I Was Cured, All Right!

 

I danced in The Morning 

when The World was begun,

And I danced in The Moon 

and The Stars and The Sun,

And I came down from Heaven 

and I danced on The Earth:

At Bethlehem I had My Birth.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am the Lord of The Dance, said He,

And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in The Dance, said e.

I danced for The Scribes and The Pharisees,

But They would not dance, 

and They wouldn't follow me;

I danced for The Fishermen, 

for James and John;

They came with Me 

and The Dance went on:

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am the Lord of The Dance, said He,

And I'll lead you all, 

wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in The Dance, said he.

I danced on The Sabbath 

and I cured The Lame:

The 'Holy People'

said it was a shame.

They whipped and They stripped 

and they hung me on high,

And They left me there 

on A Cross to die :

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am the Lord of the dance, said he,

And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in the dance, said He.

I danced on a Friday 

when The Sky turned black;

It's hard to dance with 

The Devil on your back --

They buried My Body 

and They thought I'd gone;

But I am The Dance, 

and I still go on :

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am The Lord of The Dance, said He,

And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in The Dance, said He.

They cut Me down 

and I leapt up high;

I am The Life that'll 

never, never die.

I'll Live in You if 

You'll Live in Me :

I am The Lord of The Dance, said He.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am The Lord of the dance, said He,

And I'll lead you all, 

wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in the dance, said he.

Nietzsche believed that the long tradition of “unfreedom” characterizing dogmatic Christianity—its insistence that everything be explained within the confines of a single, coherent metaphysical theory — was a necessary precondition for the emergence of the disciplined but free modern mind. As he stated in Beyond Good and Evil:

 

            "The long bondage of The Spirit … the persistent spiritual will to interpret everything that happened according to a Christian scheme, and in every occurrence to rediscover and justify the Christian God in every accident: — all this violence, arbitrariness, severity, dreadfulness, and unreasonableness, has proved itself the disciplinary means whereby the European spirit has attained its strength, its remorseless curiosity and subtle mobility; granted also that much irrecoverable strength and spirit had to be stifled, suffocated and spoiled in the process."

 

            For Nietzsche and Dostoevsky alike, Freedom — even the ability to act — requires constraint. For this reason, they both recognized the vital necessity of the dogma of the Church. The Individual must be constrained, moulded — even brought close to destruction — by a restrictive, coherent disciplinary structure, before he or she can act freely and competently. Dostoevsky, with his great generosity of spirit, granted to The Church, corrupt as it might be, a certain element of mercy, a certain pragmatism. He admitted that the spirit of Christ, the world-engendering Logos, had historically and might still find its resting place — even its sovereignty — within that dogmatic structure.

 

            If a Father disciplines His Son properly, he obviously interferes with his freedom, particularly in the here-and-now. He put limits on the voluntary expression of his son’s Being. forcing him to take his place as a socialized member of the world. Such a Father requires that all that childish potential be funneled down a singly pathway. In placing such limitations on his son, he might be considered a destructive force, acting as he does to replace the miraculous plurality of childhood with a single narrow actuality. But if The Father does not take such action, he merely lets his son remain Peter Pan, the eternal Boy, King of the Lost Boys, Ruler of the non-existent Neverland. That is not a morally acceptable alternative.

 

            The dogma of the Church was undermined by the spirit of truth strongly developed by the Church itself. That undermining culminated in the death of God. But the dogmatic structure of the Church was a necessary disciplinary structure. A long period of unfreedom—adherence to a singular interpretive structure—is necessary for the development of a free mind. Christian dogma provided that unfreedom. But the dogma is dead, at least to the modern Western mind. It perished along with God. What has emerged from behind its corpse, however—and this is an issue of central importance—is something even more dead; something that was never alive, even in the past: nihilism, as well as an equally dangerous susceptibility to new, totalizing, utopian ideas. It was in the aftermath of God’s death that the great collective horrors of Communism and Fascism sprang forth (as both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche predicted they would). Nietzsche, for his part, posited that individual human beings would have to invent their own values in the aftermath of God’s death. But this is the element of his thinking that appears weakest, psychologically: we cannot invent our own values, because we cannot merely impose what we believe on our souls. This was Carl Jung’s great discovery—made in no little part because of his intense study of the problems posed by Nietzsche.

