Tycho Talk

"Guess what: God created beings not to act in a morality play but to experience what is unfathomable, to elicit what can become, to descend into the darkness of creation and reveal it to him, to mourn and celebrate enigma and possibility. The universe is a whirling dervish, not a hanging judge in robes."

- Richard Grossinger

niiiice...

http://lullaby-child.deviantart.com/art/Pan-Syrinx-Voyeur-52566977

This site is pretty cool. I don't know how accurate the information is, but it looks like fun. The entry for Pan:

PAN: God of Shepherds, Flocks and Fornication. (What does that tell you about the ancient Greek countryfolk then?)

The son of HERMES, and possibly a goat, PAN was one of the DIONYSUS drinking crowd, with all the leering lusty living that entails. Woodland glades. NYMPHS. Orgies. Flutes. That sort of thing. You get the picture.

As a God with his hooves firmly placed on the ground, PAN was (and still is) worshipped as a potent deity of fertility and earthiness.

He was known as FAUNUS by the faunicating Romans. In time his carefree lifestyle began to upset the early Christians, who saw his earthy temptations as a manifestation of the Devil. Who would've thought that the horny old goat would become the blueprint for Satan, cloven hooves, horns and all?

They even have Mielikki:

MIELIKKI: Mistress of the Forest. She's Mrs TAPIO, and the mother of NYYRIKKI and TUULIKKI.

Her husband often refers to her as 'All-Pleasing Woman'. But as he's a tree, it's hard to know what to make of that. How do you please a tree?

I was able to spring Pan from Bryan-College Station on Friday, in the form of a (estimates vary) 300 pound five-foot tall statue. I've been good and making layaway payments for some time, and was finally able to go get him with help from Gordon (for the moving not the buying- I am very proud to have made this purchase solo). It took a dolly to get him into the van, and when we got home we could only tip him out and rock him over to the inside of the garage, and contemplate how to get him in the house (over a couple of steep steps and through a couple of rooms). We finally decided to use leverage and drag him on a piece of carpet, which though my hands are all cut up worked smashingly. He's in the meditation room with the 55 gallon fish tank. He has a platform on his head, which I've tarted up already with fake plant garlands- one of ivy, which I think will stay there all the time, another of assorted flowers (which I may change out seasonally) and a bug heart-shaped glass vase-jar thing that starts as turquoise and shades up through purple and a dark pink color, and the jar filled with white Christmas lights. It may be a little over-the top but I think it works- is Pan known as being a big fan of demure moderation?

I will post pictures as soon as I can get some good ones- the flash on the camera is washing it out so you can only see the color of the stone and not the details of the face, which was what really captivated me.

burgundy turned me on to this website, where you can make your own superheroes; which allows me to bring you...




Pan Man!

I could have crapped him up more with swords and crossbow guns and capes and stuff, but I imagine Pan Man is more of a minimalist when it comes to accessories. If I buy the upgrade, maybe I can actually give him goat feets, but he's pretty cool as is.

What I see Pan as being opposed to is not Christianity, but rather what I guess I could call guilt-based consciousness. I believe that one of the great roadblocks to happiness is poverty-based consciousness, where you always feel like there's never enough and spend all your energy grasping at things to fill that unfillable hole caused by that frame of mind. Another block to happiness, and these both may have the same root somewhere deep down, is guilt-based consciousness. That's about not ever feeling like you're good enough, sort of a poverty of spirit.

Christianity sadly can lend itself to this sort of mentality very well, because you are always in a state of sin and there's no hope for you unless you've atoned through being baptized or confessing or whatever... and to me, that's an awful way to live. Wiccans who (in my mind) misinterpret the Rede to mean 'you must never harm anything' set themselves up for this same sort of always-reaching yet never-attaining that seems to me would be very depressing. It's not the fault of these paths, but it says more of the person who latches onto this particular interpretation that they would set themselves up for endless failure that way... it reinforces my belief that your worst enemy is always yourself.

Obviously not every Christian or Wiccan gets themselves trapped in this sort of mentality. But a lot of people do, and it poisons every aspect of their lives. Perhaps they were raised by disapproving parents and mined this particular vein of their spirituality to the very dregs... where others raised in happiness ignored it. So while I don't buy into the notion that all Christians were dour guilt-peddlers and all ancient pagans were happy and carefree, I definitely see this sort of guilt-consciousness (and its handmaiden, Miss Misery-Loves-Company) in people around me. One of the most unfair traps Christians set up is 'despair is a sin'. So even feeling bad about your perpetual state of damnedness is just making it worse for yourself.

So what opposes it? This is what I see Pan as representing. Ethical hedonism- thoughtful, mindful joy. Pan-consciousness. Something that deep down I think we are all born with the potential for- I don't think we're born with it, because part of the joyful process of maturity is to extend your circle of happiness to include family, friends, your community, humanity, all of creation. But it gets squashed, caged, stifled, twisted. By your parents, a bully, a bad teacher, a bad culture, bad luck, bad brain chemistry- any number of things. Bringing Pan-consciousness to replace guilt-consciousness must truly be one of the Great Works.

Bleh! At last I post! Seems everyone is having sign-in problems these days; Amazon still seems to be having problems. Is Mercury having an unscheduled retrograde?!

Friday I decided to go visit Mom in Bryan-College Station, home of the Texas Aggies and quite the bastion of traditional Texas redneckery. Anyway she's been cut back to 32 hours a week, and they tell her she'll have every Friday off. She is quite the awfulizer, if your therapist has familiarized you with that term- she seems to focus on the negative in every situation, and managed to find things to complain about with this though it really seems like a lot better work situation then she had before. I'm pushing the 'your daughter will be able to visit you more often' angle with her which seems to help. She doesn't seem as depressed.

