Local journalist, Starshine Roshell, has published a story in the current Santa Barbara Magazine on Jane Hollister Wheelwright. She writes, “Known for being curiously fearless and wise, passionate and plainspoken, author, feminist, and stewardess of the land Jane Hollister Wheelwright literally walked softly but carried a big stick.” For a poignant and illuminating look into Jane’s legacy, with lovely photos of family and the beloved Hollister Ranch, click here to read the full article.

This frieze is from the temple of Zeus and Athena at Pergamon, currently housed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The scene of Hekate using a torch in the battle of the Gods and Goddesses with the Serpent-Footed Giants that were born of Gaia  is described in Apollodorus (The Library) 1.6

Thank you to Richard Buchen for sharing this image!

The Ram’s horns are so often associated with a powerful and vigorous vitality displayed in the image of the Ram, who has become a rich symbol for, among many things, power and/or sexual, creative energy. Similar to Pan, the goat-god, the zodiacal sign of Aries, or Amun-Re, Egyptian sun-god, these figures tell of a solar illumination of both Earth and consciousness.

However, if we focus on the shape and curvature of the spiraling horns, something feminine also shines forth. Goethe, in his development of The Metamorphosis of Plants, deepened his observation on the repeating patterns of the spiral found in the natural world, calling it the Spiral Tendency. In these forms, manifesting in the vine and seed, for instance, he found a feminine drive that worked to balance and support the upright, linear line – the stem of the plant – Goethe experienced as being masculine in nature.

In the spiral there is energy both masculine and feminine. In it’s curvilinear form, we find a graceful strength – a burrowing, supportive structure; while through the Ram’s battering horns arise not only an onslaught of  hierarchy and violent bravado, but also a music echoing throughout mountain ranges, heralding signs of the creative spirit.

“We follow the clown into the circus by entering a perspective of rebellion against the dayworld order; rebel without cause or violence. Turning topsy-turvy, we deliteralize every physical law and social convention in the smallest things that we take for granted.  Through him we enter the perspective of the fantastic soul, clown as depth psychologist. Imagine, Freud and Jung, two old clowns.” (Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld,” (p. 180)

Our July eNewsletter is now available – click here to read.

If you haven’t done so, join our email listand receive this direct to your inbox.

The Melissae or Melissai were the Greek nymphs of honey bees. Priestesses at Aphrodite’s temple in Eryx were called Melissai thus conferring to the goddess the title of Queen Bee. It is said that the Melissai priestesses would enter into visionary trances by eating bee pollen.

Bee pendant found in Crete

The Duende?

From out of the alchemically green-gold valleys and hillsides of Andalusia, Spain, comes the myth and aesthetic experience of the duende. From “duen de casa” or, Master of the House, the duende is reminiscent of the Trickster, said to bring havoc and interruption when the home is upended with internal strife. More, this figure relates to the Self with a mysterious, chythonic-infused passion for both life and death.  The duende can be that very center and circumference of psyche: irrational, earthy, present to death, and possessing a “dash of the diabolical.”

Federico Garcia Lorca

An admixture of Gypsy, Moor, and Middle-Eastern influences, this Spanish hobgoblin took on a new character through the verse and prose of poet, Federico Garcia Lorca. In Lorca’s imagination, the duende is embodied by song, dance – both lyrical and the particular pattern formed within the confines of the bullring – and the literary arts. “Black tones,” or the “cante jondo” (Deep Song), as Lorca described them, rose from within the soul of the performer, enfolding the witnessing audience. As was often heard in these moments of collective participation, the excited shout, “That had much duende!” would descend over the crowd.

These occurrences of duende give an embodied example of shared empathy: when groups and communities enter a mythic consciousness, recognizing the profundity of a personal or cultural grief.  In the Andalusian psyche, this grief has a beauty sublime, black, and yet verdantly green.  From Lorca’s Deep Song and Other Prose: “These black sounds are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that gives us the substance of art…. The duende, then, is a power, not a work; it is a struggle not a thought” (43).