 

            We rebel against our own totalitarianism, as much as that of others. I cannot merely order myself to action, and neither can you. “I will stop procrastinating,” I say, but I don’t. “I will eat properly,” I say, but I don’t. “I will end my drunken misbehavior,” I say, but I don’t. I cannot merely make myself over in the image constructed by my intellect (particularly if that intellect is possessed by an ideology). I have a nature, and so do you, and so do we all. We must discover that nature, and contend with it, before making peace with ourselves. What is it, that we most truly are? What is it that we could most truly become, knowing who we most truly are? We must get to the very bottom of things before such questions can be truly answered.

 

 Doubt, Past Mere Nihilism

 

 

            Three hundred years before Nietzsche, the great French philosopher René Descartes set out on an intellectual mission to take his doubt seriously, to break things apart, to get to what was essential—to see if he could establish, or discover, a single proposition impervious to his skepticism. He was searching for the foundation stone on which proper Being could be established. Descartes found it, as far as he was concerned, in the “I” who thinks—the “I” who was aware—as expressed in his famous dictum, cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). But that “I” had been conceptualized long before. Thousands of years ago, the aware “I” was the all-seeing eye of Horus, the great Egyptian son-and-sun-god, who renewed the state by attending to and then confronting its inevitable corruption. Before that, it was the creator-God Marduk of the Mesopotamians, whose eyes encircled his head and who spoke forth words of world-engendering magic. During the Christian epoch, the “I” transformed into the Logos, the Word that speaks order into Being at the beginning of time. It might be said that Descartes merely secularized the Logos, turning it, more explicitly, into “that which is aware and thinks.” That’s the modern self, simply put. But what exactly is that self?

 

            We can understand, to some degree, its horrors, if we wish to, but its goodness remains more difficult to define. The self is the great actor of evil who strode about the stage of Being as Nazi and Stalinist alike; who produced Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and the multiplicity of the Soviet gulags. And all of that must be considered with dread seriousness. But what is its opposite? What is the good that is the necessary counterpart of that evil; that is made more corporeal and comprehensible by the very existence of that evil? And here we can state with conviction and clarity that even the rational intellect—that faculty so beloved of those who hold traditional wisdom in contempt—is at minimum something closely and necessarily akin to the archetypal dying and eternally resurrected god, the eternal savior of humanity, the Logos itself. The philosopher of science Karl Popper, certainly no mystic, regarded thinking itself as a logical extension of the Darwinian process. A creature that cannot think must solely embody its Being. It can merely act out its nature, concretely, in the here-and-now. If it cannot manifest in its behavior what the environment demands while doing so, it will simply die. But that is not true of human beings. We can produce abstracted representations of potential modes of Being. We can produce an idea in the theatre of the imagination. We can test it out against our other ideas, the ideas of others, or the world itself. If it falls short, we can let it go. We can, in Popper’s formulation, let our ideas die in our stead.¹⁴⁷ Then the essential part, the creator of those ideas, can continue onward, now untrammeled, by comparison, with error. Faith in the part of us that continues across those deaths is a prerequisite to thinking itself.

 

            Now, an idea is not the same thing as a fact. A fact is something that is dead, in and of itself. It has no consciousness, no will to power, no motivation, no action. There are billions of dead facts. The internet is a graveyard of dead facts. But an idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to express itself, to live in the world. It is for this reason that the depth psychologists—Freud and Jung paramount among them—insisted that the human psyche was a battleground for ideas. An idea has an aim. It wants something. It posits a value structure. An idea believes that what it is aiming for is better than what it has now. It reduces the world to those things that aid or impede its realization, and it reduces everything else to irrelevance. An idea defines figure against ground. An idea is a personality, not a fact. When it manifests itself within a person, it has a strong proclivity to make of that person its avatar: to impel that person to act it out. Sometimes, that impulsion (possession is another word) can be so strong that the person will die, rather than allowing the idea to perish. This is, generally speaking, a bad decision, given that it is often the case that only the idea need die, and that the person with the idea can stop being its avatar, change his or her ways, and continue.

