A Prayer For Coming Home

Healing the Divided Brain

Photo by Christian Paul Stobbe on Unsplash

Dear Readers,

This week I am going to share an incredibly formative story for me without much commentary since I am in the thick of another revision of my book, “Piko: A Return to the Dreaming.” (A publisher wants to see it!)

You’ve probably heard of the Greek story Psyche and Eros. It’s one of the most famous stories in the European tradition and has been directly depicted or echoed in many forms of art from painting to film. Cupid, another name for Eros, has made it into popular culture to the extent that people who aren’t familiar with mythology know of him.

I first heard the story out loud at The Great Mother Conference, told by Martin Shaw. (Here’s a link to his substack: The House of Beast and Vines.) That year at the Conference we had live actors as Martin told the story. I played Psyche in the Underworld and I’ll never forget crawling toward Persephone as Martin thundered above me, “Don’t identify yourself with the goddess!” Good advice. It’s important to remember we are human and ground ourselves in that. Acting can be a dangerous sport.

My scene ended with me collapsing on the wood floor after opening up the box Persephone had given me that supposedly contained her beauty secrets. It was one of the tasks given to Psyche by Aphrodite, as you’ll discover when you read the story.

My fall to the floor must have been very convincing because after, the poet Tony Hoagland came up to me and said, “Jen, you seem to have a talent for acting.”

“Acting? That wasn’t acting?” I told Tony. I was completely identified during those moments with Psyche. Tony just gave me a wry look.

In As You Like It, Shakespeare’s Jacques says, “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts.” (Act II, Scene VII)

The soliloquy ends with something I have really been coming to grips with lately-the impermanence of the physical. “Last scene of all, / That ends this strange eventful history, / Is second childishness and mere oblivion; / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Several people close to me have died and internally I’ve become aware of how I’ve been holding on to emotions from the past in order to create some sense of stability in a world that will never provide that for me externally. The only stability I will truly ever have will be from within. It’s a work in progress.

One last thing before I share my version of Psyche and Eros. I said there wouldn’t be a lot of commentary this week, but once again my hands have other ideas!

I’ve been reading the book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist. Since I wrote Piko: A Return to the Dreaming I have been particularly interested in how the brain perceives and shapes the physical world. It’s a theme in the book and it’s the inspiration for this newsletter. In case you didn’t read the first edition of this newsletter, here’s a link if you want to catch up on the specifics: Filling The Eye With Gazelle's Milk.

McGilchrist’s book is incredibly complex. I’m not even sure I understand it sometimes, but hopefully I can extract a few points from it that will help you understand the book and motivate you to go read it yourself. As a scientist, he has the scientific evidence to support what mystics already know: the intuitive right brain has primacy over the logical left. The left brain, whose skills involve categorization (including language), cannot see beyond its self imposed limits and thus doesn’t know that its other half actually enfolds it. Language, which Western Civilization sees as a mental process, is actually generated in the body and McGilchrist asserts was created from gesture, not through imitating sounds outside the physical body.

This is a gross oversimplification of the sophisticated science of this book so I do encourage you to read it. What I want to share specifically from his book is something I read this morning:

“This is similar to the delusional misidentification syndromes of Capgras and Fragoli referred to earlier, in which familiar people, things or places are felt to be replaced by copies, or impostors-syndromes which are also associated with right hemisphere deficits. Vié, In a series of papers in 1944, reported some remarkable examples of various kinds of misidentification, including two separate cases of French soldiers, who, invalided out of the First World War, maintained that it was all-soldiers, trenches, bombs and all-a theatrical performance.”

This got me to thinking about the current state of Western Civilization in which so many believe in conspiracies like Qanon, Pizzagate, White Hats and abducted children underground. I’ve had conversations with friends who believe these stories. These are people I love, so I haven’t wanted to dismiss them outright. “Do you think there’s a possibility that these ideas are metaphorical and not literal?” I asked one friend. “Maybe the abducted children,” I suggested, “are actually an energy or quality that humanity has lost and that our civilization has become so literal and over-identified with the material many are confusing an energetic loss with a physical? Don't you think if there were millions of abducted children in underground bunkers in the midwest their parents would be in an uproar?”

