Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment
An Analysis of The Crowning of Mary as Calculated Ritual Informed by Somnium Spirituality
I. Introduction
II. Conscious Ritual Investment as a Technique
III. The Axis Mundi, The Shiva Lingam and the Maypole; A Cross Cultural Analysis
IV. God’s Power of Life Experienced Through the Calculated Ritual of the Crowning of the Virgin Mother
V. Conclusion
Introduction
The month of May brings a month dedicated to Mary and the beautiful paraliturgical ritual of crowning a statue of The Virgin with flowers. If one lives in a society where Roman Catholic culture is fairly ubiquitous, then one will probably be intuitively struck with a sense of newness, life, and renewal when attending this ritual. In such a case the culture itself is so synchronistic with the ritual that the symbols are effective, even if subconsciously, and the actor or observer need take no conscious action for the ritual to impart meaning, emotion, piety, desire for action etc. Yet in today’s more secular world, many such calculated symbolic rituals, especially ones honed toward a religious end, wind up being so out of sync with secular expectations, that to the observer, the entire ritual seems only vaguely meaningful. The ritual may come off as forced or too “fabricate”. The symbols don’t make sense and are ineffective in their inspiration or call to action, thus, the rituals need bolstering in order to be effective.
The purpose of this treatise is to devise a technique one can practice for religious ritual participation if one is submerged in a culture where one’s religious rituals are not supportive intuitively. The technique of conscious ritual investment works on three basic levels an epistemological level, a cognitive level and on the level of somnium spirituality. With the epistemological level, one must invest in a multivalent epistemology which will allow for proper cosmology, understanding how it relates to ritual and how ritual invests one teleologically. The second level is a cognitive investment. It involves learning the deep, even pan human, meanings of the symbolic structure of the ritual and demands a study of the mythological symbolic structure of humanity as it is informed by the dream world. This leads to the final step, which employs our former techniques of somnium spirituality to take conscious ritual investment beyond simply an academic exercise and toward an effective religious experience.
After covering the technique of conscious ritual investment abstractly the second section of the treatise will apply the methodology to the ritual of the crowning of Mary. This will assume a epistemological reorientation and set in on exploring the panhuman symbolic complex presented in the May crowning through a cross cultural compare and contrast. The next section will cover the May crowning itself exploring its particular symbolism and commenting on a somnium spirituality overlay.
The May crowning is fairly easily invested in given its close connection to spring. It presents as a good study for this technique, because there are most likely elements of intuitive ritual investment still available to the participant, yet the encroachment of secularism and a shift in Catholic culture in general may have lead to other elements of the ritual being “outdated”, such that a conscious ritual investment may be helpful.
Once such a technique is developed and practiced it could conceivably be useful in re-enlivening ancient calculated ritual whose intuition is beyond reach. It could also be useful for introduction of calculation as a skill for dynamically developing paraliturgical ritual in the diocese parish or domestic church as a matter of effective devotion and proselytization.
Conscious Ritual Investment as a Technique
Our task in this first part of the treatise is to abstractly lay out the process of conscious ritual investment. To that end we will explore the epistemological as well as the cognitive groundwork to be laid in order to reach a threshold for effective calculated ritual. Then we will review the technique of somnium spirituality as an overlay that will activate the spiritual effectiveness of the ritual so as to allow religious experience instead of simply cognitive exercise.
In order to begin it may be important to talk about what we mean by calculated ritual. This phrase was first hinted at in the treatise Somnium Spirituality presented here and first used in the Thanatosian Piety treatise, but heretofore has yet to be well defined. The time for such a definition may be at hand. Calculated ritual is a ritual action that utilizes a symbolic language symbiotic with dream and myth, which seeks to invest one in and actualize deep human meaning. It is calculated because it adds or is the interface of the collective unconscious expressed as myth and how this myth is consciously acted upon ritually. This type of ritual is calculated for an effect. The ritual allows for participation in meaning and myth and allows the participant to activate myth and meaning in their own life.
Our main purpose here is to foster effective ritual participation and in order to have effective ritual action one must have a teleological worldview. One’s view could be intuitive or conscious, but a current cultural problem is that many are intuitively nihilistic and or secular, thus our rituals come off as at best unreliable and at worst fabricated nonsense, or “play” that makes one feel better if one can fool oneself enough.
Effective ritual is easiest when one can intuitively invest, but one of the dangers of our modern pluralistic life is when a conscious nihilist or secularist questions a person who is ritualistically religiously invested on an intuitive level. Because they act intuitively they may not be able to cognitively frame why they act the way they do. This lack of ability to comment does not inhibit the effectiveness of the ritual. Christianity is not a gnostic religion where rites are incumbent on the knowledge of the believer. However knowledge is valuable, and it is supremely valued in our society, thus when an intuitive believer is questions about their ritualistic action and they can provide no coherent explanation it makes them feel foolish and pointless because they don’t know the answers.
This type of questioning is common from the nihilist despite the professed lack of meaning. It would seem that a lack of meaning would dispose a nihilist toward leaving others alone, in fact they use that asserted lack of meaning to admonish the believer into passivity. But the nihilist himself needs this line of questioning because nihilism ultimately seems fail, at least existentially, people seem geared to find meaning. The most sustainable way to be a nihilist is to fabricate a narrative of “the brave nihilist against the self deluded believer”. But bravery, fear, delusion and a host of other assumptions here only work against a backdrop of some sort of meaning.
Different from the nihilist is the secularist. The secularist attack gains effectiveness because it is the ethos of modern western society. It controls the epistemology, cosmology, and teleology. Thus secular ritual action does not appear to be fabricated, it is intuitive, it is “just life”. The sociologist Emile Durkheim made a conscious effort to speculate on the eradication of religious ritual while maintaining a secular use for the power of ritual itself. What he and his followers, who take a more behaviorist tack, focus on is the actions themselves, and seem to fail to see the relationship between ritual action, mythology, cosmology and teleology, as presumed or intuited by the study subjects. Despite their narrow view, what he had planned to do in the late 18th early 19th century, simply happened because rituals spring to life out of how humans are constructed. A whole host of secular calculated rituals, related to secular myth, secular scientific cosmology and secular teleology are now present and intuitively competing with religious ritual.
It should not be off putting that both secularists and, more surprisingly, nihilists have rituals and myths in abundance, though it may be hard for them to admit. The assertion of this treatise is that these traits are built into humanity as part of our nature in order to allow us to commune with God, receive revelation and grace, and experience meaning. Below we will go over the interface of dream, myth, and ritual. For now it suffices to say that an intuitively invested participant in ritual is able to draw on the predominant myth, the symbols of which interface the dream world, for a natural experience of fulfillment and effect vis a vis the ritual. This communication complex is as fundamental to humanity as spoken language. Culture effects intuition regarding ritual because culture is where one garners one’s worldview and one’s myth, both of which are vital for effective ritual. Given the pervasiveness of the secular worldview it may be dangerous to simply rely on intuitive ritual investment for religious rituals.
From either the nihilist or the secular end, the attack springs epistemologically from an over emphasis on philosophy (wisdom) as personally speculative, logical and objective as opposed to communal and/or teleological. The facets of philosophy espoused by the secularist are good when applied to the correct end. Yet such a statement implies that the teleological is primary to the others and one must have the proper teleology. From the start it is our assertion that dream, myth and ritual have a purpose, and that is to invest the participant with a sense of meaning, a connection to the deep mysteries of life and humanity and open one to the grace of God.
The fact of the matter is no one can be a master of all trades. It’s not important that a person be brilliant in every respect to live a fulfilling live. Again, the Christian religion is not a gnostic religion. In its ancient forms Christianity is a ritual and person based religion, the book is secondary to these things. Thus it is important that a “tradition” be intelligent, conscious, and reflective so that its ritual can be synchronistically calculated with myth, cosmology and teleology. If the tradition is prevalent enough, an individual can live that tradition intuitively and need not engage in conscious ritual investment. This actually may be preferable, because the meaning has seeped into their bones so to speak. Yet this is no longer our situation in as Catholics in the United States of America. Perhaps it never was except for certain stronghold cities. Thus we must consciously invest in our rituals, which may give it the feeling of fabrication or play acting because humans are meant to live ritual not think it, that awkwardness makes us prone to secular or even nihilist attack. The solution to this feeling of awkwardness is a multivalent epistemology that allows for a particular cosmology and teleology. All of this is garnered from a is somnium spirituality and the technique of lucid waking.
This is personal investment, yet there is also the necessity of breaking out of one’s self, and one’s community. When studying the background and connections it is important to realize that ritual, especially paraliturgical ritual, is a great means of evangelization. If one can devise a well crafted calculated ritual that employs all the dynamics we are about to discuss, suited to a culture that is not Catholic, one can use the deep urges of humanity, put there by God, to their intended purpose, bringing people to him. The new rituals can be created through the old, as the symbols are transposed and counter posed, in order to draw people to the truth. As we shall see, this is why so many rituals in Catholicism bear the impression of former pagan rituals. This fact should not be disturbing to at all, it is simply a recognition that God called the pagans and they responded in terms of their nature using myth and ritual. The Catholic Church then drew their myth further toward the truth and made it more impactful to its purpose. That process need not end, either in terms of pagans or secularist.