 

            To use the dramatic conceptualization of our ancestors: It is the most fundamental convictions that must die—must be sacrificed—when the relationship with God has been disrupted (when the presence of undue and often intolerable suffering, for example, indicates that something has to change). This is to say nothing other than that the future can be made better if the proper sacrifices take place in the present. No other animal has ever figured this out, and it took us untold hundreds of thousands of years to do it. It took further eons of observation and hero-worship, and then millennia of study, to distill that idea into a story. It then took additional vast stretches of time to assess that story, to incorporate it, so that we now can simply say, “If you are disciplined and privilege the future over the present you can change the structure of reality in your favour.”

 

            But how best to do that?

 

            In 1984, I started down the same road as Descartes. I did not know it was the same road at the time, and I am not claiming kinship with Descartes, who is rightly regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. But I was truly plagued with doubt. I had outgrown the shallow Christianity of my youth by the time I could understand the fundamentals of Darwinian theory. After that, I could not distinguish the basic elements of Christian belief from wishful thinking. The socialism that soon afterward became so attractive to me as an alternative proved equally insubstantial; with time, I came to understand, through the great George Orwell, that much of such thinking found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor. Besides, the socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue. There are many problems that money does not solve, and others that it makes worse. Rich people still divorce each other, and alienate themselves from their children, and suffer from existential angst, and develop cancer and dementia, and die alone and unloved. Recovering addicts cursed with money blow it all in a frenzy of snorting and drunkenness. And boredom weighs heavily on people who have nothing to do.

 

            I was simultaneously tormented by the fact of the Cold War. It obsessed me. It gave me nightmares. It drove me into the desert, into the long night of the human soul. I could not understand how it had come to pass that the world’s two great factions aimed mutual assured destruction at each other. Was one system just as arbitrary and corrupt as the other? Was it a mere matter of opinion? Were all value structures merely the clothing of power?

 

            Was everyone crazy?

 

            Just exactly what happened in the twentieth century, anyway? How was it that so many tens of millions had to die, sacrificed to the new dogmas and ideologies? How was it that we discovered something worse, much worse, than the aristocracy and corrupt religious beliefs that communism and fascism sought so rationally to supplant? No one had answered those questions, as far as I could tell. Like Descartes, I was plagued with doubt. I searched for one thing—anything—I could regard as indisputable. I wanted a rock upon which to build my house. It was doubt that led me to it.

 

            I once read of a particularly insidious practice at Auschwitz. A guard would force an inmate to carry a hundred-pound sack of wet salt from one side of the large compound to the other—and then to carry it back. Arbeit macht frei, said the sign over the camp entrance—“Work will set you free”—and the freedom was death. Carrying the salt was an act of pointless torment. It was a piece of malevolent art. It allowed me to realize with certainty that some actions are wrong.

 

            Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, definitively and profoundly, about the horrors of the twentieth century, the tens of millions who were stripped of employment, family, identity and life. In his Gulag Archipelago, in the second part of the second volume, he discussed the Nuremburg trials, which he considered the most significant event of the twentieth century. The conclusion of those trials? There are some actions that are so intrinsically terrible that they run counter to the proper nature of human Being. This is true essentially, cross-culturally—across time and place. These are evil actions. No excuses are available for engaging in them. To dehumanize a fellow being, to reduce him or her to the status of a parasite, to torture and to slaughter with no consideration of individual innocence or guilt, to make an art form of pain—that is wrong.

 

            What can I not doubt? The reality of suffering. It brooks no arguments. Nihilists cannot undermine it with skepticism. Totalitarians cannot banish it. Cynics cannot escape from its reality. Suffering is real, and the artful infliction of suffering on another, for its own sake, is wrong. That became the cornerstone of my belief. Searching through the lowest reaches of human thought and action, understanding my own capacity to act like a Nazi prison guard or a gulag archipelago trustee or a torturer of children in a dungeon, I grasped what it meant to “take the sins of the world onto oneself.” Each human being has an immense capacity for evil. Each human being understands, a priori, perhaps not what is good, but certainly what is not. And if there is something that is not good, then there is something that is good. If the worst sin is the torment of others, merely for the sake of the suffering produced—then the good is whatever is diametrically opposed to that. The good is whatever stops such things from happening.

