Today the noble polar bear was listed by the US Government as a threatened species because the icy environs in which it thrives are diminishing. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said this step did not denote a policy shift to lessen ‘global warming.’ It appears to be the government’s first use of the Endangered Species Act to note the loss of animal habitat caused by dramatic man-made or naturual climate changes.

But far away from the world of argument about what or who causes what, in the world of dreams and ideas, the bear carries ancient names: La Osa, El Oso, in Spanish, and in the Latin, Ursa (female bear), and Ursus (male bear).

Throughout folktales and mythos of people who live anywhere in the world wherein also live bears, there are myriad stories about the bear as an enchanted human being…

…one who is destined to wander as a bear in survivor mode, until a challenging and magical event takes place. Sometimes, the bear is transformed back into human form again– if and when the bear is loved by a human being of great heart.

Thus sometimes bear stories are called in variation: The Old Man In the Black Fur Coat. Or white, brown, yellow or red fur coat.

There’s an idea in archetypal psychology– the study of symbols and the psychological catalysts they seem to represent in the human psyche– that some ancient stories can mimic the human condition in such a timeless way that the ancient stories are as relevant to our inner lives today… as they once were to peoples who lived thousands of years ago.

There is an old Greek story that qualifies as such, I think. This story has remained alive since time out of mind, and concerns a young woman who is transformed into the Mother of all bears… ironically — as in our own times– this ancient being was endangered, for she was driven out of her original habitat, and in the midst of being hunted to extinction…. but at the last moment she was saved and protected in a most stunning way.

The story goes like this…

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Barbaro. Now Eight Belles.

My father comes from a place where the old men and old women still consider horses to be gods who came to earth.

In Hungary, every tiny village had a council of elders: the old men in their szurs, long wooly white shepherd’s capes, the old women in their red boots with the black heels, the fine leather pleated and stitched with red thread all the way up to the knees… the old men who smoke pipes with drawing bows 18 inches long… the old women who if need be, could still swing up into the saddle of a stamping stallion…

These one of a kind people, these last-of-their-kind people in our family, say this about horses: “Never force a horse to run relentlessly, for a horse is made of Love and Courage on four legs …

…and the horse will literally love you so hard, it will run its heart out for you until it is dead.”

This is not just a saying. The old ones are serious. Descendents of the Huns and Swabians, the horse tribes of mountains and plains, they have their own ancient forms of knowing.

The old people have another saying, jokingly said…but not really:

–“You want to know the secret of the determination of the Hungarians? They are in all their dreams, fully human, and fully horse.”

–”You want to know the secret of the determination of the horse? They are in all their dreams, fully horse and fully god.”

In the United States this weekend, at the Kentucky Derby, a horse race of long standing… Eight Belles, a filly, was running against the boys.

Coming out of the race, she suddenly dropped her heavy body to the ground. Two broken ankles. She was ‘euthanized’ where she lay.

From a piece by Beth Harris: Louisville, Kentucky.

“Winning jockey Kent Desormeaux and Big Brown galloped by Eight Belles in her waning moments.

“This horse showed you his heart[Big Brown], and Eight Belles showed you her life for our enjoyment today,” he said. “I’m deeply sympathetic to that team for their loss.”

Big Brown, the favored horse, had won the race.

But so much was not won. So much that is not about horse races and horse owners, but about Equus, the god of the horses…

Those as ancient as the Greeks, but unrecorded by stylus, are said to have held that the god-horse, the king of the horses of heaven, arrived on earth when time was still only fog… that the godly horse arrived on earth with the silver reins made of nebula on him, and with the bit made of stars in his mouth.

He who is known by many ancient names, came in order to teach humans the beauty of the world beyond their small and squalid ways of life.

Thus, the oldest Hungarian horse people say the horse god came to earth out of

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Has the spectacle of the Olympic Torch relay, first introduced by Nazi Germany in 1936, hijacked the Olympic tradition? After the mass protesting in Paris, London and now San Francisco, and due to the ‘dubious’ Nazi origins of the Olympic torch relay, this editorial from the NRC Handelsblad of The Netherlands opines, “Four years ago, the torch, which had to go from Olympia to Athens, traveled 48,466 miles. And this year is no different. … This is megalomania. … IOC Vice President Gosper has called for the trip to be restricted to the direct route between Olympia and the organizing city. This won’t deter future demonstrators, but there is a lot to be said for a relay of more modest dimensions.”
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I like Hillary Clinton. Although my heart belongs to John Edwards, I voted for her as the candidate most likely to succeed, and even succeed superbly, at the thankless damn task that cleaning up after George W. Bush is likely to prove. After all, it’s not a
job for someone who can’t deal with being hated. But what a lot of people are saying now is that Hillary is too hated generally to make it to the White House; therefore Dems should get behind Obama.

