Filling the Eye With Gazelle's Milk: Reissue
Celebrating six months of the Corpus Callosum Chronicles
Aloha Dear Lahui,
I’m addressing you with the Hawaiian word for community, lahui, because six months in to The Corpus Callosum Chronicles that is what we have become. This publication started out as a solitary dream, just me sitting at my counter in Puna, on the eastern side of Moku o Keawe, typing words into my computer tucked into the jungle. The view was lovely, but limited. I learned to look closely and to slow down, to channel the pressure until I had the right words.
In the beginning I typed accompanied by the sound of a fountain gurgling in the pond in front of my tiny house. Now, I write from 1500 feet up on the western flank of Hualalai, not far from the Mauna Loa eruption where Pele is slowly streaming down toward the base of Mauna Kea, domain of the snow goddess Poliahu. Fire is moving toward ice, not with urgency, but in a steady manner so that when the melting occurs, the release won't be a shock, but a graceful transformation into a new form. When ice melts it becomes a more fluid form of water. My prayer is that we all transform our internal worlds in the same manner, without urgency, but with acknowledgment that evolution is inevitable. All we have been is contained and archived in the water of our world. What will we learn about our species and our individual selves when the ice melts that will carry us forward? Now, for us all, I invoke surrender to these elemental forces and banish control. Your task, if you choose, is to discover your individual quest in this collective journey. Where do you find yourself as fire and ice move towards each other through water that has remembered how to flow?
When the eruption began and the lava began moving toward the Saddle Road, a major throughway that runs between the two volcanoes, I immediately thought of the snow-capped Mauna Kea as the left brain, and of Mauna Loa, whose fire looked like birth blood, as the right hemisphere. Then I realized it’s the opposite if you are driving the Saddle Road from Hilo. Left and right brain hemispheres are not truly divided. In fact, scientists have discovered that most functions take place in both hemispheres, and the corpus callosum does not divide them, it’s a bridge to connect what they both know. As of now, it looks like the lava will not cross the Saddle Road, but is instead spreading out along the natural contours of the land. Lava is a liquid, it is following the way of water.
In celebration of these six months I’m reissuing the first edition of The Corpus Callosum Chronicles where I planted the seeds in solitude and have been delighted to see how they’ve started to blossom in our shared lives. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being you. It’s an honor to create this space, to be received by this virtual village as I commit to fulfilling my kiakahi through my contribution of words that acknowledge the sacred relationship between beauty and grief. May we all continue to grow and deepen through surrendering to all we lose and bring that beauty into the world in whatever particular ways we are called.
Filling the Eye With Gazelle’s Milk, Vol. 1
It’s an honor to have you along on this journey, the first issue of The Corpus Calossum Chronicles. My intent for this weekly letter is to create what is known in Hawaiian as a Pu’uhonua, a Place of Refuge, 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, music 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 starts.
How will we do this? By filling our eyes with gazelle milk! I’ll go into that more later in this essay, but in the meantime I’ll say through tears, through wonder, and through a quality so much of us are missing as we adult our way through the demands of making a living in a system that is trying to kill us-delight.
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 and tongue, we find delight as noun and verb with similar definitions and intent, state of being and action as one, feminine and masculine united at the genesis of the word.
Before the word, however, were the images that provoked it, events or things seen that summoned it into the body who expressed it with sounds like laughter and then a word, that when written down no longer conveys the feeling of looking out a bus window leaving San José to see it wasn’t snow falling on the approaching mountain, but a flurry of white butterflies. Yet delight isn’t really provoked. It is summoned. These days especially, barraged with statistics and dire news on the daily, we have to be open to receive it for it to appear as a noun or be felt and expressed as a verb. That is what we are going to do here, summon delight. We all need it.
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 Pu’uhonua o Honaunau over twenty-one 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 laws known as kapu. Punishment for breaking one 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 Hawai’i Island, and interestingly, I have had significant experiences at both before I knew what the places were-but that is another story. You’ll learn all about those experiences in my upcoming book, “Piko: A Return to the Dreaming,” as well as the significance of the corpus calossum as it revealed itself to me in the ceremony.
What I will share with you is the function of this part of the brain because facts are important, too. We need both fact (logic) and imagination to experience the world at its fullest. One thing I’ve learned as an esoterically inclined poet, is that logic and structure are necessary to a vital poem that can move the reader. Many of my early poems dwelt purely in the image and I was disappointed and sad when they didn’t connect with readers. My apprenticeship to craft as a poet has been learning to marry the two, and I can say that my work every now and again has had the effect I desired- to move the soul, fill eyes with tears, and create a silence in the room where held breath can actually be heard.
Back to the biology…the corpus callosum is the largest mass of white matter in the brain that divides the two hemispheres. However, on the functional level it is not actually a diver, it’s a bridge that facilitates the rapid transmission of neuronal impulses between hemispheres, linking logic and image. An optimally functioning brain does both.