One person I said this to was willing to concede this possibility, but every other red-pilled acquaintance has so far proved unmoveable. I would love to see scans of their brains to see if they have damage to the left brain hemisphere. I suspect it would show this was the case, which makes me feel a lot more compassion for them, and for me and every other human. Based on the condition of our planet right now, I suspect all of us would show left brain damage. By damage, I don’t mean from an accident necessarily-just living in this culture is enough. The brain, like every organ and cell in the body, is responsive to its surroundings. It can also heal. What would our planet look like if that happened?

This newsletter is my contribution to that healing process. Physical changes occur through the process of evolution and since our bodies are how we perceive the world, this means that cultivating the neglected right brain through images, mystery, story, poetry, symbols, movement and gesture, we can hopefully awaken the categorizing left brain with a blast of shaktipat so that human beings can remember we are enfolded by Mother Earth, inextricably a part of her body the way a fetus is part of a human mother’s. This doesn’t change when we travel down the birth canal.

At the same Great Mother Conference I remember ceremonialist Miguel Rivera saying as we sat in circle in the sweat lodge-the purpose of the lodge was to remember our connection to the Great Mother. (That’s my paraphrase, not his exact words.) Without direct experience of the Great Mother, we remain connected to our biological mothers and grandmothers. The result is inter-generational trauma. We never truly feel at home as sovereign beings on Earth.

Everything I write is a prayer for homecoming. May you hear that in these words.

Psyche and Eros

It was not my fault I was born so beautiful birds crashed into buildings to get a glimpse of me, that the river stopped flowing in the hopes I would touch it before it carried on to the sea. Not my fault at all. I would have changed places with my older sisters in a minute, the two of them already married while I lingered on the shelf because my beauty was so intimidating no one would even speak to me. It was not my fault they whispered, “Psyche is more beautiful even than Aphodite,” after me when I passed through the village. I wanted to turn and tell them to be silent, terrified Aphrodite would hear them and curse me, but I knew that would make me even more lonely.

Aphrodite heard their talk, of course. She was the Goddess of Love. Her ears were always attuned to praise. Distance was not an obstacle. She was livid. She ordered her son Eros, God of Desire, to come down from Olympus and punish me. He was to make me fall in love with the most hideous creature anyone could imagine. My beauty would be devoured by a monster.

My poor father, at his wits end at not being able to marry me off, consulted Apollo’s oracle who told him the gods were angry with me. My destiny was to marry a hideous, flying snake. The only way to appease them was to tie me to a mountain crag and let the winged serpent take me.

I’d like to tell you my father refused, but he dressed me in a wedding gown and sent me up the mountain. Tied to the crag, I resigned myself to my fate. At least I would no longer be lonely. I didn’t know it at the time, but Eros was watching me. Instead of making me fall in love with the monster, he fell madly in love with me. He commanded the West Wind, Zephyr, to waft me off the mountaintop. I landed in a magnificent palace with gold walls and marble floors. I was bedecked with jewels, bathed in sweet-scented water, massaged with precious oils and led to a bedchamber where I was told their master, my new husband, would soon come to visit me.

He touched me in the dark, even though I begged for the light. Not because I was terrified, but because I longed to see his beauty, the magnificent stranger who introduced my body to pleasure in shudders and shouts that went on all through the night. I was consumed with desire for him. It was like my body knew before I did the delights that awaited me, like we’d been together a thousand lifetimes and only my mind had forgotten.

On and on it went, the nights of consuming passion where we feasted on each other. He always left before dawn, and except for the servants I saw no one. I was still lonely. I even missed my sisters who had never really been that nice to me. I asked my husband if they could visit. “Yes, your sisters are welcome,” Eros told me, “but are you sure you can trust them? You are living a life far reacher than they can even imagine. They can come, but my love, I beseech you, be careful. What we have is precious and will never come again in this life.”

His words went in one ear and out. Why would my sisters want to harm me? I dispatched an invite and they arrived forthwith, eager to see my palace and meet my husband. I never dreamed they would set themselves against me, but I’d never been jealous. Always the most beautiful, everyone had been jealous of me.

