards the sea,  meaning naturally tends to flow towards a state of coherence. The flow and what flows is the stream of consciousness. The stream of consciousness has to be aware of itself. 

We can feel a sense of flow in the stream of consciousness much like we sense flow in the movement of matter or energy  in general. The flow of energy washes life and consciousness into the world; consciousness washes energy and life into the world, by immersion in the flow of psychic imagery. Imagination flows through us, welling up from our core as a flow state. Dreams offer deeper insight into the truth about ourselves, a way of exploring both internal and external hindrances to flow and unbroken wholeness.

In the soma-significant and signa-somatic flow, meaning and being become one another. The flow between various levels of subtle and manifest can be described as the apprehension of the meanings of meaning, a process which, he suggests, may lead on to a grasp of very subtle meanings in a flash of insight. Soma-significance regards the field of reality as a whole, as an unbroken flow. Meaning is carried somatically in chemical, electrical, and photonic processes. 

Meaning becomes more subtle, elusive and intangible. The subtle contrasts with the manifest that gives rise to it. This principle extends to indefinitely deep and subtle levels of significance -- infinite manifolds of inherent meaning. We meet with a certain content first on a certain level and again and again on deeper levels of relationship, in a structure that continues indefinitely -- a sort of existential fractal cascades of irreducible meaning. It is a mystery of meaning that “both nature and mind as we experience it (…) share a basic over-all process which is an extension of soma-significant and signa-somatic activity."

“The notion of soma-significance implies that soma (or the physical) and its significance (which is mental) are not separate in the sense that soma and psyche are generally considered to be; rather they are two aspects of one overall indivisible reality. By such an aspect, we mean a kind of view or a way of looking. That is to say, it is a form in which the whole of reality appears (i.e., displays or unfolds), either in our perception or in our thinking. Clearly, each aspect reflects and implies the other (so that the other shows in it). Although we describe these aspects by using different words, we imply that they are both revealing one unbroken whole of reality, as it were from different sides.  ...A level that is mainly somatic may have a significance, which is carried into the next more subtle level of soma, which has a further significance.” (Bohm, “Soma-Significance”).

On the Timeless Banks of the Nile

So begins our sojourn through nonlocal Egypt, a search for significance. Somehow, though we don't know how, we are entangled with it already. Ancient Egypt is a realm of the soul, of the imagination, of the celestial sphere -- but also the ancestors and our own body. Imaginal Egypt is the liminal repository of submerged memories. While the ancient culture suffered context collapse at the end of the dynasties with loss of political control, the natural forces represented by the Neters lives on. 

Animism/nature worship  is primal religion. A response to and a belief in life in other forms is animistic thinking. Animism is the religious belief that objects, places and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. Animism not only concerned higher cosmic forces and earth energy but the souls of those who had died. Death was just a doorway to another form of existence. 

Potentially, animism perceives all things—animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, human handiwork and perhaps even words—as animated and alive.  Anima Mundi is the universal animating principle, the upwelling spring of the creative imagination, the dynamic flow of imagery, pattern, and form.

Sacred Power 

In pre-dynastic times, religion was largely animistic. They considered certain animals, plants and geographic features to be the homes of spirits. Many Ancient Egyptian gods are represented by totemic animals based on the ancient understanding of the role or characteristic of the animal. he worship, however, was not, except in a few instances, paid to them as actual deities. The animals were merely regarded as sacred to the deities, and the worship paid to them was symbolical. 

The animistic worldview contains both the observed or physical world and the unseen or spirit world. There is no sharp distinction between the two realities in this holistic view. What happens in one affects the other. The worlds of the seen and the unseen are interconnected. Extreme care is taken to maintain the harmony between the two worlds. Through animism, the belief that all objects on earth have consciousness and a personality, the earliest Egyptians sought to explain natural forces and the role human beings played in the patterns of existence. 

Animism defined “spirits” in creatures and in nature and included awareness of the power of the dead There are sacred places, things, and actions; sacred words and sacred persons, sacred healers, rituals, magic, and divination. The seen or physical world consists of what we can see, feel, and experience. It includes forces of nature and physical beings. Important in animism is the remembrance of the ancestors. Animism teaches that people possess immortal souls and a potential afterlife.

Today, a soulful approach to the World Soul, anima mundi, is similar, "as if", though more metaphorical than literal or concrete. The term Animism is derived from the Latin anima, meaning "soul". In its most general sense, animism is simply the belief in souls. In this general sense, animism is present in nearly all religions. 

In a more restrictive sense, animism is the belief that souls inhabit all or most objects. The old doctrine of Animism, anima, soul; anima mundi, the soul of the world — has in some form come down through all the past. Plato thoughts the force immaterial but inseparable from matter (anima mundi) which gives the latter form and movement. 

Today we have theories of panpsychism and panprotopsychism. Consciousness may be intrinsic to matter. Or, consciousness may exist in the universe without depending at all on anything physical. It is a "fundamental property" of the universe, like gravity. 

In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that consciousness, mind or soul (psyche) is a universal and primordial feature of all things. Panpsychism suggests that everything in the universe might be conscious, or at least potentially conscious, or conscious in certain configurations. Panprotopsychism postulates that fundamental physical entities are proto-conscious. Some fundamental physical entities have protophenomenal properties (Chalmers).

Panprotopsychism is the view that fundamental physical entities are proto-conscious. Such arguments are summarized in philosophical notions of Panprotopsychism and Panexperientialism, which describe emergence of primal non-conscious processes. Panprotopsychism suggests proto-consciousness may exist in the universe as a “fundamental property” without depending at all on anything physical. all energy manifestations have a ‘subjective’ aspect.

This canon suggests, by focusing on experience rather than mentality, panexperientialism avoids some of the traditional objections to panpsychism. Absolute space is the noumenal source of phenomenal consciousness, a fundamental quality, and Mind is a higher order hyperspace field outside brain's EM field. Fundamental proto-consciousness finds more particular expression when matter comes together in a certain way. But we still cannot explain consciousness.

The old myths still play a fundamental role in our psychic life of spiritualized matter and materialized spirit. It is the basis of all magic, sympathetic response, synchronicity, invocation, visualization, correspondences. The translation comes through the process of kindling a response. 

The psychoid archetype at the level of the unconscious is where psyche and nature are one, deeply unconscious embodied structures and processes. What precedes the image of the empty archetype, is a movement of energy out of what Jung describes as the psychoid character of the collective unconscious. The psychoid is the meeting-point of mind and matter, which remains an area of mystery. The psychoid archetype is used as core concept to explain the union of matter and spirit/mind which can manifest in a synchronicity. 

Transition to this ‘space’ can inflict dread of erasure, a blanking of mind, as well as joy of abundance, of freedom from encumbrance, of soul to be lived. Matter and mind are both objective and subjective complementarities, and at the psychoid level are reflective of each other. It is in the flow of these complementarities and achieving balance between these, that can create meaningful and purposeful lives. 

The unconscious merges with the body in the psychoid. The psychoid is defined as a realm “beyond apprehension,” that “precedes conscious experience” (Jacobi, 1959). Aspects of the psyche beyond the “threshold” of our conscious perception are“psychoid” processes at work both in the “subconscious” as well as the “superconscious.”

In Psyche (1846), Carl Gustav Carus distinguished  three levels of the unconscious: 1) absolute and unknowable; a type of pre-conscious which influences our emotional life through the vital organs of the body. 2) Consciousness may affect this level of the unconscious, like a person’s face and body can reflect their personality. 3)  the repressed material – once conscious feelings, representations and perceptions subsequently become unconscious (subconscious, personal unconscious). 

At the boundary of psyche there is a psychoid area, psyche-like but not limited to subjectivity. It is both inside and outside of the psyche. Jung's notion of the objective psyche embraces a space that is beyond the usual subject-object, inner-outer dichotomy and includes parapsychological phenomena.

Research shows, the psychoid nature of the archetype is a function of an organically anchored archetype/primordial image analogous to implicit, dormant neural ensembles/representations in the body. These underlying representations or images activate cognitive/spirit and emotional/matter processes, and energy charges ideas, emotions, and feelings, either separately or together. (von Eggers)

Images are then released, producing cognitive and/or emotional responses. Ambiguous energy charges are responsible for less complete cognitive, emotional, or feeling images, observable in unfinished sentences, phrases, words, and pauses in narration. The analysis also discovered how spiritual material supports the suggestion that cognitive and emotional processes are present at the same time in a psychophysical process releasing images, which produce thoughts, emotions, and feelings.

Neuro-Gnosis

Neurognosis has evolved over millions of years of hominid phylogenesis. Neurognosis is a technical term used in biogenetic structuralism to refer to the initial organization of the experiencing and cognizing brain. All neurophysiological models comprising an individual's cognized environment develop from these nascent models which exist as the initial, genetically determined neural structures.  

Neurognosis refers to the initial, inherited organization of neural models from which more developed models grow. The world of experience and knowledge, termed the cognized environment, develops from neurognostic structures in the brain. The concept of neurognosis describes the inherited structures and processes mediating the structural properties of consciousness. 

The course by which the nervous system comes to know about self and world is a well ordered one from beginning to end. The neural networks constituting our knowledge and experience have their developmental origin in initial neurognostic* structures that are present before, at, or just after birth. Our genes provide neurognostic structures and endogenous healing responses. 

Neurognostic structures are the initial structural and functional organization of neural networks for representing information, which provide the basis for behavior and mind. The neurognostic structures correspond somewhat to Carl Jung's archetypes -- to the essential unknowability of the archetypes-in-themselves, 

Laughlin, McManus, and d'Aquili (1992) characterize the archetypes in terms of neurognostic structures, the neurological foundations of our innate mechanisms for knowing the world. Cosmology is embedded within and organizes the particular culture's cosmic world view. The universal cosmology is expressed in mythical stories that penetrate to the neurognostic structures of the young brain. Neurognosis is potentiated for development and through the course of a lifetime.

It refers to the initial, inherited organization of neural models from which more developed models grow -- the world of experience and knowledge. Neurognostic models account for the ways all humans are alike. Neurognostic structures are present in the pre- and perinatal nervous system, and because they are comprised of living cells, they function as soon as they grow and become interconnected (1991). (Laughlin l99l. l996: Laughlin and d'Aquili l974:83: Laughlin et al. l990:44—75). The term also applies to the genetically conditioned development of these structures. In other words, neurognosis refers to both the initial organization and function of neural models and their connections.

They are precursors of the psychoid unconscious, the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious. Unlike the strenuous efforts of the conscious mind, the psychoid uses little energy and thus does not ‘need rest’ like consciousness. It is the source of healing for the mind and body, and it is through the unconscious that we remain in connection with the rest of the world and other individuals. The psychoid archetype is the progressive synthesis of instinct and spirit. To Jung, instinct was the innate pattern of human behavior and spirit was the innate pattern of meaning ascribed to life events. 

Jung suggested a universal psychoid field, even more foundational than the unconscious. The building blocks of life are not devoid of psychoid responsiveness which goes all the way down to inorganic 'entities'. Every particle of reality is entangled and potentially responsive at the psychoid level. He linked it neurologically in Mysterium Coniunctionis: ‘deepest down of all, [is] the paradox of the sympathetic and parasympathetic psychoid  processes’ (Jung 1955-56, para. 279).

All of reality just is psychoid, psyche-like, or proto-psychic as an interactive ecology that is non-local and synchronistic. Jung's theory of synchronicity is based on the psychoid and archetypal patterning of events. Two or more simultaneous unrelated events have the same or similar meaning. Jung elevates the numinous character of an archetype to a 'psychoid factor that belongs to the invisible end of the psychic spectrum. Psychoid nature extends beyond neuronal-physiology into dynamical patterns of all matter and energy.

The psychoid archetype which was the progressive synthesis of instinct and spirit. To Jung, instinct was the innate pattern of human behavior and spirit was the innate pattern of meaning that was ascribed to life events. Transpersonal phenomena have a psychoid nature as hybrids of the twilight zone between consciousness and matter. Protean psychoid events transcend mechanistic models of consciousness. Their elusiveness is an inherent characteristic, a kind of transformative interface between psyche and matter. 

Synchronicity means the objective situation coincides with an unconscious image made directly conscious from a dream, idea, or premonition. Phenomena include synchronicities, spontaneous psychoid events that influence physical reality, and psychophysical anomalies, even siddhis, magic, and spontaneous physical healing. The “psychoid archetype” grounds the psyche in biology. The psychoid expands the definition of the collective unconscious to include all of the natural living world. 

Psychoid Unconsciousness

Matter is subtly sentient, or psyche could not emerge at every level of material complexity. The psychoid processes that make up life, intentionality, and sentience belong to matter itself, down to molecules and atoms. Whitehead claimed the physical pole is the established past, while the mental pole is the living, choosing, feeling present. Giveness meets the concrescence of the moment. This is world of 'feeling',  or feeling responsiveness, not 'thinking.' The mental pole of the universe, its psychoid capacity, helps us feel the immediate past of the cosmos.

For Jung, 'psychoid' denoted a life-force in the world which is 'mind-like', that is, non-spatial, intensive and qualitative rather than spatial, extensive and quantitative. Jung's psychoid realm has three qualities: 1) The psychoid is level of the unconscious completely inaccessible to consciousness, because its real nature is transcendent; 2) It has a paradoxical liminal qualities neither wholly psychological or physiological; 3) It is expressed in the mind/body connection.

Psychoid responsiveness must go “all the way down” to the most inorganicseeming of entities. Anything less, and we make living processes an exception to universal physical principles. In our view, Jung's psychoid argument implies that everything that is, every particle of reality, is responsive in the psychoid sense.

This deeper layer of the unconscious underlies any archetypal image. It retains its character at all stages of development, though empirically it is capable of endless variations. Jung postulates archetype as a psychoid entity. The archetypes are psychoid, partaking of both a spiritual and physical nature as well as having a transcendent dimension. Naturally, this includes Sobek as the Egyptian prototype of the Primordial Man-God.

"Psyche is essentially conflict between blind instinct and will  (freedom of choice). Where instinct predominates, psychoid  processes set in which pertain to the sphere of the unconscious as elements incapable of consciousness. The psychoid process is not the unconscious as such, for this has a far greater extension."  ["On the Nature of the Psyche,"CW8, par. 380.]

This layer is not accessible in any way to consciousness but Jung felt it may play a part in, for example, synchronistic events. Nobel laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Embracing Jung's concept, Pauli believed that the archetype provided a link between physical events and the mind. https://holographicarchetypes.weebly.com/synchronicity.html

Jung claimed the psychoid layer undergirds the collective unconscious and all matter and thus functions as a mediator between the psychic and material planes, much like the image. Psychoid is more fundamental than matter and psyche and the basis of synchronicity. The psychoid layer is a realm where the boundaries of the physical and psychic realms dissolve so that a larger encompassing boundary becomes apparent. Jung regarded the psychoid archetype as proto-mental, non-psychic, and transcendent.

To Jung, the archetypes emerged from a lower unconscious realm universally subtending the psyche: "... the phenomenon of archetypal configurations - which are psychic events par excellence - may be founded upon a psychoid base, that is, upon an only partially psychic and possibly altogether different form of being. ...But in so far as the archetypes act upon me, they are real and actual to me, even though I do not know what their real nature is" (Jung 1963 384).

Part of our inherent environment is the psychoid realm of the archetype, the hidden, chthonic foundation of consciousness -- the dark, maternal, earthy ground of the unconscious psyche. Psyche and matter merge into synchronicity in this hidden foundation. The psychoid field imposes holistic function. Autonomous inner forces arouse compelling opportunities to enact archetypal behaviors. 

In a psychoid realm mind/matter meld subjective and objective into a unity, the vast non-human action of the universal forces. Psychoid phenomena manifest through the mingling of these modes. Synchronicity is the core of the world and human existence, a special case macroscopic expression of microcosmic entanglement, coherence, and superposition. It is a unique expression of the metaphor-forming process, manifesting as uniquely magical, uncanny or unnerving moments. 

Here mind/matter duality ceases, creating enchantment, uncanny synchronicities, time warps, psychic experience, revelation of the mind of matter, the Nature Mind. Archetypes guide our perceptions and behavior, usually without our awareness. The archetype manifests itself on the level of material substance, on the level of human psychology as well as on the level of physical pathology. 

“Our deepest darknesses are pregnant with incredible life energy. Cultivating a living relationship with the mysteries of the psyche and psychoid depends on our ability to of into the darkness, dim the light of the ego, and attend to what appears.  We descend into the darkness voluntarily when we meditate or engage in any kind of spiritual practice, dream work, active imagination, shamanic journeying, creative endeavor, and so on.  We descend involuntarily through depression and crises, such as health problems, loss of love, loss of position, and so on. […] “both of these paths, the active one where we court the soul, and the one in which crisis pulls us into the psyche, can lead us to the source of transformation and renewal.” Monika Wikman, Pregnant Darkness: Alchemy and the Rebirth of Consciousness

The psychoid field imposes holistic function. The psychoid level of archetypes is analogous to the heritable DNA biohologram. According to Jung, psyche is not different from matter at the psychoid or psychophysical ground level. The psychoid nature of archetypes extends beyond a neurophysiological basis into the general dynamical patterns of all matter and energy. 

Jung summarized his notion of a 'metaphysical substance': ‘Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable even that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing’(Jung 1947, para, 418).

Entangled Lives

Such phenomena are undeveloped and uncoordinated. It is an area of experience where bodily sensations are symbolic, sometimes represented through very primitive sensations, proto-symbols and psychosomatic metacommunications which are felt both inside us and also simultaneously around us in relationships. (Clark, 1996)

Our ancestors live on in our genetic material that embodies an unceasing stream or ocean of human ancestry -- our inherited possibilities. We discover them in our life pattern, dreams, beliefs, and symptoms. Jung associated the inherited ancestral material with the autonomic nervous system within a powerful, unconscious, dynamic, timeless totality. Jung asserted that the body’s ancestral, psychoid heritage reaches back to the most archaic lifeforms.

Our consciousness oscillates between form and formlessness. The gravitational field in empty space is zero; with QM it oscillates, due to the quantum fluctuations. Time and space help us perceive reality but they are also formidable obstacles to complete reality perception. 

Reality is flashing in and out of existence at Planck time – 1044 times per second, the smallest units of space (length) and time apparent in our universe. Our reality oscillates between form and the pure energy state of the field. Our awareness is constant so doesn’t flash in and out of existence. It informs the reappearance of the field when it makes its transition back to form at the quantum level.

The Egyptians lived in a radically different paradigm, a different reality. The idea of nonlocal consciousness is universal through time, culture, and geography. It is likely rooted in personal experiences. The non-physiological aspect of consciousness is called nonlocal consciousness, which manifests in the phenomena of quantum entanglement and an integral map of cosmos and consciousness. We are part of a matrix of life, but more fundamentally, space time itself arises from consciousness, not consciousness from spacetime. (Schwartz, A Reality Based on Consciousness)

Spiritual teachers from all traditions have spoken of reality as a limitless, transcendent and holistic consciousness, fundamental properties of our consciousness. Egypt reminds us that archaic man has a sense of being embedded within a great universe of life and in direct interactive relationship with this whole.

Enlightened individuals have been called by many names including avatars, mystics, sages, saints, gurus and shamans. The least we can say is that Pharaohs were in quantum entanglement with their sacred land and their unique people. The Priest-King and the land were one and that included the celestial realm. The astronomical vastness of space is undergirded by consciousness as are the gaps between our atoms.

By whatever name they have been called, all held a similar world view --living harmoniously in balance with nature and one’s fellow humans and recognizing the interconnectedness and interdependence of all creation. Resurrected pharaohs may have enjoyed such a state -- infinite consciousness beyond substance, a nonlocal phenomenon of a universal Being. One unites with the nondual, transphysical field, a a superposition of possibilities. He stood for the source field that connects us all --resonating collective consciousness.

Nonlocal mind erupts spontaneously, surprising, even shocking us.  The mind has ultra-dimensional qualities seemingly unlimited by physical constraints.  Psi phenomena concern organism-environment interactions in which it appears that information or influence has occurred that cannot be explained through current models of sensory-motor channels. 

Myth has not only its "active period of psychic eruption and imaginative overflow, but also its subsequent period of extinction and disintegration." A later form of extinct myth will differ greatly from the earlier expression of the active period and may retain little of the tension-imagery. An archetype inevitably succumbs to metaphysical concretism, the tendency to view phenomena literally rather than metaphorically, too. The qualitative aspect it appears in clings to it, so that it cannot be described at all except in terms of its specific phenomenology.

Sobek represents the primordial or creator god coming, as the crocodile does, from the depths of the murky Nile. Sobek describes processes that occur both in the universe and in our unconscious human psyche. We can experience Sobek as a state of mind and psychic function. The Egyptians equated their concrete conception of the underworld with a psychic realm of mystery and death. They relied on concrete observation and intuitive thought. Sobek as Pharaoh is the Original Man.

It is the mostly unconscious instinctive human tie to symbolic fantasy and mythic emanations leading to literalisms and concretism, the attempt to turn the imaginal into events where there is little capacity for metaphor. Mythological motifs project themselves into situations and objects, including other persons. Everything unconscious about ourselves is projected.

Jung's concept of concretism, which is the opposite of differentiating abstraction, is also closely related to participation mystique. The mythical world is concrete because in it the two main factors, thing and signification are undifferentiated. Here for the first time the image world acquires a purely immanent validity and truth.  

Concretism is a participation mystique -- taking psychological events as actually, literally, concretely real. Concretism obscures the light and blocks the movement of fantasy. A pure spark of reflective life must be kept intact at all costs. Spontaneous insight ignites the capacity to imagine life and not only be driven by it. Thus for the first time the world of images becomes a self-contained cosmos ... severing its bonds with immediate reality, with material existence and efficacy which constitute the world of magic and myth; it embodies a new step.

Embodying Sobek

"In reality a darkness altogether different from natural light broods over the land. It is the psychic primal night which is the same today as it has been for countless millions of years. The longing for light is the longing for consciousness." 
(Memories, Dreams, and Reflections by C.G. Jung). 

The primordial Dragon-Pharaoh, identified as Sobek, exists in the unconscious. Our task is to resurrect him through deep understanding. They are alive in the way we live, and are not elsewhere. The Hebrew word messiah ("anointed one") comes from the ancient Egyptian word MeSSeh, the king anointed with oil containing crocodile fat that is poured over his head during the coronation process. The ancient world of mystery was apprehended by the unconscious mind. The way of transcendence is self-discovery.

The tale of our genesis is our prima materia (cosmic egg, oroboros) and our ultima materia, the unknown and self- knowledge. Our reflection deepens beyond mere surface mirroring. To go deep into our own “dark waters” -- the unseen wavelike infinite spirit -- we must trust the unconscious mind, letting go of identity, thoughts, and concepts. 

The waves we are actually concerned with is wave-particle duality as an oscillation. We concentrate our mind, making it smooth and empty, so our wavelike spirit can taste the flowing waves. All true creativity springs from the unknown, from a deep wellspring of flowing forth. Creativity involves a sense of discovery and epiphany, of realization as well as shaping of media. 

“Emergence” is the process by which order appears spontaneously within a system. This perilous adventure is a dangerous descent into the dark world of the unconscious -- a major life transition. We may find ourselves inundated with emotional flooding. We are descending to a more primordial level of self-awareness, a slower brainwave. At this deeper sensory level, images appear that appear solid, or ugly sensations and colors, or perhaps odors or sounds, monsters or evil creatures of cold and dark. These are energies that keep us in bounds, and trapped in our habits.

We inhale and exhale smoothly, so our body becomes majestic and serene. We want to plunge deep into our reflections on human experience. We may find ourselves immersed in despair and meaninglessness. Recognizing the moment, we realize that 'oh, this is the moment' and we go deep down into something and it gets scary; then we come out of it and can go back down into it later. 

Ego cannot separate itself from the powers and abilities of the subconscious and its indistinguishable metaphors. Metaphors are manifolds of multiple meanings. This is the underlying and initial experience of our explicit and unique confrontation with the unconscious. The soul dives into the depths for its own sake. This part of life isn't certain or comfortable. To submit this material to the process means to apply conscious effort to the task, and find our own experiential spirituality. 

Prima Materia represents the crossroads or crisis preceding a spiritual awakening (intellectual doubts, metaphysical problems). Its object of this darkness of the soul is the restoration of the whole person, who emerges transformed and complete. 

We're simply trying to sort something out. Thus, prima materia, raw uncooked emotion, is the seed of the process, which takes place in the natural mind; it is the seed of enlightenment. We need to recognize the difference between information and experience. We need to inform our sense of reality from the basis of experience not information.

We don't have to interpret our images, or make symbols out of them, but form a living relationship with them, with that mighty stream of consciousness we can poetically liken to the Nile or even the celestial river of the Milky Way. Our therapeutic method is more magical than rational, more a process of discovery, or an initiation.

Natural Magic

In Egypt magic was part of nature. Magic is a technology of natural philosophy. Universal principles reflect natural laws. The knowledge of the secrets of nature was central to magic, a field with an ambiguous relationship to natural philosophy. Natural magic was an ideology as much as it was a natural philosophy. Alchemy is a natural magic. Egyptian thinking was concrete, rooted in immediate, tangible experience.