For the rest of this section we will abstractly lay out the process by which one cognitively and spiritually prepares for conscious ritual investment. After that the next section will begin with the groundwork analysis for conscious ritual investment while participating in a May crowning of Mary. The last section will go on to specific analysis of the ritual itself.
The Groundwork of Conscious Invested Ritual: Cosmology of being and time
When intuitive ritual investment is not an option, conscious ritual investment is the process one could engage in to have better effect during ritual participation. To begin, one must go to the fundamental level if their view concerning the nature of reality, time and space. We will begin with a conception of space and move toward the conception of time required for effective calculated ritual.
To begin one must garner an understanding of sacred time and sacred space. When distinguishing between sacred and profane time and space, one should remember that in many ways this is a false dichotomy. For a religious believer the goal is to be able to view all space and time as spiritually and existentially somehow invested with the fullness of meaning. But given the nature of theodicy, one must draw a phenomenological distinction between sacred and profane space and time. Profane points to when one is distracted in one way or another from the deep meaning or purpose of one’s life. A sacred situation is a situation set aside from these distractions to allow for deep investment.
All of this was hinted at in detail in the treatise Somnium Spirituality where sacred spaces were discussed as a preferred place to practice lucid waking.
Even the secular atheist, when entering an ornate Catholic church most likely feels transported at least back to a past dead world. The space is setup to contrast the hustle and bustle of everyday life. It is designed as a place to encounter quite and peace. . . The space itself is meant to channel an entire system where the invisible realities of grace become visible by physical signs.
Sacred space in a ritual system works in conjunction with sacred time. Sacred time is also a situation set apart from the hurly burly of life in order to reconnect with the deep meaning that should in the ideal always be present. As Mircea Eliade states in Myth Dreams and Mysteries the purpose of sacred time is to, “transcend the human condition and regain a non conditioned state which preceded the fall into time and the wheel of existences.”
The two work together within rituals in an elaborate communication system that speaks to the human person and allows them to commune with their very nature through participation in myths and with heroes.
An accessible example of this would be the passover ritual itself. If one conceives of the passover ritual as done in Jesus’ time, the sacrifice would have been done in a sacred space, the Temple of Jerusalem. The actual sacrifice would have been performed by the priests in a part of the temple set aside for that purpose. The Jews who were not priests would be in another part of the temple, doing ritualistic actions that relate to the slaying of the animal. Even though, “they were not there” when the animal was “sacrificed”, they most certainly are part of the sacrificial ritual. Part of that rite is the draining of the blood into a trench where the participants walk through the blood in order to bring it back to their house to put it on their doorways. The communal pool of blood recalls that all of these individual sacrifices are one sacrifice together.
Meanwhile, back at home other members of the family are preparing the house for the ritual meal associated with the sacrifice The houses of those participating in the passover would be ritually cleansed, making them into a sacred spaces. The meal is eaten in each house according to prescription and with synchronized connection to the passover story. Thus each house in Jerusalem would also be considered part of the sacrifice.
At that time it would be preferable to go to Jerusalem for the sacrifice, yet many Jews in the diaspora would not be able to make the journey. This would not dissuade them from engaging in the ritual, because as was just demonstrated, physical distance does not exclude one from the sacrificial ritual. If they perform the actions appropriately, they too would be part of the same sacrifice as was taking place in Jerusalem.
What binds all of these is the arranged space, marked ritualistically, the ritual itself and the narrative of the myth, the Exodus. Then, what connects it all to the deep meaning is the meaning behind the myth and the emersion of the practitioner into the myth itself. This immersion is facilitated by all of these calculations coupled with the effect of sacred time. Sacred time is measured in the same way that distance is measured in the ritual, meaning it is not considered a separator but a unifier, sacred time transcends and binds all time into one. If someone can perform passover rites in Ephesus and be part of the same sacrifice as the one in Jerusalem, then one can perform rites in 2017 C.E. and they are participating in the same rite as the one done in 32 C.E. and these and all other passovers are the participations in the same rite done in 1446 BCE. For calculated sacred ritual, the divisive nature of time and space dissolves and one gains access to the myth and the heroes whose narrative give meaning to the ritual and to the participant.
Again in Myths Dreams and Mysteries Eliade says, “In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time” This works for myths what are absent of historical fact because one is participating in a deep truth which is expressed in a symbolic narrative form. It works all the more when one is participating in a ritual such as passover where the myth has its roots in a historical event. In some ways the Judeo Christian idea of salvation history is an unfolding of the truths of myth and fable in the flow of history then recodified into narrative by the guidance of the Holy Spirit and made available for summative ritual effectiveness. This hints at why it is so important that Jesus was a historical person, yet at the same time, over focus on the historicity at the expense of meaning and ritual is a problem all its own.
From the passover ritual one can move on to read Eliade’s remarks considering Christian rites in The Sacred and the Profane
Just as a church constitutes a break in plane in the profane space of a modern city, [so] the service celebrated inside [the church] marks a break in profane temporal duration. It is no longer today's historical time that is present—the time that is experienced, for example, in the adjacent streets—but the time in which the historical existence of Jesus Christ occurred, the time sanctified by his preaching, by his passion, death, and resurrection.
Eliade’s understanding of sacred ritual is that it ultimately transcend time by returning to a cosmically generative point, and often this is the case. But, there may be cases of ritual where the point is to reinvest profane time with a sense of deep meaning and re integrate meaning into one’s life. This is certainly the view of Catholics whose central rite, the Eucharist is connected to this world and, as was discussed in the treatrise Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton, is presumed to pass away, at least structurally, when perfection is reached. The Catechism of the Catholic Church in article 1085 states
In the liturgy of the Church, it is principally his own Paschal mystery that Christ signifies and makes present. During his earthly life Jesus announced his Paschal mystery by his teaching and anticipated it by his actions. When his Hour comes, he lives out the unique event of history which does not pass away: Jesus dies, is buried, rises from the dead, and is seated at the right hand of the Father "once for all.” His Paschal mystery is a real event that occurred in our history, but it is unique: all other historical events happen once, and then they pass away, swallowed up in the past. The Paschal mystery of Christ, by contrast, cannot remain only in the past, because by his death he destroyed death, and all that Christ is - all that he did and suffered for all men - participates in the divine eternity, and so transcends all times while being made present in them all. The event of the Cross and Resurrection abides and draws everything toward life.
The events of the paschal mystery are summative for Christians, it is not cosmically generative, but cosmically regenerative, thus it should regenerate the ritual participant’s present life. From the Christian point of view, all other mythologies leading up to Christ are preparative to his coming, and are fulfilled by his life death and resurrection. Every myth that is developed subsequent to the historical events of the paschal mystery are either aberrant forces which seek to undermine salvation history or, more importantly for our purposes, developmental flourishes which seek to recontextualize the paschal mystery for a new culture or generation. In the case of the latter, the paschal mystery is still the primary focal point of myth for the Christian, but supplemental myth bolsters the ability of the faithful to participate in the paschal mystery by providing supplementary accessible symbolic context.
Thus in order to engage in conscious ritual investment, the first groundwork to be done is to realize the nature of time, space and mythology in calculated ritual. It is helpful to understand the interface between myth, sacred time and space, and the ritual that is calculated by means of these. If one is in a situation where they are bereft of intuitive investment this knowledge is important because the intuition supplied by the general culture will make all of these deep human qualities work toward separate cultural ends by means of other cultural rituals, which are often imperceptible in their exercise because they are intuitive. This leaves a person with an uneasy sense of alienating multifurcation.
Importance of Dream Myth and Ritual
That a new set of useful myths may develop after the ultimate revelation of Christ in the paschal mystery seems counterintuitive until one realizes that all people and all societies that people develop are imperfect. This means that whatever preparation the ancient pagans needed by their myths to recognise Christ, we would also need as deluded moderns. Our imperfect modern myths do the same type of preparation for us as the older myths did for the ancients. This is because myth is not a temporary tool rendered useless after fulfillment, but an integral part of what it means to be a human. It is an important part of an elaborately intricate system of self revelation, both personal and communal that God grants to humanity. Investment in mythology springs from our very being and the most obvious way this is seen is in the dream world. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell says,
Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in dreams the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.
Myth and narrative as a means of finding meaning is built into us as reflected in our subconscious and our social state. The archetypal symbols are generated in our unconscious and experienced by means of our forays into the dream world. Then any given culture would use their shared symbolic system to create myth. But myth is not simply entertainment. As we have been discussing, it begs to be invested in and the methodology for that is ritual.
The cosmology hinted at above allows for calculated ritual that facilitates direct participation in the myth by the participant. As noted ritual does this my means of a set aside space with sacred, set aside, artifacts and at a sacred time. These work in concert with the myth, song and motion of the ritual to bind the participants to the myth. All of this is not simply entertainment, an ancient form of virtual reality. It is calculated to change the participant and change the world. This is not simply the modern view of literature rationally instilling morality by reflection upon a narrative. That is only one small part of the usefulness of myth. When calculated ritual is added, the participation in the myth itself allows for the mystical experience described by Eliade of temporal transcendence, or a more existential investment in the foundation of the cosmos themselves.
