Welcome to On the Soul's Terms podcast, a weaving of astrology, greek mythology and depth psychology. I'm Chris Skidmore, an astrologer, psychotherapist and craniosacral therapist living in Ubud, bali. Hello, and welcome back to On the Soul's Terms podcast. Thanks a lot for listening in Around about the March equinox. I completed my project of the Great Round a year exploring the mythic elements of each astrological sign and interviewing someone each month who held particular signatures of the sign in question. I want to take a moment here to thank all of those who were involved and give them a shout out. Rick Levine kicked things off as our Aries figure, followed by Persia Juliet for Taurus, melanie Reinhart for Gemini, the Mothers at Midnight crew of Indigo, melrose and Rose Harvey for Cancer, james Mattingly for Leo, colette Davis for Virgo, my mentor Brian Clark for Libra, jason Holley for Scorpio, elsa Henderson for Sagittarius, michael Mead for Capricorn for Sagittarius. Michael Mead for Capricorn. Saffron Rossi for Aquarius and finally, martha Alter Hines for Pisces. Each of these episodes remains in the archive and if you haven't had the chance to listen in yet, I highly recommend each and every interview. Each guest gave us a glimpse into the underlying archetypes of the signs they represented, often in unexpected and surprising ways. I want to take a moment here to also thank my collaborator and fellow astrologer, faye Northgrave, who helped me along the way by bouncing the symbols and images around in the episodes dedicated to the signs themselves.
Speaker 1:Now, originally, the idea was to complete the podcast at the end of this year of the zodiac, finishing it up back in the Piscean Sea as we ended the great round, but, as it turns out, the myths have much more to say. The muses continue to speak, and so I begin anew with this next iteration of the podcast. Just as the 12 figures along the ecliptic known as the Zodiac constellations are embedded within 88 constellations in the sky, the stories of the Zodiac are nestled in a bigger, more expansive realm of mythology and cosmology. As such, I plan to move with the myths into the wider oceanic sky and to explore more deeply the archetypes that our ancients were able to reflect on in their theatrical night sky world. Before I begin, though, I thought I'd take a Simon Sinek moment and come back to the why. Why send these podcasts out into the world? Why spend all these hours in front of this microphone, waxing poetic and mythic? The best way to answer that, possibly the only way for a podcast called On the Soul's Terms is to use a little mythology.
Speaker 1:I've been thinking lately about two books that have caught my attention. One is the Master and His Emissary by Ian McGilchrist. The other is an older text from Leonard Schlein called the Alphabet vs the Goddess the Conflict Between Word and Image. They both come from different angles, but each suggests that of the two hemispheres of the brain, the right is the more wise and ancient. The right brain rules over creativity, spatial awareness, holistic thinking, non-verbal communication, visual imagery, emotional processing, pattern recognition and musical ability. Meanwhile, the left brain leans into logical reasoning, analytical thinking, language and verbal skills, mathematical computation, sequential processing, detail orientation, reading and writing and systemic planning. Of the two books I mentioned, each author goes to great lengths to come to the same basic conclusion. Mcgilchrist speaks of how the left reductionist brain is meant to be in service to the right holistic brain, but in the Western world we have that upside down. Schlein talks about how the invention of writing approximately 5,000 years ago changed the balance of power and gave rise to a more masculine outlook on the world, creating the conditions for us to subjugate nature to our will, denigrate typically feminine roles and amplify the position of the male. This is the movement we refer to as patriarchy.
Speaker 1:The language I use to define these two modes of being is the distinction between logos, or logic, and mythos, or dreaming, and the way I'd like to look at that is through the myths themselves. Recently, I've been spending some time with the primordial image from ancient greece of the cyclops. These monstrous creatures were the children of gaia, the earth mother, and uranus, the sky father. They possess just one eye in the middle of their foreheads and give us a symbol of what it's like to be stuck in the left brain or locked into the world of logic. Myths are a form of collective dreaming. They are not the same as stories in that they weren't written by an author. An author might pull through these mythic images in their writing, but it's through ancient myths that were developed before the written word became king that we find the best example of this collective dreaming process in its raw form. So how did the Cyclopses come to be?
Speaker 1:According to Hesiod, an ancient Greek scribe, in the beginning was chaos. Chaos was the androgynous element of a yawning chasm, or the great void. By some strange miracle, chaos gives birth to five original elements. These were Gaia, which, as I mentioned, was the earth, mother Eros, representing life force and the element that draws the opposites together in order that they create something new. Tartarus, which is a place in the underworld reserved for the punishment of those who go against nature in an extreme way. Erebus meaning darkness, and Nix meaning night.
Speaker 1:For a time, gaia existed on her own, as the original creatrix, able to bring many things into existence without the help of a partner. But after a while she becomes a little bored and perhaps lonely, and so she creates for herself an equal partner named Uranus, the Skyfather. She did this because she wanted companionship, something pretty to look at and protection from the sometimes menacing empty night. The Greeks saw Gaia and Uranus as two spheres spinning together in space Uranus above and Gaia below. Together they created the twelve titans, who were the race of beings before the Olympians. But then things become strangely lopsided. They give birth to the Cyclops I mentioned before and the Hecatonchires. Heca means 100, and kairos means hands, so these beings were born with 100 hands. They also had 50 heads.
Speaker 1:Uranus didn't like the look of these last two beings, and so shoved them down into Tartarus, the only problem with that being that Tartarus was deep inside of Gaia, so it was as though he was shoving these beings back into Gaia's womb. This was the first transgression between the Sky Father and the Earth Mother and would have disastrous consequences. They represent the Logos element of reality becoming lopsided and beginning to dominate mythos. With one eye, they are only able to access one side of the brain. They have tunnel vision and an unnatural focus on just one thing. With only one eye, we lose our depth perception and are unable to see the wholeness inherent in reality. Getting locked into a fixed way of seeing the world, this laser focus was useful as well as destructive.