Prima materia, or first matter, is the ubiquitous starting material required for the alchemical magnum opus and the creation of the philosopher's stone, self-realization. It is the primitive formless base of all matter similar to chaos, the quintessence, or aether. Some called it an inner spark, others chaos, some blood, but ultimately it's the spark inside of us, own own inner light that guides us to our true purpose. 

If a natural philosopher wanted to describe and understand nature, a practitioner of magic wanted to investigate it and its occult properties in order to work with natural forces. Hermetic philosophers, such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, focused on the means by which the truth of nature and being could be revealed by observing and examining the symmetries between man, the world, and the universe.

We can make a more spiritual and more soulful world if we appreciate the power of ordinary things to affect our emotions and sense of meaning. Through magic, we bring the heart into play and become directly able to see the most ordinary aspects of daily life as sacred. This raw material includes our symptoms, problems, wild undulating melancholy, and terrible inclinations which form the basis of transformation. 

The raw material has to be cooked, to take some time to become part of our heart and soul. But it doesn't all have to be cooked. There are things we work on many times but are never finished. The elemental nature is the four-fold nature of the prima materia is expressed by the four functions which correspond with the alchemical elements: intuition (fire), thinking (air), feeling (water), and sensation (earth).

We can only watch patiently and let things happen. This promotes healing through the imagination and reconnection with primordial source. The soul vanishes into the shape of things. It is a form of meditation, like the alchemical meditatio, in which psyche "matters." Through imaginal consciousness we affirm our ground. A spirituality of our own increases our security, peace, inner guidance and connects us to natural magic. 

Every temple in Egypt and Greece was a veritable storehouse of natural magic. Feeling nature as an opening for spirituality. Thomas Moore suggests, "By bringing together seemingly divergent practices of science and magic, and applying them to leading edge subject matter, we can uncover a more expansive and evolutionary truth.

The idea of man as microcosm, representing in all his parts the earth or the universe, is a remnant of an original psychic identity, which reflected a twilight state of consciousness, according to Jung. This primordial man has taken many forms throughout history, including that of the Sobek dragon/crocodile as Pharaoh, who was the living god, converted to a cult on his transformation to the netherworld..

By meditation, the alchemists explicitly mean an inner dialogue, a living relationship to the answering voice of the “Other' within us, the unconscious. The unconscious potential state leads to a manifest one -- the hidden image of unconscious imagination. The modality of unconscious states is sensory imagining. It is a way of sorting things out. Unconscious imagining is going on in perception, generally.

In all temples, Pharaoh was the officiating high priest. Pharaoh, as an anointed dragon/crocodile, can be understood as an archetypal idea of the "Perfect Man." A being accomplishing the ultimate spiritualization is a Self-realized human being. The word "sovereign" was written with the hieroglyph of a crocodile that protected the Pharaoh from dark magic. Sobek is a beast who never sleeps, a beast whose eyes are seen in the mirror of knowledge. 

We will discuss the aspects of Nature, our nature, and our cosmos represented by the Neter, the divine name and principle of Sobek. The Ancient Egyptian ceremonial order is a gigantic effort to symbolize the process by which Pharaoh (Self-realization) exists and endures. When studied as such, these various rituals are archetypal ideas in action and universal.

In a Jungian approach, the Egyptian deities are archetypal ideas. The whole of  Egyptian religion is the manifestation of various systems of archetypal ideas (Ennead or "companies of gods"). Myths and theological systems reveal psychic phenomena, i.e. collective & subjective (Ancient Egyptian) perceptions of objective natural events, rather than observation of facts. It hints at an unseen presence, a numen unconditioned by human expectations. It lives of itself.

This is especially so for the ante-rational mind and the Egyptian deities, who, together with the hidden, fused, and precreational Atum, are born, rise, go under and are reborn. For Jung, experience of a supernatural being originated in a projection, a reflection of aspects "of the unconscious," or psychological realities from within.  It is out of this primordial fusion state ("ground-unconscious") that the separate self emerges. Unborn consciousness slumbers in the primordial -- an undifferentiated fusion of ego and soul.

Atum, Amun, or Ra is often referred to as the first deity that sprung from Nun and Neith. This primordial god of Heliopolis swims as a serpent in the sea of Nun before the creation and at the end of time. This sea is more of a plenum, plasma, or undifferentiated fusion of the prime material. Non-differentiation  is oceanic consciousness.  The "oceanic feeling" refers to the sensation of being one with the universe. Two other self-engendered gods existed,  less popular perhaps due to their destructive qualities -- the violent twin brothers Sobek and Apep. 

Atum is essentially a fugue-state, primordial fusion. A dissociative disorder, the fugue state is an altered state of consciousness in which a person may move about purposely and even speak, but is not fully aware. A fugue state is usually a type of complex partial seizure. The French word "fugue" means "running away" or "flights of fancy". 

A reversible amnesia, those in the fugue state are unaware that they've lost their identity and memory. This experience does not include necessarily, but may include empirically, states of fusion  (massive projective identification, participation mystique) as part of observable experience -- a recapitulation of the infant.

There is a certain part of us that is not conscious and from which a depth of innate self-generated wisdom arises. Naturally, reptiles are among the oldest creatures on our planet. People have believed in reptile guides and protectors since ancient times. They have been used as animal totems in many cultures throughout history. The crocodile/dragon is foremost among them. An unconscious substructure  lies beyond the reach of conscious perception..... the feeling of oneness (or fusion/merger/union) with one's entire surroundings. 

Because he had no Graeco-Roman correspondence, the cult of the god Sobek in the Faiyum kept its indigenous character. Hieratic texts from AD 135, of the ‘Glorification of Sobek’, suggest the Fayum lake as the epicenter of creation by the god Sobek. In processions of major festivals like the Soucheia each year.

The god was carried on a bier by pastophoroi, accompanied by priests in full regalia, with incense, flowers, and hymns. The flowers reveal a “sacred botany,” a sensuous reality and specific content, symbolizing the flowering of the imagination as rooted living forms. All the ritual forms are psychosensual triggers, ways of keeping company with heavenly beings, indicating a blossoming of psychic relationship.

Sobek relates to awakening our senses and raising our level of awareness, like the water of the Nile.  Originally, a water god, Sobek is the Nile itself, whose annual flood was a Mystery in ancient times. As such, he was the lifeblood of ancient Egypt. The degree of approaching floods was predicted by how high above the high-water mark females laid their eggs. Pleasing Sobek meant that the river would continue to bless the land and its people. This is not a mundane but a mythic crocodile, identified with and embodied in every ferocious Pharaoh. We will discuss powerful initiations once practiced in the name of Sobek.

Fierce and voracious, the terrifying predator Sobek was both feared and revered from archaic Egypt, through the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, through the Graeco-Roman period. The crocodile cult supposedly began with the Pharaoh Menes, the legendary unifier of Upper and Lower Egypt. The crocodile/dragon embodies the raw psychic energy of the unconscious and relates to a number of human concerns -- death, rebirth, healing, immortality, knowledge, wisdom, and wealth. The Egyptians sowed the seeds of regeneration in themselves.

Instinctive Psyche

Sobek can be correlated with certain physical structures and body processes, derived from our primal instincts and archaic functioning. The earliest brain to develop was the reptilian brain, responsible for survival instincts. The behaviors of the reptilian brain are largely unconscious and automatic, and highly resistant to change. The true decision-maker is the Reptilian Brain, the subconscious mind The cerebellum receives and coordinates information from the sensory systems, the spinal cord, and other parts of the brain.

The reptilian brain is reliable but tends to be somewhat rigid and compulsive. The base of the brain contains the cerebellum, and it directly connects to the spinal cord (or brainstem). A withdrawal of the thinking mind from the senses involves going into a deep cerebellar state of trance. This brain layer does not learn very well from experience but is inclined to repeat instinctual habits. The cerebellum can be obsessive. The Brain Stem evolved over 500 million years ago; the Cerebellum evolved approximately 400 million years ago. 

The 'sea' of the hindbrain is the 4th ventricle. The fourth ventricle is one of the four connected fluid-filled cavities within the human brain. These cavities, known collectively as the ventricular system, consist of the left and right lateral ventricles, the third ventricle, and the fourth ventricle. The main function of this ventricle is to protect the human brain from trauma (via a cushioning effect).

The reptile brain can be divided into 3 sections: the forebrain (olfactory nerve and bulb, cerebrum, pineal complex, pituitary), the midbrain (optic tectum), and hindbrain (cerebellum, pons, choroid plexus, medulla). The forebrain includes both the telencephalon and diencephalon and is a neural center for smell, taste, and . Protoreptilian formation includes the brainstem and the cerebellum, as well as some of the oldest, from an evolutionary perspective, subcortical nuclei, including the corpus striata complex (also called the basal ganglia).

The reptilian brain, the oldest of the three, controls the body's vital functions such as heart rate, breathing, body temperature and balance. Our reptilian brain includes the main structures found in a reptile's brain: the brainstem and the cerebellum. It is fundamentally physical survival and maintenance—or homeostasis—of the body. It controls movement, breathing, circulation, hunger and reproduction. It is concerned with territory, social dominance, and questions of “fight or flight." Instincts are the natural impulses of the unconscious. The cerebellum regulates and coordinates movement, posture and balance.

The archetype may be experienced as a physiological dynamism and may enter consciousness as an image, showing that psyche and body are different aspects of the archetype. Psychic functions change into the instincts and physiological processes. The instinctive psyche, the body is considered a sensor, an informational network, a messenger with myriad communication systems -- cardiovascular, respiratory, skeletal, autonomic, as well as emotive and intuitive. (Clarissa Pinkola Estes). 

Sobek is real, not just a symbol. Still, Jung mourns the loss of direct meaning: "Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree means a man’s life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom, and no mountain still harbors a great demon. Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to things, like stones, springs, plants, and animals....His immediate communication with nature is gone for ever, and the emotional energy it generated has sunk into the unconscious."

Jung wrote in “The Function of the Unconscious” that "The unconscious processes that compensate the conscious ego contain all those elements that are necessary for the self-regulation of the psyche as a whole. On the personal level, these are the not consciously recognized personal motives which appear in dreams, or the meanings of daily situations which we have overlooked, or conclusions we have failed to draw, or affects we have not permitted, or criticisms we have spared ourselves."

The depth and quality of our contact with the sacred and numinous forces of existence depends on how well our symbols and practices fit the time, for each time requires new means of access. Dogmas and beliefs wear out, but the need for transcendent contact remains. He helped update it by reimagining the gods as archetypes: resplendent potentials that recur again and again.

Our orientation sees beyond false distinctions between The depth and quality of our contact with the sacred and numinous forces of existence depends on how well our symbols and practices fit the time, for each time requires new means of access. Dogmas and beliefs wear out, but the need for transcendent contact remains. He helped update it by reimagining the gods as archetypes: resplendent potentials that recur again and again., healing the mind/body split. 

Sobek's net rescued the gut instincts (lover, lungs, intestine, stomach) of Horus from dissolution in oblivion: "He also rescued the four mummiform sons of Horus (Imsety the human headed protector of the liver, Hapy the baboon headed protector of the lungs, Duamutef the jackal headed protector of the stomach and Qebehsenuef the falcon headed protector of the intestines) by gathering them in a net when they rose from the waters in a lotus bloom."

Jung himself said, he would have no objection to regarding the psyche as a quality of matter and matter as a concrete aspect of the psyche, provided that the psyche was understood to be the collective unconscious. (von Franz, Psyche & Matter, p. 40) Ppsyche and matter share a common transcendent essence. 

The gods might be reborn: not as distant deities or contendingpotentates above or behind the things and elements of life, but within them as their awakened spirit, essence or soul. We can re-vision ways in which the psyche matters. Unconscious psyche and matter are not separate. They interface in numerous connections.

Physical reality becomes psychic, and psyche becomes real--it "matters." The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and outer world are both real and in fact One World. Image, metaphor and symbol bridge the abyss between matter and spirit. Images are the subtle net that unites symbols. 

The substance of the insubstantial is what makes psyche matter. And it is an intrinsic part of alchemical method. Ancient philosophers proclaimed the world soul, a pure ethereal spirit, is diffused throughout all nature. The notion of soul is imaginative possibility in relation to the archai or root metaphors. “Consciousness does not create itself—it wells up from unknown depths. At the most fundamental levels psyche and matter are the same't psyche and soma are indissoluably welded.


Paleocortex

The hippocampus is the principal part of the archicortex, related to mood and emotion. Our archaic brain, the paleocortex is very thin, primitive cortex with few clearly defined layers. The paleocortex, the basal surface of the brain, is the part of the cerebral cortex that is evolutionarily older than the neocortex and composed especially of olfactory cortex. It includes the hippocampus, limbic system, and encodes declarative memory and spatial functions. 

Paleocortex synchronizes mnemonic representations of past experience with new sensory data, energized by limbic excitation. Perception of pattern recognition and representations of memory become separated. Memory consolidation is in the primitive archicortex and paleocortex on the medial surface of the brain, the limbic lobe. They integrate paleocortex with homeostatic and motivational circuits. 

The limbic core organizes motivational and mnemonic processes. A memory aid (mnemonic) helps to retain meaning for a long time in our memory. Paleocortex prioritizes the sense of smell. Originally the older parts of the forebrain, the archicortex and paleocortex, were specifically related to the sense of smell. Smell is a trigger for memory. Brain anatomy may explain why some smells conjure vivid memories and emotions. 

Scent Memory

Odor memory is involuntary memory. The olfactory bulb has direct connections to two brain areas that are strongly implicated in emotion and memory: the amygdala and hippocampus. Implicit memories of stimuli do not require conscious recollection of the initial encounter of the stimulus. In regards to olfactory memory, deliberate recollection of an odor experience is not necessary in order for implicit memories of odors to form in the brain. 

Odors evoke emotional experiences. A smell can bring on a flood of memories, influence our moods. Because the olfactory bulb is part of the brain's limbic system, an area so closely associated with memory and feeling it's sometimes called the "emotional brain," smell can call up memories and powerful responses. “Odor-evoked autobiographical memory” brings a flood of lost memories.

The amygdala receives multimodal sensory input that may trigger fear. Input from the hippocampus is related to mnemonic (remembered) aspects of emotional experience. Input from the associational cortex is related to subjective cognitive aspects of emotional experience. It then orchestrates emotional responses through its hypothalamic (limbic) and autonomic connections.

A mnemonic theory of odor perception suggests odorants bring certain things to mind as a basic property of odor perception,. Odor quality depends on the implicit memories that an odorant elicits. Odor quality as well as our ability to discriminate odors is affected by experience. The olfactory system is stimulated chemically on inhalation, and/or chemically by volatile chemicals in the mouth during eating or drinking. 

This is basic crocodile and primitive human behavior, watching, sniffing, and devouring. Chemical stimuli transform into neuronal activity. Mnemonic coding extends to visual space. Mnemonic functions allow the flexible coding and retrieval of all forms of relationships among objects and events. Myrrh is Sibek's cult incense. He holds the epithets 'He who rejoices in the incense' and 'Lord of myrrh'.

Sobek Oil
1 part myrrh
1 part sandalwood
a few drops of lotus
1 part frankincense


Slow Wave Sleep: NREM

Dreams are consequential. They change us at the most fundamental psychophysical level. The evanescent, prophetic and diagnostic nature of dreams has been heralded since the dawn of history. We can also link Sobek to a more unconscious dreaming in non-REM sleep, that is more disjointed, can move backward in some sequences. Sub-cortical activation results in dreaming during the NREM stage during the morning hours. Unlike REM sleep, there is usually little or no eye movement during these stages. 

Dreams occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, while ponto-geniculo-occipital (PGO) waves in the waking stage (NREM) initiate hallucinations. PGO waves are spiky waves that herald the onset of REM sleep. PGO waves help regulate hypnogogic and hypnopompic imagery, vivid dreamlike audio, visual and tactile sensations. Waking dreams (hallucinations / visions) can discharge PGO "residues" even in the absence of REM sleep. 

Such visions can resemble classic leitmotifs of death/rebirth, ego-death, and near death experiences (NDEs). Stages include: 1) subjective feeling of being dead; 2) peace and well-being; 3) disembodiment; 4) visions of material objects and events, 5) tunnel or dark zone; 6) evaluation of past life; 7) light; 8) access to a transcendental world, entering in light; 9) encounter with other beings; 10) return to life (Sabom 1982). Sabom, M. B. (1982). Recollections of Death: A medical investigation. Harper and Row, New York.

Dreaming is rare during NREM sleep, and muscles are not paralyzed as in REM sleep, so it can also lead to enacting dreams. The major synchronized EEG waves of nonREM (NREM) sleep states 2-4 are delta waves, spindle oscillation, and slow sleep oscillation.

The content of SWS dreams tends to be disconnected, less vivid, and less memorable than those that occur during REM sleep. This is also the stage during which parasomnias most commonly occur. examples of parasomnias are somnambulism (sleep walking), somniloquy (sleep talking), sleep eating, nightmares or night terrors, sleep paralysis, and sexsomnia (or "sleep sex"). 

In parasomnia, inappropriate instinctual behaviors like hunger, sex, and aggression can arise out of context, sometimes with great fury. The person may look awake, but they are not; they are acting from the dream content -- even to the point of murder. There is a parasympathetic dominance during NREM om slow wave sleep. 

Unihemispheric Sleep; Sleep Vigiilance

The meaning of his name, Sebek, Sobki, Suchos, Sobeq, Soknopais, is “He Who Watches.” That eye is fixed on eternity not temporal life. The fearsome reptiles sleep with one eye open. Crocodiles can deploy “unilateral eye closure” while dozing to keep a close eye on potential threats or prey. They don't sleep like we do but keep an eye on things. They evolved unihemispheric sleep,. One half of the brain stays awake while the other shuts down. This allows animals to keep one eye open to monitor events around them. 

When humans sleep in an unfamiliar place, the left cortical hemisphere is more vigilant and responds stronger and faster than the right one. Evolutionarily, this reaction makes a great deal of sense. It is important that a sentinel—here the left cortical default-mode network—monitors the unknown environment for threatening events while we sleep.

For humans, most of the night is spent in NREM, with the most restorative deep sleep and its associated SWA, taking up 20 to 25 percent of a full night's slumber. Slow-wave activity is homeostatically regulated—that is, the longer somebody stays awake, the deeper and more frequent slow waves occur the following night.

Sleep is for the brain not the body. SciAm reports that animals are not the only creatures who can be literally half asleep. Research shows we experience this, too. (Christof Koch on September 1, 2017). Unihemispheric Slow-wave Sleep is sleep with one half of the brain while the other half remains alert. Initiates practice this state as dream yoga, in which they develop a certain lucidity. Part of the left hemisphere, in essence, is not sleeping as deeply as the right one during the first night.
The left hemisphere is more vigilant in an unfamiliar environment.

Lesku said colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany had discovered this behavior in adult Nile crocodiles, suggesting that "this is a crocodilian trait not specific to one species."  An ambush predator can be immobile yet still looking out for prey. If an animal passed on the bank of a river, the crocodile could fully wake up and attack it.


Jung called the vast sea the collective unconscious, out of which arises the sun of the spirit, Sobek-Re. Deep meaning arises from the realization of the self, which is metaphorically described as the emergence or embodiment of light. It is more of a force of nature or aspect of consciousness than a divine principle -- nature's ferocity. All Neters were aspects of Nature. The earliest gods are the controlling forces of the material world.

The original evolutionary impulse is the mystic grandfather of all existence. Sobek is the root of the Egyptian Creation Myth.  It speaks to us from the remote depths of the unknown, before the birth of human consciousness.  It represents an aspect of the universe which appeared before space and time. Zero is pure unmanifest potential, even prior to the original impulse. Its psychic equivalent is superconsciousness, primordial awareness.

In ancient Egypt what is symbolic is actual and organic, energetic structure with an integral function in the ever-flowing, ever-changing pattern of the meaning of life itself. Sobek means engaging spiritually with the unconscious. The netherworld gate, the Ancestral Gateway to the Stars, is the entry into a world that we cannot control but controls us. We have no control over the collective psyche, the dynamic totality of all conscious and unconscious psychic processes. It is a self-organizing process with its own structure and flow of self-presenting forms.

Human life is all symbols, visible signs of invisible reality, intuitive ideas that cannot yet be formulated in any other or better way. Symbols wield the power of pattern recognition and association. 'Archetypal' means fundamental  intrapsychic organizing principles. The deepest levels of psychological structure, holographic embedding and resonant fields, are common to the human psyche in general. Information results and arises from innate structure.

We can begin our own exploration with instinctual survival mechanisms and unconscious regulation of our physical body. Unconscious physical functions are housed in our cerebellum, hypothalamus, brain stem., and autonomic (involuntary or unconscious) nervous system. Jung concentrates on the image within the collective unconscious that  dominates when there are no other rational thoughts.

The Field is the only reality. Thus, we can equate the crocodile/dragon with primordial awareness, but also with the inner effective power of matter, immanence or the subtle body -- vacuum potential -- the internal aspects of matter and mankind -- the energy body or psychophysical self. 

The Egyptian archetype is that of the snake which destroys life and has to be defeated before life is reborn -  in other words the Prime Material, the alchemical prima materia. The dragon as universe symbolizes the wholeness of relationships. As Above; So Below.

The depth perspective is foundational. If imagination is suppressed or unavailable, it erupts as excessive emotion not contained within its image. Imaginal imagery is revealed in dreams, visions, and divination. It often contains opposing figures, sensory images, mostly in the form of visual images. 

James Hillman called images 'concrete particularizations.' If symbols belong to one god or another "where better to find the gods than in the things, places and animals that they inhabit, and how better to participate in them than through their concrete natural presentations." We cannot acces the mind of nature without accesing the natural mind (Blue Fire).

Oneiric means "of or pertaining to dreams; resembling a dream, dreamlike." The oneiric language is a natural activity of the soul, the compressed associations of the multidimensional symbolism of dreams and oracles. Expressiveness is the fundamental principle of creativity. It is the same creative impulse as healing.

Our exploration will range from the fearsome sharp-teeth of mortality to transcendent aspects of Sobek, from the material to the transpersonal, the elemental to the celestial, from the blindness of darkness to the vision of the seer and initiate. They believed to be reborn in the sky meant having to manifest the sky on earth. If we are unconscious or unaware of our own spiritual nature, we are disconnected from our own life force, personified nature, and personified instinct. Feeling always binds us to the reality and meaning of symbolic contents.

The hypothalamic region of the limbic system is the most primitive and important part of the brain. The hypothalamus serves the body tissues by attempting to maintain internal homeostasis and by providing for the immediate discharge of tensions. This is the realm of deep drives -- breath, thirst, hunger, satisfaction, pleasure, pain, hate, anger.

The sympathetic nervous system (E) prepares the body for intense physical activity through the fight/flight response. The parasympathetic nervous system (T) has an opposite effect that relaxes the body and inhibits or slows many high energy functions.

Our body is the root of Sobek as paradoxical  'Rager' and 'Healer.' Normally, the E-system activates during arousal or in situations of apprehension or danger, while the T-system manifests when danger or anxiety are minimal.  We can use a mnemonic to help us remember: the E-system is energized, exalted, or enflammed; while the T-system is tranquil, transformative, and transcendent.

The sympathetic nervous system activates ergotropic arousal; while ttrophotropic relaxation is mediated by the parasympathetic nervous system. The Ergotropic System excites physiological activation and general excitation. Stimulation of the E-system leads us into our external environment, and is associated with warming. Conversely, stimulation of the T-system leads us into the internal environment, and is associated with cooling. 

The Trophotropic System relates to physiological mechanisms of recuperation, protective mechanisms, unloading, restitution, normalization, and healing. Both systems are mediated through a balancing process (ma'at) which takes place in the hypothalamus, so that an “ET” balance is present in “normal” situations. The interplay of both processes keeps our organism in homeostasis. Hence, 'Rager' and 'Healer.' (Miller, https://ionamiller.weebly.com/emotional-alchemy.html )

"The natural world demands a response that rises from the wild unconscious depths of the human soul." (Berry, 1999) Our wildness is the autonomous body interacting with the unconscious depths of mind, with constant environmental contact. Our psychic inheritance is an endowment rooted in the rhythms of nature.

Carl Jung described a conscious connection with the unconscious “animal within" as a tremendous “overwhelming experience… an utterly different thing from our consciousness.” Accessing our unconscious through dreams links us to the “original primordial being" of the deep historical past. This demands the dramatic severity of looking “into the eyes of the animal.” We remain attached to nature through this chthonic part of the psyche, where the earth and cosmos feel most tangible, most immediate.

We will explore the archetypal dragon bloodline from a few novel perspectives, including devotion, initiation, and direct experience. All the Pharaohs were called Sobek 'Dragons'. They became synonymous with immortality because the celestial dragon was exempt from the cycle of time, since the dragon lineage did not die but was preserved in the noble bloodline. 