 

 Meaning as the Higher Good

 

 

            It was from this that I drew my fundamental moral conclusions. Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death. Become aware of your own insufficiency—your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred. Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world. Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s you. You’ve failed to make the mark. You’ve missed the target. You’ve fallen short of the glory of God. You’ve sinned. And all of that is your contribution to the insufficiency and evil of the world. And, above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people.

 

            Consider then that the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good. Make that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering. You have now placed at the pinnacle of your moral hierarchy a set of presuppositions and actions aimed at the betterment of Being. Why? Because we know the alternative. The alternative was the twentieth century. The alternative was so close to Hell that the difference is not worth discussing. And the opposite of Hell is Heaven. To place the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering at the pinnacle of your hierarchy of value is to work to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. That’s a state, and a state of mind, at the same time.

 

            Jung observed that the construction of such a moral hierarchy was inevitable—although it could remain poorly arranged and internally self-contradictory. For Jung, whatever was at the top of an individual’s moral hierarchy was, for all intents and purposes, that person’s ultimate value, that person’s god. It was what the person acted out. It was what the person believed most deeply. Something enacted is not a fact, or even a set of facts. Instead, it’s a personality—or, more precisely, a choice between two opposing personalities. It’s Sherlock Holmes or Moriarty. It’s Batman or the Joker. It’s Superman or Lex Luthor, Charles Francis Xavier or Magneto, and Thor or Loki. It’s Abel or Cain—and it’s Christ or Satan. If it’s working for the ennobling of Being, for the establishment of Paradise, then it’s Christ. If it’s working for the destruction of Being, for the generation and propagation of unnecessary suffering and pain, then it’s Satan. That’s the inescapable, archetypal reality.

 

            Expedience is the following of blind impulse. It’s short-term gain. It’s narrow, and selfish. It lies to get its way. It takes nothing into account. It’s immature and irresponsible. Meaning is its mature replacement. Meaning emerges when impulses are regulated, organized and unified. Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world. If the value structure is aimed at the betterment of Being, the meaning revealed will be life-sustaining. It will provide the antidote for chaos and suffering. It will make everything matter. It will make everything better.

 

            If you act properly, your actions allow you to be psychologically integrated now, and tomorrow, and into the future, while you benefit yourself, your family, and the broader world around you. Everything will stack up and align along a single axis. Everything will come together. This produces maximal meaning. This stacking up is a place in space and time whose existence we can detect with our ability to experience more than is simply revealed here and now by our senses, which are obviously limited to their information-gathering and representational capacity. Meaning trumps expedience. Meaning gratifies all impulses, now and forever. That’s why we can detect it.

 

            If you decide that you are not justified in your resentment of Being, despite its inequity and pain, you may come to notice things you could fix to reduce even by a bit some unnecessary pain and suffering. You may come to ask yourself, “What should I do today?” in a manner that means “How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?” Such tasks may announce themselves as the pile of undone paperwork that you could attend to, the room that you could make a bit more welcoming, or the meal that could be a bit more delicious and more gratefully delivered to your family.

 

            You may find that if you attend to these moral obligations, once you have placed “make the world better” at the top of your value hierarchy, you experience ever-deepening meaning. It’s not bliss. It’s not happiness. It is something more like atonement for the criminal fact of your fractured and damaged Being. It’s payment of the debt you owe for the insane and horrible miracle of your existence. It’s how you remember the Holocaust. It’s how you make amends for the pathology of history. It’s adoption of the responsibility for being a potential denizen of Hell. It is willingness to serve as an angel of Paradise.

 

            Expedience—that’s hiding all the skeletons in the closet. That’s covering the blood you just spilled with a carpet. That’s avoiding responsibility. It’s cowardly, and shallow, and wrong. It’s wrong because mere expedience, multiplied by many repetitions, produces the character of a demon. It’s wrong because expedience merely transfers the curse on your head to someone else, or to your future self, in a manner that will make your future, and the future generally, worse instead of better.

