Stephen appeared on Caroline Casey’s Visionary Network radio show to discuss the state of the world and our role within it.
Caroline did a Yijing reading for this show and received 64.3 > 50. This forms a thematic foundation for their discussion, generating ideas and images which they explore and apply to the current world situation.
The discussion ranges over large areas such as the Han and Song dynasty commentators and the way they moved some of the Yijing text around to accommodate the idea of Yang - male, inspirational good and Yin - female, passive and evil and the way this was echoed in the first few centuries of the Christian Church with the outlawing of divination on pain of death. Both these movements were involved with the excommunication of our own inner underworld and its communication with us through symbolic imagery.
Thus the Confucian movement, by moralising the text, cut the user off from the animate images which were there before and in their place developed correlative categories of meaning and moral principles.
The theme which runs through this topical discussion is the way these symbolic images can be re-animated and how they can then be used to guide and inform. The way we can live the symbol, inviting it in, rather than cognating the it from above and beforehand.
I enjoyed listening to these two as they moved the symbols around and found the messages thus conveyed. They are both adepts at myth and imagery.
You can hear the show here.
The visionary Network website is here.