I say that Obama would be much better off if he let Hillary do the cleaning up before he takes the presidency; it’s going to be a nasty, unpalatable job for the most part involving choices between one decision with consequences that are hard to stomach and another that is even worse. But Obama has signified that he would like to be president now. And many of my friends want him simply because they’re sick of the sound of Clinton-bashing. At least with Obama, mused one, we’d hear new, fresh contumely.

And we all know it’s true: Hillary is hated by many-many-many. In fact, she routinely gets reviled by right, left, and center. At The New York Times, Stanley Fish discusses the loathing that Hillary Clinton evokes from her detractors (not all of whom are Republicans), compared to which, he says, " the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a model of objectivity."  Fish lists some of the crazier allegations against Hillary.  As he says, when the question presented is  "“Have the Clintons ever murdered anyone?” — and it turns out to be a rhetorical
question like “Is the Pope Catholic?” — you know that you’ve entered cuckooland."" (NYT)

But I’m more interested in the allegations of Hillary-haters who aren’t actually certifiable.  As Fish points out, many of the allegations against her are flat-out contradictory.  She is damned by her detractors (who aren’t limited to Republicans) no matter what she does.

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Turn off the stove. Turn off the TV. Take a blanket. Go outdoors. Walk to the place you can see the sky with the least amount of city light. Lie on the ground. Look up into the darkest part of the sky. Tonight you will see as many as 60 meteors an hour flash through the night sky.

The old people in my family, say this is the Sky Smithy hammering on the iron anvil. She is shaping raw silver buckles for the saddle straps of the Night Horses. They are the ones that pull the sun up from under the dark earth every night.

Usually invisible to humans, tonight you will see the sparks flying from her forge. The silver buckles must be made ready before first light… The mother of all, the Smithy of Heaven, will hammer and shape the silver. Her muscled arms will strike and strike with her great hammer, and the sparks from her labor will fly all through the night.

These meteor showers are called The Perseids, named after the mythic hero Perseus. And, the lost story that hardly anyone remembers is this one:

In the late Greek stories, Perseus was sent to retrieve the Golden Fleece which was being secreted by the writhing snake-headed Medusa, she who could turn a human to stone with her insane stare alone. The Gorgon monster Medusa was filled with the black poison of war and warring. She had no rational nor peaceable mind left. All humans feared her and would not go near her.

Except for Perseus, who confronted her with a large mirror, that reflected her evil face back to herself. SO startled was Medusa to see her own vicious and blood lusting face in the mirror, she was momentarily weakened. Then, Perseus unsheathed his sharp sword and slayed the mythic monster.

We have, so many of us, for years now, wandered from war to war. I count seven domestic wars in my lifetime, and two more I met in Central America. What can come, we ask ourselves, what can come for us who seem to be under the will of a force that inhales our money and our young, and exhales war.

Whether we are at war inside, outside, here, over there, whether war is brought on without our will or by our assent, or brought on by our own naiveté, lack of experience, slowness to record the underlying motives, quickness to be hungry for heroism… what can come in these times, especially as a ‘good enough for now’ nourishment for the soul?

Perhaps you’ve wondered who or what are those Night Horses that the Sky Smithy fires the metal to make the tack for the saddle… the saddle that rests on the spine just right, the bridal and bit that are not made cruel, for the horsemen, the horsewomen have faith… that the Night Horses know the way…

To slay the Gorgon; there’s an interior and psychological meaning to much of myth-making; often recording in the stories the weakness and strengths and strategies we might take to mend ourselves, or to restore vision. The instruction, if one could say, the ancients were writing to us who live here in the future, the instruction they may have given us in Perseus’ myth, might be this: To not fight evil by exhausting ourselves with railing only, but to also hold a mirror to it, so that it can dread itself with complete alarm for a moment…

and then to strike, whether with a votive or a vote, with an inclusion or an exclusion… regardless, to sever the evil thought system from the evil system of actions… to make certain the monstrous cannot act ever again.