Traditionally, the left brain has been associated with logic, the right with intuition. Science has discovered, however, that most of these functions occur in both hemispheres, though the metaphor is convenient for the primary polarity that is result of our psychic trauma, the dominance of the wounded masculine over the victimized feminine, so I will use it, but I do want to give science its due. The left hemisphere is, however, the home of language, and if we’ll allow poetic license to make the leap for us even if the science doesn’t quite back it up, we could say that 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, made 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 the death experience.
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 6 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 gets his eye back and it becomes The Eye of Horus, also known as the Wedjat-a symbol of totality or unity restored; the whole, complete, uninjured eye, both literally and metaphorically. Some say the lunar god Thoth heals the eye with plants and minerals. Some say it is Hathor, goddess of women, fertility and love, who restores 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 calls on his mother Isis to help him retaliate. By an unnamed process, they force Set to ingest Horus’s semen. Set then gives birth to the eye through his forehead. Although Set and Horus were enemies, polarities representing good and evil, in conceiving The Eye together their creation resolves polarity and holds the space for potential unity for all who view its physical representation as a symbol.
When Horus finally defeats Set he becomes King. Instead of keeping the powers of the Eye all to himself, he offers it as a sacrifice to his father Osiris who consumes it. In doing this, he acknowledges that the Eye ultimately comes from Osiris, as does everything in creation. In some versions The Eye sprouts grapevines after it is has been offered, offering the gift of holy wine to bring the intoxicated seeker closer to the gods.
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, the moon being associated in most cultures with the feminine principle, and by Hathor, herself the goddess of women and fertility. Totality is restored by the feminine.
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 masculine principle and the subjugation of the 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 the facts-the astonishing facts! The Eye of Horus when superimposed on and image of the mid-sagittal brain (a cross-section) corresponds perfectly to the location of 6 parts that facilitate the human senses. I’m not one for numbers, but I might have been if they were explained this way back to me in high school geometry class. Let’s begin with a diagram:
The symbol we know as The Eye of Horus is divided into 6 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 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 calossum, thus we can say that thought is birthed on the bridge between intuition and logic. Both are essential to navigating our way through the human experience.
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 lobe that are the location of the auditory cortexes.
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. They 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 the 1 must be hiding on purpose. Why could that be? So we can experience the return to totality, the sweetness of having our eyes restored by Hathor’s gazelle milk. When this happens we’ll remember that seeing happens with all of our senses, not just our eyes, that the body is a pathway to the inner vision that we have ascribed to the gods.
What will we see when this happens? Ourselves. Gods.
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 the mythology and in the famous symbol, The Eye of Horus.
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 and relegating it to an afterthought.
I can’t help wonder if any of the authors have been in ceremony with plant medicine, where it becomes clear that the plants we ingest to have visions have an intelligence of their own that speaks in visions and symbols, the language of the feminine. 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. The symbol is primordial intelligence and stories are messages directly from Earth in her language-symbols.
Earth does not speak in language, we do. It is time to recognize this gift as something unique and incredible, as something essential. It is time for us to call on Thoth, not just a moon god, but the god of writing, and heal our vision with Hathor’s gazelle milk, with images serene and cool as a serpent meeting its own tail with the new moon just visible.
Before I go, I’ll leave you with one more synchronicity, tying this missive back into where I began in the Pu’uhonua. My mentor Ke’oni Hanalei, a descendant and lineage carrier of the ancient Mū culture that seeded the great ancient civilizations like Egypt and the Maya when the Mū civilization was destroyed by cataclysms, speaks of an occurrence known in Mū as Wat eht, symbolized by a snake meeting its own tail. I remembered it when I was researching this letter and read that The Eye of Horus was known as the Wadjet. The words are obviously similar. At this point I was not surprised when I read that the Wadjet represented the “totality restored.” 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.
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, will step onto the bridge and look down at the water with clear eyes.
The water may be cloudy at first. What is mirrored there is yet to be revealed, but don’t doubt that the leap will occur. Do we allow our eyes to be filled with the sweetness of Hathor’s gazelle milk or do we choose to blind ourselves by believing the facts that say there is no way out of the current narrative of ecocide and extinction?
What is your gazelle milk? I’d love to hear in the comments below as this ark launches. Are your seas stormy or calm? Are you so afraid you’ll be mesmerized by sirens you, like Odysseus, have stopped up your ears with wax and allowed yourself to be tied to the mast? That is one way to get past the seductions and the monsters, but I know from experience it only leads to more trauma.
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 be logical. Here’s to opening ourselves up to the capacity to hold space for both as we stand together on the bridge. Traveling companions. Smell the wind, see the reflections on the water, hear the gulls cry, taste the salt on your skin, touch the ground beneath you, know it is a privilege to be a human being. Our greatest potential is calling us.
I don’t know where we’ll go next, but this letter will give you some ideas of what the journey may look like. Know there will be poems, there will be stories. There will be fellowship. There will be you.
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light,
Jen