Our problem comes when the effectiveness hinges on intuitive investment in ritual yet the entire culture has gone a different way than one’s preferred mythic ritual life. At this point one’s rituals become stale and meaningless. The second step in our task of conscious ritual investment then is to learn the meanings behinds the rituals we invest in, to see how they relate to myth and what that myth says about humanity and the human condition. Since our sincere belief is that dream myth and ritual are built into humanity in order to speak to us something of God and ourselves, the fact of myth and ritual as a pan-human phenomenon is also useful. The anthropological tracing of the interconnectedness of symbols is an integral part of conscious ritual investment. Then a synoptic comparison will allow one to begin to get a sense of a pan human communications system and suit one better to continuously invest in ritual.
As a methodology then, conscious ritual investment must understand how dream myth and ritual interplay to allow participation in deep meaning by those engaged in calculated ritual. Since intuition is lost, one must begin to learn the complex symbolic structures and how they relate across the ritualistic expression of humanity, both in one’s own tradition and outside of it. One’s own tradition, in our case Roman Catholicism, would be the calibrator for what is good and what would need to be rejected in other traditions’ rituals. All of this is a cognitive exercise the practitioner of conscious ritual investment as a methodology must undergo.
However, to simply learn the meanings behind the symbols does not allow for intuitive investment. In fact it opens one up to the danger of becoming an academic, more impressed with information than existential meaning. Thus our technique of conscious ritual investment now turns to a somnium spirituality overlay to allow for more effective ritual.
Somnium Application and Conscious Ritual Investment
The dangers of straying into seeing myth and ritual simply as an interesting interplay of symbolic structures in a cognitive academic game can be abated by an overlay of somnium spirituality that practices lucid waking during the ritual activity itself, as described concerning Holy Mass in the last section of the treataise Somnium Spirituality. In some ways this treatise is simply an expansion on that last section and more general application of the extended example given there.
The first step there was to realize the importance of a multivalent epistemology. To understand that simply learning facts is not the only way to understand and know. That phenomenologically, the dream world and many aspects of the waking world that exist beyond the physical world are as important in gaining knowledge. And that knowledge is not simply facts, but also experience, for our purposes particularly an experience of meaning.
What may be needed here is a basic re-cap of somnium spirituality. In the aforementioned treatise we sought to relegate the scientific worldview to a more appropriate place and open the reader’s worldview to a more amiable position concerning dreams and how to use one’s experience of the dream world in their spiritual life. Mainly the first section was meant to bolster the importance and meaning of dreams in a spiritually centered life and the validity of the dream world as a actual world, at least phenomenologically, but possibly ontologically. After an exploration of standard and well known techniques for lucid dreaming were explored as a means for bringing the waking world into the dream world the treatise set in on the technique of lucid waking, that is bringing the dream world to the waking world. That is approaching the waking world with the same awareness of the dream world as one approaches the dream world with an awareness of the waking world when lucid dreaming, treating each world as valid to it’s purpose in God’s plan.
High grade lucid dreaming allows for real time symbolic interpretation of the dream and interaction with one’s subconscious manifestations of archetypes. If one has undergone extensive studies in the crosscultural similarities of a particular ritual, then one can begin to recognise how these themes manifest in the one's life. The most effective rituals will effect the deep meanings of humanity on the participant by means of a symbolic structure, which would also present in the dream life of the invested participant. As was explained in the treatise Somnium Spirituality,
The collective unconscious is composed of “primordial forms” or archetypes, which are hard to define, being that they exist solely in the unconscious realm. They seem to be the innate ordering principle of the human psyche, but they only acquire form with the individual’s encounter of the physical world. The synthesis of the amorphous collective unconscious and the experience of the human generates archetypal representations under various forms such as archetypal events, for example birth, death, separation from parents, marriage, the union of opposites; archetypal figures such as the great mother or father, the child, the devil, god, the wise old figure, the trickster, the hero and archetypal motifs: the apocalypse, the deluge, the creation. These are presented to humanity in a network of “non-scientific” yet invaluable panhuman phenomenon such as the creation of myth, the dream world, religious devotion, a sense of transcendence etc. These are then taken codified by the collective conscious, the social world’s organization and analysis of the primal material as it is first presented and turned into social structures such as religion.
These same symbols will crop up in symbolic form over and over in the ritual lives of humans across the scope of history and geography. Once one can begin to relate in real time as they are dreaming, and interact in their dreams in a way that is consciously informed by the panhuman experience of calculated ritual, one can begin to align that same deeper awareness of self to one’s experience of ritual in the waking world and practice more effective lucid waking.
Lucid waking is best pulled off in a setting of calculated ritual, where the symbolic structure also uses those same archetypes, yet more generally geared toward the culture, or micro-culture as the case may be as drawn from their myth. As Joseph CAmpbell says in his work, A Hero With a Thousand Faces,
Even when legend is of an actual historical personage, the deeds and victory are rendered, not in life like, but dreamlike figurations; for the point is not that such-and-such was done on earth; the point is that before such-and-such could be done on earth, this other, more important, primary thing had to be brought to pass within the labyrinth the we all know and visit in our dreams.
High grade lucid waking allows for real time emotive experience of the symbol to manifest given how well dreams are geared toward awareness of meaning and symbol. A lucid waking experience of ritual is an experience consciously garnered but intuitively encountered, because one has brought one’s own intuitive experience as felt in the dream world to the ritual in the waking world. The dialogue between cognitive investment and experience of the dream world chips away at the unsavory portions of the secular empirical myth because it requires a multivalent epistemology. Also since the dream world isn’t “thought” but “generates”, growing one’s spirituality by an interplay between lucid dreaming and lucid waking allows for conscious knowledge and intuitive self experience. Thus one can encounter ritual as a conscious experience of what one would have felt intuitively before.
In the treatise Somnium Spirituality the interplay of dream, myth, ritual and somnium spirituality was described by means of the Holy Mass. For a Catholic this makes sense because Jesus is the historical and revelatory summation of the mythic hero. As was noted in the treatise Anthro-Expansivity Jesus is the only example of postlapsarian anthro-authenticity we have. That he is the example by which all others are calibrated demonstrates how Eliade is slightly off when asserting that ritual always goes back to the generative point. If this were the case then the other two examples of anthro-authenticity would be in play, Adam and Eve. But we are not at that perfect point, so our action and effort lays in the postlapsarian state of affair. Thus effective ritual does not simply deliver the ecstasy of mystical perfection by ritually participating in primal or eschatological perfection. It also delivers experience of meaning behind the theodicy of the present condition by effective ritual participation.
That the paschal mystery as ritualized in the Holy Mass makes use of the interplay of myth and ritual as a temporal transcender of sacred time is validated by The Council of Trent
[Christ], our Lord and God, was once and for all to offer himself to God the Father by his death on the altar of the cross, to accomplish there an everlasting redemption. But because his priesthood was not to end with his death, at the Last Supper "on the night when he was betrayed," [he wanted] to leave to his beloved spouse the Church a visible sacrifice (as the nature of man demands) by which the bloody sacrifice which he was to accomplish once for all on the cross would be re-presented, its memory perpetuated until the end of the world, and its salutary power be applied to the forgiveness of the sins we daily commit.
For the Roman Catholic the Eucharist is THE Ritual. Just as Jesus, his historical life and narrative are the example of humanity by which all other lives are to be calibrated for efficacy and meaning, the Eucharist in its basic form is the ritual by which all other rituals are calibrated for efficacy and meaning. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says in article 1407,
The Eucharist is the heart and the summit of the Church's life, for in it Christ associates his Church and all her members with his sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving offered once for all on the cross to his Father; by this sacrifice he pours out the graces of salvation on his Body which is the Church.
Each of the other seven sacraments as ritual action flow from this ritual as do all paraliturgical ritual. In subsequent parts of this treatise, rituals of pagan traditions and paraliturgical ritual action of Roman Catholicism. Any good meaning that springs from these can only be validated as such by their conformity to the Eucharist. From it one finds the good message of effective ritual.
The New Evangelization: Bringing it Back in . . .
To wrap up this section it may be helpful to offer a current reason for the application of conscious ritual investment. As Catholics we run the risk of our most effective ritual becoming intuitively meaningless to our own people much less the world. This is a tragedy because this ritual is revealed by God in order to calibrate the ritual experience of humanity across the board like Christ calibrates humanity in general. A popular thing among the more pious regarding the mass, especially in it’s tridentine form, is to focus on the mass as a mystery. But in an unreflective way this “mystery” is sometimes conveyed as a symbolic structure that is confusing and hard to understand, for example it is a foreign language, therefore it is mysterious. The pious soteriological maneuver being that the confusion leads one to rely on God for salvation and this is seen as the summit of effective ritual. Mystery in this piety focuses on secret ritualistic meaning in an almost gnostic way. This same bias is seen countless times in movies and pop culture when “ancient pagan rites” are displayed in a way that seem ungraspable and self effective. The pious Catholics’ fear is that a mysterious pagan rite will be more drawing because it is more mysterious. All of this is in many ways ridiculous, because ritual without some type of symbolic understanding, either intuitive or conscious, is practically ineffective. Private ritual falls prey to Ludwig Wittgenstein's arguments against private language. Communication systems are meant to be understood in some or other way or they are useless.
One purpose of this treatise is to focus the mystery of ritual toward a general understanding of calculated ritual. That is, that the “mystery” is not what the actions mean in a ritual, that should be known either intuitively or consciously. The “mystery” is the deep mystery of life that one is participating in and with as one effectively engages in calculated ritual. For example one of those mysteries often commented on below is that of the paradox, or as we will call it the union of opposites. Such mysteries are not shut doors, but aporia, ever open and ponderable questions.