There are many ways we can engage with Sobek and our unconscious disconnection from primordial nature. We are an image-based culture. We can try to arouse Sobek's instinctual creative potential. Nature is the unconscious—raw primordial life. The unconscious holds the power to destroy, but also the impulse to transform and preserve. Unconscious processes are not literally unconscious. They are just background noise until and unless they cohere into awareness. Our approach is more poetic and metaphorical, than psychological.

We are the embodiment of the living genetic matter of our ancestors, their enlivened atoms. Their living matter is entombed within us, preserved secretly within our DNA, better than any mummy. Genealogy is our ritual, and spiritual rebirth is its telos. It is literally a way of self-realization. This is our foundation. 

The oldest mythic dragon stories deal with an amniotic creation from the primal oceanic chaos which is a great dragon. We explore a world where order (ma’at) or meaning is created without a designer out of an intricate dynamic system of universal forces, reflected in Egyptian sacred science. Sobek lurks un-confronted in the hidden depths of our unconscious. But, do we just plunge forward in our doomed quest to master insurmountable forces that will finally annihilate us?

Mythic consciousness and its practice, ritual life, require a telos to create the dynamics of consciousness in imaginal life. This urge propels the soul. Telos is our destiny or innate potential for becoming. It is embodied in life-force and magical potency. You cannot understand Egypt unless you understand magic and transformation. 

Wholeness is the goal of self-realization, including where we come from and who we really are. But we cannot know the end at the beginning because possibilities necessarily arise along the way. Between destiny, destination and necessity, the crocodile suddenly arises, explosively surging from the deep waters.

For myself, such an exploration is an experiential voyage back in time on the wings of my ancestors showing a direct family connection to the god and his patron dynasties and priests. Herodotus (2, 142) reports that the Egyptian priests accounted for a human line of ancestors of 341 generations. 

Herodotus calculates 11,340 years as the calendrical equivalent of these 341 generations The priests showed Herodotus a great temple with colossal wooden statues commemorating 345 men who served as chief priests during the 341 generations of kings. Each statue was a son succeeding his father.

It is one thing for history to tell us there was a Sobek cult in Memphis, and another to find that one particular ancestor priest there who served Sobek, rather than Ptah, like his own priestly family before and after him. It puts a ‘face’ on those linking us back in remembrance and sets us wondering, 'why did he do that?'. What called to him? Perhaps  he was a natural seer. Ptah was the local god of Memphis, but because of the importance of the city of Memphis as a religious capital, Ptah became an important national god. So we find the god Sobek at Memphis in the Ptah Temple.
 

Sacred crocodile wearing rose crown in a Nile mosaic now at Centrale Montemartini. Rituals at Egyptian city of Crocodilopolis.

My attempt is to contemporize both the mundane or material and transpersonal aspects of the Sobek cult and modern devotion. While informed by Depth Psychology, I don't use the tired Jungian tropes and theories, but approach the archetype poetically, even animistically. Post-Jungian archetypal psychology is radically polytheistic and rooted in notions of the World Soul, Anima Mundi.

We have an opportunity to expand our understanding of what that direct experience might be like, not only as its metaphors and manifestations, but as self-arising generative power that impacts our instincts, dreams, healing, and transformation. We need to know where the crocodile god hides within us. 

Genealogy is not a practice we make up to suit ourselves; it is just a graphic depiction of psychic realities which still exist at the core of our being. It has been created by generations who retained the knowledge of their roots as a great treasure. It is a given, a living Presence. It is still there if we but look and carefully dig down like archaeologists through the sands of time to the right strata.

While rooted in my own genealogy, the dragon bloodline applies to anyone who knows their similar royal lines, as well as those who intuitively feel a soulful connection to their roots, including Sobek. Simple mathematics shows we are all connected, just as we are to Genghis Khan or Charlemagne, for example. Mythically, this approach suggests that ancient practice can inform our own devotion. Our own experience may help us understand actual Egyptian devotional and initiatory practice as well as or better than interpretations from archaeology and anthropology.

Since not much is written on Sobek we have to trust our imagination, dreams, and ancestral memories to guide us in the process. My work as a therapist in Transgenerational Integration has given me the opportunity to watch many others besides myself find their roots in the mists of pre-history with various gods and goddesses. Most discover it strikes at the core of their self-image and worldview, transforming their lives.

The result is often shock and awe that traditional genealogy reveals such divine wonders at its deepest roots. Such awesome numinosity is a trait of Sobek experience, itself a primary instinctual manifestation – a primordial Mystery. The convergence of the popularity of personal genealogy and personal mythology from the transpersonal schools of psychology has created a hybrid spirituality, fusing ancient knowledge and eclectic practice. You may have done your DNA, but it will never divulge a single name, much less a face we can relate to.

Elsewhere, in other devotionals, I have unpacked the royal connections back to Aphrodite and Mars by using my own genealogical lines as a thread to explore the labyrinths of time. History takes on a different feel when we see it unfold in the lives of our own alleged great-grandparents. There are millions, who know or don’t know, their own branches of such bloodline descent from various cultural gods and goddesses. But something special happens to each of us who discover them. It forms a solid bond, couple by couple back to our ancestral root, our genetic foundation.

This linking back or re-membering of our chain of ancestors, our capacity to recite them, and their veneration is a big part of what Egyptian religion was all about – keeping their names and their Ka souls alive. We can see it as a metaphor of Sobek saving and recollecting the parts of Osiris and revivifying his generative spirit. There are so many aspects of this vital connection, based on blood descent, that we cannot follow them all out, even in a long essay.

My approach arises from my own experience as a therapist in modern Dragon bloodline societies and heritage groups. Interest in books from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The Da Vinci Code, The Dragon Legacy, and the many works of Sir Laurence Gardner on Grail cultures created a modern myth of ancient cultures. It led to the formation of many international societies and gnostic religious groups. It also created a fad of dis- and misinformation, as well as confused fantasy and grandiose self-delusions.

Much of this literature focuses on alleged descent from the family of Jesus. But the origins of archaic royal lines as a civilizing force in early Egypt and Mesopotamia are even more interesting. These gods are older, even more chthonic, and only for those who are not afraid of the initiatory dark. What we don't know lives in our dark places, deep in the primordial unconscious waters. Our spiritual task is to form a conscious relationship with it.

The dragon bloodlines are rooted in tales of the Anunnaki gods. For me, this is a way of ‘making soul,’ of deepening relationship with the unconscious as represented by the archaic Sobek worship. This takes it far beyond the intellectual or conceptual, into the experiential realm, where genealogy, care for, and tending to the ancestors is a new ritual for realizing the promise of Egyptian ‘immortality.’ It goes far beyond the occasional 'A-ha' into deep initiation as direct experience -- our own metaphorical death and rebirth.

The ‘underground’ stream’ of ancient and royal descent runs through our history. Such exploration is valuable for myself and others, because we all want to know who we are and where we come from. I can trace my own lines back to the legendary first pharaoh Manes, a generic title or a pre-dynastic term for mythical tribal kings, described by Manetho. While some of the above interpretations are unconventional, the traditional genealogy is completely standard, though it ranges into legendary and mythological figures. This is the archetypal realm, the Netherworld of the Egyptians.

It describes an alternative view of the historical practice of the Dragon tradition that illuminates the ancient cult and informs our own devotion. The dragon/serpent/crocodile is an over-arching symbol of this royal line, especially in Egypt and Mesopotamia. One of the original Dragons is Sobek, and each Pharaoh from first to last was also known as a Dragon priest-king. The dragon ‘overmind’ links them all to their transpersonal divinity, one unified super-being.

We will explore many aspects of this convergence of old and new, but can only briefly introduce many of them. We will explore such themes as The Dragon Heart, The Wild Psyche, The Dragon Legacy, Creative Potential, Riding the Dragon, Freeing the Dragon, the Sobek of Our Dreams, Archaic Spiritual Legacy, and a few prominent figures from Egyptian history who built the Sobek cult. Hopefully, some resonate with your own devotion, service, and practice. More may be revealed as we unconsciously ‘digest’ the implications for ourselves. -- Iona Miller

For more on Ancestors and Archetypes, see https://ancestorsandarchetypes.weebly.com/




EXPLORING THE WILD PSYCHE
through Depth Psychology, History, and Genealogy


SOBEK & THE DRAGON BLOODLINE
A New Myth of Bloodline Transformation for an Ancient God
by Iona Miller, (c)2018


"Myth is a story that needs to be told, just like our individual personal stories. From these stories that are intertwined since the beginning of time, the meaning of human history is born, which is the history of all of us, but above all that extraordinary meaning emerges to belong to a single collective story to which each person carries his own extraordinary personal contribution and its own patrimony of co-belonging. This principle is at the basis of the construction of the value of subjectivity, of responsibility and at the same time of the indispensable role that we attribute to the relationship, which is the archetypal story of all our common histories that we have internalized and of which we must be increasingly aware." --Eldo Stellucci


Zep Tepi, 10,500 years ago, Spring Equinox

It's dragons all the way down. In the beginning, dragons were all that stood between the yawning Abyss of the Void and the world, which was no more than a mound of earth arising from unfathomable depths. Benben was the mound that arose from the primordial waters Nu upon which the creator god Atum settled in the creation story of Heliopolis. 

Sobek arose from the primeval waters of Nun to create the world and made the Nile from his sweat. In  the creation myth Sobek laid eggs on the bank of the waters of Nun thus creating the world. The egg of the world is the Cosmic Egg. The naval of the world is the point of creation, the Island of the Egg, symbol of creation, the underworld of the soul. Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.

In alchemy the egg stands for the chaos apprehended by the artifex, the prima materia containing the captive world-soul. Out of the egg — symbolized by the round cooking vessel — will rise the eagle or phoenix, the liberated soul, which is ultimately identical with the Anthropos who was imprisoned in the embrace of Physis.

This is the seed or embryo of rebirth in the womb of the celestial  or cosmic mother. That something missing in the lives of so many people isn't found in another's form, it's found in the dark of the unconscious. Sobek guarded the way. From archaic times to 300 CE, Sobek was venerated. The reptilian brain and atavistic memories are his human biological basis. 

Celestial dragons or constellations surrounded the stillpoint of the celestial North pole, guarding the entrance to the Netherworld, the starry realm. Astronomy, myth, and celestial mechanics are involved, including the Precession of the Equinoxes. Hathor and Nuit were goddesses of the Milky Way, the Nile in the sky in archaeo-astronomy. The polar axis is key.

So say the Egyptians in their creation myth. Sobek is a Water God and thus associated with fertility who was worshiped from pre-dynastic archaic times right up to the end of Egyptian autonomy. He is an old god of immense power and technically a primordial god. All pharaohs were Sobek and Sobek was all pharaohs. The kings were “twice-born”,  each a human and divine god-man, with roots in the archetypal Osiris-Horus myth. Sobek represented the four elemental gods, Ra of fire, Shu of air, Geb of earth, and Osiris of water, making him a fourfold deity.

The powers of the crocodile god were thought to have extended to the very creation of the world. Lake Moeris, in the Fayoum, was regarded as the primeval ocean (Nun) of ancient myth wherein all forms of life originated. It was at Shedyet that the primordial mound arose out of the waters of this ocean, and life appeared on the earth for the first time.

The crocodile, which emerged silently and mysteriously from the waters  of the lakes and river, was likened to the primeval mound and was thus believed to embody the elemental powers of creation. Although a treacherous creature, it was considered a benefactor of the land, analogous to the Nile itself whose threatening floodwaters nonetheless ensured the perpetuity of life. 

Sobek is connected with original creation; for as the crocodile rises up out of the Nile, so the primordial Sun arose from the waters of chaos. Sobek correlate with the Greek Ouranous. Old god of immense power and technically a primordial god.Osiris in the Fayyum had to leave his power to his successor, who took the aspect of Sobek-Horus there. In this way, Sobek-Horus can finally become king of Upper and Lower Egypt. Sobek manifested in the crocodile and represented the power of the Nile to rise and fertilize the land.

There was a time when mankind was still wild, when the psyche was wild, and it still lives deep within us. Sobek embodied mankind's original role in nature. Feared and revered, he was worshiped as Sobek-Re, as a solar god, in Memphis from the Archaic Period with prayers, incense, and invocations. 

He was worshipped at the Faiyum and Ombos. During the middle Kingdom he coalesced with Re, Sobek-Re, and was worshipped as primordial deity and creator-god. Like Ra rose from Nun. He rose from the primal waters of mer-wer/Lake Moeris/Μοἵρις 'Pure lake' located in Faiyum. Hybrid Gods Sobek-Horu (Solar deity) Sobek-Ra (Solar deity). He was also considered an aspect of Horus because Horus took the form of a crocodile to retrieve the parts of Osiris’ body.

He was conflated with Ptah. The primordial waters: Nun and Naunet. Nun and Naunet were the personification of the primordial watery abyss. Ptah, who as lonely creator god, was neither male nor female, was identified with both Nun and Naunet in his roles of begetter and giver of birth: 

"Pap. Harris I, from the 20th Dynasty, which mentioned “Sobek’s Wall” in it, identified one form of the god Ptah with the shape of the god Sobek... The papyrus tells us that the “Terebinth” and incense trees were planted there in Sobek’s temple domain built on the ruins of the old property of the king Pepy I, near to his (=Sobek) water lake [which was there as a “sacred lake”!], where many “offerings and sacrifices”...were made with huge considerable quantities to the honor of “Ptah, the Primeval Water” and the “Holy Water of the Ennead”. (El-S   )

He was worshiped in the Middle Kingdom at Fayyum. His name was written in Greek “Sochos” or “Suchus” Abbrev. “Sock-” or “Sek-“ , and followed by any other word. His cult center was Mi-w' r, literally ‘the great channel’,  in El-Fayum oasis, where the Nile was diverted into a seasonal lake. Sobek was called the Lord of Faiyum, and was considered the god who controlled the waters. According to myth, Sobek was considered a fourfold deity who represented the four elemental gods: Ra of fire, Shu of air, Geb of earth, and Osiris of water.

"During the 12th and 13th Dynasties, the cult of Sobek was given particular prominence, as the names of such rulers as Sobekhotep and Sobekneferu indicate. Sobekneferu (1799-1795 BC) was the sister (and maybe the wife) of Amenemnhat IV (1808-1799 BC), was the last ruler of the 12th Dynasty - the first definite female pharaoh of Egypt. There were eight rulers of the 13th Dynasty with the birth name of Sobekhotep, including Sobekhotep II Amenemhat (c. 1750 BC), Sobekhotep III Sekhemrasewadjtawy (c. 1745 BC) and Sobekhotep IV Khaneferra (c. 1730-1720 BC)." -- Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson (2003), The Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, p. 273

Later versions of ancient stories, including Mesopotamian texts, the Bible, the Greeks, and Gnosticism, lead to a proliferation of corresponding names for mortal and divine Egyptian figures. The Hermetic tradition creates a genealogy: Thoth was the father of Agathodemon, the great serpent that is the demiurge and the father of Hermes Trismegistus, also called Atothes of Hermogenes. The Greek Agathadaimon was a syncretistic deity of later antique relgion, rooted in Greek and Egyptian theology. For the gnostics, the agathodaimon, or good genius, symbolized a serpent embracing the mundane egg.

Eusebius called Thoth the counselor and scribe to Cronus [Ham] (my 100th Gr-Grandfather), father of Misor, for whom Cain is claimed as an ancestor. Though you or I can "raise Cain" (my 77th Gr-Grandfather) in our drop lines, there is no way to document such mythic descent. Yet, these are the ancestors of our souls, of our psyche, including Sumerian KIngs, Egyptian Pharaohs, Trojan Lords, Jewish Kings, Viking Warriors, Merovingian Kings, Russian Tsars, Scottish Royalty, British and French Royalty, Moors, Habsburgs, etc.

The first Hermes is suggested to be Enoch (my 76th Gr-Grandfather). This may not reflect history, but it reflects what the ancients thought in various eras. Agathodaimon and Hermes are the ancestors of occult science and deeper spiritual reality. Genealogy, the family tree,  is an unconscious diagram of a psychic event. There is no real life without archetypal experiences. Felt-sense is direct experience. Meeting in the imagination, we find the wisdom left by our elders. We don't have to ask what it means. We just have to ask 'who is there?'

The Egyptian Thoth, the Hermes, or Mercurius Trismegistus was considered as secretary to his father Mizraim, the son of Ham, who is also called Manes, the legendary first pharaoh, founder of the nation. This second Thoth is the second kind of Egypt. son of Mena, the Menes of Herodotus, also called Mizraim, Mestraim, or Misor. Egypt was unified c.3200 BC by king Menes.

According to Manetho, Thoth, the primitive Hermes, had engraved, himself, on columns in hieroglyphic characters and in the sacred language, the elements of all knowledge. After the flood, these first sacred books were translated into the usual idiom by the son of Agathodemon, (the Hellenized name of the god Khnum or Kneph), the second Hermes. The revered serpent proceeds from the Logos, transmitting the stream of life to all creatures.

The source of our body is the ground and that ground is the fathomless depths. Neshamah, the breath of life and source of spirit, is the element that forms the human spirit. Union on the four planes, including the Neshamah, or glorious body is experience of the true intellect emerging from the source of life - well-spring of intelligence awe, wisdom, and understanding.

This unique life potential is the bridge between human and divine that serves creation and life in the world by providing it with substance forming light, creating darkness, and making in the middle. At night, when we close our eyes in the darkness, something else in us comes awake, something even beyond our dream images, the intelligence that lives in the interior of our experiences.

Supernatural tales have their liminal settings, mythical characters, inter-species romances, and close family connections. The otherworld and the ordinary intermingle. This is the gloss of imaginal vision that co-exists with ordinary reality -- our desires, phantasms, and projections.

Some genealogists want to expunge supernatural characters and liminal settings from the World Tree, but we do so at our peril -- cutting of psyche from its own imaginal roots. Naturally, to claim we literally descend from dragons, serpents, gods or goddesses sounds preposterous, and must be contextualized as imaginal and symbolic.

The irreconcilable dual nature of human and bestial ancestry demands we work that out for ourselves, so it not turn monstrous. Ours is a very complicated and nuanced family full of by-gone cultural dreams that still inhabit and inform our dreams, films, and literature.

It's not about fixing, or making, or doing, but being in the presence of the Mystery into which we are born and to which we return with a fully open heart. The Egyptians had a ceremony for weighing the lightness of the heart against the weight of a feather of Ma'at for balance. Thought, memory, and emotion came from the heart. Today we speak of the neurological heart-brain and gut-brain. We might imagine weighing our own hearts for such psychic and emotional balance.

We consciously and unconsciously mourn the loss of the sacred in our lives to the abyss of evolution and our primordial relationship with Mother Earth. We've forgotten our connection to the dark animal orobouric Great Mother. Mother Nature may be the oldest motif but it is the underlying pattern of symbol-formation that is inherited. An involuntary flood of charged emotions arises from the unconscious.Hyperarousal leads to emotional flooding -- that ocean of emotion.


Inundation

When the Nile flooded during the 3 months of inundation, the divine island of Giza emerged for 3 to 6 months of the year. The depression at Fayyum, sacred to Sobek, would become an annual large lake. At Fayyum Upper and Lower Egypt met. The 12th dynasty constructed extensive waterworks there. Waterways helped create transport and water management -- and more crocodile habitat. 

Evon Hekkala discovered by DNA testing that the Nile crocodile is a combination of two species. Crocodylus niloticus is one of the largest of the family, and among the most feared. One of them is the sacred crocodile Crocodylus suchus. The Eastern one has two fewer chromosomes than the Western sacred crocodile, and is actually more closely related to crocodiles in the Caribbean. 

The sacred crocodile is also reportedly more docile than its belligerent Nile cousin, and digs caves in which it shelters. The Egyptians seemed to know the difference: The mummies that Hekkala studied were all sacred crocs. At that time, both species used to co-exist along the full length of the Nile. Today, they mostly stick to different parts of Africa.

In remote prehistoric times the Fayum depression was probably dry. With the gradual rise of the river bed the high Nile reached a level at which it could enter,. At the outer end of the channel, Amenemhe III built his pyramid near the inner end at Hawara. The vast labyrinth attached to it was probably his funerary temple.

They built dams that took off so much water from the Nile, it was essentially controlled. There was a natural and an artificial lake connecting by canals back to the Sea. A secondary overflow basin within the Fayum contained any disastrous high Niles. A depression connected the Nile to the lake and here  on the bank of the channel Amenemhet III placed his pyramid and the renown Labyrinth.

Supraconscious

There were oracles of Sobek in the Fayyum temples. Supplicants received a prepared answer inscibed on a ticket chosen by the god for them from many. Personal oracles were deciphered from movement's of Sobek's statue on the shoulders of the priests in processions at the Philae Temple of Isis and Tebrunis temple of Sobek. 

They sought divine omens by sleeping in the temple precinct. They demoncratized dream incubation. Divination in the Graeco-Roman period is an extension of indigenous tradition. There was a shift in priestly dream incubation for divine instructions to dream cultivation for healing and divine control over the body. (The Oxford Handbook of Roman Egypt)Sobek not only connected the dead with the entry to the netherworld. It was also a rebirth ritual for living initiates who underwent an archaic dark room retreat, in which they drank a libation and stayed in a tomb-temple for 3 days. This is an archaic sensory deprivation experience, perhaps enhanced with plant drugs. The initiate is essentially 'buried alive' to find out the next world is not that different from this one. A crocodile monster devours you when you enter the heart of the sacred mountain, and it is the darkness of Sobek. Solar biorhythms cease and default to lunar rhythms. 

Khonsu, son of Sobek, is the Ancient Egyptian god of the moon. His name means "traveller", and this may relate to the nightly travel of the moon across the sky. Along with Thoth he marked the passage of time. Khonsu was instrumental in the creation of new life in all living creatures.

Death in the artificial cave is metaphor. The darkness and silence itself provide the initiatory magic, producing characteristic hallucinations and out of body experiences. The Pyramid Texts of Unis describes the otherworld as having mystical experiences, ascent of the soul, meetings with gods, access to special knowledge, and spiritual rebirth. 

Tibetan Buddhism has a similar process called Bardo Retreat. Sound becomes light. Chanting and drumming amplify the effects, which culminate in a rebirth of the spirit when one enters the point of Light or primordial Luminosity.

Imagine descending into the utter darkness into the Abyss of the Transcendent imagination. Isolated from external light, the third eye (pineal gland) overflows with certain neurotransmitters that awaken the higher brain, the ability to imprint the brain, reprogramming  itself for an “instant experience of pure Being.” This is a kundalini awakening. 

Profound darkness, in and of itself, creates a primordial biochemical shift in the human organism that literally is Light revealing. It awakens the immediacy of luminous awareness, where physical vision is superseded by multidimensional mystic vision that is ‘now’ yet eternal and opens to all past and future generations.

The cave-like space is symbolic as a liminal threshold where we can enter the womb of the earth. But that dark retreat has a dramatic alchemical effect that is literal and life changing. Further, we carry that cave within ourselves, in the deepest part of the skull where the pineal or Third Eye sits bathed in the CSF lakes of nectar, which nourish and cleanse the pinecone-shaped pineal gland.

Caves were the original sensory deprivation chambers. The ancients associated caves with the womb of the earth, life and death, the afterworld, and the place of healing. They made petitionary art in these caves in an attempt to create magical outcomes for their survival.  To procede you have to control your fear and panic.

The cave-space is a bubbling cauldron of darkness and silence, with an alchemical interior that is the hotbed of incubation and transformation, of that which is concealed. Absolute darkness has an initiatory quality - the metaphor of moving from the darkness of ignorance into the illuminative light. But it is more than a metaphor. All wisdom traditions have used sensory deprivation and darkness (such as caves, tunnels, catacombs, or special chambers), as a shamanic mind-altering force.  

Ancient Egyptians and Mayans practiced a form of the dark retreat traditionally lasting 10 days. Holy men, or shamans, would enter into the center of their respective pyramids, completely removed from light and sound to experience visions of the workings of the universe. Now we know that when the human body is deprived of visual stimulation, the brain produces a substance called DMT, a triptamine, which results in intense hallucinations.

Illumination has been described as being blinded by the manifestation of divine presence, which has no relation to visible light. Visionary experience, which has symbolic or religious content, gives way to this dazzling light, which is reported in eastern and western religions.

There are two major phases to near-death experiences characteristics of two phases of NDEs (Sabom, 1982):

Autoscopic phase includes: 1) subjective feeling of being dead; 2) peace and well-being; 3) disembodiment; 4) visions of material objects and events.  

The Transcendental phase includes: 5)  tunnel or dark zone; 6) evaluation of one’s past life; 7) light; 8)  access to a transcendental world, entering in light; 9) encounter with  other beings; 10) return to life.

The nature of universal consciousness is oceanic. The archaic meaning of the Dragon is wisdom and eternity. Mentality doesn’t become primordial in the individual atoms but by virtue of a supra-natural “overmind,” and Sobek was the overmind of Pharaohs. We worship with a combination of love and awe.

We feel awe in the presence of great people. Awe predates religion by millions of years. It is an instinct. Awe makes us humble. There is an appreciation and wonderment toward life, a childlike awe and admiration of that which is mysterious about the universe, blending into a mystic or oceanic feeling.

