Filling the Eye with Gazelle's Milk

A Reintroduction of The Corpus Callosum Chronicles

callouses, photo by author

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Dear Readers,

I have decided not to change the name of this publication to The Coracle, but to stick with the original title that I have been defining through two years’ worth of essays in this space.

I started out two years ago with just a few subscribers. Since then, that number has multiplied, with hopefully many more to come. Since many of you have come onboard in the past year, I’ve decided this week to reintroduce the mission of The Corpus Callosum Chronicles by updating my very first post, in which I explain my motivation for choosing this part of the brain as my Substack’s title.

The corpus callosum is a mass of white matter that bridges brain hemispheres. Last week I shared the etymology of corpus callosum: Latin for “hard body,” and shared that while I still resonated with the metaphor of the bridge, I no longer felt connected to the word “hard,” as in calloused, which can mean rough-skinned or uncaring. After it came to me that I didn’t want to change my name, I started thinking about callouses, and realized I liked mine. I’ve never understood why people file them away. Without calloused feet one can’t walk barefoot over rocky beaches, one of my favorite pastimes. Callouses on the hands are also the mark of many a craftsman. My brother couldn’t play the guitar so brilliantly without calloused fingertips. Callouses are far from a sign of not caring. They are a measure of our commitment. Here’s to reclaiming our callouses as an embodied symbol of how much we do care. Who wants to walk across a soft bridge? That’s the kind of bridge that snaps mid-stride.

The name Coracle will remain exclusive to my online mythological mentorship that I will be launching soon. Stay tuned for more details, and please reach out now if you’re interested in discussing one-on-one mythic guidance with me.

It’s pretty amazing to retrace my steps back to the beginning of this publication. I had just heard of Substack, and had never written personal essays. I had written scholarly papers for my MA in English, and had devoted over 20 years to the craft of poetry. I didn’t really know what I wanted to say, but I knew I wanted to say something. The choice of the corpus callosum as my guiding symbol, has led down hundreds of rivers that I had not expected to navigate. I have found aspects of my voice that poetry could not fully discover, and along the way been joined by almost 400 subscribers. Thank you to every single one of you. I hope you enjoy this glimpse into the origins of this publication and choose to be here for many more adventures to come.

Filling the Eye With Gazelle’s Milk: The Origin of the Corpus Callosum Chronicles

I live on Moku o Keawe, known in one dimension as Hawai’i Island, or the Big Island. But that is not the dimension this publication will explore. Instead, we’ll be courting the mythic, the “place”’ where logic and imagination unite and speak as one. In this dimension, we realize what we have deemed inanimate is actually more alive than the flat, materialistic dimension of modern industrial civilization. When we reach this place, the world begins to converse with us in our shared language, one most of us have forgotten—the language of symbols.

Close by is a sacred Hawaiian site known as a pu’uhonua, or Place of Refuge. My intent for this weekly letter is to create a pu’uhonua in words, a sanctuary for the imagination in a world assaulted by the seeming inevitability of facts that predict the human species is doomed.

I’ve learned over the years as a solo traveler that good companionship is really what makes the journey. I may have set out alone and absorbed much in solitude and silence, but it’s the people I’ve shared experiences with along the way I remember most. I’m hoping to create a space like that here where we can journey as a community into the imagination’s power to move the mind, body and heart. We will delve into poetry, story, myth, and symbol to restore our vision so we can see the truth, and from there discern how to respond to the current crises we face collectively on Earth as the fallout from the Anthropocene Age begins.

How will we do this? By filling our eyes with gazelle milk! I’ll go into that more later, but in the meantime I want to talk about delight, one of the guiding principles of this publication.

Delight (n.) c. 1200, delit, "high degree of pleasure or satisfaction," also "that which gives great pleasure," from Old French delit "pleasure, delight, sexual desire," from delitier "please greatly, charm," from Latin delectare "to allure, delight, charm, please," frequentative of delicere "entice.”

Delight (v.) c. 1200, deliten, intransitive, "to have or take great pleasure;" c. 1300, transitive, "to affect with great pleasure," from Old French delitier "please greatly, charm," from Latin delectare "to allure, delight, charm, please," frequentative of delicere "entice.”

