Savage Babalon
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JAE, 93,
In the thread on the Thelemic Mass, about Babalon you observed:
That was Parson's ego. There was no real harm, except to the ego. <deletion>
To the Master, though, there is no resistence and, one recognizes, there is no harm. Nothing that is REAL is harmed.Now, that's cool, but the ferocious mothers - Kali, Durga, Sekhmet, Coatlicue and all the rest of the Savage Sisterhood - can be discouraging. And intellectually, they don't seem to fit with Binah, Understanding. My own sense of Binah is of Saturnine slowness, depth and an enormously embracing reach. Binah seems to be about absorption more than expression.
Sure, Binah is also about death, but I've always seen it as Death + What-happens-afterwards, not about actual, savage, I chew on your bones as you scream dying. The idea of that savagery doesn't seem related to either AMA, Dark and Sterile, nor the Bright Fertile Mother AIMA, but is its own thing.
I've tried for years to fit the Savage Mother archetype into Binah, and it always insists on slipping away into Geburah or Teth. Any thoughts here for those of us whose sense of reality is still non-Magisterial? The only conclusion I've reached is that there's a re-definition of Binah itself since the New Aeon began.
93 93/93,
Edward
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Those mothers aren't any more savage than Kronos himself, who devoured his children whole.
Try this one on for size: The consciousness of Binah (as Neshamah) is characterized by the direct perception of a thing unfiltered by distortions in the physical senses, emotions, or intellect. In the best 'material' Saturnian "reality" sense, Binahis the most literal, REALISTIC, confronting the actuality of manifestation that we're likely to encounter.
What Binah/Babalon etc. shreds is distortion, falsehood, considerations that filter one from the actuality of WHAT'S SO, etc. It blows through your projections and dissassembles your intellectual constructs that are modelling reality and therefore blocking it. Binah shreds the map and disclosed the territory.
She is simultaneously the essence of love.
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I believe Freud said that the act of breastfeeding, in which we consume the mother, is the root of the opposite notion of the mother in turn devouring the child.
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Jae, 93,
"The consciousness of Binah (as Neshamah) is characterized by the direct perception of a thing unfiltered by distortions in the physical senses, emotions, or intellect. In the best 'material' Saturnian "reality" sense, Binahis the most literal, REALISTIC, confronting the actuality of manifestation that we're likely to encounter. "
Okay, that's tonight's meditation subject settled then. But I've always seen Understanding as implying an absorption of the reality, including it but also maintaining a different, deeper perspective through a kind of eternal meditation on that direct perception.
Wrong idea?
93 93/93,
Edward
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so for mental pictures sake, Binah is all the most sweet soft goddesses and the most terrifying goddesses in one?
like Binah being Love, the goddes as she is pure (pretending for a moment she is a female being), and venus, kali, babylon, anu, nuit, and the list goes on, are all kinda like personality traits of her?
and that we cant hold one thing against Binah like we do with people in life, right? correct me if im wrong -
@Edward Mason said
"But I've always seen Understanding as implying an absorption of the reality, including it but also maintaining a different, deeper perspective through a kind of eternal meditation on that direct perception. "
I have no problem with that description. I might have said, instead, the apprehension of a nature of a thing, stimulated by the directing of attention upon it, and without relying on physical sensation, thought, or emotion to determine its nature (even if they are used in the process of direction attention upon it).
I know, not very concise...
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JAE 93,
Concision isn't too helpful in this instance:-).
The expansion is appreciated.
93 93/93,
Edward
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In view of cognitive science's discoveries, which point to the impossibility (if not the sheer logical incoherence of the concept) of *uninterpreted *experience (i.e. in light of the discovery that all memory, experience, etc., is *reconstruction *of a "model" based on sampling of little bits of reality), might it not be better to say that Binah is simply seeing the *is-ness *of things?
Like this quote from the French Philosophe-cum-Pratyekabuddha, Stephen Jourdain:-
What interests me in things is not their beauty, their harmony—I couldn't care less about that. It's that they are. Because one day something clicked, a veil of some sort was torn, and I was granted a compelling perception of their existence, with the discovery that simply by being, a thing—any thing—possesses a value in which Beauty, Harmony, simply don't figure. A value so unparalleled, producing by simple contact a happiness so lofty, so beyond all expectation, that beside it the very Parthenon is a trinket.
It's this sheer being of things (of anything!) that we normally elide in our day-to-day living that is absolutely "awe-ful" if noticed.
IOW, the "illusion" we want to get rid of is the same as the familiarity that breeds contempt. "Seeing things as they are" isn't necessarily seeing the world in some kind of direct perception (for such a thing is not possible, at least in terms of scientific understanding, all perception being necessarily mediate), or seeing it "better", but rather it's seeing *that *things are - one might say, for the first time.
"Something exists" - this can be taken lightly, as a ho-hum fact, or it can be the most nauseating, terrifying understanding (same as the "fear of the Lord" that is the beginning of wisdom) or it can be a cause of bliss (depending on one's condition at the point of discovery, and how deeply one is enmeshed in being an ordinary human being).
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@Jim Eshelman said
"What Binah/Babalon etc. shreds is distortion, falsehood, considerations that filter one from the actuality of WHAT'S SO, etc. It blows through your projections and dissassembles your intellectual constructs that are modelling reality and therefore blocking it. Binah shreds the map and disclosed the territory.
She is simultaneously the essence of love."
Would another aspect of the Great Mother be a sense of the fragility of life and acute awareness of the permanent disappearance of life-forms - e.g. endangered or extinct species? Or would that fall under Ruach conditioning?
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With Babalon, I think the idea is closer to, "wholeness of mature Woman in all respects."
This does include her being the ultimat M.I.L.F. <g>
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Alrah, 93,
"Married woman with grown children?
"The age of the kids is immaterial.
The usual derivation of the acronym is from "Mothers I'd like to [F-tetragrammatize]."I do think this is one area in society where the Babalon archetype has had impact. The neopagan community still speaks about the Maiden-Mother-Crone triad (nubile, fertile, senile), which defines woman in terms of her relationship to breeding. I find that a little too close to Christian Family Values (tm) in concept.
Babalon has opened up a more complete expression of femininity where the phases are not mutually exclusive. What next - ROLs? (Raunchy Old Ladies?) Rock on!
93 93/93,
Edward