A dual or twofold mystical state means that while we experience events in the phenomenal world, we also have an enduring separate “witness” aspect of consciousness. Creation evolves a psychophysical structure of self-similar forms, literally and symbolically. Personal and transpersonal were equally present, inextricably fused. 

The novel aspect of this state is not shaped, mediated, or formed by language, cultural beliefs, or expectations. Radical transcendence, an emptying of consciousness, is a fascinating mysterium tremendum that is immanent and informed by participation mystique -- an exteriorization of the unconscious. Healing is a special case of creativity.

Amazement combines with an edge of fear. Even mild awe changes attitudes and behavior. Attention expands to a bigger picture, so diminishes the sense of self. The huge desert with distant horizons can trigger it and our primal survival instincts with its immenseness.

Awe is a subjective feeling rooted in the body. Awe is so powerful it alters our sense of self, connects us with humanity and connects mind and body. It can be triggered by nature, a stunning view, the vastness of the night sky. The response is sublime; feeling awestruck dissolves our sense of self. Something vast challenges our sense of self, transcending our frame of reference and understanding. Awe makes the self vanish. 

Numinous  perception carries a sense of the divine or ecstatic. This expansion of consciousness from contact with numinous archetypal energy is felt as an  expansion of consciousness or awe, 'calling,' and a deepening of soul. But we tend to reify the limits of our knowledge and place our notions of God just beyond what we can conceptualize and understand.

On a personal level this means this reuniting of spirit, soul, and body indicates a full knowledge of both the heights and depths of one's character. When the hieros gamos is consummated in our daily lives, it means that we have learned to apply our insights in practice. When the Royal union, or hierosgamos, is consummated, it means both both “being” and “non-being” are transcended by the truth exists beyond that dual state. But our identification with a non-dualistic state-space of possible experiences is the broader frame of expanded awareness.

The 'ground' is a fathomless depth.

We experience dread and resistance when we delve too deeply inside ourselves -- this is the devouring darkness of death and desolation before rebirth. Death is at the heart of alchemy. We can understand the "deathexperience" metaphorically and psychologically, but we still must all confront it with naked awareness without the symbols and images born of nature's own workings.

We are in no way separate from Nature and our nature is archetypal. We discover how to orient ourselves in the tidal pathways of the unconscious. We see that our shadows and strengths fall into archetypal patterns -- the timeless parts of ourselves we act out unconsciously.  Our genealogical maps help us find our way into the deep unconscious and our greatest possible treasure -- our inner gold.


Water of Life: Oceanic Immersion

Individual primordial awareness is transformed into consciousness by infinite primordial awareness 'concentrating' its apparent darkness. The 'concentration' is activated self-awareness. The terminology of 'light' does not mean it acts likes a spotlight, illuminating an object, but actual 'light' is the internally illuminated object, the image, the astral light.

Much has been made in recent years of the power of Presence in the Here and Now, but perhaps our HERE/NOW awareness can be used to violate energy conservation. We might think that moments when we are fully present would be more powerful. But flights of spiritual or religious ecstasy  take us out of ourselves, beyond our ordinary boundaries of being and perception.

Nonetheless, when the time dimension collapses in non-ordinary awareness, we are still a consciousness present in some manner at a particular time and space, while simultaneously connected in a peculiar way to the ground of being.

Perhaps there is a third Zen-like quantity or Observer Self that also needs to be present to break Time/space symmetry. Then concurrently maximizing all three variables becomes maximally conducive to producing transformative experiences. For example, during meditation, activity in the parietal lobe slows down processing sensory information about the surrounding world, orienting us in time and space.

This balance or centeredness opens new doors of perception. In ancient Egypt this ruling principle was called Ma'at, the concept of truth, balance, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice. Ma'at regulated the stars, seasons, and the actions of both mortals and the deities, who set the order of the universe from chaos at the moment of creation.

In the moment of transformation we realize the effulgence of meaning in the plurality of common life. We don't forget ourselves when we partake of cosmic myth or ritual; we find or remember ourselves in larger realities of our own being.

Primordial Human Consciousness

First the silence of inner wholeness is in the background along with mental activity (DMS), and then it gradually extends out from the self and permeates the field. Primeval human consciousness in no way resembled the human form as we know it. It could see to the far reaches of the universe, for the light is, a metaphor for pure awareness. And the light of the rising sun is Horus.It sees with an immeasurable "knowing." This teaches that as each and every mortal being is a spark from the cosmic man. We all have the potential to perceive everything knowable in this universe.

Non-Conscious Primordial Awareness: Unconsciousness, Unthought, and Not Thinkable is the experience of the unborn and undying nature of luminous awareness. It is awareness of your awareness which is awareness itself -- primordial consciousness with creative potential. To a rigid consciousness, the primal ocean of the unconscious is experienced as chaotic, violent, irrational processes of generation and destruction.

Non-differentiated primordial consciousness unfolds individuated consciousness, according to the life principle. The bliss of being is co-extensive with non-dual wisdom awareness of the universal field, an 'awareness beyond consciousness.' The experience is one of vastly expanded awareness. We aren't out of the body but recognize our vast potential connections as oceanic experience. We are wave upon interpenetrating waves of virtually infinite potential. 

Distractions cease, replaced by the direct impact of oceanic expansion, sudden insight, childlike wonder, ecstatic exaltation above bodily and personal existence, dissolution in a timeless moment, fusion, gnosis. Old forms disappear and new regenerate forms emerge. 

The direction is a recapitulation of, a re-experiencing of sequences from earlier life, conception and birth experience, ancestral awareness, genetic and physiological recognitions, phylogenetic regression, molecular and atomic perception, and ground consciousness.

Immersion in the oceanic experience of universal consciousness is a life-changing experience.  It is experience of the web of life, the biological life flow, an ineffable current of bliss.  Once we experience that larger world and self--the rhythmic pulse of all life--we are never the same again, so long as we remember. 

Communing with this energy, experiencing these states of consciousness, has been the practice of shamans since the dawn of man.  The shaman is a healer, “one who sees better in the dark.” This oldest form of spirituality is the oldest form of spiritual practice, for some 30,000-50,000  years. This is the ancient origin of soul journeys, an authentic whole-being experience, a power to initiate change and transformation through awakened imagination, movement, and feeling including ideomotor communication.

The shaman can walk in more than one world. They can remain in both states of consciousness that is, staying in the present moment while traveling at the same time to upper or lower worlds. In lower worlds, the shaman travels to acquire messages from an animal spirit. The upper world is used for healings, perhaps soul retrieval.

Imagine one of our ancient ancestors, suddenly stricken by illness or a near-fatal accident. Hovering near the brink of death, an ordinary person suddenly finds him or herself locked in an immersive visionary experience of shadowy figures, muted voices and blinding luminescence.

The cosmos opens its enfolding arms and infinity spreads out in a timeless panoply that dissolves all fear, all separation from the Divine. Fear of death vanishes in a comforting flood of bliss, peace and dazzling light, the ultimate ‘holy’ connection. Overwhelming conviction arises that this is the more fundamental Reality. The welcoming gates of a personal heaven open.

Suddenly back in the body, returned to ordinary reality, one is left to interpret that transcendent experience to oneself and others. This near-death experience may not have resulted in physical demise, but it has led to the death of the old self, the personal self -- and the rebirth, rapture, or resurrection of the soul or spirit. It brings a surge of emotions, conviction and even transformation in its wake. The soul has taken a journey from which one cannot return the same.

A descent into psychobiological hell can lead to a transcendent journey toward Heaven or perhaps the yawning abyss of the Void. Shamans, priests, prophets, mystics, and gurus arose to show the Way of navigating these nether regions, of finding healing, the eternal moment, a peaceful heart, and unity.

Shamanic consciousness means the ability to enter and exit altered states at will.  This power is connected to the liquid expression of life--the sap of life--the vegetable forms of the liquid Stone, and its identity with psychotropic plants.  This notion reiterates that of the "greening of consciousness."

Spiritual reincarnation means bringing to life that which was formerly dead or unawakened, through connection with the original creative power.  It is the theme of the Quest -- the greening of the Wasteland.  The process of rebirth is the mythic enactment of "the one story" whose pattern is found in every narrative.

It is direct perception coupled with high emotion and deep realization of what appears to be ultimate truth. We maintain a clear sense of the interior awareness, a persisting sense of an unmoving silence at our core, even while working and living. We delete everything inside, becoming "Nothing," blank.

Esoteric Dualism, this dualistic mystical state (DMS) creates oceanic feelings, the experience of being expanded. It implies a flowing state of consciousness, "liquification" of consciousness, a return to the womb for rebirth, a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness, the structuring of free flowing energy...

When we voluntarily relinquish our constructions, consciousness "liquifies" and rapidly moves toward the unconditioned state. Our quiescent nervous system is open and receptive to the conscious recognition of pure energy transforms with no interpretations.

Nonconscious perception, conscious awareness and attention rests at the intersection between conscious as well as non-conscious emotional processing. Denton argues that, if self-awareness and intentionality are intrinsic to consciousness, the primordial emotions such as thirst, hunger and pain (that involve feeling the self and intentionality) are the likely precursors to consciousness.

A kind of non-reflective consciousness evolved along with these feelings and before the emergence of cognition. We can live as uncollapsing quantum superpositions in that  bountiful ocean of soul and spirit. Distractions cease, replaced by the  direct impact of oceanic expansion of the energetically superdense purely informational force. 

Denton distinguishes between primordial emotions, "imperious states of arousal and compelling intentions to act" (p. 7) driven by activation of interoceptors and involving ancient, lower brain regions such as the medulla, midbrain and hypothalamus, and "classic" emotions, such as anger, fear and love, driven by distance receptors (vision, hearing, olfaction) and mediated by higher, more recently evolved brain regions. (Jablonka)

In China, the Dragon was not only a metaphysical property of nature, it symbolized learned instructors (“wise men”). Egypt's sovereign throne is the 'Dragon Seat,' the 'Seat of Wisdom,' the 'Throne of Matter.' The only proof of divine blood in the veins was to recite one's sacred ancestors.

Sobek images include both a subterranean and celestial counterpart in the netherworld. In the northern sky, the Big Dipper/Sobek; in the southern sky, Orion/Osiris. The Presence of the afterlife changes the Present. Ritual recalled primordial origins from the Island of Creation, a reflection of the heavens, that arose from the chaos of primeval waters.

The Dragon, the Crocodile, and the Pharaoh were one -- SOBEK -- The Ancestor/Father (of the Gods). There are instructions in the Pyramid Texts on the nature and destiny of the soul and how to attain rebirth, the Egyptian obsession. Sobek arises from the Aquatic Endlessness, cyclical and magical endlessness. 

Three aspects of experiences related to animals include animal autosymbolic transformations, animal identifications, and phylogenetic memories—each have theirspecific characteristics. There isn't a sense of time regression, but include all forms in our phylenogenic history -- the animal potential of soul.

It echoes the domain of ritual, of Enki/Ea, and the capabilities of navigation and access in the extraordinary realm. The primeval waters can be represented in several ways, including as Neit, the "aggressive water" which was the mother of Sobek. Set was considered Sobek's father by some. However, although crocodiles may be of Sobek, they are also the messengers of Set. Set may be called msha [crocodile].

On the other hand, msha, the crocodile, is sometimes called the son of Set. Set isn't the father of a particular mythical son, in the way Osiris is of Horus. The intention justexpresses that a dangerous crocodile is an archetypal Setian form. Sobek's wife, Renenutet, the snake goddess, brought plenty and good fortune to the ancient Egyptians. 

Sobek is likely the father of Khonsu, the God of the moon and time. And the priest Ankhfn-Khonsu, listed as my 122nd Gr-Grandfather, harks back to this root. Merenenre II, King of Egypt b. estimated before 1971BCE) and Nitocris are his parents. Pepi II is the father of Merenenre II, father of Ankhfn-Khonsu, Prince of Egypt.

In our generations we emulate the supernatural terrestrial domain and eternal cosmos endlessly renewing itself with inexhaustible life, the equivalent or essence of immortality. The astral realm is supra-polar, expressing transcendent notions.

For all we can never possibly know about the ancients, for all that remains profoundly unconscious,we experience an "Egypt of the Imagination."An imaginary, esoteric Egypt endures into the present enlivened by our modern psyches.It is much the same for their gods. We cannot possibly know them as they knew them. We can only know them through our own experience, informed by our times, imaginations and dreams.

Descent from Antiquity remains controversial. The historical or genealogical threads that we have may never be enough to reconcile the dates or determine historical figures accurately. This is not the essence of a mythology, especially a primordial one. But we can cite standard historical dates, even though they are confusing, reversed, or collapse the timeline. Such legends come from many peoples and eras and were mostly oral, so there is bound to be confusion since their notion of time itself was fairly new.

One of the most personal ways to approach the timeline is to trace back our own ancestors with standard genealogy. Estimated dates of birth and death are assigned to the most remote ancestors, including the Pharaohs. We can trace them back to the times of their respective creations. 

We can't deduce whether there is an actual family relation, a cultural contact, or syncretism. We do know that later the Greeks derived most of their pantheon from the Egyptians, considered the oldest and wisest culture, though the Sumerians may pre-date them or be contemporaries.

If we find any relic royal lines among the branches of our family tree, chances are some go back through the Egyptian Pharaohs into the mists of pre-history and creation myths, the Egyptian Zep Tepi. Some researchers set itat least 10,000 years ago. Such a time frame suggests a possible relation to the era of the Gobekli Tepe temples in Turkey and early settlement Catul Hayuk.

Many claim this era witnessed a ‘war in the sky’ as a massive comet broke up and made frightening serpentine displays across the sky. Tiamat was the largest of these chunks and debris masses, some of which struck Earth and melted northern glaciers, changing weather patterns. They were perceived as Dragons.

An old Bedouin myth says that when mankind first began tilling the Earth, a seven-tailed dragon appeared in the sky and exploded in the air, sending cascades of rocks and fire across the whole area. Tiamat may have been a bollide or impact event. Meteor fragments are still highly revered in the Middle East, and Egypt (Benben stone).

11,000-5,000 years ago is also the era of the Green Sahara of the Neolithic and Holocene Wet Period. From about 7500–7000 BCE to about 3500–3000 BCE wet and rainy conditions prevailed in the climate history of northern Africa.

It is the era of Nabta Playa, 6000 years ago, the oldest known astronomically aligned stones in the world and a 'regional ceremonial center' around 6100 to 5600 BCE. "The repetitive orientation of megaliths, stele, human burials and cattle burials reveals a very early symbolic connection to the north."

The Nile Valley itself was more a big marsh at this time. The Holocene Wet Period ended around 2450 BCE. It wasn't until the rains returned to their Sub-Saharan pattern that the volume of the Nile increased significantly into the mighty river.

The valley only became increasingly habitable as swamps and marshes dried and formed solid earth. The climate became warmer and dryer and the Nile became extremely fertile. The desiccation of the Sahara affected the farmers of the Green Sahara, and farmers of the steppe zones north of the Fertile Crescent.

Around 5000 BCE, when the climate became more arid, nomadic groups retreated from the arid desert to the Nile Valley, creating the first urban settlements. These communities were concentrated in the North and the South. So, Egypt became known as the "Double Land" or the "Two Lands" of Upper and Lower Egypt.

Agriculture expanded into dense settlement. In Egypt, agriculture moved on to the Nile floodplain, characterized by recurrent and relatively predictable annual flooding. Irrigation made it possible.

In the early Predynastic Period people settled along wadis, especially where the wadi mouths reached the Nile Valley. The change to drier conditions forced people to move closer to the floodplain, which became habitable because of lower and less-erratic floods. Agriculture developed from inception to full capacity between 5200 BCE and 3400 BCE.

It isn't hard to imagine crocodiles as a major part of this world. As top predators, they were both feared and revered. This humid period might explain the existence of the Nile crocodiles in isolated Saharan oases. The green Sahara also contained numerous closed basins that supported some very large lakes and rivers, as satellite photos show.

Furthermore, there are desert-adapted crocodiles on the southern edge of the Sahara. Crocodiles rarely venture far from water. But the crocodiles in Mauritania livein caves, burrows, and under rocks, near wetlands that dry up and disappear for months at a time. It is not difficult to imagine mythic ideas arising in this uncertain atmosphere.

Paradox and irreconcilability is one way myth moves us to the other realm, where we find ourselves relating to the many gods that live there. Opposites clash and crash into one another like matter and antimatter. Legendary figures blur and become confounded with each other.

Gods and men take on different names in different areas, and their legends take on local flavors. The gods of Egypt first originated in the primordial power derived from the Mother-earth and the elements of objective nature. These gods became astronomical as the Khus or 'Glorious Ones.'  (Massey)

The gods carry the complexity with which we express our potential to be-in the world. They offer us once again the opportunity to understand the ancient path of evolution, bloodline, and history that each of us somehow subjectively summarizes. We carry this human legacy forward. The Egyptians aimed to turn the earthly into the heavenly man.

 


Only the Names are Changed

On December 25, 3117 BCE, a total solar eclipse culminated at Sunrise of Winter Solstice. This Egyptian date is close to the start of Hebrew, Hindu and Mayan calendars. Sumer claims 3760 BCE as its beginning. Following suit, the Jews count their years from 3761/3760 BC.

It is the beginning of the Reign of Me-Sin, or Menes, "he who endures," a legendary, and even archetypal or prototype Pharaoh -- the first of his kind of priest-king in the united nation-state.He is the living representative of Osiris, the Cosmic Man.

Because we are dealing with legends, as well as histories of Egypt, The Bible, and Mesopotamia, it can be difficult to correlate names and stories to form a single linear narrative. But the gist remains the same, for it is an archetypal rebirth story. From the time of Memes, each Pharaoh is reborn a Star, as described in the Pyramid Texts. Later, others sought the same path, which we find in the Coffin Texts.

There is controversy about Hor-Aha. Some believe he is the same individual as the legendary Menes who unified all of Egypt. Others claim he was the son of Narmer, the pharaoh who unified Egypt. His tablet describes the events.

Narmer and Menes may have been one pharaoh, referred to with more than one name. It is suggested he is the Mizraimof the Bible.Regardless, considerable historical evidence from the period points to Narmer as the pharaoh who first unified Egypt and to Hor-Aha as his son and heir.

Menes (Hor-Aha) is the first Pharaoh of legend. His reputed lifespan in genealogy is -3020 to -2975. We’re already in metaphorical deep water, churned by multiple conflicting tales of the Crocodile god. Perhaps it helps to know that Manetho gives us  some details on the dynasties called "divine". He divides them into three categories: Gods, Heroes, and "Manes". 

Ancient sources speak to us about a lineage of gods who  reigned each one for several hundreds of years, for a total of 23,200  years, then of a list of "Shemsu Hor", called "Followers of Horus", who  reigned for 13,400 years. Then come the names of the "normal" Pharaohs  whom we know. Those 'Followers of Horus' whom the Turin Canon of Kings gives as predecessors of Menes (the first king of the Unified Upper and Lower Egypt) and whom Manetho describes as Demigods of Manes. Manes implies Mortals.

The reign of Menes succeeded that of the ' Manes and Demi-Gods." The Manes seem to have represented such Kings of the primeval time, as were strictly speaking classed as mortal, but who nevertheless were held in peculiar respect from being the ancestors of individual tribes. The Turin Canon assumes the list of kings in the 1st Dynasty to include Narmer, Aha, Djer, Djet, Den, Anendjib, Semerkhet and Qa'a, though many current texts list Narmer as belonging to Dynasty 0 prior to unification, so that there would only be seven kings during the 1st Dynasty.

Manetho also explains that the category of the Gods was divided  into seven sections, each having a god at its head, including Horus,  Anubis, Thoth, Ptah, Osiris and Ra, and that "these gods who originated  from Earth then became celestial and associated with the stars as they reached heaven'. 

Next are the Heroes, beings with supernatural terrestrial  powers, and finally the "Manes" (also called "Khus"), glorious beings and chthonic deities, corresponding to the spirits of ancestors revered in other cultures. King Menes ( also known as Meni or Manes) of Upper Egypt conquered Lower Egypt in c. 3118 BCE or c. 3150 BCE. This version of the early history comes from the Aegyptica (History of Egypt) by the ancient historian Manetho.

Gerald Massey describes how a garden was made for the manes to cultivate, as the manes represents the second Adam, who as Egyptian is NeferAtum, or Atum in sprit—otherwise man the manes in the garden of Amenta. So, Manes is a sort of generic title for a pre-dynastic term of mythical tribal kings.

“Venerables of Shemsu Hor, 13,420 years, and reigns before the  Shemsu-Hor, 23,200 years; Total 36,620 years.” Such vast numbers bring us into the domain of axial Precessional numbers. If Schwaller's interpretation is correct it suggests that the Greek historian's priestly informants must   have had access to accurate records of the precessional motion of the sun going back at least 39,000 years before their own era. What might we have learned about the First Time if the Turin   Papyrus             had remained intact?  The final two lines of the column quoted above seem to represent a summing up or inventory, are particularly provocative. 

The healer traversing the axis mundi to bring back knowledge from the other world is a common shamanic concept. Anyone or anything suspended on the axis between heaven and earth becomes a repository of potential knowledge. The Tree is the means of communication with spiritual realms. It is our Tree of Voices -- Tree of Souls. Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history.

For the early dynastic period, the archaeological record refers to the pharaohs by their Horus-names, while the historical record, such as the Turin and Abydos king lists, uses an alternative royal titulary, the nebty-name. Aramaic writings sayNimrod was the father of a pharaoh, even though no name was provided, but Rohl names as likely Aha, who is generally associated with Menes.

Menes' father is alsocalled Narmer (b. -3050), a historical figure, now known. The historical Menes (a nebty-name) is identified with the Narmer Horus-name from the archaeological record. Both figures are credited with the unification of Egypt and as the first pharaoh of Dynasty I, andas the predecessor of Hor-Aha (the second pharaoh). So, in this reasoning, Menes is most likely Narmer, not Hor-Aha, his alleged son. The dragon gave his power, seat, and authority to Egypt.

Semiramis, (between -2660 BCE and -2600 BCE), the Babylonian Queen, is called daughter of Menes. She gives birth to Tammuz and Marduk, among others. Thus, Egypt cements its relation to the Dragon lines of Mesopotamia, though she is said to be born in Assyria. She ascends the Throne of Tiamat, the Dragon mother.

Stretching the timeline and our imaginations, she allegedly served as regent from 811–806 BCEfor her son, Adad-nirari III. Shammuramat would have thus been briefly in control of the vast Neo Assyrian Empire (911-605 BC), which stretched from the Caucasus Mountains in the north to and western Iran in the east to Cyprus in the west, to the Arabian Peninsula in the south, which borders Egypt. Wherever the bloodline went, they ruled. The throne is essentially that of a god or goddess.

Her forces conquered Bactria (Tocharians), later to become Scythia (Saka), and introduced Dragon culture there, which fused with the shamanic Tengri sky-religion of the steppes. The dragon culture spread East along their trade-routes into China. Bactria is riddled with dinosaur fossils reminiscent of winged dragons, which became their dynastic icon.

Desert nomads likely stumbled across such puzzling skeletons over 5,000 years ago, establishing the dragon link more firmly. The American History Natural Museum links such fossils with stunning skulls and skeletons of Protoceratops, a large creature whose beak, and crooked fingers, and splayed ribs suggest a dragon or griffin. Legend said they guarded the gold of the Gobi desert. The horse tribes adopted a sort of dragon armor that made them formidable. It was their totem.

The real and historical Shammuramat (the original Akkadian and Aramaic form of the name) was the Assyrian wife of Shamshi-Adad V (ruled 824 BC–811 BC), king of Assyria and ruler of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and its regent for five years until her son Adad-nirari III came of age and took the reins of power.

But, in legend, Semiramis is called the wife of Nimrod, who figures in the stories of Egypt and Assyria. Such things will likely never be resolved. Some genealogists would rather just cut such droplines with mythological roots, but this remains the traditional 'best practice' of genealogy despite unresolvable discrepancies. We can only approach such material as imaginal and metaphorical,yet psychologically meaningful,and spiritually valuable to our primal sense of being. It is ‘real’ to our primordial instinctual nature.

It is really the collective unconscious that 'endures,' unchanging for aeons like the crocodile. This the Two Million Year Old within us. It is from the collective unconscious that all the gods and goddeses arise, as well as all the animal forms. They recapitulate our phylogenetic origins in the fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals that preceded the evolution of our human form. 

This reliving of archaic experience is recounted in shamanism and modern altered states of consciousness (Tart; Gowan). The somatically rooted origin may be the development of embryos through protoplasmic to a gill stage, then into mammalian form of our organismic existence.

In the Pyramid Texts, Unas is described on his journey as transforming into a falcon, a hawk, a powerful bull, a crocodile, a serpent, and other animals, and he takes on aspects of various gods and goddesses. These are all elements which can be present in shamanic travel. So is a journey to the North, to the apex of the world axis, the stillpoint as entrance to the sacred realm.