Rising up through the human body around 1200CE to be expressed as a word by lips, teeth, and tongue, delight is both noun and verb with similar definitions and intent—state of being and action as one—feminine and masculine united at its genesis as a word.

Before the word, however, were the images that provoked it, events experienced or witnessed that summoned it into the body, who expressed it through sounds—peals of laughter and ooohs of wonder. How else should one respond to a flurry of white butterflies glimpsed out a bus window climbing the mountains as one leaves San José headed for the Nicaraguan border? Delight is a primal remedy, one we are in much need of in this time where the news grows more dire daily. Delight leads to appreciation. It may be a baby step, but maybe baby steps are the best way for us to choose the other roads. Babies don’t know they will grow up and be required to walk in grids. They stand up and walk because they have legs. I believe it’s time for us to return to this kind of simplicity, and that delight, following the impulses of awe, curiosity, and laughter, could lead us, in practical and grounded ways, to choose a different trajectory for humanity.

I have chosen the corpus callosum as our guiding metaphor because it is a symbol that appeared to me in the landscape during a ceremony I enacted in the nearby Pu’uhonua o Honaunau, over 21 days in April 2021. I mean for this newsletter to be a true sanctuary like this sacred place where I sat in ceremony with the elements.

In earlier times, Hawaiian civilization was governed by a system of sacred law known as kapu. Punishment for breaking kapu was death. However, a condemned person, if they could make it to the pu’uhonua, was given sanctuary, and their crimes were forgiven. There are two on Moku o Keawe, and I have had significant experiences at both before I knew what the places were—but that is another story. You can read all about those experiences in my book, “Piko: A Return to the Dreaming,” as well as the significance of the corpus callosum as it revealed itself to me in the ceremony.

We need both fact (logic) and imagination to experience the world at its fullest. Facts ground us. Without them, we are living in a juvenile fantasy world. Inclined to the oracular, it took me a long time to stop resisting that the material world, in the form of logic, daily life, and structure, could make my poems more vital and relevant to a reader. Many of my early poems dwelt purely in the image and I was disappointed and sad when they didn’t connect. I isolated myself in the oracular, disdained the common man for not getting it, until I apprenticed myself to a teacher who patiently helped me come down to Earth. I learned to marry inspiration and craft, and can now say my work has, a few times, had the effect I always desired—to move a soul, fill eyes with tears, create silences where held breath can actually be heard, silences that lead to audible exhales, a giving back of breath to the world.

Piko on the bridge where it was born. Photo by author.

What is the Corpus Callosum?

The corpus callosum is a large mass of white matter in the brain that divides the two hemispheres. However, on the functional level it’s not actually a divider, it’s a bridge that facilitates the rapid transmission of neuronal impulses between hemispheres, linking logic and image. An optimally functioning brain prioritizes both.

Traditionally, the left brain has been associated with logic and the masculine principle, the right with intuition and the feminine. I see Western civilization, valuing logic over imagination and intuition, as the result of a severe trauma to the left hemisphere that occurred when most of humanity was wiped out by ancient cataclysms. Our situation was so dire, we had to over-rely on the ability of the left brain to compartmentalize. We divided our world up into task, roles, and hierarchies, and forgot we were connected to something greater than the need to survive. We may have remembered the Great Mother in our myths and stories, but we have forgotten what it felt like to be connected to her, and our civilization, accelerating ever more rapidly toward extinction, is the result of this amnesia. (For those interested in the brain science behind this, I recommend reading The Master and His Emmissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist. His thesis is that the left brain has forgotten its true master, the right brain. The brain science behind this is fascinating, but beyond the scope of what I want to explore in this essay.)

Language is generated in the left brain hemisphere. Words are an interpretation of the symbols generated in the right. With a damaged bridge between them, our current language is severely lacking in depth, and is suffering from a lack of vital images, relying on shallow clichés that convey hollow “truths” no one really believes in any more. The neurons aren’t firing. The bridge is giving out. It’s like one of those bridges you see in adventure movies like Indiana Jones or Romancing The Stone, a bridge of frayed rope suspended over a terrifying abyss the hero and heroine have to cross to escape the bad guys. We need to repair that bridge, become cultural heroes by restoring our vision so we can see our way back to a harmonious way of living. We need to get over the idea that the bad guys are outside of us.