Speaker 1:They were renowned for their craftsmanship and were later responsible for the manufacturing of Zeus's thunderbolts, poseidon's trident and Hades's helmet of invisibility. Poseidon's trident and Hades' helmet of invisibility these three gods ruled over the sky, the ocean and the underworld, respectively what the Greeks saw as the most important three realms of existence. And so these Cyclopses. They were able to strengthen the hold that the gods had on the world and wrest the power away from the feminine goddesses. Myths are timeless. This isn't something that happened back then, a few thousand years ago. It's something that can happen at any time. Cyclops consciousness occurs throughout history when new inventions and innovations occur and the humans adapt to the new technologies. This brings me back to the podcast and the why of what I'm up to here, why I'm making these episodes and why you're listening in, and that is to give a second eye to these cyclopses and to restore their depth perception. Whilst the cyclops are great at doing specific things, they're not so good at sensing the greater picture in which they are doing their work. I feel this is particularly important in the world of psychology.
Speaker 1:Psychology can be broken down into two parts. Psyche means soul and was also the word for butterfly In Latin. Its word was anima and it speaks to the animating principle behind all of existence. Logos means logic and is responsible for breaking things down into their separate parts. Logos separates, psyche brings things together. Psychology is a relatively young science. Over the last hundred years, it has tried to keep up with its scientific brethren by becoming more sensible and logical. It has spent much of its time leaning into the logos part of its name and attempting to separate and name the many different maladies that can afflict the psyche. It's given us words like narcissism, ocd, neurosis, psychosis the ego, id, superego, affect, transference and projection, among many others. It has been like the sword that constantly separates things out. This separation process is valuable and necessary, but it seems to me that, as a discipline, it has largely forgotten its why, which is to care and nurture the psyche or soul, to bring our disparate parts together as individuals and as collectives, to understand ourselves as all part of the same essential story of creation. What I'd like to contribute towards with this podcast is the project of reunion.
Speaker 1:The Greek myths strike me as an ancient form of psychology, before psychology was even a thing. By exploring the tension points between the many different gods and goddesses, we can reflect inward and see the tension points within ourselves. As I said earlier, the myths didn't happen in some other time. They are timeless and are happening within us eternally. This is what I would call soul work.
Speaker 1:To give balance to my mythic argument, I'd also like to bring attention to another figure called the Argus. The Argus was a monster with 100 eyes looking in all different directions. It could sleep with some eyes whilst keeping the other eyes awake. He was therefore the perfect watchman and was in charge of guarding the unfortunate Io, a maiden who had been transformed into a cow. This image is the equal opposite of Cyclops. To me, it represents an overly active right brain consciousness, where we see everything but are unable to focus and therefore unable to truly rest. Interestingly, it is the trickster god Hermes, who rescues Io from her predicament. He arrives on the scene disguised as a shepherd, wistfully playing melodies on his panpipes. Argus asks him to come over and tell him a story, and Hermes obliges and takes a seat nearby. He begins to tell old tales, trying to think of the most boring stories he can imagine to send the Argus to sleep. Eventually he tells the story of Pan and the creation of the pan pipes themselves. Somehow, this is the most dull of all the stories Argus has heard and he drifts off to sleep. Hermes swiftly takes off his head and frees Io from her prison.
Speaker 1:If we think mythologically here, uranus heals the problem of left brain dominance by sending the Cyclops deep into the Earth. For us, this could mean that when we're under the extreme influence of left brain possession, we need to reconnect to the earth through the most earthly thing we have our bodies. We take the focus off the information and bring it back to sensation and feeling. Hermes takes off the head of Argus, much like what happened to Medusa at the hands of Perseus. Mythically, this could also be seen as being freed of our headiness.
Speaker 1:Of course, the ideal is not to be dominated by either logos or mythos, but to move freely in between. This is the magical third thing, as represented in the brain by the corpus callosum, a thick band of nerve fibers that facilitates communication between our left and right hemispheres. This connecting force in nature is represented by that primordial entity mentioned earlier, eros. It's Eros that Psyche seeks in her most famous tale, and perhaps it's Eros that we moderners need to seek as well in this current age. The word Eros has a sexual connotation in the modern mind, and no doubt that was part of it for the ancients too, but in fact Eros is the symbol of life force, participation in nature and the ability to be both in the world and of the world.
Speaker 1:As I move into this new season, I'll be looking at the tension of many archetypal oppositions that are explored through Greek mythology. Some of these include Artemis, who represents a chaste dedication to nature, and Aphrodite, who represents the desire to connect to others. Apollo, who is civilization, and Dionysus, who is wildness, athena's rationality and Poseidon's dreaming mind, and many more archetypal pairs. We will be amplifying the tension between the two and then dreaming into the magical third thing Along the way, I'll also be interviewing some thinkers in this field. In fact, I've already recorded interviews with Carrie Honey and David Russell which I can't wait to share with you.
Speaker 1:If you enjoy the show and want more people to participate in what we're up to here, please consider sharing the episodes with your friends and on social media. And if you're really enjoying it, you could go to my Patreon account and sign up to show some financial love to this soulful project. Thanks again to my patrons who have already done this. Your support makes all the difference. Your feedback is also very welcomed and encouraged. If you'd like to let me know how you're finding the show, please send an email to chris at skidmoredynamicscom or contact me through the website onthesoulstermscom. As a final note, I'd like to dedicate this season to Arnold Mendele, the Jungian founder of process-oriented psychology, who passed into the next realm at 84 years old this month. You impacted so many people's lives whom you never met, myself being among them. I look forward to seeing you next week on the Soul's Terms. Thank you.