Central Texas has decided to put on it's rainy face, so it was a wet drive. I arrived around noon and while Mom was getting dressed I looked at her computer- it appeared to have every spyware program ever written on it, and I spent probably an hour trying to clean it up, with help from hub who led me into the strange and creepy territory of 'the registry'.

We lunched at Oxford Street Pub, which looked very British (dark woods, cloth wallpaper) but still had drawling redneck waitresses, which amused me. The food was edible- I just did soup and salad. Next we went to Earth Art, the only pagany shop in B/CS- and frankly I wonder that they stay in business at all, so I try to do my part whenever I'm there. I looked for Pan things, since I've become quite fond of him lately. I found a couple of little wall plaques, but what really caught my eye was a statue. I immediately saw it when I stepped in the door, but felt weirdly shy and looked through the whole store before coming back to it and staring at it.

It's a herm, which means the lower half is a plain square column. Halfway up are carved leaves and vines, then the trunk from the belly-button up- thus eliminating the need to carve his wang, which I have seen on other herms. He holds his pipes down around his navel, and is looking rather amused and thoughtful. The whole thing is about 5 feet tall and made out of some dark brown stuff that is probably cast concrete. Me and the shop lady got to talking about it, and she mentioned they have layaway. It's really a pretty expensive statue, but I am really drawn to it and hope to be able to scrape up enough for a down payment and pick up some extra shifts to pay for it on layaway. She had the thing right up front, surrounded by crosses and 10-commandment plaques and so on (I expect they do the angel angle probably to keep from getting lynched), which I pointed out as being sort of ironic- she said 'we aim to amuse'. He needs to be rescued!

After that we went to Hobby Lobby where Mom got the picture we gave her for Christmas rigged so she can hang it on the wall for $1 (alright!!) and I picked up a sketch pad. We rented 'Briget Jones' Diary' and went home to watch it. I'd seen it in the theater, but I was battling food poisoning and didn't remember much of it. It was cute. Eh. After that, we ordered some Chinese and watched Blast! and chatted; by then it was after 10pm and I headed home. It rained on me the whole way, but I lived to tell my tale.

(Everyone seems to be having vivid dreams... I guess it's my turn.)

A boy, about 11-12, but ancient. Returning to the side of a lake that has a stone building that appears to float over it. Walking along the edge of the building by the clear green water, remembering his first fumbling attempts at shape-shifting and laughing. Getting into the head of the animal, letting go of your shape enough to change, but still being you. His first shape to change to was a big, mossy-backed turtle. [at this point, the story teller in me is saying, what not a hawk or a cougar or something cool? A turtle?] Yeah, a turtle. His friends reminisce about the fun they had, and ask if he can be a salmon, and they playfully argue about what a salmon looks like, exactly. Do they have those lower jaws that jut out, or was that some other kind of big fish I'm thinking of? Well, let's give it a go. He is a salmon, swimming through emerald waters.

Later...

A confrontation. A group of older, bigger boys has come to the lake, which is a popular swimming hole after all. The youth isn't scared of them at all, and finds one of them to be rather attractive. He swims up to them, and the cute one, a boy with curly dark hair and big eyes, notices him and sizes him up. The youth swims just out of reach, almost taunting. The cute one motions to a bigger boy, an 'enforcer' type who is big and mean-looking, and has his hair dyed some garish shade of orange/blond. They both begin to swim after the youth, who manages to stay just out of reach, swimming farther and farther away from the shore. He even stops, waits until they almost catch up, then darts ahead. At one point he ducks underwater, swims around behind them, pops up smiling. He doesn't do this in malice, just in teasing playfulness, completely without fear.

Suddenly these three are in a city, in some kind of store- a used record store of some kind. The pursuit is going on around the bins of dusty old records. The cute one gets a call on his cell phone, and motions to the big one to quit playing around, and start pounding the youth while he takes a call. The youth takes a look at the big one who is approaching menacingly. Looking past the horrible dye job of the big one's hair, he notices the medium brown eyebrows over surprisingly beautiful blue eyes, and blurts out 'I love you!', truly meaning it. The big one looks startled for a second, then scornful, as if thinking 'oh, you're one of those. I'm gonna beat the crap out of you.' The youth looks straight into his eyes and says the thing that pops into his head, as if he put out his hand and was given a scalpel. But he doesn't use the scalpel to harm, but as it was intended- it cuts to heal.

"Your mother loves you too." The big one, whose mother has died, instantly knows that the youth is not lying to him- he somehow knows this. His startled expression begins to crumble into previously-unreleased grief. "She remembers how you used to sit on that blue wooden rocking horse as a little boy and rock on that horse until you fell asleep, and she misses you." The big one dissolves into great heaving sobs, clinging to the youth who holds him and cries with him a little too, arms stretching across the big one's broad shoulders. The wrenching sobs that had been held back for so long are healing, making him whole at last. It has been so long.

So at that point I woke up. Who the heck was the youth? Well, he'd been hanging out with the dead, and was all about love, so was he an angel? No, angels seem to be more purposeful, serious, and ethereal. They're messengers of God and stuff. This youth was playful and teasing and lusty and very, very earthy. Not what I think of as angelic, for sure. A bodhisattva (sp?)? Again, they seem to have more of a sense of purpose. Then I thought, maybe Pan? Those Greek gods were quite playful at times. When I thought that I felt the youth in my head give me a big, beaming smile, a sort of mental thumbs-up, and thought of how the Hindus thought that their gods reincarnated as people many times over- Krishna is supposed to be the tenth reincarnation of Shiva, or something like that. This youth was a part of the power that I know only a small part of, and call Pan. He wasn't goat-feeted, or ugly like Pan was described as. And he wasn't petty or mean the way pretty much all the Greek gods were described as. He was full of love, and power, and it was frightening and terrible in its way.