Heaven and Earth

essay and verse

HEAVEN AND EARTH

“Anyone who likes mythological interpretations may regard the birth of Chronos, the youngest of the Titans as the description of the moment here expressed, when time appears, although it is beginningless. As he castrates his father, the crude productions of heaven and earth cease, and the races of gods and men now occupy the scene”¹

What Schopenhauer is referring to with this mythological interpretation, the “moment here expressed”, is the emergence of “time”. This involves the problem, the counterintuitive notion, that history, both historical and cosmological or physical, does not exist until there is a consciousness such as ours to perceive and conceive the world in terms of temporality.

Time, the perception of change as an ordered sequence of events, as a shifting of phenomena, linked in terms of cause and effect, cannot, after all, exist without a perceiving sentience, an intellect, or mind. This latter, according to the narratives of science and history, only emerged into the universe, on this planet Earth (as far as we know) when the cosmos, the arrangement of all the phenomena we call the universe, was billions of years old. Hence the paradox; since time can only exist in relation to the mind, there cannot have been any “before” to the first appearance of a mind.

We can of course, read backwards from this first point of the emergence of the mind, and describe scientifically or fancifully what the universe was “like” before even the planets were established. However, in doing so we are nonetheless restricted to the particular ways of understanding which that very entity, the mind, affords us. And thus, there can be no escape, no really “objective” way to know anything of this world without or before the emergence of the mind. In a real sense, the “objective” world did not, can not, exist apart from the subjective consciousness, or mind.

Where purely rational explanations can fail to adequately express the significance of paradoxes such as these, which, after all do seem to lie at the very foundation of the human condition, mythological interpretations – really, revelations arising internally to our mind from the storehouse of its a priori knowledge- present themselves.

Ouranos, the divinity of heaven, understood in the ancient Indo-European sense as the being of the entire universe, is ontologically prior to the emergence of the rational mind, Nous, signified by Chronos, a deity associated with time. Here we are talking about a different kind of priority, in another sense of “before” and “after” than the temporal sense. Ouranos is prior to Chronos in a way similar to when one says, for example, that “ I am a human being before I am an Irishman”. One is derived from the other, one is “prior” to the other, without any sense of temporal difference, or indeed of referring to a distinct entity. Before Being enters into the form of the world we know, into space and time, that is, before it is perceived as an objective field of phenomena positioned in spatial relation to each other and connected in casual sequences, it is the eternal and unchanging Being-in-itself, or Being-itself. It remains as such the ultimate reality, transcending the world that appears to and in consciousness, from which, as long as consciousness remains, we can never escape.

Ouranos, although castrated by Chronos, remains the eternal foundation and the stage whereon all of the great drama of gods and men takes place. All experience, all history, all life (the Soul of the universe, in mythological form, Zeus himself) happens in space and time, with Chronos, and thus, within consciousness, but the foundation or root of consciousness is beyond the confines of space and time, is Ouranos.

For the triad of Ouranos, Chronos, Zeus (in reality, aspects of the one ineffable principle) other theological characters in relationships of priority can be substituted; Ymir, Odin, Thor for instance, in a more or less coordinate mirroring of the Greek by Norse or Germanic myth. But it need not necessarily be in such an obvious imitation. Donn, for instance, is the ancient Gaelic-Celtic lord of death, whose name is probably derived from “Dhuosnos”, meaning “the Dark One”. Just as darkness is often thought to precede the emergence of light, so too, we could identify Donn with the ultimate reality outside the mind, beyond space and time, which latter would then be personified as the Dagda. Indeed, the Dagda’s son, Oengus MacOcc, has been associated with vitality, with life in general, much as Zeus in the above paradigm.

These are ways of understanding the nature of our existence, beyond mere recognition of the paradoxes, and the eventual counterintuitive tangents taken by purely rational explanation. However, it would be unwise to assume these myths are only fictional creations, on a par with, for instance, the marvel comic book universe. The thoughts that arise within us are, after all, not really ours in the sense of our ego’s production; they precede even the ego, our concept of ourselves, which is itself a thought.

Even the aforementioned Marvel fantasy, and like popular fictional creations, seem to based on some inherent and pre-existing patterns or paradigms within us. This is not to claim that the characters and acts of mythology and religion are factual entities in the way we think of each other and in general of people and events in time and space, in history; but by recognising that the world of people, events, and history only exists within consciousness, and thus, only as phenomenon, we allow for the reality of what is signified through myth, indeed, It’s supremacy.

THE WATCHERS OF THE WALL

There nothing, nothing here at all,

apart the shadows and the eyes,

unseen, by watchers of the wall,

whose meaning, stones impart besides

***

a living cavern, breath and fire

house of Pluto, Donn’s domain,

where sieve and turn to death desires

from out the grey and mottled flame

1. Schopenhauer, Arthur, “The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1”