All this bears down with great importance on the movement known as “the new evangelization.” Saint John Paul II stated in Redemptoris Missio
Today the Church must face other challenges and push forward to new frontiers, both in the initial mission ad gentes and in the new evangelization of those peoples who have already heard Christ proclaimed. Today all Christians, the particular churches and the universal Church, are called to have the same courage that inspired the missionaries of the past, and the same readiness to listen to the voice of the Spirit.
The pious take this to mean a vigilant push to instill proper ritual, the mass preferably in latin, on a de ritualized culture. They see the liturgical reforms of Vatican II as devaluing the secretive mysteries of ritual and allowing to much familiarity, thus mitigating the effect and kowtowing to a de ritualized secular world. But the secular world is not de ritualized by any means. The simple fact is that the secular world has been so effective with it’s mythologies and rituals and they are so intuitive, that they are not even recognized as such, because “ritual” is some meaningless thing outdated piety demands according to secular mythologies. The three major motivators of secular meaning are economic, politics and science. Each has elaborate myths and calculated rituals that work on all the deep human urges discussed up to this point to both good and bad effect as calibrated against the Eucharist.
If we are to engage in a new evangelization, then the techniques of conscious ritual investment will allow one to recognise the symbolic interfaces between, for example, eucharist, our calibrating ritual, ancient ritual, and modern secular ritual. Jesus must still be our example of anthro-authenticity and the Eucharist must be seen as the definer of what makes for meaningful and true ritual. The application must be expansive, finding every good in secular ritual then bringing them back to the Eucharist, as well as developmental, instituting paraliturgical ritual that speaks to the modern mind. After that conscious ritual investment also has the ability to be turned toward ancient rituals, Catholic and otherwise, that humanity has put to rest and enliven them with a new vigor for conveying deep meaning. At this point Christian ritual will again be the driver of any sense of aesthetic and meaning in society.
In this section we have laid the groundwork for a complex of calculated ritual. In this complex one must recognise the interplay of dream, myth, and ritual as a mode of revelation from God and a tool for finding meaning as well as connecting to that meaning as a human being. We started with a cosmological inquiry into how one must view space and time in order for the methodology of conscious ritual investment to be effective. We then discussed the how mythology and ritual work together to invest the participant in with meaning. We also discussed the necessity of understanding how mythic ritual symbolic structures work if one loses an intuitive investment in ritual. This is done by study of one’s own tradition as well as cross cultural study. We then gave the cognitive study phenomenological effectiveness by overlaying the information with the practice of informed lucid dreaming coupled with tactical lucid waking as described in somnium spirituality. Lastly we discussed the very important advantage that conscious ritual investment allows to the new evangelization as promoted by Saint John Paul II.
In the next section we will begin an application of everything discussed. The technique of conscious ritual investment will be applied to the may crowning of Mary. In the next section we will lay the cognitive groundwork necessary by performing a rudimentary a cross cultural symbolic deconstruction, which will help with the cognitive end of the analysis. The section following that will deal with the crowning itself as a calculated ritual open to the possibility of conscious ritual investment.
The Axis Mundi, The Shiva Lingam and the Maypole; A Cross Cultural Analysis
In the previous section we lamented the dying ability to practice intuitive ritual investment in Catholic rites because of encroaching secularism. We laid then laid out a program for conscious ritual investment which is a conscious effort to regain the effectiveness of the ritual that would be intuitively available in a monolithically Catholic culture. The process entailed returning the participant to a better understanding of how dream, myth and ritual are a communication system built into humanity that facilitates God’s self revelation, giving humans information concerning God as well as an experience of grace and human meaning. The process also entailed a recalibration of cosmology and an understanding of how cooperating in ritual allows the participant to experience meaning and purpose from the rite. That cosmology sees sacred time and space as binding as opposed to a divisive understanding of profane time. The second step was to reclaim the symbolic complex of the ritual by a cognitive in depth study, both within one’s own tradition and cross culturally. The more information garnered here the better one is able to perform the final step of preparation for conscious ritual investment. The last step is an overlay of somnium spirituality that allows for an interface between the waking world and the dream world. In the last step the personal symbols of the dream world are used in a lucid dreaming state to prep one in an effort to better approach a calculated ritual in a lucid waking state and achieve a conscious investment that has the same spiritual effect that an intuitive experience would have. This section will assume that the reader has invested in the appropriate cosmology and will set to the task of beginning a cross cultural analysis of the May Crowning.
To seek a symbolic structure expanding outside the ritual language of the Holy Catholic Church may seem needless or even dangerous. But it must be remembered that this technique assumes a loss of intuitive ability. One must begin this repair with cognitive edification. It must also be remembered that this treatise assumes that God is actively seeking humanity by means of dream, myth and ritual. The dreams, myths and rituals of the pagans may not have been perfect, but they were attempts to use inbuilt mechanism to strive for transcendence. A Catholics can judge their effectiveness based on how their myths line up with the life of Christ and their rituals line up with the Eucharist. The point in this endeavor is not to gain new revelation but to tap into deep human wisdom that transcends an individual or even a culture. The universal call of God and the hard paths that some follow in accepting that call was laid out in detail in the treatise concerning Ordinary and Extraordinary Religions. The following quote lays the biblical foundations for understanding that wisdom can lay in traditions outside of the ordinary form of religion,
At the flood, Cain’s line is destroyed, and then we have a new set of lines to follow. In Genesis chapter 9, as mentioned earlier, we have a second fall story once again involving themes of clothing and nudity, suspicious fruit, and some kind of loss of innocence. At the end of this story once again humanity seems to break down into two camps, but this story is filled with interesting twists, not the least of which is the number of sons involved in this part of the story. This time, when humanity seems divided between the “right” and the “wrong” way to be, you have three sons. One son, Ham, does actions not suiting respectability, and two sons, Shem and Japheth, act in accordance with decorum. Ham, the father of Canaan is cursed, whereas Shem and Japheth are blessed. It is important to note that in the blessings Shem is a dominant force as blessed by God, but Japheth dwells with Shem. It is Shem’s descendents that will produce the nation of Israel and thus bring the Messiah, but Japheth is there and is somehow to be taken as a righteous person. Why have two good sons? You only need one son if salvation history is a linear affair where sheep and goats are easily distinguishable here and now. But for some reason sacred scripture doesn’t play out that way. The entire history of humanity is God’s garden and that garden is a mixture of weeds and wheat. The location of the plants may facilitate how well either grows, but at the same time, remember that the farmer has no problem scattering upon good soil as well as thorny soil, rocky soil, or the path. And in the latter parable, wheat grows on each type. What we seem to have set up with the brothers Shem and Japheth is the beginnings of a means of ordinary and extraordinary paths of righteousness.
Both the Old and New Testaments also have many examples of people outside of Israel and Christianity that are able to shed light on a situation for those working inside the ordinary form of salvation history. An analysis of the rituals and myths of other cultures can bring a freshness to our own rituals that are seeking to communicate and invest the same meanings. As long as one utilizes the calibration factors set up above, the life of Jesus for myth and the Eucharist for ritual, one need not fear learning from other cultures. The basic assertion is made by Saint Paul at the end of his letter to the Romans,
For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse; for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks.
Up until just before the writing of this letter, there was no calibrating factor for appropriate myth and ritual, because Christ had not come. But what Saint Paul asserts as a condemnation also sheds light on the fact that Jews and Christians draw extensively from extra-abrahamic faiths for ritual development and deeper understanding of our own myth. In fact one may draw from St. Paul’s assertion that the more frequent a basic symbolic representation presents in ritual and/or myth, the more likely it would also be manifest similarly in the individual dream world, much like Jung’s archetypes. The closer a certain pattern of symbolic representation gets to a pan human use, the more likely it is that this aesthetic carries important content and meaning for humanity, and I would argue, the more likely it is part of God’s communication to us.
Our task at hand is an analysis of the ritual of the May Crowning of Mary. In this ceremony a statue of Mary is set up in a place of honor in a church or perhaps a field. Then, among traditional hymns and prayers, she is crowned with a crown of flowers, most often by a young girl all clad in white. The sacred time is early May, the beginning of spring. This is a time where, in the northern hemisphere, the Earth is rejuvenating and new life is springing forth and developing. It is a time across the hemisphere where rites and rituals celebrate new life and new birth make constant display.
Cosmically the return of herds, insects and vegetation after the land has died in the winter harkens to reincarnation, rebirth, or renewal. Biologically these things remind the human at the deepest level of the circle of life, and the union of opposites presented in the relationship between men and women, life and death, and the dynamic with the static. Theologically this time reminds one of God’s power to bring goodness out of barren situations and God’s ability to bring life, or even existence from nothing. All of these themes will be played upon across humanity and captivated by the crowning ritual.