 

            There is no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient. There is no careful observation that actions and presuppositions matter, or that the world is made of what matters. To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither know what you want, nor what you truly need. Meaning is something that comes upon you, of its own accord. You can set up the preconditions, you can follow meaning, when it manifests itself, but you cannot simply produce it, as an act of will. Meaning signifies that you are in the right place, at the right time, properly balanced between order and chaos, where everything lines up as best it can at that moment.

 

            What is expedient works only for the moment. It’s immediate, impulsive and limited. What is meaningful, by contrast, is the organization of what would otherwise merely be expedient into a symphony of Being. Meaning is what is put forth more powerfully than mere words can express by Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” a triumphant bringing forth from the void of pattern after pattern upon beautiful pattern, every instrument playing its part, disciplined voices layered on top of that, spanning the entire breadth of human emotion from despair to exhilaration.

 

            Meaning is what manifests itself when the many levels of Being arrange themselves into a perfectly functioning harmony, from atomic microcosm to cell to organ to individual to society to nature to cosmos, so that action at each level beautifully and perfectly facilitates action at all, such that past, present and future are all at once redeemed and reconciled. Meaning is what emerges beautifully and profoundly like a newly formed rosebud opening itself out of nothingness into the light of sun and God. Meaning is the lotus striving upward through the dark lake depths through the ever-clearing water, blooming forth on the very surface, revealing within itself the Golden Buddha, himself perfectly integrated, such that the revelation of the Divine Will can make itself manifest in his every word and gesture.

 

            Meaning is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single purpose—the glorification of a reality so that no matter how good it has suddenly become, it can get better and better and better more and more deeply forever into the future. Meaning happens when that dance has become so intense that all the horrors of the past, all the terrible struggle engaged in by all of life and all of humanity to that moment becomes a necessary and worthwhile part of the increasingly successful attempt to build something truly Mighty and Good.

 

            Meaning is the ultimate balance between, on the one hand, the chaos of transformation and possibility and on the other, the discipline of pristine order, whose purpose is to produce out of the attendant chaos a new order that will be even more immaculate, and capable of bringing forth a still more balanced and productive chaos and order. Meaning is the Way, the path of life more abundant, the place you live when you are guided by Love and speaking Truth and when nothing you want or could possibly want takes any precedence over precisely that.

 

            Do what is Meaningful, not what is Expedient.

Christopher

chest (Latin cista, Greek kiste) 

A Box-like container, corresponding also 

to the Latin area (see ARK) . 

The mystic chest of Dionysus (see BAccHus) - probably a basket rather than a wooden chest - was filled with symbolic objects and carried by special priests known as kistophoroi; 

when The Mysteries of Dionysus were celebrated, 

a SNAKE emerged from it. 

The image of Demeter (Latin Ceres) as worshipped in 

the Eleusinian mysteries shows the goddess seated on a chest. In the Roman period the cista became a general symbol for esoteric mystical religions. The anatomical meaning of the English word "chest" is an extension of this same ety- mology. chi-rho A monogram derived from the first two Greek letters in the name of Christ, which resemble the Roman letters X and P; the chi-rho has been a symbol of Christian- ity since the time of Constantine I, fre- quently appearing on church banners (see FLAG), often within a CIRCLE or a victor's WREATH. On the LABARUM (the banner of the CROSS), the chi-rho was said to have accompanied Constantine's victory over Maxentius in A. D. 312, after the prophecy to Constantine "In hoc signo vinces" ("Un- der this sign will you be victorious"), but its earlier use has been documented. It sym- bolizes the universal victory of Christianity or the victory of the Savior over the domi- nation of sin. The chi-rho is at times placed within a triple circle (a reference to the TRINITY), with the ALPHA AND OMEGA on either side. Within a circle the monogram also has the effect of a WHEEL-like symbol for the SUN, which heightens its triumphal character. chimera or Chimaera In present-day usage only a symbol of imaginings or rumor; in Chi-Rho: early Christian catacomb painting with doves and olive branches Chi -Rho: the monogram of Christ antiquity, a monster part LION, part GOAT, and part SERPENT (the Etruscan "Chimera of Arezzo" having one head from each of these animals). The Chimera is said to be the daughter of Echidna, who was part ser- pent and part woman, and Typhon, a mon- ster from the underworld; her brother was the HELL-hound Cerberus. According to Robert Graves, her TRIADIC form symbolizes the divisions of the year: the lion corre- sponding to spring, the goat to summer, and the serpent to winter. In the myth, the Chimera was killed by the hero Bellerophon riding on his WINGED HORSE PEGASUS; BeI- lerophon was thus a pre-Christian prototype of such DRAGON-slayers as St. George and St. Michael. Chimeras appear occasionally in medieval mosaics (and in the capitals of pillars and columns) as embodiments of Sa- tanic forces. In antiquity the terrifying mon- ster appeared in the coats of arms of several cities, including Corinth and Cyzicus. The rationalistic interpretation of the tripartite creature saw her as the embodiment of the dangers of land and sea, but above all of the volcanic forces in the EARTH'S interior. Chimera. Etruscan bronze, 4th century B.C. 