Perseus was exhausted by his labor. But his mythic story, did not end there. The Medusa whose blood, even a drop, was said to poison any man who touched but a speck of it…. Thus, as she was slain and fell, from her blood, sprang an amazement. Instead of a cloned monster like herself rising from her blood, the great white horse, Pegasus; the winged being sprang fully formed from her blood.

Pegasus, one of the many winged horses who lives to be consanguineous with humans, to help them remember themselves. Out of evil, in the moment of its dying, springs the quintessential Night Horse who knows how to tow the sun back up from under the dark earth again. And again. And again.

It is not too much to say that such a being as Pegasus, such a force, such an attitude resides in the psyche, in us, and for us. In a world that ridicules soul daily, and scorns the reach of the soul that resides in each person, each in his or her own way… tonight, in the dark sky, you will see the Sky Smithy fashioning the silver buckles for the saddles of the Night Horses… the mares and stallions who all these eons, despite all else, now matter the difficulty, no matter how exhausted, no matter how bewildered, the great winged Night Horses still ride strong. They know the way.

Thee, too.

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This is one of the most exciting archaeological finds in the 21st century, the discovery of the tomb of Jewish king Herod the Great, “a Roman client king who ruled the Jews with the ruthless paranoia of a Stalin or Saddam Hussein from 37BC until his death in 4BC…

“He killed three of his sons, executed one of his wives and ordered the massacre of the innocents…”

(”But he was also an able and far-sighted administrator who helped in building the economic might of Judaea by founding cities and developing agricultural projects. His most famous and ambitious project was the expansion of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.”)

The Independent reports: “Yesterday, on the powdery grey flank of an artificial mountain overlooking the Arab villages and Jewish settlements scattered across the Judean Wilderness, Israeli scholars presented their answer to one of the great mysteries of biblical archaeology: the tomb of Herod the Great.

“For Ehud Netzer, professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University, the find was the culmination of a 30-year search. Herod was known to have been buried at Herodium, the towering desert fortress he built for that purpose a day’s march south of Jerusalem.

“Herod’s tomb is no 21st-century Tutankhamen treasury. There are no bones, let alone a mummified body. What Professor Netzer unearthed on the West Bank three weeks ago were dozens of fragments of finely dressed pale-pink limestone, elegantly carved with rosettes, decorated stone urns and the remains of a stone podium 10 metres square on which the mausoleum is believed to have stood.”

Read more…

The Moderate Voice is pleased and honored today to offer our readers the first copyrighted co-blog post written for TMV by New York Times list best selling author Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés. She will be posting most of her observations in a column titled I PUT THE CULTURE ON THE COUCH. You can read about her many books (and readers’ reviews of them) by CLICKING HERE.

“If one were to look for the causes of those who fall from the sky, first look to who has fathered them in self-interested, incompetent, or non-vigilant ways; those who think of unleashing mightiness rather than teaching mightiness and its ethics, those who have no clear self boundary about ‘what is enough.”
dr.e

I PUT THE CULTURE ON THE COUCH

An Analysis of The Men Who Fall From The Sky:
Icarus … The Lost Story
by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés

What Makes a Great Raptor, Or A Good Man, Fall From The Sky?

Walking in the sweetgrass here in the Rockies, I found a small Icarus… I knelt down to see the little fan of wing feathers still tied to its boney-bones by dried-out strings of sinew. The size of the hollow bones meant this noble being, now minus its meat and breath, was once a young eagle weighing maybe a half stone.

There are several deadly things that make high-flying creatures come crashing down from the sky: illness or injury, lightening strike, gun-shot wound, in-family fighting, a predator greater, being sucked into a huge engine’s vortex, or, under freak circumstances, a profound disregard for the law…
–those laws which govern gravity,
–the absolute rigidity of immovable objects,
–unexpected blows from sideways wind shears;
–and ability to use good judgment in extreme altitudes.

The sad causes of raptors suddenly plummeting from great heights can affect modern women and men too. Human beings can also fall– or be pushed– when placed in overly-elevated positions… especially when urged to fly beyond their true range, especially if they are naive, reckless, or inflated about not needing wise advice, falsely believing they can fly through changing winds and weather without making timely corrections.

Like Icarus of Greek mythos, modern women and men who are awarded mechanical wings, but who also love power too much, are granted no lasting favor. Amongst human beings, there are laws that govern gravity and the rigidity of immovable objects, wind shears and lack of judgment too.