I could see the moment they arrived my sisters were dumbfounded by my wealth. It drove a wedge between us that had probably always been there, and right away their behavior was petty. But they were my sisters and I was glad to see them. I wanted Eros to come meet them, but he still refused to make an appearance in daylight.

“Psyche, where’s this sexy husband of yours? Why are you keeping him from us? Are you afraid we’ll steal him away?” They laughed when they said this because they knew there was no way this was ever going to happen, but the onslaught had begun. Slowly they chipped away at my confidence, the radiance I’d gained in Eros’s arms began to dim and I agreed to their plot one fateful afternoon when they said, “How can you lie in the arms of someone you’ve never even seen? Aren’t you afraid he’s a monster? What if he’s deformed? What will your children look like?”

I wish I’d been strong enough to resist them, but I wasn’t. I didn’t have the confidence to trust my body’s instincts. That night, when my husband fell asleep, I lit an oil lamp and held it above his body. What I saw was far beyond what I could have dreamt. My husband was not a monster. He was the most beautiful man who had ever existed. I was so entranced by his beauty I didn’t notice the lamp in my hand was starting to tip and then-alas-hot oiled spilled from the lip onto my beloved’s sleeping body. He awoke in an instant, leaping from our love bed with a curse that I had ruined everything, and fled.

Why couldn’t I have trusted him? How violated he must have felt when I exposed him. How betrayed that I couldn’t trust him. I set off, leaving the palace to wander until I found him or died.

I wish I could say my sisters were sorry for me, but I finally saw their true colors when they heard my husband had left me. “Maybe we can have him now,” I heard them mutter behind my back. I didn’t stop them when they hot-footed it to the crag where Zephyr, the West Wind, had wafted me into Eros’s arms. I didn’t shout out don’t do it when they leapt from the precipice. For all I knew they would end up in his bedchamber. I had betrayed him so utterly I wouldn’t have blamed him for seeking comfort with my sisters.

But that’s not what happened. Zephyr did not waft my sisters to a palace with gold walls and invisible servants. He was nowhere in sight when they crashed on the rocks below, when all the bones in their bodies shattered and their brains leaked out to stain the rocks for all eternity.

I prayed to Aphrodite for help. I didn’t know then she was the cause of my despair. Who but the Goddess of Love could help me. I prayed to her, the most beautiful woman in the world despite what the silly humans who’d wrecked my life thought, and she heard me. “I’ll help you, Psyche, but there’s a cost,” Aphrodite told me.

“What is it!” I pleaded with Aphrodite. “I’ll do anything!”

When I saw what she wanted me to do, my heart quaked. Aphrodite brought me to a room filled with grains and leaped on me. She threw me to the ground and pinned my face in the mountain of seeds. Wheat, barley, poppy lentils, millet-millions of seeds-and demanded I sort them all by morning. She released me and stormed off. I sat up, and scraping seeds off my face that men had once traveled miles to see, began the task, even though I knew I had no hope of completing it.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw them, a stream of ants moving toward the seed mountain. I was in their way-they flowed right around me, rejoining each other to ascend the pile. They began sorting barley from wheat, millet from poppy, working diligently all night without stopping. In the morning, when Aphrodite came to gloat at my failure, the seeds were sorted. Aphrodite was furious when she saw what the ants had accomplished.

“I don’t know you managed it, but you’re not off the hook yet,” she told me. “I’ll not help you find Eros just yet. First you’re going to have to bring me the wool of the Meloi Khrsyeoi,  the golden sheep, and if you think grabbing a handful of fleece from a sheep is going to be easy, think again. These sheep are vicious and have poisonous bites. You’ll be sure to be trounced and gored, but if you want my help you have no choice, so get on with it.”

I made my way to the sheep’s mountain with my head down, dragging my spirit behind me. There was no way I could get close enough without being gored and maimed. Eros probably wouldn’t want me anymore after what I’d done anyway. I stood on the cliff above the river and resolved to jump. My story would end here.