Christopher, Saint 

The personification of a saintly legend, behind which there stands no historically documented person. 

Nevertheless, the legendary saint was venerated as early as the fifth century and is counted among the "14 catholic saints."

There are accounts that identify him as a GIANT named Offero or Reprobus of the savage race of the Cynocephali (dog-headed), who would offer his services only to The Strongest; a KING and The DEVIL 

proved to be timid, and only the Christ chiIld remained. 

The Giant was to carry him across a RIVER (an image of transition; see AFTERLIFE), and The Child became so heavy that he pulled The Giant under The Surface of The WATER, baptising him 'Christopher' ("The Bearer of Christ") in The Process.

He is said to have died A Martyr's Death under The Emperor Decius; his day was July 25. Christopher was portrayed as a giant with a leafy staff or stake in his hand (sym- bolizing justification through divine grace) and on his shoulder the Christ child, who is holding The Imperial APPLE, Symbol of The World. 

Frescoes depicting St. Christopher are common inside churches, which is ex- plained by the popular belief that anyone seeing Christopher's image would not die on that day; this encouraged frequent visits to churches. Christopher thus came to be seen as offering protection against sudden death; hence his modern status as patron saint of travelers. Iconographic prototypes may in- clude late Egyptian portrayals of the dog- headed Anubis with the child Horus, or 68 Chronus Saint Christopher. Woodcut, Buxheim, 1531 images of Hercules with the child Eros (CUPID) on his shoulder. The legendary .saint is an image of the witnessing believer who bears Christ through the world and thus attains salvation. The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine (ca. 1270) gives the following ac- count of him: "He carried Christ in four ways: on his shoulders, when he transported him over the water; in his body, through the mortification to which he submitted himself; in his spirit, through his fervent prayers; in his mouth, through his witness and his sermons." In the Jewish and Islamic faiths the ancestral father ABRAHAM, who will serve only the greatest master and thus comes to know God, in this respect plays a role analogous to that of Christopher. (See also STARS.) 

Chronus The personification of Time, often not distinguished ftom the God Cronus (Latin SATURN); Saturn was thus often portrayed with symbols of transitoriness, which are properly the attributes of Chronus: the hour- glass and the SCYTHE. Cronus, who devoured his children, became a symbol of Time, which Creates and then destroys. 

In ancient mysterious religions, Chronus was a primeval god of the cosmos, also known as Eon (orig- inally Aron or Aeon); this Chronus was believed 

to have emerged from The DARKNESS 

to create The World, 

making a primordial SILVER EGG out of the ether. 