The Axis Mundi
With Regards to the ritual itself, one of the prominent features is a statue standing erect towering in the center of the ritual. The towering structure of the center relates the basic primal symbol of the axis mundi. The axis mundi is an abstract concept, manifest cross culturally. Mythologically it presents the center of the world, the axis on which the world rotates. Therefore in a ritual or rite, such a protrusion would be the center of the ritual. The actions and symbols of the ritual interact around the axis generating a cosmic representation with the symbolic center as the summation of meaning. Wherever a definitive axis mundi is perceived geographically in a given culture, it is seen as locating the point of ultimate importance mythologically. In a given mythic narrative the axis mundi may take the form of a tree, a mountain, etc. It is the focal place in of the mythic journey, the place where knowledge is imparted to the hero. In most mythologies the axial mundi is either surmounted, or the hero is hung upon it in order to garner the pertinent knowledge.
For our purposes it must be realized that whatever form it may take, this symbol is always manifest in an erect stalagmitrical protrusion that juts from a flat surface as opposed to a pyramidal protrusion. This rather stripped description is helpful because the manifestation of the symbol will wildly differ as it presents from culture to culture, myth to myth, ritual to ritual and dream to dream. Given that the ritual we are analyzing is a spring ritual it is helpful to note that the axis mundi, is often likened to, or symbolically resonates with both the phallus and the umbilical cord. These are both stalagmitrical protrusions that jut from a flat surface and both offer life in a most fundamental manner, either generative or sustinative. A typical mythic representation would be the sacred pole, totem pole for example, or sacred tree, as opposed to the sacred mountain. From here we are going to analyze the role of the axis mundi as manifest in the Bible, in Hindu myth and ritual in the form of the Shiva Lingam, and in a variety of family resemblance rituals in northern Europe centering around sacred trees.
The Bible
In the Bible manifestation of the axial mundi we are going to focus on in our brief survey is going to be the tree. As we begin our analysis it is important and customary to remind the reader that to talk of biblical “myth” does not discount the historical nature of parts of the Bible. Here myth means a narrative that is swept up in the entire complex we have discussed concerning calculated ritual. As we have said, the Bible is the myth of Christianity, but all the more potent because Christ is the historical fulfillment of all human myth, historical or fable. Given that, it is also important to recognize that parts of the Bible being fables is in no way demeaning of their importance to the complex of calculated ritual.
The tree obviously serves as a functional symbol of the axis mundi in the Bible. It is a place where knowledge is imparted from God that generates some great change in the course of salvation history. Typical of Christian interpretation, there is a traumatic beginning to this symbol in the Garden that then develops throughout the narrative and is fulfilled in Christ, whose cross will be serve as the historical actuality of not just the axis mundi, but the cosmological axis en toto.
The first tree that delivers knowledge is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Here is a tree that stands in the middle of a plush garden, in which two possible trees could serve humanity as axial, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Unfortunately our common parents chose the harder path. In making this choice they opened human experience up to an understanding of evil and suffering.
The traumatic opening of the garden is then followed by series of trees, each of which garners a new step in the journey toward rectification of God. The next pivotal tree after Eden is a grove in Mamre where Abraham sets up his altar in the promised land and begins to invoke God. This tree allows for humanity to have a relationship with God that for the first time since the garden is not combative. The next tree we see is unconsumably burning on on Mount Sinai. The knowledge garnered here through the events of the Exodus story by Moses and the Israelites ultimately is that the God that Abraham and their ancestors had commerce with, the God whom they now enter covenant with, is the one true God of all creation. This God is the all powerful God of the universe who demands a certain way of living. If this way is followed, God promises life to Israel. A subsequent tree is seen in the Vale of the Terebinth, where David slays Goliath and the revelation comes that it is not by our own might or technology that we are protected, but by trust in God. A final tree we see in the Old Testament is the broom tree, under which Elijah despairs and rests seeking death. Under this tree he is given encouragement and returns to Sinai to restore the covenant. Here the role of the prophet of the heart is defined in the Old Testament tradition, that one’s desire and intentions as well as one’s actions are important. The trajectory runs from rebellions to a striving toward relationship with God, right action, right disposition, and right intention. All of this leads to the summative hero of Christians, the hero who possesses all of these qualities perfectly, Jesus Christ.
The axis cosmos for Christians is the summation of all of these axis mundi, and the direction to where they are all leading, the Cross of Christ. It is not simply the axis of this world, but the axis of the entirety of creation. One can see how the cross fulfills the heroic demands of the standard axis mundi myth in this sermon of Saint Theodore the Studite,
How precious the gift of the cross, how splendid to contemplate! In the cross there is no mingling of good and evil, as in the tree of paradise: it is wholly beautiful to behold and good to taste. The fruit of this tree is not death but life, not darkness but light. This tree does not cast us out of paradise, but opens the way for our return.
This was the tree on which Christ, like a king on a chariot, destroyed the devil, the Lord of death, and freed the human race from his tyranny. This was the tree upon which the Lord, like a brave warrior wounded in his hands, feet and side, healed the wounds of sin that the evil serpent had inflicted on our nature. A tree once caused our death, but now a tree brings life. Once deceived by a tree, we have now repelled the cunning serpent by a tree. What an astonishing transformation! That death should become life, that decay should become immortality, that shame should become glory! Well might the holy Apostle exclaim “Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world!” The supreme wisdom that flowered on the cross has shown the folly of worldly wisdom’s pride. The knowledge of all good, which is the fruit of the cross, has cut away the shoots of wickedness.
Thus, as Christ is the calibrator for all humanity, the cross of Christ is the calibrator for any mythic or ritual use of the axis mundi.
The Cross also typifies the paradox, the archetype of the union of opposites, as will be discussed later in the treatise. The path humanity chose, one of life through the knowledge of both good and evil ultimately manifests as a dead tree which bears the living Christ, the Son of God, through whom all things are made, who is also human and dies. By death he brings everlasting life to all. Incarnate as he is, the Son of God is both the ground of being itself, as well as the human, who is subject to the ebb and flow of life and death. He represents perfect communion with The Father, perfect action amid postlapsarian humanity, perfect trust of The Father and Perfect intention. He is offered exactly the opposite of the first parents and responds in exactly the opposite manner. The ultimate surmounting of this dead tree brings life everlasting to all who bind themselves to him. The entire biblical narrative, the flow of actual salvation history as well as all fables both abrahamic and otherwise, inasmuch as they are effective in the complex of calculated ritual, are harmonized and brought into accord by this axis, the cross.
The Christ myth, with the cross as the summit, is also the absolute inversion of what a heroic myth is as described by Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
[Here is] the nuclear unit of the monomyth. A hero ventures from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
In the Christ story, the Son of God incarnates from the fabulous world of eternal divine bliss into this quite mundane world filled with sinful suffering. The forces here are not dramatic or transcendent, but petty, vulgar, and violent. As the trajectory of the standard human life goes, Jesus does not triumph, but dies abandoned and rejected by everyone. All of this as a historical reality summarizes God’s work toward our salvation, not our own. In this way the Christian myth breaks the convention and works from the ultimate to the mundane and not the other way around. The hero who traverses from the mundane to the fantastic is the disciple who follows Christ, who brings them salvation and heaven. One vehicle of this journey is the entire complex of calculated ritual. The cross as a historical fact and the historical axis mundi and a conveyer of God’s saving action is of primary importance to garner to full effect of calculated ritual.
The Lingam
Having made clear the importance of the axis mundi as a centralizing figure in certain calculated ritual actions, and the cross as the historic and mythic calibrator for manifestations of the axis mundi in myth and ritual, it is helpful also to have a manifold view. Somnium spirituality demands a certain type of symbolic interpretation. The dream world, the world of myth, and the complex of calculated ritual manifest any given symbol in relation to multiple other symbols in an almost infinite variety of ways. Thus to have a pool of resemblant symbols as they appear across the scope of humanity’s striving for God is helpful to begin to notice patterns of behavior in calculated ritual as well as one’s own experience of the dream world.
In exploring the symbols of myth and ritual one can get overly bogged down in a sea of examples as multifaceted as humanity itself. For example when one reads Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough one can quickly become overwrought with the rich detail of both myth and ritual. His work is exhaustive for its time and reflects an academic approach which, though impressive according to its own goal, falls short of our target.
Since this is an introductory attempt at conscious ritual investment we will stick to two major multi-cultural calculated ritual complexes in order to help begin the symbolic analysis of our process. The two manifestations we will explore will be the Shiva Lingam and the May Pole. Both of these are representative of the more general symbol of the axis mundi, and both deal with the union of opposites as present in the male/female, the life/death and the dynamic/static. They will each relate to our target ritual in particular ways, and they may serve as a jumping off point for the somnium spirituality exercises we will engage in.
The Shiva Lingam is a myth and ritual in the shaivite tradition of Hinduism. The Hindu tradition has a rich mythological makeup that contains a plethora of variations for each story. In its most basic form the story of the linga is as follows. Vishnu and Brahma are arguing in some way about who is greater and as they do a pillar of fire blazes between them. They are amazed and stupified and decide to see if they can find its generating point, each going his own direction, up and down. They are unable to find the generating point of the shaft. When they meet together to continue their dispute, out of the shaft of fire (the lingam) emerges Shiva, who asserts primacy over each of them. The shaft is most obviously representative of a fundamental cosmic axis mundi, as is the ritual linga used in devotional practices.
This comically bare bones synopsis of the lingam myth supplies the elements we need for our analysis. The shaft has neither beginning nor end, just as time and life are eternal in the eastern cosmology. Substance is timeless, and out of it, the law of Karma draw temporal and phenomenological flux known as samsara. Each instance of reincarnation is an atman, piece of brahman or fundamental stuff, is pull out of the whole are given the accidental features of samsaric existence. At death the atman re-merges with Sat or Brahman only to be pulled out again by Karma.