Menes may be an allegorical figure, but many stories link him to the Mesopotamian Nimrod, considered the root of the dragon lines of Babylonia and Egypt. One legend claims Athothis/Nimrod/Osiris was married to Hept, wife of Menes (his uncle Mizraim). Hept was another name of Isis. Nimrod was allegedly killed by a dragon (Set, a mythic persona of Shem).

Both Nimrod and Menes may be mythologized figures. Early genealogies are a hopeless mish-mash, but there are Biblical, genealogical, and archaeological standard interpretations. Many legends collapse the timeline of historical rulers into an utter mess, but the gist remains somewhat valid where details are not, until we can pick up the historical chain again of locally accurate relationships. Scientific data and interpretation confound things as much as illuminating them.

In My Father’s Tree Are Many Branches

My own genealogy lists Nimrod as my 99th Gr-Grandfather with a descent through Abraham, the Exilarchs, Kings of Judea and Emesa, Moorish and Spanish lines down to the English marriage bridge of Sir Walter Blount and Sancha, Lady of Alaya. Menes standard descent is similar, but descends through Arab lines of Sheba, through Vizcaya Spanish lines, down to the same English-Iberian match.

In another branch, Nimrod is my 138th Gr-Grandfather through Belus or Hotepsekhemwy (in Greek known as Boethos), Kheops, Pepi, and other Egyptian kings to Scota and the high Irish Kings, to Dal Riada.

And in a third branch Nimrod is my 81st Gr-Grandfather, but the descent is through Terah, Jacob, and Judah to Troy and Alba Longa, then to Cornwall of the Druids and Silurians, to Old King Coel, and Wales.

Unas (Wenis / Oenas), King of Egypt (Pyramid Texts)
 Princess Iput of Egypt = Teti (Othoes), King of Egypt
 Pepi I, King of Egypt
 Pepi II, King of Egypt
 Merenenre II, King of Egypt
 Ankhfn-Khonsu, Prince of Egypt
 Inyotef I “the Great”, King of Egypt
 Inyotef II, King of Egypt





            
Rare: A reconstruction of the tablet, right, showing what the images originally looked like.


Libation Cup of Gudea -- Archaic Holy Grail;
the serpents were a healing symbol, later used by Asklepios.

The relief portrays a unique depiction of the ancient Sumerian lion-serpent-dragon Tiamat, standing guard over the terrestrial Tree Of Life, which is entwined with a serpent. The image is repeated on both sides of the original cup, forming one of the oldest known images of the snake and the caduceus. The "Guda" was an important type of Sumerian priest, or prophet.

These days on exhibition in the Louvre Museum, the votive chalice was a favorite possession of King Gudea, who ruled the Mesopotamian city of Lagash from 2141 to 2122 BC. However the cup itself has been dated to as early as 4000 BC, which would explain the archaic Sumerian iconography and perhaps, the earliest known depiction of the Dragon in Indo-European history. The cuneiform inscription reads:

"To the god Ningizzida, his god Gudea, patesi of Lagash, for the prolongation of his life, has dedicated this."

It is said that Ningizzida is identified with the star goddess Ishtar, who is also identified with the celestial Dragon Tiamat and often pictured with a caduceus of serpents climbing the tree of life. Noah gets equated with Gilgamesh or Utna-Pishtim.

Genesis 4          Mesopotamia          Egypt                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                http://www.domainofman.com/book/chap-5.html

My family tree claims Nimrod (Narmer/Enmerkar), (b. circa -2275 to d.circa -1943BCE), son of Cush, was in the direct line of descent from the first Adam, the god Atum. He is the (honorary) grandson of Ham. However, beginning with Genesis 4:25 another line of descent from Adam and Noah is introduced.

This new succession includes a son of Adam called Seth, which means “substituted,” and a grandson named Enosh. We are told that the second line of Adam was “granted” by God to replace that of the martyred Abel. The reader takes for granted that the two lines of Adam through Cain and Seth are contemporary and collateral. They are not! Nimrod is listed as a progenitor of Abraham, the Patriarch.

The Biblical Nimrod is also corresponded with Osiris, the Primordial Man. Aramaic writings stated Nimrod was the father of a pharaoh, even though no name was provided. Rohl names this pharaoh as likely Aha, who is generally associated with Menes. Egypt itself is the living body of Osiris, the 'many eyed' dragon.

Is it possible both figures gave birth to dynastic Egypt. Is it possible Nimrod had conquered what Menes ruled? DidMenes actually relate with anyMesopotamian potentate? Dr. W. F. Albright suggested that Naram-Sin had conquered Egypt, and that the “Manium” whom Naram-Sin boasts he had vanquished was in fact Menes himself (“Menes and Naram-Sin”, JEA, Vol. 6, No. 2, Apr., 1920, pp. 89-98).


This remains speculative and therefore imaginal or legendary. But we get the sense that the royalty of both regions was strongly linked in the minds of the ancients by such myths and legends, and that may not be an accident, even if the precise facts are obscured.


Stairway to Heaven

In 2011, a carving of the Tower of Babel was revealed publically.Thestone tablet or stele datesback over 2,500 years. King Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled Babylon 2,500 years ago, stands next to a huge ziggurat, consider the Tower of Babal, a typical "Stairway to Heaven," much like a pyramid. The archaeological site of this towering edifice is known, though it is utterly ruined. The Smithsonian says this tablet is further proof that the tower of Babel was an actual building.

Gardner suggests that Raneb, pharaoh of the Second Dynasty, circa 2852–13 BCE, was a grandson to Nimrod, and listed Boethus, son of Nimrod, as Pharaoh Hotep- Serhemwy. We don't know the exact relationships between Egyptian pharaohs and the Dragon bloodlines descending from Ham, Noah's son, but that is the story. Others equate Nimrod and Osiris.

Still others claim a marriage bridge between Nimrod and Semiramis, as the daughter of a Pharaoh. My own genealogy lists her as the daughter of Menes, born estimated between 2660 BCE and 2600 BCE, the mother of Tammuz and Marduk.

Theosophists claim post-diluvian Egyptian kingship came from conquest sponsored by Nimrod. All the dynastic trappings , including the Tiamat dragon cult and the intermarrying within the dynastic family came through the pure Anunnaki/Nephilim bloodlines. Anunnaki means 'princely seed' or 'offspring of the prince.' The royal seed were those of princely seed or royal blood.

Menes (c. 3150 BCE) is the legendary first king of Egypt, thought to have united Upper and Lower Egypt through conquest. He also founded the First Dynasty, the great city of Memphis, and established his capital there. The legend of Menes (who may be Narmer) is a meaningful ideal, a symbol of the whole, of Egypt. SOBEK is foundational, arising from the Dark Waters of creation and death.

Diodorus Siculus describes a myth where Menes rode on the back of a crocodile to escape rabid hunting dogs (symbolic enemies). So, Menes 'rode the dragon' to safety. He founded the city of Crocodilopolis, 25 miles south of Memphis, in thanks.

The lake district of the Faiyum was the domain of Sobek, the crocodile god and the primeval waters could be represented in several ways, including as Neit, the mother of Sobek. Menes raised a great city in the name or governorship of the crocodiles, where the creatures were honored by people from all over Egypt.

The dragon priests of the sacred city of Shedet, known to the Greeks as Crocodilopolis, told this story. Here a sacred crocodile was kept in its own artificial lake. Attendants adorned it with gems and gold. When it died, it was mummified and replaced by a new crocodile god.

The city served as the capital of the Faiyum and was the cultic center for the crocodile deity SOBEK. The crocodile story should be transferred to Dynasty XII pharaoh Amenemhat III. 

His daughter was Sobeknefru who became Pharaoh. 'Seven' is the meaning of Sebek, or Sevekh, the name of the Queen, i.e. the female pharaoh Sobek-nofru who revived in Egypt the indefinitely ancient Typhonian mysteries of the Goddess of the Seven Stars. She ruled Egypt for four years at the end of the 12th Dynasty, leading Egypt out of the Middle Kingdom period. She revived an indefinitely ancient past, prior even to Egypt, the original Typhonian Gnosis, the raw, unfettered power of the wild and terrifying, unconscious psyche, including the deepest elements of the archetypal shadow.

Many monarchs incorporated the name of the god in their titles. Yet, all pharaohs constitute one archetype -- the Sobek crocodile/dragon archetype. In some temples Horus is called ‟Horus the Glittering Crocodile,” and “Horus the Dazzling Crocodile.”

Dragon Blood

We can all travel inside. It is called gnosis. You can take a journey into the microcosm to learn the secret of our existence. You can create the universe, if you know how to get to and retrieve the knowledge. The oldest known Pyramid Texts date to around 2400 BC; whereas, the Coffin Texts were developed around 2100 BC. The Star shafts in King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid point to Orion and Alpha Draconis.

The Hawara labyrinth is the body of the cosmic dragon, its vast interior. Schwaller de Lubicz describes the dual nature of the Dragon Body, the immortal luminous spiritual body, as the Ka (lower body) and Ba (higher body).



Ancient Royal Descent

An ancient bloodline tradition descends from Egyptian and Scythian ancestors through the Pictish, Dragon Princess Maelasanu of Northumbria and the Ancient and Original Angevin Royal House of Vere of Anjou, the Imperial Dukes of Angiers. This Dragon Bloodline descended through the Tuatha de Danaan (the Dragon Kings of Anu) on one hand, and the Egyptian Dragon Dynasty of Sobek on the other, including the priest-prince Ankhfn-Khonsu. (de Vere)

Here the modern Dragon Court and Dragon Fraternity revival meets the ancient Sobek cult, which inform its wisdom and practice. The old myth and the new myth share much in common. Old world fantasies mix with the new. 

Myths are not distorted records of historical events; events are demonstrations of the myths -- rediscovering the archaic past in the living present, informed by the Presence of what has gone before. The Egyptians didn't discern an inner world and an outer world.

There was no distinction between objective and subjective, which is an illusion. To them it was all just one. Jung puts it simply, "the sense of a higher meaning of existence is what raises man above his elementary condition. If he lacks this sense he is lost and unhappy."

What we are conscious of is in the Light; what we are unconscious of is in the Darkness. The all-devouring deep sweeps over us. Pre-historic shamans of the hunter/gatherers used the Hole of the Universe (Thuban, the Dragon) to travel spacetime in our universe of the heart.
Priests and pharaohs replaced shaman. The priesthood helped preserve old traditions that underpinned Egyptian culture and its hierarchy helped keep order within society. Religion and priests were central to everyday life.

The antediluvian dragon was the majestic animal of kingship before Eden. Dragon sovereignty evolved in Egypt from the Mesopotamian Tiamat cult and its tradition was vested in Sobek.

The Dragon legacy is simply an extension of the archaic cult, informed by today’s science, depth psychology, and spiritual aesthetic. The Dragon is human life-force and magical potency -- the instinctive impulse to preserve itself.

We can learn about its Jungian, Theosophical, and Hermetic or Al-Khem (alchemical) roots. We can also learn to inhabit two worlds, the ordinary and the sacred realms. All genetics eventually merge into our pre-historical ancestors, the archetypal progenitors.

We are all Sons and Daughters of the Dragon -- the generator of light and life -- whether we can trace our direct genetic descent, or not. We express our devotion to Sobek with some form of living relationship.

The reality of the soul is a transposition of psychic events into experiences. Soul is a relationship. Perhaps all our acts of knowledge are unconscious attempts to remember what we once knew, but we have forgotten. In the act of re-membering, we resemble Osiris.

In his "Oxford Seminar" (1985), Hillman describes consciousness resting "upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate or inner place, there when all other aspects go into eclipse." Our exploration is less about self-improvement and more a quiet act of daring. We may partially aspire and partially tend downward.

'Dragon' and 'naga' were names given to wise and holy men. In symbolism, the serpent and dragon are interchangeable. 'Dragon' also designated 'to see clearly.' Their attribute is penetrating vision. It explains why the dragon, though often feared, was traditionally associated with prophecy and wisdom. It is the symbol of individualized thought, "passing individually and personally, i.e., spiritually and physically, through every experience and feeling that exists in the manifold or differentiated universe" (HPB).

Dragons guarded temples. The dragon recognizes the non-separateness of the Universe and everything in it from the Absolute. The middle eastern cult of the seer were conscious of their interior sense of divinity and the nonmaterial dimension of transcendent consciousness -- the continuum of the divine intuitive / personalistic animal mind. The divine wasn't a vision of the universe, but an imaginal experience of human life and relationships put into your heart.

Theosophy synthesized archaic wisdom before it was deconstructed by psychology and distorted by New Age thought. Theosophists call the dragon a multidimensional symbol related to the highest level of spirituality, the intermediary planes of phenomenal life and the lower inferior and telluric forces. It isn't entirely clear whether it is pre-existent, self-existent, or born of chaos. Theosophy considers this spiritual efflorescence of Manas, the fifth principle. Mind is space-like.

They teach that "The Logos is passive Wisdom in Heaven and Conscious, Self-Active Wisdom on Earth." HPB said, it is from the human personality "from which proceeds “the psychic, i.e., ‘terrestrial wisdom’ at best, as it is influenced by all the chaotic stimuli of the human or rather animal passions of the living body” (Lucifer, October, 1890, p.179).

They relate their Fifth Principle to the Makara or crocodile, called "Thou Art That." The dragon principle is dual psychic energy, like inspiration and expiration. This dragon is described in the Voice of the Silence in the exhortation addressed to the candidate for initiation: “Have perseverance    as one who doth for evermore endure. Thy shadows [personalities] live and  vanish; that which in thee shall live for ever, that which in thee knows, for it is knowledge, is not of fleeting life; it is the man that was, that  is, and will be, for whom the hour shall never strike” (p. 31).

"Dragon" was also the symbol of the Logos with the Egyptians, and the Gnostics. The Hebrew word 'naas' for serpent gave rise to the Naaseni, priesthood, who later were called Gnositics because they "pretended that they alone knew the depths of knowledge." The dragon of the soul imbues us with divine perceptions, making the inner world visible, enriched by moments of Intuitive Truth. It can appear as a flash of genius. The Universal Mind is the fountain head from which we occasionally glimpse what is beyond our sense that make us a seer, a oothsayer or a prophet. This is the real seership.

Though she flirted with it herself, HPB describes psychism as a disorder of the desire-body: "We Theosophists, on the other hand, who do not believe in the ‘communion of spirits’, as Spiritualists do, regard [Page 40] the gift as one of the most dangerous of abnormal nervous diseases. A medium    is simply one in whose personal Ego, or terrestrial mind, the percentage of the astral light so preponderates as to impregnate with it his whole physical constitution. Every organ and cell thereby is attuned, so to speak, and subject  to an enormous and abnormal tension” (Lucifer, November 1890, page 183)."

Transcending the duality of heaven and earth, the Dragon of Wisdom is the human soul. The real human concealed under the personality is the sacred Crocodile of Egypt. The seat of its “worship” was Crocodilopolis, sacred to Set and Sobek, its alleged creators. Actual crocodiles are the closest animal to the mythical dragon, a wide-spread and archaic symbol. The Dragon is the dark side of Osiris.

The Dragon symbolizes the universal ether, the lower World-Soul, as the fundamental light frequency or form of ‘pure energy’. All other forms of energy are a modification of this primal energy, creating the impression of a concrete physical world, along with the astral impressions of the imagination, and the various sensations and perceptions that accompany human existence. It appears that reality has two aspects: the underlying field continuum, and the nature of the form perceived in it.

Carl Jung called the Dragon the ‘lower half’ of man, implying we ride on the back of our archaic unconscious instincts, our ancient creative source and ancestral heritage. Thus, through identification, like pharaohs of old, we become ‘anointed’ with, even self-initiated by the spirit of Sobek, deep time, and the dragon lineage or current -- self-rooted sovereignty.

The original Grant of Arms for the Messianic Dragon Bloodline in Sumeria described this insignia as the Gra-al. Laurence Gardner called it the 'Mark of Cain.' The Dragon King was known as the King of Kings and his symbol, Draco, represented his succession through the Egyptian pharaohs, the Egyptian Therapeutae, the Qumran Essenes to the Merovingian kings of Europe.

Sobekh Nefru rebuilt the labyrinthine Sobek temple at Khayyum. She re-established the Dragon Court of Prince Ankh-fn-Khonsu and her ancient heritage. Anunnaki dragon legacy descended to her bloodline daughter Merytaten, (granddaughter of Queen Nefertiti) -- later known as Scota.

Coomaraswami spoke of the flowing vase of Mesopotamia as a mythical and iconographic equivalent of the Indian soma. It can be represented by a tree, a plant, or the full and overflowing chalice from which the plant grows, or an inexhaustible spring. Gudea's flowing vase flows onto his body.

The act of anointing a newly invested king with priestly oil was known in the Ancient World, at least from the time of Sargon. It was recognized in the Bible as an act of consecration to God from the earliest times, but its most memorable instance was when the priest Samuel, custodian of the Ark of the Covenant, summoned David, the son of Jesse, and, proclaiming him king by the grace of God,

Took the horn of oil and anointed him
in the presence of his brethren;
and the Spirit of God
came upon David from that day on.
—I Samuel 16: 13

Utterance 77 - Pyramid Text
Ointment, Ointment, where are you? O you who should be on the brow of Horus, where are you? If you are on the brow of Horus, I will put you on the brow of this King, that you may give pleasure to him who has you, that you may make a spirit of him who has you, that you may cause him to have power in his body, and that you may put the dread of him in the eyes of all the spirits who shall look at him and everyone who shall hear his name—first quality pine-oil.

The anointed kings of this dynastic succession were called 'Dragons', or 'Messiahs'. In war, the armies of different kingdoms joined. An overall leader was chosen called the 'Great Dragon' (the 'King of Kings'). In old Celtic form, it is 'Pendragon'. Thus begins our quest for the Grail...


Dragon Heart

The Dragon-Logos, Sobek, is the root of the lines. As archetypal water-dragon, this Crocodile-dragon is primal dragon who emerged from the Cosmic Sea, as lord of vast cycles of nature. Its dragon treasures include clarity, foresight, and transformation. The names may change, but the Dragon archetype, like the crocodile, remains the same. We can approach it, with reverence and caution -- literally, metaphorically, or symbolically.

Nevertheless, it lives within us in the deepest recesses of our unconscious, in the absolute space of our subatomic nature. While such outrageous claims are arguable, we hope to provide some credible clues from both the lineage and modern research. There is precedent.

We will explore the core commonalities of old and new practices, then discover more about the dragon descent. We learn how to connect with the dragon archetype, tame that force as the Egyptians trained their sacred crocodiles, and use ancestral veneration as a basis of our devotion, practice and service.

We hope to establish some flow by re-visioning the ancient and modern practices. We want to see with Dragon Eyes. Yes, there are ‘secrets,’ but such secrets always remain concealed, reserved for initiates. They simply cannot be divulged solely because they are subjective experiences, not just concepts. This essay hopes to stimulate your own vision and wisdom about this ancient path.

In The Secret Doctrine, H.P. Blavatsky says, “’Serpent’ and ‘Dragon’ were the names given to the "Wise Ones," the initiated adepts of olden times. It was their wisdom and their learning that were devoured or assimilated by their followers.“ 

The crocodile is "the “Dragon of Wisdom” or Manas, the “Human Soul”, Mind, the Intelligent principle, called in our esoteric philosophy the “Fifth” principle." (p. 219) It is a dual principle joined to the animal and the True Ego, as well as "a celestial body always joined with the soul, which is immortal, luminous, and star-like." 

Hence, we have the notion of 'astral voyages,' the path of souls. The destiny of the soul is the path to the North., the stars of the northern sky, as described in the Pyramid Texts. The “Never-setting Ones” were a powerful symbol of immortality. The path to immortality is through the astronomical Eye of the Dragon, the natural stillpoint at the true North of our spinning globe. The khemi were the imperishable northern stars. This was a great archaic discovery.

“We find (a) the priests assuming the name of the gods they served; (b) the “Dragons” held throughout all antiquity as the symbols of Immortality and Wisdom, of secret Knowledge and of Eternity; and (c) the hierophants of Egypt, of Babylon, and India, styling themselves generally the “Sons of the Dragon.” (Blavatsky)

“The crocodile is the Egyptian dragon. It was the dual symbol of Heaven and Earth, of Sun and Moon, and was made sacred, in consequence of its amphibious nature, to Osiris and Isis. ...The crocodile was moreover, the symbol of Egypt herself. The Alchemists claim another interpretation. They say that the symbol of the sun in the ship on the Ether of Space meant that the hermetic matter is the principle, or basis, of gold, or again the philosophical sun; the water, within which the crocodile is swimming, is that water or matter made liquid; the ship herself, finally, representing the vessel of nature, in which the sun, or the sulphuric, igneous principle acts as a pilot.” (Blavatsky)

Looking for mythic sources, The Smithsonian suggests: "The Nile Crocodile. Native to sub-Saharan Africa, Nile crocodiles may have had a more extensive range in ancient times, perhaps inspiring European dragon legends by swimming across the Mediterranean to Italy or Greece. They are among the largest of all crocodile species, with mature individuals reaching up to 18 feet in length—and unlike most others, they are capable of a movement called the “high walk,” in which the trunk is elevated off the ground. A giant, lumbering croc? Might be easy to mistake for a dragon."

As in the case of the later Grail Kings, the King and the Land were One, and the Dragon-Crocodile symbolized it all – the sovereignty, might, and wisdom. Numinous means "arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring." Rudolph Otto suggests the numinous can be understood as the experience of a mysterious terror and awe and majesty in the presence of that which is “entirely other” and thus incapable of being expressed directly.

Sobek is a numinous religion of immediate experience, not faith. In On the Nature of Psyche, Jung says, “Numinosity is wholly outside conscious volition, for it transports the subject into the state of rapture, which is a state of will-less surrender.” Wonder and astonishment are part of taking it to heart, interiorizing it, becoming intimate with it. Primordial wisdom" is "unborn, unceasing, unlimited, undying," and that is always our fundamental nature.

The transcendent function arises when our conscious mind begins to become aware of some aspect of the unconscious mind – immanence. The conscious and unconscious aspects of the mind work together to conceptualize life experience. By opening to the unconscious, the conscious mind gives form and meaning to deep ineffable truths. They are known, but unknown: intuited, but unspoken.

In Egypt, Babylon, and Chaldea, magic and occult practices were connected with astrology. Annedotus (Gr.) was "the generic name for the Dragons or Men-Fishes, of which there were five. The historian Berosus narrates that there rose out of the Erythræan Sea on several occasions a semi-dæmon named Oannes or Annedotus, who although part animal yet taught the Chaldeans useful arts and everything that could humanise them." (See Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, p. 203, and also “Oannes”.)

Mythologies surrounding Nimrod and Osiris and Horus worship the sun god, the stars, and planets. In some legends and genealogy trees, Nimrod married Semiramis, the Egyptian princess daughter of Menes, the Pharaoh. It all goes back to ancestor worship, at the crux of it all. Between dynasties, Egypt is more a spiritual priestly lineage than a dynastic genealogical one.

"This fantastic claim was supported by a collection of Aramaic writings called the Targum , 4 the Old Testament translated into Aramaic, 5 utilized by Jewish temple priests to aid in interpreting and understanding key texts. 6 These Aramaic writings stated Nimrod was the father of a pharaoh, even though no name was provided, 7 but Rohl names this pharaoh as likely Aha, who is generally associated with Menes, 8 the founder of the Pharonic form of kingship after the deluge, circa 2900–3100 B.C.E. Aha, also known as “Hor- Aha” and Manetho’s “Athothis,” is thought by some to be either the son of Narmer or Menes. 9 Another Ethiopian text on the Old Testament names the pharaoh son of Nimrod as Yanuf, known also as Anedjib, who reigned around 3000 B.C.E. , thereby establishing by either source the first postdiluvian Egyptian kingship stemming from Nimrod 10 as the originating patriarchal Dragon blood of the pharaohs."

"Further, Gardner suggests that Raneb, pharaoh of the Second Dynasty, circa 2852–13 B.C.E. , was a grandson to Nimrod, even though the Bible does not list any sons or descendants of Nimrod in Genesis or 1 Chronicles, likely for these Nephilim reasons. In his genealogies, Gardner additionally listed Boethus, son of Nimrod, as Pharaoh Hotep- Serhemwy. 11 This, then, was how Hagar, the Egyptian mother of Ishmael, was linked as a descendant of Nimrod. Nimrod, then, through partnering with Nephilim, spawned through his progeny the postdiluvian kingships of Egypt and Babylonia." 

Above all, the Egyptians believed in active ancestor worship or veneration, beginning with their Pharaohs. They believed in constant North as a portal to heaven for pharaohs, and the stars' close association with eternity and the afterlife. The myth of Osiris embodied their hopes for a life after death. Sobek helped re-member the body of Osiris to impregnate Isis. Remembering is crucial, as remembrance and integration.

This important rite of Remembrance was to keep the ka "alive" in this life as well as in the next. Royals, nobles and the wealthy made contracts with their local priests to perform prayers and give offerings at their tombs. The Egyptians believed that lack of ancestor veneration was one of the worst things a soul could endure.