The figure of The Time-Guardian Chronus appears on many baroque clocks. The fleeting nature of passing time is often suggested by his WINGS, its cruel inevitability by The Scythe with which Cronus (in Hesiod's theogony) had castrated the primeval god -- His Father -- Uranus; drops of Uranus' BLOOD seeped into the ground, and from them the FURIES (Greek Erinyes) arose. chrysanthemum In East Asia a prized flower: in Japan an imperial emblem, and in China a symbol of autumn, as the PLUM- blossom is of spring. Its Chinese name (cha) is a homonym for "wait, linger" and suggests reflective contemplation, an association that is found in poetry as well: "0 yellow chry- santhemums, in the light from my little lamp you have grown quite pale," or "In late splendor do chrysanthemums bloom. " State attire was often decorated with designs containing chrysanthemums. Rebus-like messages of good will or congratulations were built on homonymies linking "PINE" and "chrysanthemum" ("May you have long life"), or "nine," "quail," and "chrysanthe- mum" ("May nine generations live together in peace.") A European wildflower variety, the tansy (Chrysanthemum vulgare), was used in folk-medicine against intestinal worms but is used today only for garden decoration. cicada (Greek tettix) The "tree cricket" of the Mediterranean region. According to Greek myth, Tithonus, the brother of King Priam of Troy, was the lover of EOS, the goddess of dawn. She asked Zeus to make Chronus as an angel. St. Hawes, The Pastyme of Plea- sure, 1509 Cicada ornament, symbolizing immortality. China, ca. 1200 B. C. Tithonus immortal but forgot to ask that he might remain forever young. He therefore lived forever, but became more and more feeble, mumbling to himself meaninglessly, until he shriveled up and was transformed into the constantly chirping cicada. The literature of antiquity sometimes describes the high-pitched drone of the insect as pleasant, sometimes as annoying. For Cal- limachus (ca. 300-240 B.C.), the sound symbolized "elevated" poetry; the cicada, in various contexts, stood for the tireless poet, was his helper, or appeared as an attribute of the MUSES. In ancient China the cicada (shan) sym- bolized immortality or life after death; a JADE amulet representing a cicada was placed in the mouth of the dead. A queen of the Cicada singing from the summer heat. J. &schius, 1702 circle 69 vassal state of Ch'i in the east was said to have been transformed into a cicada when she died; for this reason, the insect was also known as "the maiden of Ch'i." A stylized cicada ornament also represented "loyalty to one's principles." Circe A Greek demigoddess and the quin- tessential enchantress (see WITCH); the daughter of the SUN god Helios. She was said to have transformed men whom she loved into animals; she turned Picus, the son of SATURN, into a woodpecker. She did not manage to transform Glaucus when he requested a love-elixir from her, but she did change the nymph Scylla, whom he loved, into a hideous monster, the bane of seafarers (see WATER SPIRITS) . Circe is best known for her adventure with Odysseus, whose men she turns into swine (see PIG). Only Odys- seus himself-protected by the magic herb moly, which Hermes (see MERCURY) had given him-was impervious to her spell. He forced her to reverse the transformation of his men, spent a year with the enamored sorceress, and was finally freed by her and sent on with useful advice. Circe came to symbolize the seductive woman whose en- chantment leads her admirers to forget their dignity. circle Arguably the most important and most widespread geometric symbol; its form also corresponds to that of the SUN and MOON as they appear to us. In the specula- Circle: Cosmos, zodiac. R. LuHi's Practica compendiosa artis, 1523 70 circle Circle: Mausoleum decorations. Ireland (Sess Kill- green), Brittany (Gavr' Inis) tive philosophies of the Platonists and the Neoplatonists, the circle is the ultimate, the perfect form. The legendary Hyperborean temple of Apollo is described as circular (a reference to the prehistoric Stonehenge in southern England?), and the capital of Pla- to's "island of ATLANTIS" as a system of concentric rings of land and WATER. In mys- tic systems God is spoken of as a circle whose center is everywhere-an expression of per- fection and of surpassing human understand- ing (limitlessness, eternity, the absolute). In the circle there is no beginning or end, no direction. The "canopy" of the HEAVENS (see BALDACHIN) is represented as a round Circle: Reconstruction of shrine at Stonehenge. Southern England, ca. 1800 B. C. dome (partly because of the circular trajec- tory of the STARS around the celestial pole), and thus the circle also stands for heaven and all things spiritual. When spokes are drawn in, it becomes a symbolic WHEEL, which however carries dynamic associations opposed to the permanence of the circle. The Egyptian symbol for eternity is a string tied to form a circle; the corresponding sym- bol in the world of the ancient Greeks was a SNAKE biting its own tail (UROBORUS) . Concentric