March 31 2024 Happy Down the Rabbit Hole Day: Easter, Spring, Fertility Rites of the Bunny Goddess, Transformative Rebirth, and the Reimagination of Humankind
On this day of Easter in which the forces of light and darkness align in balance and signal the fertility of spring, I wish us all great happiness of our transformative rebirth, the awakening of creativity, and the reimagination…
On this day of Easter in which the forces of light and darkness align in balance and signal the fertility of spring, I wish us all great happiness of our transformative rebirth, the awakening of creativity, and the reimagination of humankind.
Today we celebrate the renewal of the world as Easter, Ēostre in Old English, the ancient Germanic fertility rite of spring which honors the prolific Bunny Goddess, Ostara in Old High German, cognate of the Viking deity whose name in Old Norse, Austr, means dawn and who Shiva-like dances the ongoing creation of the world, and as a celebration of Resurrection from death was assimilated into the new faith of a sacrificial and redemptive man-god which exploded across the world two millennia ago, an appropriation and radical revision of Passover in Judaism by a Roman mystery cult. From this beginning it became more layered, assimilating local faiths and cultures wherever it propagated, as did our civilization as a whole. For myself, all of this is bound together with the figure of the Rabbitt in Alice in Wonderland as an Orphic Guide of the Soul.
On this Down the Rabbit Hole Day, we celebrate a Gordian Knot of history which makes ambiguous and relative our multilayered and interdependent mimetic cueing systems of transformative rebirth and the reimagination of humankind, whose origins in the spring fire festival and planting season rites were revisioned with the idea of Christ as death transcendence and symbolized by the colored eggs we now hide for children, a near cultural universal with a history over sixty thousand years old in Africa which was transmitted through the early church in Mesopotamia to the Orthodox faith, and with the Roman Ritual of 1610 became associated with the Resurrection.
The divine re-enters and sacralizes the world, reanimates and makes new the material universe, and the dead rise up in glory and awaken from their discarded husks and the limits of their forms; it is an ancient idea, born of the primal fear of death and nothingness in a universe without any value or meaning other than that which we ourselves create, which echoes the first religion of humankind, the global neolithic cult of the Cave Bear whose return from hibernation after winter provided a metaphor for the existence, survival beyond death, and rebirth of the soul.
Like much of our cultural identity in America today and of the historical civilization of Europe, it is a complex structure of interdependent and diverse sources, at its roots born of the tumultuous mixing of peoples from which we ourselves arise.
Such recursive and chaotic processes of change and transformative rebirth are ceaseless and ongoing, creating new forms of primordial truths written in our flesh. Though Easter in its original form is primarily an orgiastic rite of affirmation of our life force, in which nothing is Forbidden, beyond all boundaries and limits as ecstasy, transgression, and self-reinvention, the Rites of Spring have long been Bowdlerized as a children's holiday rather than one of the fertility of the earth as planting begins, and creating children who are the objects of celebration, in balance with Halloween as a celebration of the coming of winter, veneration of our ancestors, death as liberation from the limits of our form, transformation, and the embrace of our monstrosity.
The dance of life and death always contains its opposite force as a defining negative space.
Here I think of the genius of Jenna Ortega's mating and hunting dance in Wednesday, which embodies the inherent polar forces of our existence performed to a song which was originally a queer cruising anthem in which headhunting and hunting for sex are unified as performances of ourselves and our monstrosity as figures of the wildness of nature.
Humans create themselves over time; through other humans who are different from themselves as well as those alike.
Humans create ideas as tools with which to organize and shape ourselves, and our rites of spring are similar because they meet universal needs, Ostara and its reimagination as Easter among countless others. What needs are so enormous and universal to us that we create festivals as annual reset buttons to restore us to our true selves and free us from the legacies of our history?
We honor our diversity on this day of Easter, and look to the reimagination of ourselves, our civilization, and the futures to come.
What emerges from the Easter egg are the unknown possibilities of becoming human, and the myriad selves and futures we may unfold.
Happy Easter and good hunting; may you find the best future self and humanity it is possible to envision, and the freedom, means, and will of action to become and live your true image and self.
Here follows one of the most beautiful and luminous Easter poems in the English language, T. S. Eliot's East Coker, second of the matchless Four Quartets:
"I.
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotized. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not reflected, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.
In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
II.
What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns
That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hope for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebitude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill.
III.
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again,
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
IV.
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
V.
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."
Wednesday Dances
How if we must tell our stories, or be rewritten and falsified by others? I find it interesting that Jenna Ortega chose a queer cruising anthem for her signature dance, which confuses and conflates in ambiguous meanings the rituals of mating and hunting, as this Netflix series does as an extended metaphor and allegory of subversions of authorized identities of sex and gender and seizures of power as revolutionary struggle.
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