The Great Vessel Blog

Myth and Theatre – Meeting our Ancestors

We have just opened up a new area called Myth and Theatre. What on earth has this got to do with the Yijing?

I recently attended a conference on divination at Kent University (UK). There were some presentations which examined the western world’s Greek divination heritage. I was quite surprised at the extraordinary relevance of Greek Myth and the great Greek teachers, along with their machinations, to our current world. I had always assumed that folk like Socrates, who drank hemlock to make his point, and his student Plato,  gave birth to the rational world. Also that this was eventually achieved with a little help from others like Pythagoras (who probably pillaged his maths from further east) and that they left us with the foundations of science, a charming mythology and a tradition of theatre of which Tragedy is pretty impressive. Not a bit of it! Mythic battles took place between these apocalyptic philosopher heroes and some of those struggles continue to this day. One of these is between the rational and the gnostic parts of our selves. Parmenides, a great thinker and mystic, was metaphorically murdered by Plato and Neo Platonists like Iamblichus later led a revolution to try to reclaim the mystical world which Plato banished. Iamblichus examined divination and the processes it involved in an effort to ‘clean up’ fraudulent and unfounded methods and practices. I am grateful to him in that he was one of those who moved us away from peering at the entrails of animals. Thankfully I do not need to go to the butcher to ask for a ‘diviner’s pack of Ox entrails and a bottle of libation blood’. Hail Iamblichus!

Part of this heritage was Greek theatre. It was rich with archetypal characters and Gods. They birthed our deepest hopes and fears into the daylight and played them out in front of their audiences. Their gods and myths represent deep and enduring structures in our psyche. So what is the relevance of this to the Yijing? It too uses a profound symbolic language drawing on myths of heroes, gods and situations of mythical proportions. It too was tempered in the struggles which took place in the same magnificent epoch as that of the Greeks. It too demands we listen with a poets ear.

By belatedly working to reclaim these culture spirit ancestors, the Greeks, I have found new inroads into understanding the Yijing, not so much logically with my mind as by drawing on a psyche full of innate images which give meaning rather than rational understanding. In divination we are challenged to bring together both our rational world understanding and the symbolic feeling world of our deeper gnosis. When we do this we are in fact re-entering that ancient Greek struggle. This is the struggle to synthesise these two core aspects of our human experience, our struggle toward wholeness.

These ‘Myth and Theatre’ pieces explore this realm whilst seeking echoes and linkages to the Yijing. A word of warning, some of these pieces are graphic and even disturbing. They have taken me to those darker thoughts and feelings which are uncomfortable, but which are nevertheless part of who we are as humans, more synthesis. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.