No one can tell you what to expect from an encounter with the primordial, the numinous. It is different every time. Sometimes it is awesome and full of wonder, yet others can be paralyzing, even terrifying in their intensity and strangeness. A mysterious, majestic presence inspires dread and fascination.

For a mystical experience to occur, perceptions narrow and brain regions that orient us in space and mark the distinction between self and world must go quiet. We give up the past and give up the future, we give up our defenses. All feelings cease as the self merges with the numinous element. The mind becomes tranquil, withdraws itself from all sides, becoming firmly established in the supreme Reality.

In order to feel that time, fear, and self-consciousness have dissolved, certain brain circuits must be interrupted. This includes damping activity in the fear-registering amygdala, which monitors the environment for threats. Parietal-lobe circuits that give us a sense of physical orientation and a distinction between self and world must quiet down.

The orientation area requires sensory input to do its calculations. Intense meditation blocks the brain from forming a distinction between self and world. Frontal and temporal-lobe circuits, which mark time and generate self-awareness, must disengage. When this happens, self-awareness briefly drops out and we feel like our boundaries dissolve.

The Dragon is the universal energetic field, slumbering at the center of the Universe. A hidden Dragon sleeps within our deep nature and guides our collective destiny. Virtual and electromagnetic waves bathe all things in this radiation, in their motion. Through minuscule perturbations, waves can change to forms and images that can speak, becoming voices that can be heard by our sensitive energy bodies, feeding on biophotonic light. Transformed to vision and dreams they produce presentiments in us. We learn to see through our Dragon Eyes.

The etheric ocean, within which the dragon swims is "the generation of gods and the generation of men," swirling with flux and reflux. The most immediate experience is that of always having been and being forever. The three illusions of space, time and personality are obliterated in cosmic consciousness, as the soul completes its journey to its spiritual home. Human consciousness is eliminated, having been reabsorbed into the primordial essence. All becomes All without differentiation. This is the Unborn Self.


The Wild Psyche

On this path, we might imagine that as we merge into one overarching Being incorporating our ancestors and potential progeny, we ourselves embody the transpersonal for that period of time. But the ego can take no credit. It is not our abilities that allow it, but the responding connection with the depths. Thoughtforms can take on certain autonomous behaviors.

Identification with the numinous can also lead to dangerous ego inflation, over-identification, or 'possession' -- seizure of the psyche by a seductive archetype and over-expansion. Inflation is the misuse of transcendental energy. In extreme states the non-personal unconscious can form a vortex that pulls us under a stormy sea – the Dark Waters of Sobek.

Dragon "nautioneers" go through a similar process in their visionary explorations, navigating waves of Unborn Nothingness. They magically explore the inner, deathless universe identified with, magically connected to, and transformed by Sobek. The god comes down to earth in our own psychophysiology, dwelling within us, down to tactile understanding.

Dynastic sovereigns interbred for the ability to jump instantaneously from one place to another, to take a "jump off the path," "short cut," or 'travel without moving' – a quantum leap in consciousness to the stars. Their anointed Messiah was the genetic solution to simultaneously being in many places at once. The infinites are black-hole jumpers, traveling from universe to universe.

This is the source field of the fertility of microscopic, human, animal and plant life. It illumines the universe and directs nature in producing her species. This is the magical world of creative mystery. Our geocentric understanding of ourselves expands to realize that we are an intrinsic part of Cosmos.

The Universe is also literally within us. We become the personification of the whole natural world. This light, the dynamic reality of the energy field, is within us as within everything. Embodied nature is the link between the archetypal and formative worlds, the hyper-dimensional matrix of eternal patterns with sacred proportions and unique manifestations. It is also infinite potential, the possibility of bringing creative ideas to birth, to manifestation.

Spirituality is linked to the "oceanic" feeling of limitlessness. The sensation of an indissoluble bond is a deeply meaningful connection with the external world in its integral form. This feeling is an entirely subjective fact, not an article of faith. The oceanic experience is usually brief and completely unexpected. It is being at one with the entire universe, and of feeling a deep meaning and purpose to every part of existence.

This numinous experience is often accompanied by feelings of compassion and love for all beings. -- sacred participatory consciousness. But it may just be a momentary glimpse, a felt sense of what an integrated state would feel like. The universe looks very different seen from the inside out as pure consciousness apprehending itself. The holistic shift reveals that matter, energy, biology and consciousness are all inter-connected in a coherent sympathetic resonance.

 
The mummy of a four-meter crocodile, who personified the ancient Egyptian deity Sobek,
discovered by scientists in 2017 during excavations in the North of the Qena governorate.
https://earth-chronicles.com/science/in-egypt-have-found-a-mummy-of-a-giant-crocodile.html


Dragon Legacy

The Egyptian priest-Prince Ankhfn Khonsu (2170 BC) is a Dragon Court ancestor. My genealogy shows him as my 122nd Gr-Grandfather, naming each couple in between. Today’s dragon descendants have a legacy of spiritual practice for enhancing vision, clarity and foresight. Its antecedents can be found in the practices of Sobek cults of the sacred dragon/crocodile/serpent in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and elsewhere.

For example, in Ptolemaic times, Sobek was sought as an oracle to whom mundane and spiritual questions were put. To ancient astronomers, Sobek became the Polar Dragon of vast temporal Precessional cycles, a visual and symbolic reference uniting heaven and earth. Sibek was also associated with both solar and lunar eclipses. For healers, Sobek was sought as an epiphany in dreams. In Theosophy, it is Dragon Logos of the great Root Dragon. The Dragon Wisdom is designed to lead humanity to Self-Knowledge.

The dragon practices deal with self-transformation, depth awareness, and expanding interiority. It is all about building a real relationship between our conscious and unconscious minds. Practice and devotion facilitate direct experience of the deep unconscious and eruptions of ancient instincts, genetic memory, and dream life, as well as wisdom.

They include a wilder, more eruptive and primal form of Kundalini awakening than the systematic Hermetic practices of Thoth. Even shock, terror, and fear can bring a rude traumatic awakening when raw emotion overwhelms us. The Egyptians didn't distinguish much between the natural and supernatural creature, or its space-based form in the heavens.

Sobek is about interiorization, containing and symbolizing that energy. Practices are based in magical and therapeutic identification with or invocation of Sobek, natural transformational processes, and inner journeys in the netherworld. Some are rooted in alchemy and dreamwork.  Sobek also had astronomical, astrological, and magical aspects. Scientific finds in astronomy, archaeology, and genealogy are providing more evidence.

In psychological terms they relate to the archaic source of the collective unconscious, psyche, and soul. Sobek was the source of both great creation and destruction. When ego and shadow unite, the Self arises as a transpersonal force of the unconscious.Draco derives from the original drakon, or draconta, which alternatively translates as “to watch”. And what the numinous Eye of the Dragon watches over is the netherworld.

These are death-rebirth mysteries that allude to Kundalini activation and direct experience we can call a primordial ‘Sobek consciousness’ or ‘Riding the Dragon.’ As an archetypal power, Sobek can never be fully known, since our deepest unconscious essence is unknowable because it is the Unknown.

All dragon court practices trace back in some way to traditional practice. While the Coffin and Pyramid Texts describe them as death rites, they are also metaphorical and initiatory rites of symbolic immortality and primordial awareness. They can be done by devotees, descendants, and priest/esses of Sobek. We have to rely on intuition as Sobek’s internal guidance, a sort of navigational compass pointing to our true spiritual North.

When they were crowned, Pharaohs were anointed with Sacred Crocodile (Messeh) fat, referred to in Egypt as the Holy Mesa, which became the Aramaic Mashih, which in its verb form is MeSHeH or ‘to anoint’. Early Kings were called ‘Dragons’, ‘Mesas’ or ‘Messiahs’ and Draco. This tradition may have begun in Mesopotamia, but Queen Sobeknerfru instituted it in Egypt at the end of the Middle Kingdom. Sobek reigned supreme into the early New Kingdom of the 13thDynasty.

The first known female Pharaoh, Sobeknefru is sometimes named as the Egyptian Princess who rescued Moses, who was Amenemhat IV, who fled when he killed the Egyptian. She took the throne supported by the cult of Sobek. The care of the holy crocodiles has been suggested as a reason why babies were left adrift as a method of population control.

Others say Moses was raised by a daughter of a Pharaoh, or link him with the family of Akhenaten. Princess Sobeknefru married Pharaoh Khenephres, who can be equated with Khaneferre Sobekhotep IV. Genealogy shows descents from them to Meritatin or Scota who fled to Ireland, as well as Jewish lines that married into the royal families of ancient Europe. Their reunification led to the Grail Kings, who are still claimed as legendary progenitors of royal descent.

Naturally, many others are suggested as Moses, but this is arguable and plausible. Anyway, the tacit evidence is that the Hebrews used a holy anointing oil for their kings and priests, so a connection occurred at some point. Today we find that both anointing recipes may have had wild consciousness-altering properties that could account for radical experiences and transformations of the ‘anointed ones.’ Their original basis was rendered crocodile fat.

Simcha Jacobovici, the ‘Naked Archaeologist’,says Moses' rod became a crocodile, not a snake:

"Did you know that, when facing Pharaoh, it is not Moses that throws down his staff; it is his brother Aaron and, according to the original Hebrew, it did not turn into a snake but a crocodile? Since the Egyptians worshiped the crocodile god -- Sobek, when Aaron's crocodile swallowed up the Egyptian crocodiles, Pharaoh understood that the God of Israel was more powerful than his entire pantheon. All this is lost if the Hebrew word 'tanin' is mistranslated as 'snake' instead of crocodile.” (cited in Mogenson)

This latter branch included the bloodline of the Davidic House of Judah who married into the descent of the Merovingian Kings of the Franks. They claim a linear descent from the Priests of the Dragon Court of Queen Sobekh Nefru of Egypt, whose predecessor Amenhemet had built the Dragon Labyrinth of Fayyum -- dedicated to Sobek. The royal lineage, descending from archaic times has always been associated with the Dragon, whether as crocodile or serpent. (de Vere) In mummified form, crocodiles look even more serpentine.

                                                                    This crocodile mummy is almost four meters long (Credit: Trustees of the British Museum)


Creative Potential

Laurence Gardner wrote, "One of the interesting items from the archives of the Dragon Court was the origin of the word 'kingship'. It derives from the very earliest of Sumerian culture when 'kingship' was identical with 'kinship' - and 'kin' means 'blood relative'. In its original form, 'kinship' was 'Kainship'. And the first King of the Messianic Dragon succession was the biblical 'C(Kain)', head of the Sumerian House of Kish."

He notes, "The Dragon King was known as the King of Kings and his symbol, Draco, represented his succession through the Egyptian pharaohs, the Egyptian Therapeutae, the Qumran Essenes to the Merovingian kings of Europe."

"In pictorial  representation, the Messianic Dragon was, in essence, a large-jawed serpent with four legs, very much like a crocodile or a monitor. This was the Sacred Messeh whose name was 'Draco.' Draco was a divine emblem of the Egyptian pharaohs, a symbol of the Egyptian Therapeutae, of the Essenes of Qumran, and was the Bistia Neptunis (the sea serpent) of the descendant Merovingian Fisher King in Europe." (Gardner)

"The kings of the  early succession (who reigned in Sumer and Egypt before becoming kings of Israel were anointed upon coronation with the fat of the Dragon (the sacred  crocodile). ...This noble beast was referred to in Egypt as the Messeh (from      which derived the Hebrew verb 'to anoint'), and the kings of this dynastic  succession were always referred to as 'Dragons', or 'Messiahs' (meaning Anointed Ones)."

Just as we do today, the Egyptians sought their origins through connections to their ancestors and their mythic antecedents in the mists of pre-history. The ancient Egyptian royal bloodline is the House of Sobek. Their reign spanned the 12th and 13th Dynasties. The royal Messianic line passes through David and Solomon to Jesus and the Desposyni, down through Roman leaders, through Scota, to the mythic-historical lines of the Holy Grail: descent from Joseph of Arimathea, Arch Druid Bran the Blessed, and Pendragon Dynasty of King Arthur.

This Dragon Bloodline has always practiced its magic of the 'secret fire' which is known as “Kundalini”, “The Serpent Fire”, and the “Dragon,” depending on tradition. Egyptian coffin texts describe a process of identification or invocation of this dragon energy and its intensely transformative effects. The Dragon bloodline is known for its clarity of vision and second sight.

Alchemical philosophy is an intrinsic part of Hermetic thought, from the land of Khem (Egypt). Tuthmosis III of Egypt, who reigned about 1450 BC, maintained a hermetic school he inherited from the Royal Court of the Dragon. The oldest alchemical symbol is the Dragon. The Work is a waking dream, often a nightmare, in which the Prime Matter appears as a dragon.

There is evidence from ancient times that holy anointing oils of crocodile fat and intoxicants amplified the magical process. In legend, the alchemical Philosopher's Stone is kept in the custody of the reawakened Dragon, the Adept who inhabits his or her Body of Light. As dragon he devours himself and as dragon he dies, to rise again in the Lapis. Carl Jung called the dragon a symbol of the universal unconscious, a fundamental theme in mythology the world over — death and rebirth.



Riding the Dragon

Jung said, "It is as though consciousness were aware that the dragon is the lower half of man, which indeed and in truth is the case." (Letters Vol. 1, Page 489). It is our earthly essence of which we are not conscious.

H. Niehr, writes in The Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, that 'tannin' can be translated as “dragon,” “serpent,” “crocodile,” or “sea monster.” In addition, Niehr said that the tannin lives in the sea, lakes and rivers, and the netherworld. The ESV translates the word tannin as “sea monsters” and the KJV translates the same word as “dragons.” (Mariottini)

'Riding the Dragon' has always been considered a dangerous practice for the unprepared because of its wild and destructive energy. An eruption of the unconscious, the prima materia is often symbolized as a dragon, as it is the personification of the instinctual psyche. It is self-generating. The dragon represents the fertilization of the prima materia, the original material from which the universe is created.

Jung tells us, “It is a characteristic of the arcane substance to have ‘everything it needs;’ it is a fully autonomous being, like the dragon that begets, reproduces, slays and devours itself…a being without beginning or end."

But dreams bring healing epiphanies with the god. The dragon is also a healing power. The spiritual food of immortality signifies the ability of the ego to assimilate the previously unconscious aspects. This is the elixir of youth that creates the immortal body, equivalent to the Philosopher's Stone.

Riding the dragon, priest-kings or queens can call upon the aid and power of dragon potential to perform great magic. The Great Work allows the human body to contain the power of the Dragon. The dragon as universe symbolizes the wholeness of relationships. Psychologically, the dragon is the union of ordinary human reality with the Transpersonal Self and a passion for transformation.

As a symbol of DNA or the kundalini energy, it is a symbol of the Great Work. Even shock and fear can make the kundalini life force arise. Considering the entire history of our human emergence into the animal world is forever recorded (repressed) deep within our genetic code, certain aspects of our powerful ancient animal nature may lay dormant, just under the surface of our expression.

This innate wisdom is not a message transfer (from a sender through a channel to a receiver) but a communication in consciousness that allows consciousness to see itself arising. Meaning arises in the universe when sentient beings observe it, the universal quality of the animal as a symbol of transcendence. Coming from the depths, they are symbolic denizens of the collective unconscious. They bring into the field of consciousness a special chthonic message.

Morgenson speaks of dragons as, "what is totally unconscious and incapable of becoming conscious, but which, as the collective unconscious and as instinct, seems to possess a peculiar wisdom of its own and a knowledge that is often felt to be supernatural. This is the treasure which the snake (or dragon) guards, and also the reason why [it] signifies evil and darkness on the one hand and wisdom on the other. Its unrelatedness, coldness, and dangerousness express the instinctuality that with ruthless cruelty rides roughshod over all moral and any other human wishes and considerations and is therefore just as terrifying and fascinating in its effects as the sudden glance."

Today's dragon descendants and devotees of Sobek carry such traditions forward as a discipline and spiritual path of the Dragon -- a soulful journey into our deep interiority. As Nicholas de Vere suggests, "Entrance to Eternity involves the 'Wave of Bliss', the 'Divine Carriage to the Immortal Realms', also referred to as 'Riding the Dragon'." Creation occurs in increasingly dense levels of energy-matter, from the most subtle, or Fire, to the most dense, or Earth.

The dragon of the original chaotic condition prevails before the radical transmutation. But it contains all the refined ingredients of the ultimate alchemical state in uncooked form. The heat has yet to be applied to the unrefined material, raw uncooked emotion. Alchemy, Kabbalah, and Hermetics all describe a 'secret fire,' a dragon energy. In Alchemy this "secret fire" is often compared to a serpent or dragon.

The alchemists recognized four grades of Fire to work with. They were called Elementary Fire, Secret Fire, Central Fire, and Celestial Fire. Elementary Fire represents our everyday lives. Secret Fire exists within our consciousness. Central Fire is the fire of creation in all manifested objects. Celestial Fire is the brilliance of the transcendent mind of the Dragon itself -- primordial awareness. When the great cosmic dragon wakes it ravages everything in its path.

The paradox of the alchemical work is expressed in the allegory of the dragon. One version of the prima materia is poisonous and the other is “the most noble purified earth”. The prima materia— dragon of chaos—serves simultaneously as the source of things, the subject to whom things appear, and the self-arising characteristic images. This is not a mere material “source”; It is the absolute unknown itself.


Freeing the Dragon

We extend deep into matter, then into energy, and primordial ground. Psyche plays a role as primal as that of matter, energy, and space-time. It is the state of reality in which we become identified with and transformed by deathless awareness. This is who we are. Depth is our internal infinity.

So, how can we metaphorically tend to, tame, and feed our sacred inner Dragon, as was done in his sanctuaries, whether as devotee, descendant, or priest/ess? What can it mean in terms of our depth experience and soul? The dragon was originally revered for living in two realms, water and land, much as we exist in two realms of conscious and unconscious. Kings were also regarded as belonging to two separate realms, the mundane and sacred, source of their ‘divine right’.

Sobek was worshiped throughout Egypt; his cult center was in the Faiyoum. Sobek calls us to journey in his Dark Waters, the unconscious depths, to the restoration of life and triumph over death. We are present now, with the stars in our face and expanding universe at our back. Identified with the archetypal Dragon we are the infinite impulse of the unconscious and possess both sky and earth. We are Sobek.

The poet Rumi said, "To change, a person must face the dragon of his appetites with another dragon, the life-energy of the soul." More accurate than the old notion of the unconscious is that our conscious self is unconscious of most things most of the time and of everything in dreamless sleep. Paradoxically, the unconscious is holistically, non-locally conscious of all things all of the time. It never sleeps.

Paradoxically our conscious self is unconscious of our unconscious, and the unconscious is actually more conscious than normal awareness. Unconscious thoughts and feelings affect our conscious thoughts. During unconscious perception, an unconscious feeling can produce an unexplainable conscious feeling.

How long it takes to unblock our psychic anatomy for flowing functioning of the Secret Fire is variable. The heart is the center of the individual universe, and the most important of all psychic centers, characterized by strong intuition. This is the final resting place for the Dragon Tongue after its ascent over the skull. Sobek cut out his own tongue for his part in mutilating Osiris.

As breathing flesh, we approach the “Big King” first, and allow him to direct the activities of the dragon/serpent — language not unfamiliar in Hermetics. That Big King is the Dragon, the Draco, the Pharaoh, the Messiah within the initiate. In this consciousness we are directly linked to universal history, primal instinct, and deep evolutionary force.

Much like the Dragon Draco was the apparent center of the universe, around which all revolves, so too on Earth, the Dragon lineage is the archetypal core of humanity. The Dragon legacy is immortal because when they do their rites, the heirs of this bloodline invoke the spirits of their ancestors and embody this Wisdom Body.

Thus, everyone in the lineage is magically kept alive in memory and imagination and plausibly in the etheric or the information-carrying realm. This seems to be exactly the intention of Egyptian religion.


The Sobek of Our Dreams

"More especially the threat to one’s inmost self from dragons and serpents points to the danger of the newly acquired consciousness being swallowed up again by the instinctive psyche, the unconscious. The lower vertebrates have from earliest times been favorite symbols of the collective psychic substratum, which is localized anatomically in the subcortical centers, the cerebellum and the spinal cord. These organs constitute the snake. Snake-dreams usually occur, therefore, when the conscious mind is deviating from its instinctual basis." (Carl Jung; Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious; page 166)

After his association with Horus in the Middle Kingdom related him to the Osirian triad of Osiris, Isis, and Horus. Sobek became associated with Isis as a healer of the deceased Osiris, and a protector. His fierceness was able to ward off evil while simultaneously defending the innocent.

 He was thus made a subject of personal piety and a common recipient of votive offerings. In Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, crocodiles were preserved as mummies to present at Sobek's cultic centers. He protected the Egyptian people in the same manner that the crocodile protects its young.

The Hawara labyrinth, a vast underground temple complex, in Egypt was decorated with reliefs of the Dragon god Sobek. The womb temple is a place for rebirth. Sobek is also called the Dream Healer. The Egyptians believed that dreams could be used to get advice or prophecies from the gods, or for healing.

Healing power emerges from integration. Looking within, we arouse our tacit knowledge for participatory wisdom -- the active wisdom of the collective psyche. The same patterns are at work in the individual and collective psyche, something ungraspable in the depths. Larger patterns are at work in the collective.

A supplicant would sleep in the grounds of a temple, after praying to the god for help. This dream incubation, the hope that Sobek will visit them in a dream, was a process of “sleeping in.” Supplicants sleep on the floor of the temple; when they awake, they describe their dreams to a priest who offers an interpretation.

To dream of crocodiles may mean that there is something of great power lurking just below the surface of your unconscious mind., the instinctual 'reptilian' brain. Dreaming of crocodiles may also be messages of deep spiritual initiation. They have existed, relatively unchanged, for over 200 million years, so they are connected to a very ancient, primal, energy. Similar teachings turn up again among the Egyptian Therapeutae, a healing sect.

Sobek is associated with various Egyptian creation myths – some believe that he climbed out of primordial chaos and laid eggs from which the earth sprang. The overall theme in these ancient mythologies appears to involve power; the ability to simultaneously inhabit two realms; royalty; and creation.

The Egyptian crocodile god Sobek was a Dragon with a curious mythical lineage in humankind. The patron of the Dragon Dynasties was the inspiration for anointing the chosen with messeh, from which comes the word messiah for 'anointed one', crocodile fat mixed with fragrant oils and intoxicants.

The ancient Egyptian portion of this old myth in modern clothes includes the legend of the Labyrinth at Hawara, the priest-king Ankh-fn-khonsu, and the Pharaoh Queen, Sobekneferu, meaning "the beauty of Sobek."


Creative Potency, Protector, and Guide

Sobek, the sacred crocodile, has been identified with the circumpolar constellation Ursa Major, the Big Dipper. the Great Bear. The Celestial River is the Milky Way. The Big Dipper winds around the North Star like a crocodile in a slow seasonal deathroll. Egyptians used it to find true North, and to align the Pyramids. (Bario)

A Rumi poem, "Cry Out in Your Weakness," begins, "A dragon was pulling a bear into its terrible mouth…" The center of true North is often called The Dragon’s Eye. Blavatsky notes, “it was the goddess of the Great Bear and mother of Time who was in Egypt from the earliest times the "Living Word," and that "Sevekh-Kronus, whose type was the Crocodile-Dragon, the pre-planetary form of Saturn, was called her son and consort; he was her Word-Logos" (SD, p. 321, Vol. I.).

The word star in Egyptian was "saba." This is where the term "sabean" comes from, meaning "of the heavens" or "stars." Also seb, seba, sheba, sava, seba, seva, zeba, and so on. The English word "star," and Latin word "aster" both derives from the Egyptian original. The names of certain deities such as Sobek, Sebekh, and Set probably referred to the stars and to the master astrologers. The head of the Essenes at Qumran near the Dead Sea, was called the "Star."The title and appellation "Star" denoted a messiah or Christ figure, a great spiritual or political leader. (Tsarion)

The Egyptians laid out their kingdom according to a divine principle, a “Nile in the sky” where terrestrial localities had cosmic equivalents. Each district was a constellation, and the Nile River was an earthly manifestation of the Milky Way, a celestial river upon which the star gods and the souls of the deceased sailed. (Berio)

The Old Kingdom revered Sobek as a god of the Nile, floods, and fertility, yet feared him as a god of destruction. In the Middle Kingdom he was closely associated with Ra (the sun god).

As Sobek-Re the sky-god, he was, 'the great god whose eyes emit the two discs of light, whose right eye shines by day and whose left eye shines at night, whose two large eyes light up the darkness.' He is 'prince of maat'. Sobek embodies the creative potency of the Nile and the pharaoh. He is the intense primordial creative power of the cosmos itself. As above, so below.

Sobek's myth and cult embodied and concealed celestial mysteries. The star Thuban (Draconis) was the northern pole star around 2700 BC, during the time of the ancient Egyptians. The Egyptians emulated the heavens on earth with symbolic star pyramids along the Nile. Mythology creates narratives that contextualize experience by relating a history that took place in Primordial Time. Creation stories relate to what is sacred in a society.