For in being wafted atop the tall clouds, moderns inevitably experience psychologically and spiritually, toxic symptoms. These approximate those literally occurring to flight pilots. When the pressure drops and one has sailed far too high, then a lethal hypoxia takes over; an oxygen starvation.

The symptoms of hypoxia in a person who flies too high? Their discernment, memory, alertness, coordination, and ability to make calculations and good decisions, all these are vastly impaired.

The one who flies so very high on such unpredictable updrafts becomes drowsy, dizzy, and either notably belligerent or else fatally rapt — instead of dependably rational.

As any old-guard, “cold nose” (flying with radar turned off) pilot knows, once deep into such severe lapses, the fall from the sky commences.

Loss of consciousness, sense of inflation, thinking one is invulnerable, loss of judgment. So it was in the mythic time of Icarus, and so it goes in our modern times too…

Primary Cause of Fall Wasn’t Flying Too Close to the Sun

Many recall that the story goes, that Icarus flew too close to the sun which melted the wax holding the feathers to his wings. Thus, he fell to his death.

But there is ‘a lost story’ too, one that is seldom told, an ancient fable for modern times. As I analyze the mythos, I see that Icarus would never have fallen from the sky if the one who bragged he would and could guide him, had not failed Icarus utterly, that is, Icarus’ own father, Daedelus.

Icarus was set up into the sky by his father. But he was also set up by his father to fall, for Daedelus was well known to have an unpaid debt of blood on his hands from previous misuses of power.

Thus, Icarus, high-flier-to-be, was not just a son of a famous father. Icarus was the son of a murderer; the son of a disrupter of kingdoms; the son of a man who tried to play both sides in stealth. Icarus was the son of a man who appropriated honors and garb normally reserved for real heroes who had earned such through brave and perilous works of great heart and soul, mind and body. This Daedelus had not done.

Icarus was not the first man that Daedelus had led to the heights but who did not return alive.

The Unpaid Sins and Cunning of A Father Who Falsely Holds Himself Out as Experienced Guide, Gives His Son No Authentic Power to Choose to Be Different or Opposed to His Father, Thereby Binding The Son Into A Small World of Unquestioning Obediance… Even When Logic Alone Would Press for Inquiries at Depth

Previously, Daedelus had murdered a young craftsman whom he envied. His victim was a truly inventive soul whom Daedelus feared would be seen as a greater master builder than he himself. He threw the young inventor from a tower to his death. The stories go that Daedelus then lied about his bald crime, saying the young man simply tripped all by himself and thus fell to his death.

But as in the affairs of mere modern humans too, there was an unimpeachable eye-witness who saw it all and who cried out the truth. Thus, Daedelus, caught in his grave falsehood, fled. He hid, exiled in more ways than one, in a prison of his own deceits.

Yet, still allying with evil, Daedelus next empowered the enchanted wife of King Minos into an unholy alliance with a sub-human creature. From this, the queen brought forth a beast-man in the form of a monster who raged overland, plaguing the innocent populace.

Daedelus next, playing double agent, built a maze that restrained this beast-man, the minotaur. Daedelus played both ends against the middle: secretly enabling the creation of a monster, and then publicly holding himself out as ‘the one’ who contained the monster, all the while pretending to be a great champion of the people after all.

Sometimes the tempests and travails of the ancient world seem to leak into present time, don’t they?…

Daedelus’ very name means ‘artificer’ the maker of artifice in order to expedite, to trick, or deceive others …

That he displayed no remorse or sorrow for taking a life, or fracturing the lives of many others, or enabling a beast that murdered many people: That he had no regret for disrupting a kingdom, nor for leading others astray… thereby the blood debt of the father Daedelus, went unpaid.

If One Were To Look For The Causes of Those Who Fall From The Sky, First Look To Who Has Fathered Them

Look for who has fathered the son in self-interested, incompetent, or non-vigilant ways; those fathers who think of unleashing mightiness rather than teaching mightiness and its ethics, those fathers who have no clear self boundary about ‘what is enough.’

Thus, it is not that Icarus only naively flew too close to the sun and thus fell. No, it was far more that Icarus inherited his father’s unpaid blood debt… and in the dark of some kind of pre-human psychology, there is thus a requirement: someone has to pay this debt of blood…or else force someone else to pay it

Thus, Icarus thereafter, misled and negligently unprepared by his father about the many perils of flying either too low or too high, the young Icarus paid his father’s old blood debt with his own life. He paid by never awakening from his own naiveté. The blinders he wore, were such soft ones.

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