As I began to research the corpus callosum, I was astounded to discover that its presence and function, both practical and esoteric, were known to the Ancient Egyptians, who represented it with the well known symbol the Eye of Horus. You may have seen this common symbol tattooed onto the back of a friend’s neck, an evocative eye regarding you from behind that seems to see right into you like the Sphinx, even though your friend’s eyes face forward. The Eye of Horus is considered a powerful symbol of protection and good fortune. Why is it so powerful? The answer is multi-layered, like the best kinds of answers. The best kinds of questions are like that, too.

Let’s begin with the mythic before we delve into the science, with the most famous Egyptian story of all:

The Tale of Isis and Osiris

Osiris was the oldest son of the Earth god, Geb and Nut, goddess of the Night. His siblings were Isis, birth goddess of healing and magic; Set, god of war, chaos and storms; and Nephthys, equally magic as her sister, but whose magic was the polar opposite. Instead of birth, Nephthys watched over death.

Osiris married Isis and they conceived the hawk-headed god Horus. Set, who some say was married to Nephthys, was jealous of his brother the King and killed him, cutting up his body into fourteen parts that he cast around Egypt. With Set as King, Egypt descended into chaos as grief-stricken Isis searched the land until she found all her consort’s body parts. With these she was able to revive her beloved.

Osiris, however, had been touched by death and could no longer be the King of the Upper World. He descended to the Underworld and took up rulership there. Horus vowed to restore order and revenge his father. After many battles he killed Set and returned order to Egypt. However, during one of their battles, Set ripped Horus’s eye from the socket and tore it into six pieces. (As in all good stories, there are multiple versions of this event, which instead of making us doubt and dismiss the story as illogical and therefore false, could actually attune us to the quantum nature of time if we are open and willing to holding all these versions as true.)

What all the storytellers agree on, is that Horus got his eye back and it became the Eye of Horus, also known as the Wadjet—a symbol of totality, or restored unity; the whole, complete, uninjured eye, both literally and metaphorically. Some say the lunar god Thoth healed the eye with plants and minerals. Some say it was Hathor, goddess of women, fertility and love, who restored it by filling it with gazelle’s milk.

The genesis of the Eye also holds metaphorical clues to the implications of this powerful symbol. Some say that Set sexually assaulted Horus who called on his mother Isis to help him retaliate. They forced Set to ingest Horus’s semen. Set then gave birth to the Eye through his forehead. Although Set and Horus were enemies, polarities representing good and evil, in conceiving the Eye together, the symbol resolves polarity. How do you feel when you look at it? Let me know in the comments below.

When Horus finally defeated Set, he became King. Instead of keeping the powers of the Eye all to himself, he offered it as a sacrifice to his father Osiris, who consumed it. In doing this, he acknowledged that the Eye ultimately comes from Osiris, as does everything in creation. In some versions, the Eye of Horus sprouts grapevines after it is has been offered, offering the gift of holy wine to bring the intoxicated seeker closer to the gods.

The Egyptian trinity: Isis, Osiris and Horus.

There are so many enticing tendrils in this story it’s hard to determine which one to unfurl, but the first one that strikes me is that the Eye is restored by Thoth, a lunar god. Usually the moon is associated in most cultures with the feminine principle and female bodies. This association of the moon with the masculine points to something that feels much, much older than our concepts of gender, and even the ideas of masculine and feminine themselves. Energetically, Thoth feels to me like a trans man. As a woman, he has experienced the cycles of the moon, and has now chosen to move onto another expression without losing what he gained in changing form. He represents someone who has not lost their wisdom to amnesia, the ultimate archivist and scribe. Whether or not it was Thoth or Hathor who restored the eye doesn’t really matter. In both cases, the feminine is essential to the restoration of the Eye of Horus, supporting, as McGilchrist shows on the biological level, the primacy of imagination and intuition generated through the right brain over logic. Thoth is an example of a being who hasn’t forgotten his master, the right brain, and in his role as inventor of language and scribe, serves as its emissary.

