We Are The Brand New Ancients
“And we are still mythical:
call us by our names.
We are perfect because of our imperfections.
We must stay hopeful;
We must stay patient–
because when they excavate the modern day
they’ll find us: the Brand New Ancients”
~Kae Tempest
One of the most powerful things we can do right now is remember who we are. One of the most powerful things we can do right now is remember what the original instructions are. It is remembering our essence as human beings.
This remembering is not dogmatic nor does it mean that we are all going to remember the same thing in the same way. It means that we remember that we are all part of the unified field of the divine, that we are forms of the eternal, that we are collaborators in how that field is shaped and rises in the material realm.
And what we are experiencing is not a new condition.
In fact it is a primordial force that has always traveled through time with us. Our ancestors dealt with it over and over and it is a primary cause of human oppression and its side-effect, human suffering.
Which is why the ancients then and now, designed the tools and techniques to take that force and turn it into something generative. Some call it the force of evil, though it’s really the force of destruction; a necessary phase of creation, the pulling apart of things, the return to chaos.
When the destructive phase of creation is ignored, denied, and repressed like it is in our culture that only values growth, it doesn’t go away. Just the opposite, the unexpressed energy just gains momentum. It grows, often into a monster or what some have called an “egregore”.
An egregore is a non-physical entity that has power and agency to act on the material world. It is a psychic pattern of life, a natural aspect of the vital force that has energy. That energy will not disappear because we have exiled it. The vital force can not be stopped and will always find a way to release into the world. The energetic patterns of destruction will destroy and the more we try to stop it the stronger it becomes.
Our modern narratives of purity and moral superiority, our rigid categorizations, the orthodoxies of the left and the right, BOTH, expel the contradictory forces needed to actually experience the fullness of the generative “now”.
One of the places we see this during ancient times is in practices of the ecstatic cults. Each winter, it has been said, Apollo would leave the temple of Delphi and Dionysus would come. Apollo represents order, reason, and the rational whereas Dionysus represents chaos, the irrational, and the dissolution of order. The people, during winter, through devotion and ritual, would allow Dionysus his due, allow the deliberate unbinding of sensible to liberate raw life-giving elements within it.
When we design a cultural system that only intends consistency/sameness or fixity, the expression of the rational, that pushes constantly for unrestrained growth, that refuses sacrifice and cycles, that makes the expression of eros taboo, and actively denies death( ie. Western style capitalism and patriarchy), the chaos has nowhere to go. And because it must go somewhere, it goes to the Underworld and its expression comes up in the shadows of society.
When I say “ancients then and now” I mean several things; one being that time is an illusion, a trick or you might say a “technology” that we have all learned how to use in order to bring forth, birth, matter.
The material, the physical, and the structures that are built by nature all use time to pull together the atomic bonds necessary to hold the imprint of the unseen in a way that will allow us to not only see it, but engage with it. “It” being creation.
We know that time is a construct, and a mutable one at that, because of physics. Though physics has barely begun to understand time, we know that it is not what it seems.
We know that it is NOT LINEAR!
We know that linearity is a result of how we use time, not how time itself operates. Time is only linear when we order it that way. When we build temporal structures of relationship to our experience. For example “before” and “after” are relational to our immediate “now”. Once that “now” is gone, “before” and “after” both refer to something that has changed.
To experience a different “time” other than the “now” we are currently in, we have to step into different timelines. We have to cross into other “nows”, other “before” and “afters”. Going “back in time” from our current “now” will never get us there. Because it keeps us on the surface of reality instead of bringing us into the unified field beneath it where all the nows, befores, and afters of existence emerge.
To time travel we have to know how to drop into the “All” or the “unified field” and then, depending on our intentions, use a map to find our way to the knowledge and wisdom we are seeking.
“The idea that a well-defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion, an illegitimate extrapolation of our own experience.”Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
There are many ways to do this but one of the most accessible is through poetry. Poetry and words, not only carry the imprint, the knowledge and wisdom, that our ancestors discovered when they themselves dropped into the space of the timeless, but also can be a code or spell to take us there as well.
I’ve recently been immersed in the study of the Orphic hymns. The Orphic hymns are a collection of hymns originally written in ancient Greek and attributed to the mythological figure Orpheus, though no one knows who (or how many whos) actually wrote them. Each hymn addresses a different deity and calls them and their unique powers into a ritual or sacred practice. Each phrase, word, and even each letter of the words within the hymns is link to multiple meanings and layers of meaning.
One of our recent guest teachers for my course “Della Medicina” was Dafni Mangalousi. Dafni is a native Greek speaker who practices the Hellenic Asklepian tradition.
Dafni shared with us the meaning of each letter in the word “Oneiroi” (dreams”) from the hymn to Oneiros. Each letter is a journey or a bridge from one part of the journey to another. Each letter, which is also a sound and vibration, creates a vortex, a pattern of consciousness, that when we speak it, brings us in contact with that pattern.
Each hymn is written in dactylic hexameter which is a rhythmic arrangement of syllables. We know that rhythm audio stimulation activates certain states of consciousness via the entrainment of brainwaves.
This is why it’s important to note that the hymns were originally spoken out loud and likely sung. Here is a link to listen to the hymns spoken in ancient Greek language:https://librivox.org/orphic-hymns/
Whether it’s the Orphic hymns, other sacred ancient texts, myths, and even our ancestral folk traditions, we can find the openings to universal wisdom through our contact and engagement with them. Our ancestors all experienced the traumas of life on Earth whether natural disasters, famine, or colonization and found ways to survive and even sometimes thrive within them.
What we are experiencing now (particularly in the US but it seems to be a trend elsewhere as well) is a continuation and iteration of state violence and authoritarianism whether via fascism, communism, or any other extremist anti-social ideology.
I have only to think about my grandparents fleeing fascist Italy or my great great grandparents escaping genocide during the Potato Famine in Ireland. It doesn’t take that many generations to forget not only how quickly our supposed freedoms can be taken from us by the ruling class, but also how powerful we are to have not only survived past expressions of this but to have survived with our humanity, our beauty as a species, intact.
We see this every time. We see how well we care for each other and how good we are at forming underground networks that carry us and the wisdom of the eons forward despite the unnatural hierarchies of oppression.
“Boys around the table, mapping out their strategies, kings of mountains one day dust. A lesson learned, a loving god, and things in their own time, in nothing more do I trust. We own nothing, nothing is ours, not even love so fierce it burns like baby stars. But this poverty is our greatest gift; the weightlessness of us as things around begin to shift”
It’s this that I remember when I’m in the depths of despair. Though it’s easy to collapse in it, and I have. But sometimes I remember “this must be how my ancestors felt” and I feel instantly connected to them and their strength, tenacity, and innovation as well as a part of the mythic continuation of the unified field from which all of this emerges. And then I know
We are The Brand New Ancients:
See - what we have here is all that we’ve always had.
We have jealousy
and tenderness and curses and gifts.
But the plight of a people who have forgotten their myths
and imagine that somehow now is all that there is
is a sorry plight,
all isolation and worry -
but the life in your veins
it is godly, heroic.
You were born for greatness;
Believe it. Know it.
Take it from the tears of the poets.