In shaivite ritual the lingam is an shaft, usually stone, that is positioned in a receptacle called a Yoni. The linga abhishek is the bathing of the linga and has two basic parts. First after preparation and chanting holy liquids are is poured over the lingam,these liquids may include milk, honey, yogurt, ghee, water etc. It is said that this ritual pleases Shiva because it cools him, as he is in a state of constant flaming agitation, and therefore incurs his blessings. After this the linga is ritually decorated with flowers or chalk or ornamentation.
This entire calculated ritual hints at the scope of Hindu cosmology. The linga is the fundamental stuff, Sat or Brahman out of which each atman emerges for any given reincarnation. The linga is representative of the entirety of being, as a samsaric cycle begins, change develops from the static, ritually the ornamentation, then at the end all collapse back into the static. The cooling of the lingam is an attempt to moderate dynamic flux, which the phenomenological experience of samsara. It must be remembered that in Eastern cosmology, escape from individuated perceptible existence and permanent mergence with stasis is the goal.
A devotee will be quick to deny the sexual overtones of the union of the linga and yoni as a generator of dynamis (life). It is well they they begg of this comparison so as not to demean their tradition, cosmology is primary to sex. Yet sex is representative of cosmology and reveals something of the nature of reality to us. Saint John Paul II made an basic attempt to illustrate this in his homilies concerning Theology of the Body. The lingam’s positioning in the yoni images the sexual act and therefore is perfectly situated to symbolize creative force. The mysteries of creative force and how to engage it are the deep meaning sought by the entire ritual. Here we have a mythic and ritual axis mundi, the lingam, that physically and functionally conveys a sexual potency and relates the generation the totality of being and the bio-generation of human life.
By ritually bathing the lingam and then recreating the cycle of life and death, generation and regeneration upon its surface, the devotee is paying homage to the beauty of life which is both static and dynamic. We experience in the flux, but in the Hindu tradition, the practitioner seeks the deeper stillness. To “cool the fire” as is done in the opening of the ritual is the aim, but the general experience is the latter half of the ritual, dynamic flux.
Though not the case here, sexual rites and practices are often related to spring, the time when the earth regenerates from the winter season, a time of stillness, static deadness. The next example we will give will be clearly archetypally related and will make use of specific sacred time for great effect.
The Maypole
Another natural occurrence of a stalagmitrical protrusion that juts from a flat surface is a tree. Trees are perfect symbols of the connection between life and death because they move through a cycle of radiance and dormition as the seasons change. Their steadfast ability to do this as well as their long life truly makes them worthy of respect and perfect fodder for inclusion in the entire symbolic complex of calculated ritual. Given that, you have the entire delineation of sacred trees leading up to our Christian axis mundi, the cross, as we discussed earlier.
Across northern Europe many of the same symbolic resonances as were seen in the lingam take shape in a host of interrelated rites revolving around sacred trees. Of these we will give the briefest of outlines revolving around two rituals, the yule log and the maypole. Sir James Frazer makes an exhaustive study of rituals revolving around sacred trees in his work The Golden Bough. We need not be so detailed as our purpose is neither to academically impress, nor collect anthropological data. Instead we are seeking information that will help us garner symbology to invest in a lucid dreaming state that allows us to recognise in real time the symbolic language of the dream world, and the re apply that same sense of spiritual gravitas is a calculated ritual setting my means of lucid waking. Thus the basic symbols and how they work across the human mythic spectrum will be valuable since it is that type of symbology that will most likely manifest recognizably in our own experience of the dream world.
The interplay between the yule log and the maypole is the same interplay as one has between winter and spring, or life and death. It is the cycle of destruction of birth, death and rebirth seen in the devotional ritual of the lingam. The maypole is erected in springtime, a time of generative peak. But the yule log is cut and burned in the darkest of winter, peak stagnation or destruction. Frazer states, “In modern Christendom the ancient fire-festival of the winter solstice appears to survive, or to have survived down to recent years, in the old custom of the Yule log, clog, or block, as it was variously called in England. The custom was widespread in Europe, but seems to have flourished especially in England, France, and among the South Slavs; at least the fullest accounts of the custom come from these quarters.”
The symbol is the phallic axis mundi being destroyed by fire, the very substance of the lingam in the cosmological legend of its generation. We start here because it is by a biological metaphorical destruction, the change from the phallus to the penis (orgasam and loss of erection), that life is generated. In Eastern cosmology the absolute destruction of a of creation happens each Kalpa or Brahma day (approximately 4.32 billion years). Brahma lives approximately 100 years of brahma days and night, creation, destruction and rest, before Brahma himself returns to the static state of mergence with Sat and the reincarnation process begins again. This life from rest (destruction) from life cycle is ritually enacted in the linga abhishek and as we shall see now it is ritually enacted across the year a set of interconnect rituals involving the sacred tree. The yule log is a ritual destruction of a phallic symbol, but the erection of the maypole is the other end of the calculated ritual.
Not only is the tree perfect for phallic symbolism of life, according to Frazer,
In the Tuhoe tribe of Maoris “the power of making women fruitful is ascribed to trees. These trees are associated with the navel-strings of definite mythical ancestors, as indeed the navel-strings of all children used to be hung upon them down to quite recent times. A barren woman had to embrace such a tree with her arms, and she received a male or a female child according as she embraced the east or the west side.” The common European custom of placing a green bush on May Day before or on the house of a beloved maiden probably originated in the belief of the fertilising power of the tree-spirit.
This fact offers a direct connection between generation, life, and the tree. This is of course not surprising to the Christian, who know that a tree offers life, originally in the garden, then in postlapsarian existence by its creation into the cross. So here we have series of family resemblant Maypole rites which offer good material for archetypal deconstruction and then re-relation to the May Crowning to be discussed in the next section.
Frazer describes some of the rituals thusly,
At the towns of Saffron Walden and Debden in Essex on the first of May little girls go about in parties from door to door singing a song almost identical with the above and carrying garlands; a doll dressed in white is usually placed in the middle of each garland. Similar customs have been and indeed are still observed in various parts of England. The garlands are generally in the form of hoops intersecting each other at right angles. It appears that a hoop wreathed with rowan and marsh marigold, and bearing suspended within it two balls, is still carried on May Day by villagers in some parts of Ireland. The balls, which are sometimes covered with gold and silver paper, are said to have originally represented the sun and moon.
In the class of cases of which the foregoing are specimens it is obvious that the leaf-clad person who is led about is equivalent to the May-tree, May-bough, or May-doll, which is carried from house to house by children begging. Both are representatives of the beneficent spirit of vegetation, whose visit to the house is recompensed by a present of money or food. Often the leaf-clad person who represents the spirit of vegetation is known as the king or the queen; thus, for example, he or she is called the May King, Whitsuntide King, Queen of May, and so on. These titles, as Mannhardt observes, imply that the spirit incorporate in vegetation is a ruler, whose creative power extends far and wide.
Here we begin to see some interesting resonance between the May crowning and the may pole. It is not our point to draw a historical line of ritual development, but to draw a symbolic line of archetypes and thus facilitate our somnium spirituality overlay.
In the rituals described by Frazer, there is a young child, presumably prepubescent, who is integral to to ritual. Prepubescent girls supply a great symbol for the potentiality of life, because females become fertile at a very specific point, the first menstruation, and until that point they are only potentially fertile, whereas for males, it is only known by bio-indications and trial an error. Ritually the presence of a prepubescent girl is indicative of undeveloped potentiality. In this case they are carrying garlands of flowers, a life symbol because of they are the sexual organs of the plants and also they leap into existence in great abundance during the rejuvenation of the Earth during spring. A doll is set in the middle of the wreath, indicative of a birthing process in aesthetic-symbolic form given that a void is formed by the wreath and a small human is emerging from that void. Later Frazer indicates other rituals where the practitioner themselves are wearing the plants, the ritual costume puts them in the position of the tree spirit, a spirit of fertility. The garland with the doll in it is a sexual symbol in the same way that the lingam / yoni is. With the linga/yoni one has an internal view of the vagina during the sexual act, the beginning of the life generative process. With the garland, one has the same fundamental symbol, a stalagmitic protrusion that juts from a flat surface symbolizing a void, but one is seeing the “other end”. One is seeing the other end of the life generative process, birth, from the other end of the vagina as the child exits.
The most recognisable Maypole ritual is the dance around the maypole. Certain strings or ribbons are attached to the top of the maypole erected in a flat place. Young girls wear crowns of flowers and each takes a ribbon and circles the structure in a joyous dance. The crowns are a lingam/yoni sexual symbol in reverse, from top to bottom, and the erect human is the stalagmitic protrusion that juts from a flat surface, just as the maypole is. In this ritual the prepubescent crowned girls symbolize the individual human potential for creativity in accordance with the axis mundi, the maypole, a phallic symbol by which they are all attached by an umbilical symbol indicating sustenance. This entire elaborate celebration of life is then ritually balanced in the darkness of the next december when the yule log is set ablaze.
