A Fire in the Head

“Her bloodred halo is like the ancient Roman flammeum, the bridal veil flame-colored to induce love in the soul. This flammeum also points to the belief in the genius residing in the head, the belief in the life-soul or divinity, often referred to as “a fire in the head.” Alchemically, this reddening is also an epiphany of the rubedo, the crimson flush of Aphrodite in the bleached and whitened body of the work – blood returning to the head as after a faint, thoughts reddened into life, the rich blood of love coloring the pale face of austerity: Aurora.”

Noel Cobb, ‘The Morbid and the Beautiful’ in Archetypal Imagination: Glimpses of the Gods in Life and Art (1992).

I’ve had a difficult year, and it’s not over yet. I’ve struggled to keep it together, to be authentic, to respect my melancholy and dwell in it, but also to realise that there is more to life. I have lost love, and I have placed my faith in love again – I have chosen love. I have also chosen difficulty, being in the world, engagement.

I was born under the rulership of Venus and I cannot avoid her, cannot escape her, can never leave her service. I have shivered this year, I have reduced, my body has made stones within itself, I have bleached and whitened. It is all process, all passing –passing strange, and passing. I have tried to hold the Tao, I have tried to live in uncertainty, I have sometime succeeded.

A cruel anniversary awaits me only days away, I feel its gravity drawing me into its singularity, feel the blood draining from me in its presence. It is hard to see beyond it, it draws in all light, all life – but I will pass through it. I will work with this, as I’ve worked with pain before. I will work with it in ways I’ve never worked with pain before, and so I will add new ways of working with pain to my repertoire. Some of this is wisdom. Wisdom is some of this. It is all the work, the alchemy of the soul.

I will do my best to be true to the fire in my head, I ask you to find your mind fire.

James Piers Taylor, London 12/12/2006

IMAGE: Madonna (1894-95) by Edvard Munch.

An Eagle For Your Mind-Fire

“And it is written: ‘first the stone, then the plant, then the animal,
And then the man.’

But before the stone, I am the FIRE
Distributed equally in space,
Nowhere absent, filling all
And before the Fire, hidden within it,
I am the pure KNOWING
Whence all forms flow forth.”

From the Book of Tokens by Paul Foster Case

Akin to the molten rivers that will form rock beds, a fluid, pre-verbal, non-dual, flow of mind-fire can be seen to predate a thought, an image, and a desire. How much of the truth of this FIRE can then be allowed by the thought, the image or the desire? Is this not the test of the philosopher, the real poet and the true lover?

It is in the multiple iridescences of this FIRE that we can see clearly that the Mirror (art as reflection) and the Lamp (art as illumination) are eventually one and the same: the truest reflection is itself an illumination and burning brightly one’s innermost spark is as a candle flame to the sun of reality…

How we apply this FIRE then becomes the Promethean question of our times, indeed of our lives. Within the context of this question, that could exist personally, socio-logically, environmentally etc, and yet remaining within the imaginal realm, I ask what was Zeus’ Eagle a punishment for?

The man who gave us fire (warmth, sustenance, survival), the man who brought FIRE (the illumination of the human spirit, the reflection of the pure knowing) is chained to a rock and his liver is eaten out by a massive eagle each day only to re-grow and for the whole process to begin again the following day. Though horrible on a literal level this punishment as for example the fate of Tantalus or Sisyphus in hell is an emblematic instruction, it points to something…

Prometheus is chained to the mountaintop; he is shackled to the high-point, the peak, and the airy plateaus of spirit. The eagle that destroys him daily was a living symbol of spirit for many Native American cultures who often symbolized the attainment of wisdom with the reception of an eagles’ feather. So Prometheus is broken by spirit, shattered by the peak experience…he is then healed through the night just to be broken again.

I don’t know about you but I have felt like that. I mean I am not saying every day and I am not claiming the vast hubris that my personal experience is always a living myth (but I have my moments…) but I have felt like that. I felt like it once on LSD and I felt like it on retreat. If you touch the cold clear hand of spirit you must be prepared to winter in your Soul for certain periods for the truth of the FIRE is actually quite cold for other gardens in one’s Soul.

Maybe Prometheus is a warning, I will not say that he is not (certainly in the inflation of the archetype, possession by the mythological could damage any one of us) but Prometheus is also a symbol of painful hope, more like a Christ or the ideal of the Boddhisatva intention in Mahayana Buddhism than a simple admonition.

I do not hear his story and think ‘lets not waste our time giving to others’. I do not hear his story and conclude that humanity is worthless, that Prometheus is rightly punished for giving this childish race fire when surely it will only burn itself. Although humanity may very well burn itself… O Shit! – I see a complex image about the nature of reality and the difficulty of the human nervous system and psyche encountering the underlying rubedo of existence, the true nature of our mind.

Mark Jones

IMAGES: Prometheus Bound (1868) by Gustave Moreau, Zuni Dancers perform the Eagle Dance (2006) from the Utah San Juan County Centennial Celebration of the 1906 Antiquities Act on June 10, 2006.