Thus, Sobek became identified with the non-moving center of the night sky as a gateway to the infinite. Ancient Egyptians believed in constant North as a portal to heaven for pharaohs, and associated the stars with eternity and the afterlife. The Egyptians believed generative myths of the cosmic force acting through the crocodile star. They believed that the Nile River was created from his sweat. Therefore, Sobek controlled the waters and fertility of the soil.

Sobek is called the son of Neith or Nuit, another very ancient goddess deity of Infinite Space. Sobek is born of the primordial waters as the crocodile is born of the Nile. Born out of primordial nothingness, this creator god Sobekis also associated with various Egyptian creation myths. They credit the holy crocodile with climbing out of primordial chaos and laying the eggs from which the world sprang.

Spell 148 of the CoffinText reads, “The Crocodile Star Messeh strikes … Isis wakes pregnant with the seed of Osiris – namely Horus. Sobek embodies sexual potency: “I am the lord of semen who takes women from their husbands whenever he wishes"; in the hymns from Sumenu Sobek is said to produce all living seed, and that when he copulates he "totally assimilates the other." This devouring aspect is echoed by Saturn or Chronos, who swallowed his own children whole.



The god Sobek,  whose cultural centre was at Crocodilopolis in the Fayum, was represented by a crocodile living in the temple. A few other temples also kept sacred crocodiles, occasionally even a pair of them. A whole mummification industry grew up around his cult, with crocodiles specially grown for the purpose. Mummified effigies were used for worship and offerings.


Magically Identifying and Transforming into Sobek

CT spell 636 allows the operator to establish his/her powers of magic in the netherworld, with the operator’s ka as the source of his/her heka, ‘magic’ . They ares said to be magically “in the water with Sobek.”  CT spells 268 and 285 are both for “Becoming Sobek, Lord of the Winding Waterway,” a term which refers to the celestial ‘waterway’ of the ecliptic, which souls cross on their journey to the northern sky. They identify with Sobek.

In CT spell 158, Identifying with Sobek allows the operator to escape from the netherworld net and CT spell 991 also permits the invocation of, or “transformation into” Sobek, as a “rebel among the Gods” who has “taken possession of the sky and of the earth”.

It suggests that Sobek is conceived as a primordial God who transcends the lawful order of the cosmos as established by the Gods and can thus uphold or transgress this system as he wishes (Lexikon 1007). In Jungian terms, his consciousness is beyond the archetypal gods he helped generate. Buddhists call this seeing with naked awareness, psychic awareness stripped of all conceptual form, direct experiential knowing independent of space and time.

Sobek transcends the phenomena of his creation. Essential awareness is our essence -- timeless space consciousness is rooted in the depths of our being, the creative, the stillpoint, living presence. There is a freshness in every moment --alert to sense perceptions without thinking.


Primordial Creator

The Nile crocodile, Crocodylus niloticus, was the biggest and most dangerous predator living in ancient Egypt, so it took on mythic qualities of pharaonic power, fertility, and military prowess. The god offered protection from the dangers of the Nile as the Lord of the Nile, and the one “who greens the Two Banks.”

Sobek is called the son of Neith or Nuit, another very ancient goddess deity of Infinite Space. Sobek is born of the primordial waters as the crocodile is born of the Nile. Born out of primordial nothingness, this creator god Sobek is also associated with various Egyptian creation myths.

They credit the holy crocodile with climbing out of primordial chaos and laying the eggs from which the world sprang. In alchemy, the prima materia is also often referred to as “ovum” (egg), the egg contained the four elements according to the old definition. On the same lines it is called “sperma” (sperm) and “semen mundi” (seed of the world).

While coffin texts are for the dead, Pyramid Text 317 describes the pharaoh as the crocodile god's living incarnation, implying its impregnating power. Thus, pharaoh is an impregnator:

"Unis is Sobek, green of plumage, with alert face and raised fore, the splashing one who came from the thigh and tail of the great goddess in the sunlight ... Unis has appeared as Neith 's son. Unis will eat with his mouth, Unis will urinate, and Unis will copulate with his penis. Unis lord of semen, who takes women from their husbands to the place Unis likes according to his heart's fancy."

Clearly, the Dragon God Sobek is the custodian and protector of the blood royal. The god might have been already worshiped during the period of king Narmer, or earlier in pre-history. His cults flourished and evolved over the dynasties as Sobek-Horus and Sobek-Ra, taking on a solar character.

Its zenith was as Sobek Shedety at Faiyum''s centrally located capital, Crocodilopolis (Egyptian "Shedet"). Outside the Faiyum area, the Kom Ombo temple, House of Sobek, in southern Egypt, was his biggest cultic center in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods.


Dragon Archetype

Alchemical philosophy is an intrinsic part of Hermetic thought, from the land of Khem (Egypt). Tuthmosis III of Egypt, who reigned about 1450 BC, maintained a hermetic school, the legacy of the Royal Court of the Dragon.

The Egyptian priest-prince Ankhfn Khonsu (2170 BC) was a Dragon Court patron. The Royal Court Of The Dragon provided an institution for the pursuit of the work of the Dragon of Al-Khem otherwise known as Thoth or Hermes. From Al-Khem we have Alchemy, The Great Work of The Dragon, with its classic texts, “The Emerald Tablets” and “The Pymander.”

The crocodile god is a primordial aspect of the dragon archetype, which shares similar qualities. The dragon of alchemy "devours, fertilizes, begets, slays, and brings itself to life again." In the Book of Hermes, Pymander appears to Hermes (Thoth) in the shape of. a Fiery Dragon of “Light, Fire, and Flame." Pymander is the "Thought Divine" personified.

"The Dragon" means the dragon archetype resting within the Dragon blood and passed on through the genes. It is the conduit through which flow memories of the wisdom and experience of the Dragons. The dragon is very much our raw psychic energy within the unconscious (the cave or labyrinth where dragons live).

The fire breathing kundalini Serpent that is at first asleep is vile and dangerous to those who do not know the process of its purification. It is passed through the alchemical process, uniting cosmic masculine and feminine. The serpent/dragon/crocodile is found world-wide and relates to a number of human concerns--death, rebirth, healing, immortality, knowledge, wisdom, wealth, and finally water, which has much the same symbolism.

Dragons are associated with water in the form of weather, streams, bodies of water, and the primal cosmic ocean. The oldest and most purely mythic dragon stories deal with creation and the primal oceanic chaos which is a great dragon. Some sects believed that Sobek was the creator of the world who arose from the "Dark Water" and created the order in the universe. Sobek was a god of the Nile who brought fertility to the land.

As the "Lord of the Waters" he was thought to have risen from the primeval waters of Nun to create the world. However, as well as being a force for creation, he was seen as an unpredictable deity who sometimes allied himself with the forces of Chaos. All in all, though, there is evidence to support separate archetypal Dragons, there is none to support a single archetype for the whole human race. Sobek is the version of ancient Egypt. Later dragons guard virgins as Sobek guarded Isis, the Virgin of the World.

Thus, we can equates the dragon with primordial awareness, but also with the inner effective power of matter, immanence or the subtle body -- vacuum potential -- the internal aspects of matter and mankind -- the energy body or psychophysical self. The dragon as universe symbolizes the wholeness of relationships. As Above; So Below.


Dragon Bloodlines

In other areas, this archaic crocodile god, from the Dark Waters of the unconscious, was referred to as a Dragon, and associated with the primordial totem of ruling families. This lineage can be traced today in conventional and traditional genealogy through the Irish royal descents. The crocodile’s strength and speed symbolized the power of the Pharaoh. The hieroglyph of a crocodile represented the word “sovereign” or “ruler.”

According to Nicholas de Vere in The Dragon Legacy, "Briefly, the Dragon lineage starts in the Caucasus with the Annunaki, descending through migrating proto-Scythians to the Sumerians while branching off also into the early Egyptians, Phoenicians and Mittani. A marriage bridge back to Scythia infused the Elvin line of “Tuatha de Danaan” and the Fir Bolg, which branched into the Arch-Druidic, Priest-Princely family to the Royal Picts of Scotland and the ring kings of the Horse Lords of Dal Riada, through the Elven dynasty of Pendragon and Avallon del Acqs, and down to a few pure bred families today."

The Dragon bloodline has been elsewhere described as the “Grail bloodline”, and the Dragon priest-kings are the same as the popularly-known “Grail kings”, including the Merovingians. Legend says the first dragon king was Kain. His successors were the first great Kings (or Kains) of Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Dragon Court can first be identified in Egypt under the patronage of the priest-prince Ankhfn Khonsu at about 2170 BC. A more formal pharaonic institution was instituted by the twelfth dynasty Queen Sobekh Nefru, "the beauty of Sobek," in 1785 BC. (Gardner)

Its ancestral power still calls to many descendants, whether or not they can trace their lineage or are even aware of it. It may come as a powerful attraction to any aspects of the cult and its history. These creatures represent a deep, abiding connection with the Mother (Nature), and perhaps that's the most profound wisdom they have to share.

Those who have discovered this connection have reacted in several ways. Such knowledge enjoys a modern renaissance among those who identify their ancestry with the ancient wisdom of Sobek, and the royal dragon families, including those of dynastic Egypt. Modern claims to dragon descent have been embodied in the revivals of the Imperial & Royal Dragon Court by its presumptive heirs, who find their own ancestral history within it as a closely-held secret of the dragon.

Cult worship in the 12th and 13th Dynasties incorporated this god and the practice of anointing the rulers with the messa holy oil as part of their deification process. This compound substance, with its crocodile fat basis, is lost in the mysteries of early Egyptian alchemy, which was a literal and spiritual practice. The pharaoh was anointed or smeared by his bride before marriage (Gardner), and again at his coronation.

Sobek was one among several gods responsible for weighing the souls of the dead. In The Egyptian Book of the Dead the crocodile god opens the doors that lead dead souls into paradise. He carries Osiris in death on his back, ferrying him to the other side of the river. His name is synonymous with the portal to the underworld.

"The Book of the Dead suggests that Sobek, the crocodile G-d’s closeness to Horus can be traced back to his participation in the birth of this god. Sobek was responsible for calling Isis and Nephthys to aid in the protection of the dead. He was the G-d from the Dark Water. Sobek may have been an early fertility god or associated with death and burial." (Gardner,“The Hidden History of Jesus and the Holy Grail”)

This formula, presumably rendered crocodile fat mixed with fragrant oils and intoxicants, passed down through history as the recipe for the holy temple oils used by the Jews. Sobek was called ‘Lord of myrrh’. The recipe remains somewhat controversial for its translation, and recent suggestions it included psychoactive cannabis oil. It was called 'Christos' by the Greeks. Egyptian in origin, the word 'Messiah' signifies the 'Anointed One', and none of the kings of Israel were styled the Messiah unless anointed. Chris Bennett describes it:

"The ancient recipe for this anointing oil, recorded in the Old Testament book of Exodus (30: 22-23) included over nine pounds of flowering cannabis tops, Hebrew "kaneh-bosm", extracted into a hind (about 6.5 litres) of olive oil, along with a variety of other herbs and spices. The ancient chosen ones were literally drenched in this potent cannabis holy oil."

Gardner, in Bloodline of the Holy Grail, says "The word 'Messiah' comes from the Hebrew verb mashiach: 'to anoint', which derives from the Egyptian messeh:' the holy crocodile'. It was with the fat of the messeh that the Pharaoh's sister-brides anointed their husbands on marriage, and the Egyptian custom sprang from kingly practice in old Mesopotamia."

Sumerian monarchs were anointed with the fat of the sacred Mûs-hûs: a type of monitor-crocodile in the Euphrates Valley. Tiamat is the mother of creation who created the mushussu. Mushussu defended her against the god Marduk; after Tiamat was defeated he was allowed to live on as a shrine guardian.

By virtue of this anointing, the kings were also called Mûs-hûs (or, in Egypt, Messeh) - a term which in the later Hebrew tongue became Messiah, meaning Anointed One. As anointed Messiahs, the dragon kings were deemed to retain the supreme prowess of the sacred crocodile — the kingly aptitude of the Messianic dragon.

In the book of Ezekiel (29:3), the Egyptian pharaoh is called ‘The great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers’, and a victory song in honor of Pharaoh Tuthmosis III runs, ‘Behold your Majesty in the likeness of a crocodile feared in the waters’.


Archaic Spiritual Legacy

But our point is not how or if the royals, priests, or initiates became intoxicated, nor an ideological battle between Christ and the crocodile god. If it is so, we can presume it had a very strong effect, based on today’s cannabis research. Such a ‘journey’ may well have felt like a netherworld voyage. It wouldn’t be the only psychoactive plant the Egyptians used.

Our focus is on how dragon cult practices have come down into our own times in history, legend and myth -- not to mention our genealogies, real or fabricated. Our's is a spiritual legacy to honor and perpetuate to the best of our knowledge and practice, through personal mythology, dreams, wisdom traditions, and other means. Personal myth shapes individual behavior as cultural myths influence social behavior.

Regardless of what we think about modern vanity courts or 'what's in a name,' the spiritual legacy remains and calls to us from the depths of the Dark Waters. We can consider modern revivals of the Dragon Court a sort of personal mythology lived out loud, now gone global, based on perhaps a little truth and a lot of literalism. Descent from antiquity is considered pseudo-history for genealogists, but for others that is a way of suggesting a mythical reality, a psychic or imaginal dreaming.

At Fayyum, the Greek Crocodilopolis. Sobek was called ‘Sobek of Shedet’, or ‘Shedety’. Once this ‘civic’ Sobek was created, Sobek was able to play new roles in different environments, including Hawara, Medinet Madi, el-Lahun, Gurob and  Qasr el-Sagha. 'Mighty in Power,' he is also 'the scattering energy.' Life, death, and rebirth are all parts of the cycle of being.

The double temple at Kom Ombo honors Horus as spiritual warrior and Sobek as 'the Rager.' With Sobek, Hathor conceives and bares the god of cyclical time, Khonsu, god of the moon. Those temple priests served both gods and initiated first into the mystery of one, and then its opposite in the underground tunnels beneath the temple, from the celebration of life to the rebirth from death. (Normandi Ellis)



Refuge From Egypt in Ireland

Gaels say they descended from a princess named Scota. Her husband was Niul, by birth, a Black Sea prince of Scythia. Her name “Scota”, which was Scythian for “ruler of the people” was acquired when she married.

A variant myth in the Lebor Gabála Érenn saysanother Scota was the daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh named Cingris, wh is only found in Irish legend. She married Niul, son of Fenius Farsaid. He was a Babylonian who migrated to Scythia after the collapse of the Tower of Babel. He was a scholar of languages and was invited by the Pharaoh to Egypt to take Scota's hand in marriage. (Wikipedia)

Princess Scota, was born in Egypt, at the time when Moses began to act as leader of the children of Israel. These leaders, from which the Gaelic people descended, were themselves descended from historic people. The Scythians, before the migration of Niul and Scota to Ireland and Scotland, were descended from the Biblical Ham and Japhet. Ham, was Thoth. Japhet was Iapetus II to the Greeks. (Gardner)

The legendary stories of Scota, as founder of Ireland and Scotland have conflicting tales of her descent, including through Akhenaten, and four or five other pharaohs. But all agree on the migratory process between 4,000 and 3,500  years ago to these western lands. As Meritaten, grandaughter of Nefertiri, she may have been a religious refugee. We may never know. Whoever she was, she is the root of the dragon lineage of the High Kings of Ireland.

But we do know Egyptian artifacts, including faiance beads and bones of an African monkey, have recently been found near Tara. That seems to confirm the presence of Egyptians in Ireland at that time. Ireland and Scotland were settled by descendants of Egyptian royals. Recent discoveries in DNA research have added to already verified archaeological evidence.

Irish history (Scoticronicon) records the story about Scota, the daughter of Pharaoh of Egypt who arrived in the southern part of Ireland via Spain between 4,000 and 3,500 years ago. She sailed the trade route in search of the new world. She settled in the country of Kerry (south-western part of Ireland) and married Milesius and gave him eight sons.


Detail of a depiction of Sobek, the ancient Egyptian crocodile god. Source: Brooklyn Museum


Conclusions

The Egyptian crocodile god Sobek was a Dragon with a traceable mythical descent into humankind. The iconic patron of the Dragon Dynasties, which descend from Tiamat, was the inspiration for anointing the chosen with messeh, from which comes the word messiah for 'anointed one'. It was crocodile fat mixed with fragrant oils and intoxicants.

The ancient Egyptian myth includes the legend of the Labyrinth at Hawara, the priest-king Ankh-fn-khonsu, and the Pharaoh Queen, Sobekneferu, meaning "the beauty of Sobek." The Royal Court of the Dragon was founded by the priests of Mendes in about 2200 BC and later revived by the 12th dynasty Queen Sobeknefru.

This sovereign and priestly Order passed from Egyptian priest-kings to the Kings of Jerusalem; to the Black Sea Princes of Scythia (Princess Milouziana of the Scythians) and into the Balkans. In the Royal House of Hungary, King Sigismund reconstituted the Dragon Court around 600 years ago. Sigismund assumed royal dragon descent from Melusine into the Anjou and Plantagenet lines.

Her ancestry allegedly can be traced back to the Scythian Dragon Princess Scota, Queen Sobekh Nefru and the Egyptian Cult of the Dragon. If Prince Ankh-fn-khonsu is anyone’s Great-Grandfather, we can only deeply ponder what that might mean. Such archaic myths arise self=generated from the imaginal psyche. In a very real way, we are all descended from the dragon-like primordial evolutionary energies. The dragon remains as our deepest unconscious – vital, fertile, creative.

We can consider modern revivals of the Dragon Court, fraternities and fascinations with the Dragon bloodline a sort of personal mythology. Some live it out, some research and study it, and some perform its transformative magic. Some take it literally, others metaphorically, and symbolically. Views range from perhaps a little truth to a lot of literalism.

Descent from antiquity is considered pseudo-history for genealogists. For others it is a way of suggesting a mythical reality, a psychic or imaginal dreaming that can spontaneously heal souls. The Egyptians believed that dreams could provide prophecies from the gods, or healing. The god can appear in a dream, and that alone is enough to impact the dreamer.

At Crocodilopolis, these creatures were worshiped and adorned with bedazzling gold and jewels. Sobek was one among several gods responsible for weighing the souls of the dead. He symbolizes discernment, judgment, authority and guidance.

Crocodile meaning is inherent in their prehistoric status. The oldest and most vital part of our human brains is the brainstem and the cerebellum. Sobek and Horus represent two powerful opposing psychic forces. The old and the new parts of each of us are associated with the reptilian brain.

The primitive non-verbal part of the brain ensures our physical survival at the instinctual level of stimulus and response. The reptilian brain holds the most ancient evolutionary patterns from which we have evolved. It has kept us protected, alive, breathing, and growing forward. Ultimately, it is the lived relationship that satisfies the soul.

We can call anyone of the dragon blood who has yet to discover or prove their dynastic heritage, a "crypto-dragon." Over and over the phenomenon and transformative reaction repeats itself. A seemingly ordinary person somehow develops an interest in their family genealogy, finds a historical Gateway Ancestor, who's pedigree leads them back to medieval times where they find they descend from nobility and royalty. Because of intensive intermarriage among nobles in past eras, finding one royal usually means tapping into several blueblood lines.

Initiation opens a communication link between the aspirant and this divine guiding principle -- our inner genius -- fostering balance in the personality as the firm foundation for spiritual development. Maat or 'Balance' was the prime expression of the Egyptian Mystery Schools, because it gave order and meaning to life. In the East, it is called the Tao, a dynamic blending of yin and yang. Balance helps you to achieve the goals you want in life and to manifest your dreams. You can easily integrate this wisdom tradition in your own life. Empowerment comes through grounding and centering.

Such knowledge transforms and activates a new level of Being, internally and in the world, at large. The Dragon has come calling and collected its own, informing that consciousness spark with a connection to hyperdimensional depth, with a sense of mission and purpose, with a commitment to the recovery of full Dragon nature and inherent potential of genius for clarity. This is the Path of Return.





The Scythian Dragon spread throughout the Steppes. The Scythians or Scyths were a group of Iranian people, known as the Eurasian nomads, who inhabited the western and central Eurasian steppes from about the 9th century BC until about the 1st century BC. Scythia was the Greek term for the grasslands north and east of the Black Sea.(a) the intimate cultural contact between Egypt, Southern Arabia, Sumer, and Elam from a period at least as early as the First Egyptian Dynasty; (b) the diffusion of Sumerian and Elamite culture in very early times at least as far north as Russian Turkestan and as far east as Baluchistan; (e) at some later period the quest of gold, copper, turquoise, and jade led the Babylonians (and their neighbours) as far north as the Altai and as far east as Khotan and the Tarim Valley, where their pathways were blazed with the distinctive methods of cultivation and irrigation; (d) at some subsequent period there was an easterly diffusion of culture from Turkestan into the Shensi Province of China proper; and (e) at least as early as the seventh century B.C. there was also a spread of Western culture to China by sea.

REFERENCES

Bario, Alessandro,The Celestial River: Identifying the Ancient Egyptian Constellations, by Alessandro Berio. Victor H. Mair, Editor. Sino-Platonic Papers. Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, 2014.

Bennett, Chris,http://zzco.org/chris_bennett/christ.html, Liber 420: Cannabis, Magickal Herbs and the Occult, Trine Day, 2018.

Blavatsky, H.P., Secret Doctrine, Theosophical University Press Online Edition.

Thomas Berry, 1999, “The Wild and the Sacred,” in The Great Work, 55

Giles Clark (1996). The Animating Body: Psychoid substance as a mutual experience of psychosoma. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 41, pp. 353-368  

Ellis, Normand, Dreams of Isis: A Woman's Spiritual Sojourn, Quest Books.

El-Sharkawy, Basem Samir, Sobek’s Cult and Temple at Memphis https://www.academia.edu/10018391/SOBEKS_CULT_AND_TEMPLE_AT_MEMPHIS_Cairo_2002_

Conder, Kasey. Queen Sobekkara Sobekneferu – Mirror of Isis.http://mirrorofisis.freeyellow.com/id278.html

Devere, Nicholas, The Dragon Legacy: The Secret History of an Ancient Bloodline, Book Tree, 2004.

Devere, N. The Dragon Cede. Book Tree, 2010.

Gardner, Laurence, . Realm of the Ring Lords, Fair Winds Press, 2003.

Gardner L.Genesis of the Grail Kings, Bantam Press, 1999.

Jablonka E & Ginsberg S (2006) Book review. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13(6) pp. 97–122.

Dr. Claude Mariottini, Professor of Old Testament at Northern Baptist Seminary., “Moses and His Crocodile”.

Mogenson, Greg, http://www.cgjungpage.org/learn/articles/analytical-psychology/277-the-serpents-prayer-the-psychology-of-an-image

Night Watch in One Brain Hemisphere during Sleep Associated with the First-Night Effect in Humans. Masako Tamaki et al. in Current Biology, Vol. 26, No. 9, pages 1190–1194; May 9, 2016.

Zecchi, Marco, 2010, “Sobek of Shedet,”https://www.academia.edu/2624950/Sobek_of_Shedet._The_Crocodile_God_in_the_Fayyum_in_the_Dynastic_Period

Sethe, K., Die altaegyptischen Pyramidentexte (4 vols, Leipzig, 1908–10). Translation by Faulkner, R. O., The ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (2 vols, Oxford, 1969)

De Buck, A., The Egyptian Coffin Texts (7 vols, Chicago, 1935–61). Translation by Faulkner, R. O., The ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts (3 vols, Warminster, England, 1973–78).

Neugebauer, O., Parker, R. A., Egyptian astronomical texts, i (Providence, R. I., 1960),

Fayyum https://books.google.com/books?id=Y6VJgeU28lQC&pg=PA99&lpg=PA99&dq=,sobk,+isis&source=bl&ots=Btj8YT3ZQX&sig=bmI8W5lc4gIoj5yX9kHomnfi21s&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiIm6Xwv5nZAhVGu1MKHeyaArMQ6AEIUzAE#v=onepage&q=%2Csobk%2C%20isis&f=false

Nature never sleeps. Cave-dwelling, darkness-loving crocodiles are mutating into a new species.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/07/africa/orange-crocodiles-cave-gabon-africa/index.html


https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1168&context=senproj_s2011

http://www.worldhistory.biz/ancient-history/58945-4-oracles-and-divination.html


https://aratta.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/the-origin-of-the-dragon-cult/

 
   Kheops, King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Djedefre, King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Princess Neferhetepes of Egypt  
his daughter
   →
   Userkaf, King of Egypt  
her son
   →
   Nefirkare Kakai, King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Nyuserre (Niuserre) Ini, King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Menkauhor Kaiu, King of Egypt  
his son
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   Djedkare Isesi, King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Unas (Wenis / Oenas), King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Princess Iput of Egypt  
his daughter
   →
   Pepi I, King of Egypt  
her son
   →
   Pepi II, King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Merenenre II, King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Ankhfn-Khonsu, Prince of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Inyotef I “the Great”, King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Inyotef II, King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Inyotef III Nakhtnebtepnefer, King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Mentuhotep I (II) Nebhepetra, King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Mentuhotep III (IV), King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Princess Nfry-Ta-Tjenen of Egypt  
his daughter
   →
   Sensusret I Kheperkare, King of Egypt  
her son
   →
   Amenemhat II Nubkaure, King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Sesostris II Khakheperre, King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Sesostris III Khakaure, King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Amenemhat III Nemare, King of Egypt  
his son
   →
   Princess Kemi  
his daughter
   →
   Khaneferre Sebekhotep IV, King of Egypt  
her son
   →
   Princess Sebekhotep of Egypt  
his daughter



Interiorized Vision
Iona Miller, 2018

James Hillman tells us, for centuries we've identified interiority with experience. " This vision not only kills things, with regard to them as death, but imprisons us in that cramped cell that is me. If the psychic reality is identified with experience, it becomes necessary for psychological logic: we have to invent an inner witness, someone who, at the center of subjectivity, has experience - and we can't imagine otherwise."