This is not to value the feminine over the masculine. Rather, the story is pointing to a way to correct an imbalance that is still in play today, the dominance of the distorted masculine principle and the subjugation of the misunderstood feminine. Osiris and Isis represent the balanced masculine and feminine. When they are in harmony there is order in the Kingdom. Set, as the god of chaos, cruelty and evil, carries the energy of the imbalanced masculine that our collective planetary civilization has deemed most interesting. To correct the imbalance, we must find the feminine just as interesting. From there we will restore our vision and the clouds of illusion will begin to lift.

Now I’ve read some authors who think that the next revelation I have in store for you is proof that the Egyptians documented their anatomical knowledge of the brain in symbol and myth, but I am going to beg to differ and proclaim that it’s the other way around.

But first, I shall astonish you with some facts! The Eye of Horus when superimposed on an image of the mid-sagittal brain (a cross-section) corresponds perfectly to the location of the six parts of the brain that facilitate the human senses. Here’s a diagram:

The Eye of Horus is divided into six parts, known in Ancient Egypt as the Heqat fractions. In this system numerical values are perceived as consequential patterns. It was used to measure grains and flour—the staff of life.

The 1/2 part actually looks like a nose and is the seat of the sense of smell, lining up perfectly with the olfactory trigone. Smell is the first physical sense to develop and the last to go before bodily death.

The 1/4 is seated over the pupil, where light enters the eyes and impulses are sent from the thalamus to the optic radiation tracts and then to the visual cortex in the occipital lobes to create the visual images we call sight.

The 1/8 fraction represents wisdom and is represented in the symbol by the eyebrow. The brow is a symbol of thinking and in the mid-sagittal over-lay it corresponds with the corpus callosum, thus we can say that both hemispheres are essential to navigating the human experience with wisdom.

The 1/16 appears as the triangular shape to the left of the eye, known anatomically as Brodmann areas 41 and 42, areas in the anterior and posterior transverse temporal lobes that are the location of the auditory cortexes (hearing).

The 1/32 represents the sense of taste, embodied in the symbol by the curved tail at the eye’s bottom. Taste arises when sensation is carried to the thalamus, then to the primary gustatory area of the cerebral cortex for interpretation. The Eye of Horus mirrors this path exactly anatomically.

The 1/64 represent the sense of touch, the somatosensory pathway seen here in the symbol as a downward line carrying information down to the spinal chord, exactly as sensation is processed by the brain.

The fraction adds up to 63/64. The missing part is said to represent the god Thoth, and is associated with the pineal gland, regarded by many cultures as the seat of the soul, and the source of mystical visions leading to enlightenment.

What if the 1 is not missing? What if it’s just in hiding? The way I see it, this system is so sophisticated that one part must be hiding, or hidden from us, on purpose.

Why could that be? Any ideas?

For me there is only one answer, and I arrive at it through delight.

Thoth, god of the moon, learning, creator of language, inventor of writing, archiver of time, interpreter of the gods, and their representative on Earth, hid the 1 so we can rediscover it. We get to experience the return to totality through the sweetness of having our eyes restored by Hathor. We get to receive the gazelle milk. When we allow this to happen, we’ll remember that seeing happens with all of our senses, not just our eyes, that the body is more than a lump of clay, and though we may become ashes to ashes, dust to dust, that dust is made of stars, and we never truly die.

I gathered this information from an article I found online called “The Eye of Horus: The Connection Between Art, Medicine, and Mythology in Ancient Egypt.” At the end of the article the authors state that their investigation of these incredible correspondences are evidence of the Ancient Egyptians’ advanced knowledge of the anatomy of the brain. They conclude that the Egyptians encoded this knowledge in their mythology and in the Eye of Horus.

I agree. However, this is exactly the kind of thinking I believe it’s necessary to transcend if we want to heal our traumatized brains and reunite the hemispheres. It is a theory that favors logic, the masculine’s provenance, subjugating the feminine’s domain by proposing that the Egyptian’s created the symbol as an anatomical map of the brain they discovered through dissection, rather than considering that the Egyptians received this knowledge from a non-physical source—intuition, their own connections to the divine.

I can’t help wonder if any of the authors have been in ceremony with plant medicine, where it becomes clear that the plants have an intelligence of their own that speaks in visions and symbols, the language of the feminine/right-brain hemisphere. It is my belief that the Egyptians, like many indigenous people still in existence today, received their knowledge of the brain through visions, perhaps even directly from the beings they called gods, not from dissecting a human brain. Dissection would have only backed up what they already knew. The stories came first.