It is not desirable to have to explain all these symbolisms if one wants to get maximal effect from a calculated ritual. It is much easier to have an intuitive investment and allow the ritual to cultivate in the practitioner a sense of rebirth, new life, dynamism triumph over stagnation etc. To have to explain the joke ruins the joke so to speak. But if someone doesn’t “get a joke” what are you to do? We have lost a sense of intuitive investment, so we must explain and find a means of investment if at all possible. Thus, we have shown some very basic symbolic structures that resonate across a large swath of humanity and that will play into our target ritual as a step in that process.
We began this treatise by laying the groundwork for a complex of calculated ritual. In this complex one must recognise the interplay of dream, myth, and ritual as a revelation from God and a tool for finding meaning as well as connecting to that meaning as a human being. We started with a cosmological inquiry into how one must view space and time in order for the methodology of conscious ritual investment to be effective. We then discussed the how mythology and ritual work together to invest the participant in with meaning. We also discussed the necessity of understanding how mythic ritual symbolic structures work if one loses an intuitive investment in ritual. This is done by study of one’s own tradition as well as cross cultural study. We then gave the cognitive study phenomenological effectiveness by overlaying the information with the practice of informed lucid dreaming coupled with tactical lucid waking as described in somnium spirituality.
In this section we began an application of that process directed toward the pious ritual of the May crowning of Mary. We attempted to lay the cognitive groundwork necessary by performing a rudimentary a cross cultural symbolic deconstruction will help with the cognitive end of the analysis. We discussed the pivotal role of the axis mundi in myth and ritual and then applied this concept to a series of sacred trees in the Bible, each finding fulfillment in the Christian axis mundi, the cross of Christ. We then explored two cross-cultural examples of the same type of axis symbology in the shiva lingam and a collective of rituals revolving around sacred trees in northern Europe.
The next section will deal with the May crowning itself as a calculated ritual. We will attempt to open the possibility of conscious ritual investment by symbolically relating all we have thus far discussed to the May crowning. We will the ponder the possibility of a somnium spirituality overlay, and attempt an angle at conscious ritual investment.
God’s Power of Life Experienced Through the Calculated Ritual of the Crowning of the Virgin Mother
Up to this point we have laid the groundwork for a complex of calculated ritual and a methodology for conscious ritual investment. We started with a cosmological inquiry and a discussion concerning how mythology and ritual work together to invest the participant in with meaning. We attempted to lay the cognitive groundwork necessary by performing a rudimentary a cross cultural symbolic deconstruction in order to help with the cognitive end of the process of conscious ritual investment. We discussed the pivotal role of the axis mundi and symbolically applied it to the Bible, the Shiva lingam, and a collective of rituals revolving around sacred trees in northern Europe.
In this section we will deal with the May crowning itself as a calculated ritual. We will attempt to open the possibility of conscious ritual investment by symbolically relating all we have thus far discussed to the May crowning. We will the ponder the possibility of a somnium spirituality overlay, discussing how one may prepare oneself over time to consciously invest in this ritual by means of preparation in the dream world and disciplined practice of lucid waking techniques.
Symbolic Deconstruction: Fundamental Symbols Garnered
In the preceding section we covered a complex of thematically related myths and rituals that shared some very basic elements and attributes. Each had something to do with the fundamental power of life and dynamism, and how these relate to death and stagnation. The themes or deep meaning to be participated in revolve around a family resemblant pattern of union of opposites. These opposites included, static stasis and dynamic flux as well as life and death. More particularly, individuated examples of this pattern manifest in the latter half of the lingam abhisheck, and the treatment of the sacred tree over the year in northern Europe.
The cosmological indicators used in the ritual complex revolved male and female sexual union as a generative force, seasonal measurements of the fecund and the fallow as manifest in the yearly seasons of nature or the cosmic samsaric cycles. More particularly, an individuated example of this cycle would be flowers and individuated examples of the union would be the lingam/Yoni or the crowned human.
Some of the major symbols we garnered included the stalagmitrical protrusion that juts from a flat surface generally manifest as the axis mundi. More particularly, individuated examples of this protrusion were, the phallus, the umbilical cord, the lingam, the tree, and the erect human form.
Two Biblical Typologies: The First man and the Barron Matriarch
All of these themes and symbols will play into our target ritual in various ways. But before we analyze the ritual itself, we must be sure to calibrate according to the standard and foster a sense of true meaning according to revelation. Our analysis will concern marian devotion, and ritual revolving around it. In his apostolic exhortation Marialis Cultus Pope Paul VI states,
In the first place it is supremely fitting that exercises of piety directed towards the Virgin Mary should clearly express the Trinitarian and Christological note that is intrinsic and essential to them. Christian worship in fact is of itself worship offered to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, or, as the liturgy puts it, to the Father through Christ in the Spirit. From this point of view worship is rightly extended, though in a substantially different way, first and foremost and in a special manner, to the Mother of the Lord and then to the saints, in whom the Church proclaims the Paschal Mystery, for they have suffered with Christ and have been glorified with Him.(68) In the Virgin Mary everything is relative to Christ and dependent upon Him. It was with a view to Christ that God the Father from all eternity chose her to be the all-holy Mother and adorned her with gifts of the Spirit granted to no one else. Certainly genuine Christian piety has never failed to highlight the indissoluble link and essential relationship of the Virgin to the divine Savior.(69) Yet it seems to us particularly in conformity with the spiritual orientation of our time. which is dominated and absorbed by the "question of Christ,"(70) that in the expressions of devotion to the Virgin the Christological aspect should have particular prominence. It likewise seems to us fitting that these expressions of devotion should reflect God's plan, which laid down "with one single decree the origin of Mary and the Incarnation of the divine Wisdom."(71) This will without doubt contribute to making piety towards the Mother of Jesus more solid, and to making it an effective instrument for attaining to full "knowledge of the Son of God, until we become the perfect man, fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself" (Eph. 4:13). It will also contribute to increasing the worship due to Christ Himself, since, according to the perennial mind of the Church authoritatively repeated in our own day,(72) "what is given to the handmaid is referred to the Lord; thus what is given to the Mother redounds to the Son; ...and thus what is given as humble tribute to the Queen becomes honor rendered to the King."
Thus whatever we achieve here must ultimately point to the person of Christ. The mythical meaning of Christ’s historical life is a rebirth of humanity with the new possibility of a proper relationship with God. Christianity does not have a cyclical cosmology, but a linear one. At the same time salvation history draws on the cyclical nature of reality to make points. There is a cycle of new beginning, recurring much like the seasons of the year, presented in the old testament, each with a new opportunity. Yet there is a definitive fulfillment in Christ. Now all that is needed has been supplied, and any development is done as a better angle on what is already achieved through Christ, social calculated ritual calibrated toward the Eucharist. Just as development can take place in individuals toward conformity with God’s plan for them as they conform to the person of Christ.
First we should review the trajectory. Previously we encountered a series of trees in the Bible that represented axis mundi offering certain revelation. Each one of these trees revolves around a hero who we may want to consider a “first man”. Adam as a first man is tasked with generating humanity in toto. Abraham is a first man in that he generates the nation of Israel in toto. Moses, David, and Elijah bring this nation piece by piece to the place where they are ready for the messiah. Each figure represents some type of “starting over” existentially, politically, and morally. With the coming of the messiah we have the last first man. He represents all change that a human must undergo in order to rectify their relationship with God.
As one enters a season of renewal, the earth speaks to the human need for yearns for calculated ritual concerning renewal and life out of barren stagnation. The primary symbol chosen for our ritual is the virgin mother and God bearer. The former title hints at Mary as the fulfillment of another typology, the barron matriarch. Throughout the Old Testament important matriarchal figures have found themselves unable to bear children. This runs the gambit from Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel, all the way to Hannah. The baron matriarch ultimately conceives a child through natural sexual intercourse in God’s due time. The child is formally announced by God in some way and the child plays some pivotal role in salvation history. This typology reminds us that creative power is not our own, but God’s and we must yield to his plan. Such yielding is resonant with the fundamental message of the Cross of Christ.
The Virgin Mary, is the culmination of this typology because she symbolizes the absolute power of God. She is not a matriarch, but an unwed virgin, the most powerless position possible. The fact of her virginity puts the creative aspect of the child completely outside of human manipulation. God shapes the first first man, Adam, out of the earth. God shapes the last first man out of Mary’s body. In that she takes on the mythic image of a “new creation”. Thus the ritual of the May crowning makes use of the fact that her body represents the rejuvenation of creation. As the pivotal hero of the myth in this ritual, she gives birth to is the last and greatest hero, accomplishing the most important feat for humanity, the rectification of God and man.
Symbolic Deconstruction of the May Crowning
Once again, in our target ritual a statue of the Virgin Mary is erected in a church or field in early May, springtime. Hymns are sung and a young girl dressed in white approaches and places a crown of flowers on the head of the statue.
The stage is set by the season. The Earth formerly in a barren waste is springing back to life. At this time the statue is erected as a stalagmitrical protrusion that juts from a flat surface with all the resonances implied. The statue is the axis of the ritual, as actions revolving around it are symbolic of how dynamic creation revolves around something more fundamental. In this case the axis is an erect human form as opposed to a tree, but it is decorated in foliage, just as the maypole would be. The statue as axial also recalls the life force of the umbilical cord, but perhaps more shockingly as the phallus.