Just then I heard a sound rising up from the riverbank. It was a reed, green and pliant, making sweet music. I was stunned when it spoke to me. “Psyche, even though you are burdened, don’t pollute my clear water with your death.  I’ll tell you how to get the fleece of the golden sheep. Don’t approach them now when they’re fired up and ornery from the midday sun’s heat. Wait until the day has cooled off and they rest in the river breeze. Hide in the nearby grove and when the sheep have rested and gone on their way, shake the foliage and you will loose the golden fleece.”

This is what I did and the reed’s prophecy came true. The angry sheep slept and rested in the shady grove. When they rose and left the thickets were ornamented with golden fleece. I gathered it up and returned to Aphrodite.

Aphrodite was not pleased. Let’s just say if looks could kill I’d be dead. “You are showing more fortitude and persistence than I expected,” she glowered at me. “Either that or someone is taking pity on you and helping you out. No one will come to your aid with this next task, Psyche. That would be a death wish.”

With those words Aphrodite gave me a crystal vessel and told me I was to climb a black mountain to the source of the River Styx and fill it with water. The rocks were slick with mold and monstrous serpents hissed at me as I climbed. I was sure I would slip-I did slip-but somehow I kept going until my hands were bloody from gripping the rocks. Finally. I fell backwards and landed on my tailbone on an outcropping of rock, the wind knocked right out of me. For the second time I contemplated throwing myself off the cliff, but just as I was about to do it Zeus sent and eagle to me. The eagle took the crystal bowl in its beak and flew to the River Styx’s source, filling it with water. My third task was complete. I returned to Aphrodite, sure she would help me. But no, her heart was still hard toward me. She set me a task she knew there was no coming back from. I was to journey to the Underworld with a small box she handed to me with a smirk. “You must ask Persephone to fill this box with some of her beauty.”

I knew it was hopeless and I would die. I would never see my husband again and he would never know how sorry I was I hadn’t trusted him. Still, if I hadn’t been so curious, I never would have known how strong I was, or how many friends I had to help me. Even if they were only ants, reeds and an eagle, they were friends nevertheless. I decided I’d journeyed far off. I didn’t even know how to find the Underworld. Aphrodite had just handed me the box and shooed me away, probably because she knew this time there was no way I could succeed. I would take my own life. This time no one would stop me. I walked across a plain until I came to a tower. This would be the place. With heavy feet, I climbed the tower, walking out onto the battlement to look out over the ruins of my dreams.

I swear my hands were on the stone balustrade. I had swung one leg over. I was going to do it. There was no going back now. This was the end of everything, or at least me. But a voice spoke-the tower itself spoke to me. And this is what it told me:

Psyche, don’t give up yet. There is a way for you to go to the Underworld and survive. Go to Lacedaemon and seek out the place called Taenarus. That’s where you’ll find the entrance to the Underworld. It’s a pathless route and you’ll have to be wily as well as brave. Once you cross the threshold you’re committed. There will be no way out. And you need honey cakes. Make sure you carry honey cakes in your hands and two gold coins in your mouth. You’ll know what to do with them when the time comes.

I had seen a lot in my young life, slept with the most beautiful man in existence, touched the golden fleece, been aided by ants and eagles. How could I not try? I took the tower at its word and swung my leg back over the balustrade, walked back down the circular stairs and made my way to Taenarus in Lacedaemon. There I found the entrance to the Underworld. I stepped through the threshold without hesitation. I remained silent just as the tower had advised me, walking past the lame man driving a mule loaded with sticks who beseeched me with his eyes to help him carry his burden, the dead man flailing in the river that separates the dead from the living who begged me to pull him out, the old women weaving who moaned how much their backs ached. The tower had told me they would try to divert me from my purpose. I must remain committed. Walk on toward Persephone with the small box in my hand and ask her for the impossible: a measure of her beauty.

I knew right away what to do with the honey cakes when I saw Cerberus, the three-headed dog, watchman of Orcus. I tossed him the cakes in my left hand and dodged past while he gobbled them up in his three mouths. The gold coins under my tongue were for Charon, who would ferry me across the River Styx where I would finally face Persephone. I opened my mouth and he took one. Not a word passed between us as he poled us across the black river.