If we do not give in to that subjectivism who is no longer literal in the experience of thinking about himself, we can get rid of that fictional subject, which is our "I". His manifestation, Interiority, subjectivity [and not vague subjectivism] and psychic depth [is] all out there ". Then we will discover that, "this answer immediately connects the individual soul to the soul of the world: I, I am " animated " as an animal from the soul of the World. [....] any alteration in the human psyche is in resonance with a change in the psyche of the world. "

Paradox  constantly reenters itself through the process of iteration -- feedback  loops involving the continual reabsorption or enfolding of what has  come before.


FIRST SIGHT - IMPLICIT VISION
Iona Miller, 2018

"Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." --Carl Jung

We extend deep into matter, then into energy, and primordial ground, the primordial mind. The psyche plays a role as primordial as that of matter, energy, and space-time. It is the state of reality in which we become nobody and we remain as we are, which is deathless awareness. Yet, today our blossom clings to the vine. This is who we are.

Depth is our internal infinity. We are present now, with the stars in our face and expanding universe at our back. This is actually our primordial face. This primordial ground is the foundation not only of the universal forms and the purpose of the world, but also of distinct being and the source of all these psychic manifestations -- the infinite impulse of the unconscious.

Spontaneous Presence

The time before we become somebody is called “primordial time” in the Buddhist tantras. Nothingness or openness or emptiness or voidness or spaciousness is the ground of primordial awareness, a ground that is no ground at all. The nothingness or openness is light, luminous radiance, is the primordial ground of all that is. Consciousness-at-rest and conscious-energy are the two primary manifestations of the one ultimate, self-contained consciousness.

Taoists symbolize the Primordial chi field as Tai Yi, the Great Oneness. Tai Yi is not a deity or Supreme God, but rather signifies a chi field of Primordial Love that holds the ground for the unfolding of harmony and balance in manifest creation.

The depth dimension is human interiority, the unconscious dimension of the psyche. From the infinitely large to the infinitesimally small, the universe is the primordial depth dimension of ourselves, of human interiority. Depth includes not only the downward and the inward, but the depth of "the between."

This should not be surprising, because we each internalize our subjective life. Interioroty activates this powerful internal archetypal dimension. Each aspect has its own unique features that give the human psyche an immeasurable degree of depth. The form of our actually lived life is seen from the  perspective of psychological interiority, a more inclusive systemic viewpoint. We must value vitally important images that emerge from the unconscious, evoke such images, and engage them decisively.

Interiorization is the process of forming structures of the human psyche through the acquisition of life experience. The concept comes from the French "intériorization", which suggests a transition from the outside to the inside, and from the Latin "interior", which means the inner. Through interiorization the seer is transformed into an imaginal person--one who is living inside the creative imagination. And that's the void from which all arises. Because that seer is consciousness the faculty of attention is interiorized and turned back upon itself.

This interiorization of the person means many things. We locate our most essential being—soul, spirit, consciousness, self, mind—“inside”, and abstract time, space, and psyche. It is the interiorization and containment of the soul. Psyche as an internal orienting activity retains structural similarity with practical activities. Psyche's own language is image, not idea. Psyche needs images to nurture its own growth, for images provide a knowledge that we can interiorize.

Imagination and memory or remembrance are interiorizations. What gets interiorized are our strong affects which are mirrored back to us symbolically, metaphorically, and imagistically. Involuntary memory implies a deeper, interiorizing memory that lies forgotten and must be called to mind. Calling the material of the involuntary memory to mind alters its original form, however. Involuntary memory remains immaterial, fleeting, or at best distorted. Hegel likens the involuntary memory to the mine and the well.

Interiorizing a given phenomenon into its psychological objective meaning reaches its inner symbolic depth, its ‘soul,' the unconscious – below reflexiveness. Subjective vision helps us discover objective reality. Beyond all conceptual construction, we understand through stories of manifestation and interiorization.

The transcendent function emerges through and simply appropriates the self-arising image. We interiorize events, then go into them in search of psychological depths. We internalize body and externalize psyche. It's a false distinction, but psyche is imaginal. We can connect with it by listening, vision, dreams, attention, imagination, or 'soul making' -- trusting the transformative power of images.  Eastern traditions, especially, have cultivated highly refined practices to interiorize consciousness and heighten this sense of looking.

Divination, as interiorization, can only be done in the present. The shift from shamanic exploits in the hunter/gatherer setting of open nature to subterranean rites indicates the interiorization of the human psyche. Legend and history are tightly connected; the former proceeds through interiorization and is dispersed through images. The accidental is reconstituted in the spontaneity and dynamism of this interiorized self, and visually represented by the faux accidents of synchronicity.

"Eternity is not something that has to come. Eternity is not even a long period of time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is the size of here and now that it is excluded from the thought that moves within time terms. If we don't get it here where we are, we won't get it anywhere else ". (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth)

Transformation in individuation is often experienced, and described, as a process of turning inwards. It emerged partly due to the renaissance and post-renaissance epistemological need to interiorize psychological life (Romanyshyn 1982, 1984) We need to take “inner” literally so. We can also look outside with an interiorizing vision, rooted in an increasingly interiorized soul life -- an interization of self, community, world, and cosmos.

Subjective personal psychic mechanisms drive us as individuals. Only an approach focused on the 'soul' of the work in its Opus Magnum significance (and not on personal intricacies) can reach its objective psychological interiority. Jung held that the real driving force behind conscience, in both its moral and ethical forms, is the "emotional component" and embodied feelings. A "numinous other" within the depths of one's own psyche has the potential to profoundly alter a person's fundamental attitude toward their own interiority.

"Dreams may contain ineluctable truths, philosophical pronouncements, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, anticipations, irrational experiences, even telepathic visions, and heaven knows what besides." (Jung, CW 8, Para 317). In order to survive, we need to return to original vision ... interiority.

"We need images and myths through which we can see who we are and what we might become. As our dreams make evident, the psyche’s own language is that of image, and not idea. The psyche needs images to nurture its psyche needs images to nurture its own growth; for images provide a knowledge that we can interiorize rather than ‘apply,...” (Downing, The Goddess, 2).

Imaginal vision, mythical interiority can only be achieved when the human barriers that separate us from nature are blurred in liminality. That is, when we can imagine from all aspects of nature -- the deepening of the soul toward 'world soul.'. The world is interiorized as phenomena, as our phenomena. We disengage from the ordinary and engage the process of transformation. In mid- and late- life we open more to interiority and integration. Interiorization is seeing with the "eyes" of the heart, the eyes of prayer, and contemplation -- an interiorization of spiritual problems.

Interior senses are imagination and memory. Like when you sit down at your computer, most of the unconscious action takes place behind the screen of consciousness. In the oceanic unconscious there are deep trenches full of pressures, dangers, even monsters of the deep. The analogy fails at no point. It is mythic. To enter that world is to be seized into the underworld, as Hades did with Persephone.

We instinctively interiorize trauma, love or desire, relationships and spirituality. From mourning, death, and abandonement to loss of loved ones, lost and abandoned places, lost and abandoned self-images. We internalize the characters of a narrative whether from fact or fiction, as interiorized roles. We also internalize our splits and interpretations. We  internalize and carry anxiety and depression. Disintegration needs interiorization of values and attitudes for survival and sanity. We  reconfigure the psyche as an effect of the interiorization or revert to social norms.

We  need  to  acknowledge that the character of all our relationships arises out of our first relationships, which we  internalize  and  experience  as  an  unconscious, phenomenological relationship to ourselves as well. Out of that relationship comes the depth, tenor and agenda of all others (James Hollis). In connection with the universe as in connection with the gods, the creation of our subjectivity is found to be something independent of our subjectivity and something that, all the while, has been implicit in the energy of our subjective vision.

 That Immense Space

In Depth Psychology attention is drawn to the importance of what lies below the surface of conscious awareness. This dimension of psychic reality is revealed in the mythical genres of the time, in the expressive arts of a culture, in dreams, and in the symptoms of individuals and communities. The concepts of depth psychology such as the importance of symbol and metaphor in personal imagery or the recognition of the dynamic interplay between the natural world and the human psyche are expressed and explored. (Yau)

A commonly encountered experience includes the felt-sense of the void. The godhead, ground, Great Mother, and archetypal psyche are aspects of the void. We are lost in the immensity. It is the spiritual dimension in the human psyche and in the cosmos. It is loss of the ego, 'loss of myself.' We can track the movement of the invisible through the visible forms of the world.

Sometimes the experience of the void is around a relatively limited aspect of the psyche but at other times the void seems much more global and threatens to engulf the entire personality; the whole individual psyche then seems threatened by the possibility of dissolution into nothingness.

The void experience may result from the early failure of external objects to meet the needs of the developing ego, which leads to the sorts of primitive terrors. The experience ishe intrusion of the void into the conscious experience implies that its occurrence is not only the result of severe trauma but also a necessary aspect of the individuation process. Inner connectedness is the antithesis of the void.



The Word and the Angel
"We need a new angelology of words...
We need to remember the angelic aspect of the word,
To recognize words as self-bearers of a soul
between one person and another.
We need to remember that words are not just something
That we invent or learn at school...
The words, like angels, are powers
Who wield an unseen power over us...
Because words are people."
--James Hillman, Blue Fire


Iona Miller is a nonfiction writer for the academic and popular press, clinical hypnotherapist, and multimedia artist. Writing itself is a developmental process that creates self-discovery, image, and meaning while integrating learning, memory, and experience.

As Baudelaire suggests, symbolism and "correspondences" help us "Extract the eternal from the ephemeral." Symbolic languages such as esoterics, alchemy, and Qabalah articulate the phenomenology of inner experience. Our own personal growth and efforts towards deepening our spiritual connection help us wake up and grow up.

Symbols represent transcendental and timeless values and stories. They help us describe our kinesthetic, aesthetic, cognitive, emotional, moral, and spiritual awareness, engagement, and intelligence. This is how we think about and experience that reality.

"To heal the symptom, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself." --James Hillman

Such concepts help us move beyond over-zealous, power-driven, ethnocentric, and egocentric ways. We need to pay attention to the depth of narrative space, the spaces that connect our stories, the relationship field, and our psycho-genealogical lines. We need to uncover collaborations with new spaces and the healing power of narrative history.
http://ionamiller.weebly.com/healing-narratives.html

Nature's Narrative

We carry our histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies. Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embodied. Our bodies' sensory apparatus is the only way we experience the larger world. It is the medium through which we meet and respond to that world, feeling its reciprocal impact on us. Thus our symptoms can reflect our cultural as well as personal attitudes.

Our mind doesn't store memories; it is memory. Our wounds are necessary to fulfill our calling. The marks of memory are the signs of destiny. Penetration of the mystic veil often comes through one's wounds. They allow us to see through to an immaterial sense of being.

We are wounded simply by our relation to the world, the world's body. The world and body are the same stuff and share vision. The mind can also obscure the body, as lived experience -- the core, the limbs, the scars, the head, the back. It changes like a landscape.

Miracles of the body are triumph or transcendence over decay. We don't forget the knowledge of death until we experience it. Body is material (animal imagination), sensual, metaphorical, and spiritual. Its parts have personal, mythic, and cultural (aesthetic, social, political, and medicalized, mutilated, etc.) significance in a wide range of cultures.

Evidence suggests spirituality emerged from female body mythology as the matrix of birth. It led to a recognition of time and heavenly cycles linking earth and sky. The body's sacred geography is the primary genesis and root of mythic imagination, physiology, and psychology. It is the body that tries to find place, identity, origin, home. Soul thinks with reference to the body and body image.

Meaning is a non-material imaginal dimension. Imagination is a vital spiritual function, inseparable from the World Soul. Psyche is soul. Symbols are the currency of consciousness and the connective tissue of the mind-body correlation. . . . "the spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit - the two being really one." (Jung, CW 10, Page 195).

Art draws the viewer into its participatory space. Images and symbols are visible in the psychic aspect of symptoms and behavior. The reader can be involved in a self-disclosing collaborative process mapping the conceptual terrain, including our response to the spiritual uncertainties of our times. Our invisible ground is now simultaneous information that travels at the speed of light, centered everywhere and nowhere.

Innate Image

Iona is a Symbolist and visionary, perhaps more pragmatic and less literal than most with similar interests. Her writing is informed by Jungian, Post-Jungian, Archetypal, Personality, and Transpersonal psychologies, as well as philosophy and meditation.

Jungian psychology strongly connects with the arts, culture and history of society, which also derive from the imagination. Writing is ordinary magic, natural magic. It can transport the reader to new territory, to 'foreign lands.'

To Go Up or Down is the Same
Opposites -- actually a unified system of balanced exchanges -- are necessary for life to flow, much like current in electricity. In his natural philosophy, Jung agreed with the physicists that there is no energy without duality.

Heraclitus declared, "The road up and down is one and the same," but unity is not identity. Consciousness arises from the interplay of primal opposites, but ego resists being overwhelmed by that and tries to suppress that fear of chaos through one-sided polarization.

The psychological path is a middle way. Spiritual paths tend to encourage the glorification of the spirit (ascent) over the body and instincts (descent) we need to keep us grounded. We cannot merely drop the body and soar infinitely skyward, even metaphorically. Nor can we ever comprehend the entire meaning of all ideas, symbols, and myths.

Despite spiritual movements of fullness or emptiness (plenum or void), transcendence or immanence, we are neither solely 'ascenders' or 'descenders.' If our perceptions are flooded with the sacred, eventually we are overcome with  silence. This switch is a product of our paradoxical neurological wiring (Fischer). Soul connects the two movements if we pay attention and engage with it. When we look deeply, the self that we love so much may turn out to be everything else.

Meaning is about connectivity and interdependence with everything else out there: self, others, and cosmos.  As Hillman notes in Re-Visioning Psychology, "The soul loses its psychological vision in the abstract literalisms of the spirit as well as in the concrete literalisms of the body." Much the same holds true for the sacredness and spiritual values of the Earth, which is synonymous with body and matter, in general.

We cannot deny the body's role in our complete being as we confront the autonomous aspects of our transpersonal nature. Our wounds and blocks are expressed as psychic or somatic symptoms. The body also contains our natural innocence. We are an extraordinary phenomenon of nature. Our notions are conditioned by our experience of space and time.

So, to come 'full circle' we need to find balance. Both upward and downward spiraling movements are expressed in imagery and embedded in our innate physical nature. The deeper self releases the higher self; 'deeper' and 'higher' consciousness aren't really so different. The ultimate paradox is to get higher we have to go deeper.

The psyche of the visionary artist or seer follows unconscious intuitions about the present and the past, and unconscious impulses from both the past and the future. What we call visions are vast, nebulous intuitions. Meanings not consciously intended may emerge. In the absence of  radically polarized notions secure beliefs and critical thinking are compliments to psychological perception. Inner vision opens the whole self to consciousness.

Thus, we circulate among the aspects of our unfolding sacred and natural being as a single systemic reality. In Taoism, seeing and knowing are turned inward by reactivating the more primordial, pre-verbal, or intuitive, or tacit modes of knowledge. Empty knowing and doing resonate freely with the cosmic pulse of life and nature.

Our journey is one into the heart of primal myths, and that path is more art than theology, beyond paths of affirmation or negation. We can simply surrender into the heart of that being. Path-less, content-free, non-conceptual awareness, the ultimate ground state fosters new understandings of reality. Individuated Wholeness is Mature Freedom.

MytholoGEMS

"Great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below, just as trees never grow from the sky downward, but upward from the earth." (Jung, CW 10, Para 177)

Our co-creative task is to bring to light the mythologems, the basic core elements, motifs or themes of myth, behind our individual and collective fate. Basic themes include recurrent patterns: survival, relationships, love and war, chaos and order, revenge, self-sacrifice, or betrayal, death and grief, rejuvenation and rebirth. Jung considered rebirth "an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind." (CW 9i, Para 207)

Our myths play out in internal and external history. The paradox of myth is that they are cultural creations that declare that the cultural order can never fully contain the meaning of creation in human life. Myths transcend linear time.

Mythologems form the core of our personal myths and the whole gamut of the repertoire of humanity. They are ways to see the whole picture, without losing the relative specificity of the image as it is given, without interpretation or distortion that stops the imaginal process. We follow the thread of that tale and among tales, connections of meanings and potentialities.

If we stay with the images evoked, that immersion takes us to places where solutions appear. We don't go to the images for answers, but to have a deeper relationship with that part of ourselves. It isn't striving and it isn't ego-heroic. Our goal is self-realization. The process is one of spiritualizing the material and noticing how it is informed.

If certain conditions foster the self, then others, such as rejection, misunderstanding, incongruence or instability, can thwart it. Thwarting of self by the environment can create alienation, negativity, suppression, anxiety, insecurity, distrust, defensiveness, even violence.

Jung pointed out that God is reality itself, and therefore includes the divinity in mankind. The stars are still there in the daytime. The central meaning begins to shine through at every point of contact. The image isn't necessarily what is on the page but what can be provoked, elicited or emerges from the reader's encounter. The participant can enter or engage the dialogue.

Beyond Postmodernism

"At the root of our compulsion to create art is the need to establish some calm point within life's turbulent flow." --Camille Paglia, "Sexual Personae" (Vintage).

Early knowledge of these processes shaped her relationship to the world. She is interested in creativity, experiential therapy, extraordinary human experiences, using interpretive and non-interpretive strategies. Many of today's trends in self-exploration came from the therapeutic communities of the 1960s and perennial wisdom traditions. She is also interested in effects at the global level, unintended consequences, rather than intentions.

Experiential therapies were developed and popularized in later decades, and now are mainstream, thanks to social media. This psychology without walls transcends the consulting room, explores the soul of the world -- the global agora. It deliberately connects with personal history, the arts, culture and history of society, which are also derived from the imagination. Its lessons can be applied by individuals to themselves, adding new depth to Self-help.

Her work is an omni-sensory fusion of depth psychology, personal mythology, meditation, dreamwork, science-art, frontier science, symbolism, philosophy, source mysticism, futuring, digital life, emergent healing, poetics, and paradigm shift. Her framework is semiotic (image-as-sign) and phenomenological (image-in-consciousness).

Panpsychism is the philosophical view that consciousness, mind or soul (psyche) is a universal and primordial feature of all things. Primordial consciousness gives rise to potentialities, patterns and cycles which are realized as instances -- conscious experience.

Mystics seek the Formless God or Inner Light. While the mystic seeks the frameless, non-conceptual, thoughtless experience of primordial awareness, the artist seeks every way to navigate mind, and explore its domains by reframing consciousness.

In some languages the verb for 'paint' and 'write' is the same word. Both hand gestures initiate a flow state: When hand and eye play, awareness of self and object fuse in a new entity on the paper or screen. The inner organizing “urge to pattern and wholeness” differs from willed planning and is free to embody in the product of the process.

Once we reconnect with that core we feel that all is in alignment, including our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual domains. Bathing ourselves in Pure Awareness, communing with the groundstate of our being opens us to new possibilities. Amplifying the inaudible is a way of revealing the radiant essence of life.

Pathos

We feel like ourselves, in our own rhythm, and aligned with Cosmos. This opens us to the synergetic effects of the flow state and synchronicity; doing better than we know; Being In the Zone. This is the authentic life, also known as self-actualization. Potential becomes lived Reality. We can never achieve 100% knowledge and accuracy - this is the psychological Uncertainty Principle.

A struggle of opposites makes the image. When we make art our conscious mind intentionally cooperates with the unconscious depths, and something alive arises from the dead medium.
A sort of being that takes on a life of its own, a significance of its own, suffused with essence. We can embrace a diffused emergent reality, suspending any inclination to know or plan an outcome.

Here we explore relationships of psyche and matter, extraordinary human potential, genres of ritual healing, mythic potentials, hypnotic realities, and therapeutic processes. Cultural phenomenology explores existential significance and cultural meaning of phenomena, and mind-body-spirit modes of attention. The effects of ancient and modern doctrines of religion, science, psychology, media, and the arts hold special interest.

The Tree in the Psyche & Psyche in the Tree

The essence of psyche is myth and ritual, enactment of the stories of the soul, by which we differentiate the unconscious. Myth itself is  the human search for what is true, significant, and meaningful -- the rapture of being alive and full of life experiences.

There is more to genealogy than the search for the historical ancestors. We continue to search for the creative principle in the psyche. What spirit creates psyche and moves soul? Myth can provide psychological insight, just as it can seize and influence psychic life.

James Hillman suggests without paternal descent we have no genealogy to provide structure and content for mythology. This is literally shown in ancient lines of descent from gods and goddesses. It is not literal, but self-revelatory.

Couple after couple are thrown into an existential situation where each searches for their basis of being and continuance. Loss of myth creates existential anxiety. Genealogy is a mythology itself, not just family problems and the soul's spiritual crisis.

The wisdom of Sophia is the feminine contribution providing wider context in the relational union of love and necessity that reconciles us with our fate, necessity, and events -- reconciliation with the silent labyrinth of creation.

Love stays connected to the soul and seeks a way through a sort of personal and universal teleology beyond metaphysics. Such love shows in the spirit in which we approach psyche's phenomena and how faithfully we stick to the image with resourcefulness, inventiveness, and creative intelligence that seeks psychological connection. Creative insight is linked to involvement, engagement, imaginative complexity, aesthetic energy, and psychic beauty.

Approach

This "know thyself" approach is through novel means of presentation, conservation, and curation in a holistic, participative, contextual and relational way. Inclusion is a strategic move out of reductive frames of reference. “'Know thyself,' means also 'know thy peculiar images.'”

The intention is to promote directions of 'sensibility,' where each viewer can deploy their own narrative and approach to the material presented, blurring the logic of inside and outside,  a tension between the universal and the particular, collective and individual.

She articulates the curatorial as critical thought that does not rush to embody itself, but instead raises questions that are to be unraveled over time. There are lots of great stories out there, but not always history. Things tend to look different from inside than outside. Self-realization is a solitary journey, described by Plotinus: "The way to truth was the journey of a lonely person to that which is eternally alone."

Her labyrinth of works is a free-floating conceptual framework. It is a spiritual, philosophical, and psychological practice. In therapy we work with particular models. But an artist or philosopher can work purely symbolically. The creative impulse is brought to fruition in the world. Such secret forms grow into our life's work and purpose. By communing deeply with the outside world we find the familiar in the unfamiliar.

Works with a trans- quality go beyond mundane time, space, logic and personal taste or aesthetic preference. They connect with our essential Being at the core, reflected in nature and art, piercing time to find eternity. Transcending content, they open a new dimension...an invisible initiatory dimension. From here the artist gives birth to the secret space of the image itself which comes alive by giving shape to that secret.

In Iona's work, there is an underlying thread of digging in deep, connectivity and personal spirituality, based on contact with the numinous. Novel, transpersonal, uncanny, and highly personal appearances create a specific quality of sacredness that grips the soul with particular states (awe, dread, stupor, wonder, healing, reverence, astonishment, etc.).

This contact is the essence of the guiding process -- an act of grace and profound symbolic experience. A certain brightness in the soul transcends our own personal suffering. When we rediscover it, it turns suffering into meaning. A temporary loss of personal identity is natural when consciousness expands into transpersonal Reality, into non-conceptual Mystery.

“The main interest of my work,” writes Jung, “is not concerned with the treatment of neurosis but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences, you are released from the curse of pathology." (VonFranz, Marie-Louise, Psychotherapy, Shambahla Publications, 1990, p.177.)

Interactive Field

The reader is welcomed into their own journey of self-discovery -- sometimes lost, sometimes validated, sometimes illuminated. But, always once again picking up the connective thread. Ideally, there is a co-creation with readers, listeners, and viewers. More books and information don't change your soul, but active participation and engagement with psyche open new vistas. The psychic material weaves together into patterns with seasons of agony and grace.

That participatory process, a soul-making practice, creates a unique message, meaning, and body with poetic expression. We remember our soul's journey and calling, related to our soul's stories and moved by our struggles. We participate in this sacred act by correlating our experiences in the world with archetypal dynamics -- ancient and traditional patterns, only fleshed out in conscious content.