The Charities or Graces are divinities whose power is beauty and all the qualities of charis – beauty, grace, goodwill and favor – as it manifests in the world and the cosmos.

Hesiod (Greek epic 8th or 7th B.C.) tells of their birth – “Eurynome (Broad Pasture), the daughter of Okeanos, beautiful in form, bare him [Zeus] three fair-cheeked Kharites (Graces), Aglaia (Glory, Beauty), and Euphrosyne (Merriment), and lovely Thaleia (Festivity), from whose eyes as they glanced flowed love that unnerves the limbs: and beautiful is their glance beneath their brows” (Theogony 907 ff trans. Evelyn-White.)

A love that unnerves the limbs…I love that line. And yes, their representation in art through the ages certainly has that power.

We are nigh upon celebrating Thanksgiving, expressing  gratitude for what we have and what we can share. Here at OPUS we wish you a holiday that is graced by the Charities and their beautiful glances.

Judy has been a volunteer here at OPUS in our preservation program for over a year. Each week she digitizes the audio lectures we have of James Hillman, Marion Woodman and a few others sprinkled in, though these are her favorites. These lectures are on audio cassette tapes –you remember those, right?! We asked Judy to share what being at OPUS means to her:

“The excitement and joy of being here at OPUS is reconnecting with depth psychology. I have no one in my life right now involved in all this stuff. So to come back and listen to these people whose books I have read, whose lectures and conferences I have attended, is the chance to get reacquainted, reminded. I am working on my dreams, asking ‘what is my fate, my destiny’? And to work on this again now, as I am in a completely different place in my life, is powerful.

Being here helps get me back to the important things and way from the minutiae. After a couple of hours of listening to the tapes I realize ‘oh, right, this is what is important in life – psyche, soul’ – not the being busy, all the doing.”

We are in gratitude to Judy for her time and dedication. We are also in deep thankfulness to our donors who make the digitization preservation program possible. Your donations help us purchase the equipment that allows us to preserve the fragile materials in the collections – audio cassette tapes, photographs, and slides.

To show our thanks we have created an audio archive page on our website for you to listen to the lectures we are digitizing and directly experience the benefit of this work. Click here and enjoy!

“We need images and myths through which we can see who we are and what we might become. As our dreams make evident, the psyche’s own language is that of image, and not idea. The psyche needs images to nurture its own growth; for images provide a knowledge that we can interiorize rather than ‘apply,’ can take to that place in ourselves where there is water and where reeds and grasses grow” (Downing, The Goddess, 2).

Sulis was a water goddess who presided over the hot springs at Bath, now Somerset. These springs were called Aquae Sulis and had curative powers.

Sulis

She was one of the most important Roman/British deities and though a water goddess she also had solar powers which some claim is due to the heat of the springs. Another connection is that Sulis comes from the root suil which means ‘eye’. The connection between the eye and the sun as eye of the heavens is ancient and widespread across cultures.

The 'sacred pool' of Sulis. Roman Baths, Bath.

In this video Joseph Campbell reveals the symbolism of solar and lunar consciousness that lies within the ritual activities of bullfighting, a serpent ritual and marriage.  This is how it breaks down: the bull fighter or the priestess is the solar figure, the consciousness principle that is moving towards the birth of the new. The bull or serpent is the lunar principle, the moon power which seeks to unify and perpetuate life as it was. When the two figures meet as with the priestess and the serpent what is a ritual enactment of the sacred marriage – the solar and lunar unite – conjunction.

This video is a brief excerpt from interviews filmed with Joseph Campbell shortly before his death in 1987, previously unreleased by the Joseph Campbell Foundation – http://www.jcf.org

“The artist is the true seer and prophet of his [sic] century, the justifier of life and as such, of course, a revolutionary far more fundamental in his penetration of the social mask of his day than any fanatic idealist spilling blood over the pavement in the name simply of another unnatural mask” (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space).

Artemis the Hanged One is one of the virgin Goddesses fertility epitaph’s. The image of a hanged figure and fertility doesn’t seem to work quite right at first and so we consult Robert Graves who writes that dolls were hung from fruit trees to ensure good crops, a practice recounted in Crete, Mycenae, Rhodes and Arcadia (Graves, The Greek Myths 298). The sanctuary to Artemis the Hanged One was at Condyleia in Arcadia.

Artemis, Athenian-red figure lekythos C5th B.C., State Hermitage Museum

This connection between sacred fertility and tree worship is ancient – think of the Trees of Life in various mythologies like Yggdrasil of the Nordic Eddas and those of knowledge in the Judeo-Christian Garden of Eden.

Frequently it is assumed that because Artemis was a virgin goddess she is not connected to fertility or growth. In fact this is one of the divine paradoxes in mythic figures for not only was Artemis understood as the fertile energy of flora and fauna  but she was also invoked by women in childbirth by her name Eileithyia.

“O Lovely One [Artemis], you are so gracious to the tender whelps of fierce lions, and take delight in the suckling young of every wild creature that roams the field.” – Aeschylus, Agamemnon 140

“[Artemis] over births presiding, and thyself a maid, to labour pangs imparting ready aid: dissolver of the zone, and wrinkled care [midwifes].” – Orphic Hymn 36 to Artemis

“We have lost our containers; chaos threatens. Without rituals to make a firm demarcation between the profane and sacred, between what is us and what is not us, we tend to identify with archetypal patterns of being – hero, Father, Mother, etc. We forget that we are individual human beings; we allow ourselves to be inflated by the power of the unconscious and usurp it for our own. And we do this not knowing what we do and that we do it” (The Pregnant Virgin, 19).

OPUS awarded 13 New Mythos Grants in the winter of 2009 and all year we have been gifted in return with learning of new gems hidden in the manuscript and image collections. One of the inspirations for the grant came form Joe Campbell, of course.

In the famous “Power of Myth” interviews with  Bill Moyers, Campbell said “the only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it. And what it will have to deal with will be exactly what all myths have dealt with – the maturation of the individual, from dependency through adulthood, through maturity, and then to the exit; and then how to relate to this society and how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos. That’s what the myths have all talked about, and what this one’s got to talk about. But the society that it’s got to talk about is the society of the planet. And until that gets going, you don’t have anything.”

Craig Chalquist’s New Mythos research project focuses on the language of the Planet and I see that as a thread to the myth of the planet that Campbell was referring to. Chalquist’s preliminary research report is titled “Earthrise:Decoding the Speech of the Planet” and he writes:

“If Earth were a sentient non-human being trying to speak to us, how would we decode the message?

As the paradigm of modernity—a “Big Machine” worldview of reality as subject to linear operations of interlocking parts—continues to give way to a more comprehensive, systemic, “Deep Web” understanding of the cosmos as alive and participatory, forms of knowledge abandoned by modernity rise to the surface once again. One of these is a view of the world as animated, sensitive, and reactive, a pre-industrial view held by all our indigenous ancestors and by certain later alchemists, naturalists, and poets uninvested in mining and consuming a world of supposedly dead matter.

This essay proposes to “listen in” on the depths of nature by combining what Goethe developed as an “exact sensorial imagination” with depth-psychological methods of symbol amplification. This allows us to interpret natural events like storms and earthquakes as meaningful symbols: non-verbal, imagistic words in the vocabulary of animate Earth.”

You can read the essay on his website at www.chalquist.com/earthrise.html or visit us at www.opusarchives.org