And there she was-Persephone, Goddess of the Underworld. I had expected her to be terrifying, but she was really not much older than me. She was beautiful and smelled like flowers. She spun a pomegranate in her palm and flicked it open with a fingernail, silently offering me a seed. I had heard her story, so I said no. Even though I couldn’t see how I’d ever make it back to the world above, I preferred to die trying rather than surrender my soul to Hades.

Finally, Persephone spoke. “Why have you come, Psyche?”

Somehow I found my voice and tucking my quivering hands behind my back I said, with some audacity, “I’ve come for your beauty secrets, Persephone. Aphrodite has need of them. Would you be so kind to put some of them in this box here?”

I held out the box thinking she’d strike it from my hand and then strike me dead, but to my eternal shock she laughed. “You are a bold one, aren’t you? Well, I guess I’ll just have to give you what you want, though I’m not sure why Aphrodite needs any beauty secrets from me. I let myself go down here in Hades. I could use some of hers.”

She took the box from my hand. “You’re quite a beauty yourself. Enough to make Aphrodite jealous.” I think she winked, but I said nothing. To my astonishment she had filled the box with something that I couldn’t quite see, closed the lid and handed it back to me. “Don’t forget to give Charon that gold coin in your cheek. And good luck getting past Cerberus. He’s been a ravenous bastard lately. Hope you kept some of those honey cakes.” And with that Persephone turned and disappeared into a dark smoking landscape. I could hear laughter, demonic and delighted, a man’s deep voice, as I walked away. Charon took the second coin from my teeth and ferried me back across the River Styx. I diverted Cerberus with the honey cakes I’d saved in my right hand. I was on my way. The pathless path seemed a bit more clear. There was a faint light appearing before my feet as I walked on. The ground began to slope upwards. And then something rattled in the box. I had almost forgotten it, so intent on making it back to the light. My curiosity got the best of me. I opened the box. All that was in it was a strange, dreary sleep, a Stygian stupor. Someone screamed. The light at the end of the tunnel in front of me flared and then died.  I fell to the ground and was overtaken by a sleep from which I could not awaken.

Eros had not forgotten me. My beautiful, winged man. All this time he’d been recovering from his wounds in his mother’s house. She cosseted him and kept him locked up so he wouldn’t come after me, but eventually he healed and escaped. He flew out the window and he found me. Lying on the pathless path on the way from the Underworld he found me in death’s sleep. He’s the one who told me what he did. I don’t remember of course, but I felt it, the moment he drew the stupor out of me, Persephone’s sleep, and put it back in the box, pricking me this time with an arrow to awake me, rather than make me  Aphrodite’s plaything. I awoke with my head to his heart, joining him in joyful tears. He swooped me up and together we flew to Aphrodite.

Aphrodite was not pleased. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Aphrodite was not pleased. “Eros, you cannot marry this girl,” she insisted. “You are a god and she a lowly mortal. Think of how ugly she’ll be in a few years when you are still in your prime.”

“Mother, I love you but I’ve had enough of your machinations. I’m taking this to Zeus.” And that is what my Eros did. Now Zeus was always looking for a favor, so he consented to our marriage if my husband would give him a heads up whenever a beautiful young maiden wandered close to Olympus. Zeus even had Hermes convene all the gods and made a public statement of his approval of our union, which royally pissed off Aphrodite. There was no way she could renege on her oath now. But Zeus must have known her ways, he must have known she’d be out for revenge, for he gave us one last gift. There, before all the gods, he offered me a goblet of ambrosia. I drank it and became immortal. I married my Eros as a true equal.

A banquet followed. As soon as we could, my husband and I retired from the revels and fell into each others’ arms. This time, with the lights on, we gave ourselves to each other. I loved to look at him with his eyes closed as he writhed underneath me. And when he opened them and spun me over onto my back, I fell so deep into rapture that is what we named our baby. Voluptas was born and she was a merry baby. The feast continued and is still going on if you’d like to join us.

Kō aloha la ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light,

Jen

works cited: The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Iain McGilchrist, Yale University Press.