circles arise also when an object is thrown into the water. The frequent de- signs of this sort on megalithic gravestones can be interpreted as representations of sink- ing into the seas of death (see AFTERLIFE), or perhaps of miraculously re-emerging from them, suggesting a doctrine of death and rebirth, symbolized by concentric waves. A Circles inscribed with names of God, to repel demons. England, ca. 1860 circle with its center drawn in is the tradi- tional astronomer's symbol for the sun, and the alchemist's for the solar metal, GOLD. In magic lore the circle (drawn around the conjuring magician and not to be crossed throughout the ceremony) is supposed to serve as protection against evil spirits. The symbological opposite of the circle is the SQUARE, which is associated with the terrestrial world and things material. The circle stands for God and heaven, the square for humans and the earth. The proverbial task of "squaring the circle," constructing a circle (by purely geometric means) that has the same area as a given square, thus offers an image of human efforts to transform their own substance into that of God, and thus to render themselves divine. This insoluble problem in geometry was a frequent Renais- sance allegory for human striving for divine perfection, one that was also of great im- portance in the symbolism of ALCHEMY. Without going into the problem of equal areas, the Cabala also treats the circle and the square: a circle inside a square is seen as symbolizing the divine "SPARK" within a material envelope. In Christian iconography the halo (NIMBUS) around the head of a saint is usually circular, and concentric cir- cles also represent God's original creation. The first represents the earth, where humans will be placed only later, and God draws it with a drafting COMPASS (in the Bible Mor- alisee of the 13th century), or he reveals himself in the form of a HAND, which emerges from the center of multiple circles and breaks through them "transcendentally" on the pe- riphery (Romanesque fresco, St. Climent de Tahull, Catalonia, ca. 1123). Naturally, the importance of the circle as a symbol is not restricted to Occidental culture. For various Native American peo- ples, the orbit of the moon, and the appar- ent orbits of the sun and the stars, are round forms, and such forms appear in the way things grow in nature. Thus the camp, the teepee, and seating arrangements are all based on the circle. It is not uncommon to find traditional dances following (or gener- ating) circles. In Zen Buddhism the circle stands for enlightenment, the perfection of humanity in unity with the primal principle. In the Chinese symbol of YIN AND YANG, duality is enclosed in a circle (t'ai-chi, the primal One) . In Europe the notion of con- centric cosmic spheres dominates medieval cosmology and is represented poetically in Dante's Divine Comedy in the form of the "circles" of HELL, PURGATORY, and heaven; the hierarchies of ANGELS serve as guardians of these spheres and thus of the entire struc- ture. The TRINITY is often symbolized by three mutually intersecting circles. (See also MANDALA and SPIRAL.) city 71 city One criterion for some cultural his- torians seeking to determine whether a na- tion or people can be referred to as having attained "civilization." A city is not simply an agglomeration of fixed houses; it is also defined by central civil and religious orga- nization, and in some cases by the presence of city walls. For the symbologist, the city is a reflection in miniature of cosmic struc- tures, not sprung up in a totally random way, but laid out systematically, having at its center a terrestrial counterpart of the midpoint of the heavens (see OMPHALOS, MUNDUS, AXIS MUNDI). At this center we often find the shrine of the tutelary god of the city (in China: ch'eng huang-shen) or of a god-like hero, a local deity who ranks with KINGS. We find this not only in the Greek city-state (polis) but also in ancient Meso- potamia and Egypt. When an empire is established, the tutelary god of the central polis often becomes the god of the entire realm, bringing the gods of other cities into the pantheon over which he presides; the EMPEROR is then the earthly representative of this ruling deity. To a very limited extent, in the Christian world the patron saint of a city takes on something of the role played by the tutelary gods of old. The ideal city of the Western world is JERUSALEM, with BABYLON its ancient op- posite, subsequently replaced by heathen City: Assyrian portrayal of a Phoenician city. Nine- veh, 8th century B.C. 72 clouds Rome. The "city of God" is also a symbol of "Mary, Mother of God," and in the Middle Ages tabernacles and shrines for rel- ics were often constructed like cities, with decorative walls and miniature towers. In the symbology of the psyche, the city stands for the regularized center of a person's life, which can often be reached only after long travels, when a high degree of emo- tional maturity has been attained and the GATE to the spiritual center of one's life can be traversed