Earth

The month of May belongs to Aphrodite, the mother goddess, famed for love and beauty. This year the city seems to bless her more than other years. Lockdown remains. The shops, silent behind their steel shutters, announce a different kind of place: all sense of being in a hurry gone; nothing to buy, just days to live, without the noise and fuss of all those small invented worlds, the markets, schools, and mausoleums, competing for space with Mother Earth. 

Every evening, from eight to eleven, Barcelona floods its concrete banks, and people drift, bereft of destinations, simply walking for the pleasure of walking, to exercise their right to exercise. I join the aimless crowd, and as I walk, I ponder on the mother goddess; then, when I return home, from the roof of my apartment block, I see the mountains beckoning with hands of green.

In popular astrology, Venus rules the month of May. Modern science depicts Venus as a giant, sweltering volcano, complete with clouds of sulphuric acid. The Tarot card “the lovers” shows a man and woman holding hands in front of a volcano to evince the explosive nature of desire. In his long poem, Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare’s Aphrodite is “as red and hot as coals of glowing fire”. The associations between Spring, the mother goddess and desire are indefatigable.

Unstable passions evoke the mother goddess’s diverse attributes: loving, caring, nurturer, who stirs the world to life, and tempestuous, cantankerous, destroyer, who consumes her own infants. The green of trees has come from love; so too the stags that lock their antlers to compete. We mourn the loss of friends because of grief, and all because of love; for grief is a sad portion of universal love.

The contradictions of the mother goddess recall an ancient riddle: that of the opposition (or false opposition) between the personalities of Dionysus and Orpheus. Both Dionysus and Orpheus are associated with nature, albeit in different ways. Dionysus, as consort of the mother goddess, invokes a spirit of drunkenness and excess, orgiastic revelries in the hills, the music of trance-inducing pipes, the abundance of the earth: an unkempt savagery that lives in everything. Orpheus, on the other hand, appears to symbolise a gentler music, a more ascetic kind of ecstasy. Marc Chagall, in his beautiful poster for a production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, captures the spirit of Orpheus perfectly: an angel plays a flute to tame an effeminate lion.

Earth, Lagodekhi, Georgia, 2018. Thomas Helm.

The difference between these personalities invite division: the reveller and chaos-inducer versus the peaceful ascetic and tamer. Some have even associated Orpheus with reason and rationalism, an early spokesperson for more masculine prophets, a proto-Jesus, or Buddha, one who negates the material world (along with, one assumes, the mother goddess) to promote abstention. It is worth mentioning that Orpheus in the ancient world was as famous for being a prophet and founder of a religion (Orphism to modern scholars) as a musician. The argument that Orpheus is a kind of anti-materialist seems to gain traction when we consider Orpheus’ demise: Dionysus orders his followers to rip Orpheus apart limb by limb for failing to show him devotion. 

Nevertheless, his violent death also shows the falseness of the opposition. So far we have outlined two forms of liberation: liberation through excess and rule breaking (Dionysus) and liberation through self-restraint and negation (supposedly, but not definitively, Orpheus). This dichotomy falls apart when we consider that the followers of the religion of Orpheus celebrated Dionysus as the principle god. Why would the followers of Orpheus celebrate the god that destroyed him, a god that seems to violate the very principle of his ascetic teachings?

Now for my own tentative solution to the riddle. In mythology, death is always transformational. Orpheus’s death is the beginning of his glory. It is the moment his asceticism harmonises with the excesses of the earth. It is not a sad death, nor does it imply the triumph of the mother goddess over an impostor: it is a call for harmony between two extremes: the savage ecstasies of nature and the gentler, but no less beautiful or magical, spirit of contemplation. Orpheus followers bear his death as his greatest honour, in the same way Christians celebrate the death of Christ, or Egyptians the death of Osiris. The difference between Orpheus and Christ is that Orpheus’ death reveals an innate fallibility rather than perfection. His errors are a source of wonder.

The call for balance between the spiritual and material has a loud echo in today’s world. For 2000 years, Christianity actively sought to repress the Mother Goddess and all her wonderful magic, even associating the devil with desire. Now that we have begun to awaken from this slumber, it is natural to look for meaning on earth and not just heaven.

Perhaps the most famous “prophet” of reconciliation is Osho. Although rightfully vilified for validating a toxic consumerist culture (the sage famously owned as many as 94 Rolls Royces), it is difficult to dispute his influence. In an age of climate crisis, housing injustice, and vertiginous inequality, any spiritual leader who celebrates the current form of capitalism, along with its delinquent child, smash-and-grab individualism, is on the wrong side of history. That said, Osho’s guiding principle of “Zorba the Buddha”, when reduced to its core, is a useful attempt to reconcile spiritual and earthly beauty after millennia of conflicted divorce. Christianity, along with the other patriarchal religions, disdained valuing the earth. Perhaps if we had valued her more, we would not be in this mess. The irate Dionysus was perfectly right to tear apart the abstemious Orpheus: if only to remind him that he was also flesh and blood and came from the earth.

I would posit that wisdom, truth, and beauty are inseparable from the earth. Why? Because Aphrodite is not only a creator and a destroyer but also a preserver. All forms of beauty are coloured by the earth. No thought, however wise, survives the centuries without beautiful expression. The sea polishes pebbles as generations of men polish proverbs. Songs themselves are born of the mouth. The mouth is part of the body. Even the most beautiful singer in the world, one who makes the trees and mountaintops that freeze bow themselves to his song must celebrate the soil and the mother goddess.

And now to try and press these thoughts into a poem. Beauty belongs to the mother goddess. The errors are entirely my own.

In tangled ways, the green lives in my blood;
And when I sing, it is not me,
But nature’s savagery
Resolved in melody.
And when I sing, I am not me,
I join the centuries’ restless threshing floors,
My tiny sound thrashed out
By time and learning love and failing:
Not mine, nor ever belonging
To anything, except the wind
That stirs the tongues of reeds,
And even then,
Perhaps not known, possessed, or heard.
Beauty comes from the earth, so too these words,
Arisen from a chaos
Of sunken majesties.