The young prepubescent girl typically represents the creative potential of humanity. Yet unlike the maypole the generative power is symbolized not by the crowing of the humans with flowers as a sexual symbol, but by the crowing of the axis, Mary. Mary’s crowning captures the creative power of the sexual union, insertion of a phallic symbol (her as the axis) into a void (the flower crown). But since she is the axis of the ritual, and the human is only potentially creative, the message is the residence of creative power as transcendent, and a giving or recognition of that power by humanity who is only potentially creative according to their relation to the axis. This is the same message of every barron matriarch typology, and the message of the cosmic event of winter and spring.
The entire ritual harkens to the union of opposites that brings creative rejuvenation or renewal, especially as symbolized by sex. The Lingam as a ritual artifact gets at this union in image form, as a sexual symbol, much like the crown upon the statue does. But layered on below that is a series of transgender and gender binding mythic relationships that cue one into a deeper sense of the creative power of union of opposites. This is particularly resonant in the Christian tradition as Jesus is true God and true man. Jesus’ personal and historical union is fundamental to durability to come into communion with God.
It may seem odd that Mary is the phallic symbol in the ritual, but this should not not considered as shocking to anyone familiar with these treatises. In the treatise Divine Gender Transcendence and Incarnational Divine Presence: How Jesus Christ is the Alpha and Omega of Gender Identity we discussed how Jesus presences femininity in a way that may be uncomfortable to most pious Christians. Now we have the virgin theotokos (God bearer). This ritual does not usually involve Mary as Theotokos, but it is hard to separate her from that event in her life. As she bore Christ in her womb, his gender nonconformity facilitates a complex chiasm with her being. His internal femininity is housed by a male body, which is housed by a female body. Indeed any woman who bears a male child becomes temporarily a hermaphroditic and transgender symbiotic reality.
What is also interesting about the crowning of the virgin a sexual symbol of creative power is that, the virgin mother is the summation of God’s creative power as the fulfillment of the barron matriarchal typology. Yet Mary is not the only virgin to give birth in the Bible. She is actually bracketed by two male virgin’s who give birth. In a gender flip flop was noted in the Divine Gender Transcendence treatise,
Eve is pulled out of Adam’s side, the female birthed from the male, in a gender twist that harkens to begetting more than birth and, when grounded in a trinitarian lense, harkens to equality. The odd part of this story is that she is pulled out of his side and then from that point on all other humans are pulled from her and her biological sex, but only after they are instilled by the male. Indeed that installation in the ancient mind was of the complete human into the woman by the man, the man who makes people through the woman.
and again
Christ In John’s Gospel, dying at the hands of patriarchal brutality, stripped naked, his biological sex revealed, he is pierced by a spear (an unmistakable phallic symbol) excreting water and blood out his side, the vaginal secretions of an, in this case raped, female virgin.
Both Adam’s birth of Eve and Jesus’ birth of the Church, each occurring out of the side, are virgin birth, but this time from males. Mythologically the birth of the church is a true birth, in line with the first man typology as Jesus fulfilled it. This symbology plays into the crowning ceremony as a matter of creativity. All of this harkens to new beginnings as well as creative and transformative power as it is summed up in Christ.
The beauty of the symbolic and thematic interplay is doubtless intellectually fascinating. But cognitive stimulations does not alone make for ritual investment. Thus, the final step in the process of conscious ritual investment is a somnium spirituality application.
Conscious Ritual Investment as Informed by Somnium Spirituality
As discussed in the Somnium Spirituality treatise, such a spirituality takes the dream world into account. Calculated ritual recognizes the interface of dream, myth and ritual for a purpose. The two major techniques discussed in that treatise were lucid dreaming and lucid waking. Lucid dreaming is a popular enough technique, whereas lucid waking implies a multivalent epistemology that recognizes that knowledge and experience are not relegated simply to the realm of reason and the physical world. Lucid waking is described in the Somnium Spirituality treatise,
“lucid waking”, that is the ability to realize that one is awake, that one is living in the moment now, invested with a multivalent epistemology that is informed by conscious and reflective experience of the dream world. Mass can be a bridge between the dream world and the waking world in that once one connects that its communication system is similar to that of the dream world, one can ask, “am I dreaming? No, I am awake” This is the exact skill of lucid dreaming applied to waking life and the more one has been able to practice it in lucid dreaming, the better one can practice it in the reverse as lucid waking. The thing that separates “lucid waking” from simple consciousness of one’s environment is the sense that there are different worlds one inhabits. When in the dream world, one does not assume one is awake, one assumes one is alive. It is not until one engages in lucid dreaming that one brings any sense of the waking world to the dream world. Thus lucid waking is indicative of the same phenomenological balance. The practitioner does not assume that the dream world serves the waking world or vice versa. The practitioner simply lets each world inform the other. The benefit of lucid waking is that it brings a consciousness of the dream world and all that it entails into the waking world. As one is informed by the dream world in one’s waking life one is more easily able to be informed by the world constructed by the liturgy.
This passage relates specifically to our calibrating calculated ritual, the Eucharist. But this treatise seeks to widen it beyond simply that ritual to any experience of calculated ritual. If calculated ritual is the complex relationship between dream myth and ritual toward an investment in purpose and meaning, then somnium spirituality as a discipline can only be helpful.
As the final step of conscious ritual investment one would first use the techniques describe concerning lucid dreaming. Once one can begin to interact consciously with the symbolic structure of the dream world in real time, one can begin to look for the basic themes and symbols garnered in the cognitive step and learn one’s disposition toward them in advance of the target ritual. So for example what role does an axial stalagmitrical protrusion that juts from a flat surface play in one’s experience of the dream world? What about phallic or umbilical symbols? Vegetative expressions and flowers? young girls? One can use this information to assess if one has healthy relationships with the realities that these symbols stand in for, especially as one is on the approach to a calculated ritual that utilizes resemblant symbology. One may need to work on one’s views, attitudes, or regard for these symbols in order to have a more effective ritual experience.
The flip side of that skill is, if one has progressed far enough in the techniques of lucid dreaming, one can summon these symbols and allowing the dream world to express and play them out. Thus if one does the research of the cognitive step of conscious ritual investment, then one can begin to summon the themes and symbols in anticipation of facilitating and supplementing a lucid waking experience in a particular calculated ritual one knows one is going to engage in soon.
Using this technique one is better able to enter the experience of the calculated ritual with the full arsenal of the complex available, dream, myth and rite, all acting in unison. This goes beyond simple intellectual interest and moves one toward a ritual experience akin to an intuitive experience. Practicing conscious ritual investment as a technique allows one to encounter ritual as a conscious experience of what one would have felt intuitively before. Given the numbing effect that the pluralistic secular culture has on the intuitive ability of the Roman Catholic to enter ritual effectively, this skill could prove valuable to those less able to to experience ritual intuitively.
Conclusion
This treatise has been a longer development of the technique of somnium spirituality and how it relates to the beautiful ritual life of the Church. We began by distinguishing between conscious and intuitive ritual investment. Intuitive ritual investment is the natural state if effectiveness a calculated ritual has if one lives in a culture where the myths and symbols are pervasive enough to have seeped into the very being of the participant. Conscious ritual investment is the technique by which one can garner an experience of calculated ritual akin to an intuitive one, but by means of a conscious methodology as we described. We then explored the three steps of conscious ritual investment, a shifting of worldview, a time of study and cognitive edification, and a preparation and application of somnium spirituality technique to the ritual experience.
We then began an analysis of the May crowning with step two of the conscious ritual investment process. We limited ourselves to two calculated ritual complexes in order to seek some of the panhuman mythic symbolism that is utilized in the May Crowning, the Linga and the sacred trees of Northern Europe. We discovered a symbolic complex that celebrated the dynamic birth or rebirth of life manifest if key symbols such as the axis mundi, flowering vegetation, etc. We then turned to the may crowning itself and deconstructed the symbols contained therein to get to a basic meaning. After the cognitive groundworks was lain down, we added the element of somnium spirituality. By this addition we were able to link the dream world with the waking world in a symbolic interplay and add a level of investment in the ritual that supersedes the cognitive investment in the ritual and allows the participant to experience the ritual as effective toward its calculation.
As we end I would like to point out one final resonance concerning the technique of conscious ritual investment. In the treatise Ordinary and Extraordinary Religions, we laid out a two fold system ordinary and extraordinary means by which God offer’s his grace, this “means” included everything from sacraments, their administrators all the way to religions in toto. The ordinary means was road was the “easy road” so to speak, that is the road that is guaranteed effective by God. The extraordinary means was the road where one must rely on one’s own best efforts and intentions and God will supply the help as necessary. Here we have laid out a complex of calculated ritual with two possible dispositions, the ordinary, where in an attuned society one would have intuitive ritual investment, and an extraordinary here one’s society does not afford intuition and one must make their best effort at conscious ritual investment.
The interesting part of that is that the extraordinary means is the means by which our Christian theodicy play’s out. In many respects, life and goodness come through suffering. In the Garden there were two trees, the Tree of Life, the ordinary means, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the extraordinary means of life. I say this because at the end of each type of suffering (the knowledge of evil) given to Adam and Eve, toil and labor pains, there is life (the knowledge of good) bread and children. The second sons in the second son typology must overcome and surpass in order to achieve, and in this case those stuck in a society that necessitates the extraordinary means of conscious ritual investment will also need to overcome and surpass, but this will allow them all the more success and spiritual edification.
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