If you ask a Shipibo medicine person in the Amazon today where she received the icaros she sings in ceremony, she will tell you from the plants themselves. Symbols are primordial intelligence in visual forms that can’t be corrupted. Myths are translations of these symbols in the form of stories, which can be corrupted. I’m not advocating throwing stories out. I love them. What I’m suggesting, is look to the source. Where do the stories that shape your life come from? Are you drinking from Kane’s water of life, or dying of slow thirst from drinking bottled water, the product of a polluted civilization that has lost touch with its ability to refresh itself?

What symbols shape the way you live? Which have you chosen, and which have been imposed on you? More importantly, which symbols would you choose if you fully believed in yourself as a divine child?

Baby steps, remember.

Before I go, I’ll leave you with one more synchronicity, tying this missive back into where I began in the Pu’uhonua o Honaunau. Ke’oni Hanalei, a descendant and lineage carrier of the ancient Mū Hawaiian culture, remembered in the 19th century as Lemuria by the theosophist mystic Helena Blavatsky, speaks of an occurrence known in Mū as Wat eht, a quantum leap, symbolized by a snake meeting its own tail.

The Eye of Horus is associated with one of the earliest Egyptian goddesses, Wadjet. In some stories, Wadjet is actually Horus’s nurse who protects him from Set. The words Wat eht and Wadjet are obviously similar. At this point I was not surprised when I read that the Wadjet, symbolized by a rearing cobra, represents the totality restored, and was a head ornament worn by Egyptian pharaohs. In the Book of Revelation, it’s known as the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end as embodied by the Christ. What happens when the snake meets its own tail? Totality is restored. What happens when totality is restored? A quantum leap.

In case you are wondering, the Wat eht is now. Let me be clear. We are in a quantum leap.

The Ascension of Christ, by Salvador Dali.

As the proverbial snake devours its tail, the pressure is building. The singularity approaches. We could be sucked into the black hole and crushed into further amnesia, or we can root ourselves in the painful work of remembering and facing the world as it is, numb and wounded by war. For some the pressure will be unbearable and many may collapse under the weight into cynicism and despair, but some of us, those of us who know we have agency and are not helpless victims of a punitive Father God, those of us who have compassion for our ancestors who struggled so hard to survive after cataclysms, and compassion for our kin now still living out this legacy of scarcity and competition, will step onto the bridge for all who aren’t yet willing or able. We shall look down into the water at all our reflections and be grateful, say a prayer that our vision may be refreshed and the legacy of the organic human continue on until it resolves in unconditional love.

The water may be cloudy at first. Don’t give up. Remember what Lao Tzu said, “Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?”

If you are reading this, most likely your life is not in danger. Most likely, you have some privileges in the world—owning a computer or a phone. Most likely you have choices. Embrace that privilege and choose wisely; choose a path that returns us all to love. Even if you can only see the first step, take it. Allow Hathor to restore your vision with gazelle milk. Don’t deny your eyes the sweet balm. This Substack, The Corpus Callosum Chronicles, is a vessel moving with the current on a river flowing inland, like the Nile. With your consent, it will carry you inward, to the source of the Nile deep in the heart of Africa where humans first arose out of the dark earth. At that source is the story we need now, the one that will carry us beyond ecocide and extinction.

Suspended on the bridge above the water, surrendered to the wind, yet anchored to Earth, we are being called to remember our original spark. The answer most likely won’t sound logical, though it will feel so logical to your bones. You’ll know it by the deep exhales that surrender you to gravity.

It is truly a wonder to be alive. I haven’t found a way to make sense of it all, so I’ve stopped trying. No grand-unified theories for me, no religion, no one god, no beliefs, no opinions, although I can enjoy them all.

Here’s to opening ourselves up to the capacity to hold space for it all. A sturdy bridge above the flowing waters. Enough room for us all.

Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light

Resources

Article cited: The Eye of Horus: The Connection Between Art, Medicine, and Mythology in Ancient Egypt. Monitoring Editor: Alexander Muacevic and John R Adler.

The Master and His Emmissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist.

Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals, for information on Mū Hawaiian culture.

Tao Te Ching: A New English Version, Lao Tzu, translated by Stephen Mitchell