Rhea
XVII The Star
PHYSICAL FORM
The myth of Rhea, Saturn's Queen, is the tale of the pre-Hellenic, orgiastic cult of the Great Goddess. She is mother or grandmother to the Olympians. She knows their patterns intimately, for they emerged from her originally. She is our primordial instinctual life -- the earth.
She was worshipped throughout the Aegean area, including Crete and Babylon. Her symbols include the moon and swan. In her Phrygian form she is known as the drum or tambourine-playing Cybele. She is said to have invented the primordial drum, at least in the form of the hand-held circular drum with tiny cymbals on it.
Jungian David L. Miller makes an interesting study of Rhea as Grandmother in "Images in a Psychology of Inflation" by examining the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood (Facing the Gods, Spring Publications, 1980). It has been said our favorite fairytale often conditions or reflects our life story. But the metaphors it expresses may come into play in our lives whether we feel any affinity toward it or not. This story illustrates a physical reality of the predatory spirit that lurks in our own neighborhoods, not just the corridors of the mind.
Otto Rank linked Kronos (Cronos, Saturn), consort of Rhea, to Red Riding Hood's wolf, echoing the relentless
devouring nature of the passage of time and life transitions. As Magna Mater, the goddess actually shares in the
devouring nature of the wolf as unsympathetic devourer of souls: "Nature, red in tooth and claw." No one here
gets out alive.
Myths and fairy tales contain many layers of meaning. This one includes the theme of victim/victimizer. It serves
as advanced warning to all that is trustingly child-like in us that the twisted needs of others are to be looked at with
a suspicious eye. These users can inflict incalculable damage, loss, grief. They see what they want and take it.
There are three basic character types, each with characteristic defensive styles: dependent, controlling, and
competetive. The mature personality is an interdependent mixture of them all. Character is shaped by painful
difficulties. The dependent type was challenged by stress early in life, using denial to avoid pain. Dependency is a
passive, helpless, powerless perspective reacting to deprivation and abandonment.
The controller becomes falsely independent by sacrificing sensitivity to the feelings of others. Controllers use rigid
boundaries, manipulative pretense, arrogance and power to protect themselves from abandonment or vulnerability. The competetive type simply must win at any cost. This is a modern version of the conqueror. Even the heroic can have an exploitative nature, exemplified for example by the sexual predation of public sports figures. These are the characters in all forms of sex addiction, male or female.
In this tale of passage through the dark forest of adolescence toward maturity, the innocent child becomes prey to
sexual or other abuse at large in the world. The flower of innocence is calculatingly devoured by the ravenous
hungers of the predatory consciousness who seeks entry through disguise, deception and compulsion bent on
fulfilling his own twisted or compulsive needs. Red Riding Hood is a metaphor for loss of innocence, the needy
vulnerable child, devoured by predatory forces. She is consumed just as her grandmother was consumed.
But we do not have to be adolescent for the tale to grip us. Myths and tales are always happen-ing. It happens
any time our innocence is assaulted or threatened, when we are victimized by the mindfuckers of the world taking
what they want at our emotional and spiritual expense. Three basic components of the personality include the
Parent, Child, and Adult.
When we are lured into our innocent child-like state, even the mothering parent cannot save us from the emotional
deflowering by the Big Bad Wolf, the conquest fantasy of the predator, the victimizer. Real evil does exist out
there in the world at every level. At the collective level, corporations and governments rape the earth, mercilessly
grabbing what they want, using up the resources of future generations, and exploiting the masses to serve their
unquenchable greed.
Sociopaths, manipulators, controllers, and addicts can prey and feed without conscience, consuming us in their
own hideous distorted vision. Malignant narcissists, soulless individuals play with the lives and sanity of others,
even those they claim to love, without remorse. When the well runs dry, they simply move on to another vulnerable victim they have yet to drain. They leave a trail littered with tears and "bodies."
Miller notes that the tale itself seems somewhat inflated, that no one -- however innocent -- could be fooled by the
big teeth and eyes of the assailant. But in real life, how often are smart, honest people fooled by calculating
misrepresentation, by the wolf in sheep's clothing? It happens, and our prisons and divorce courts are full of the
small percentage who are caught in the act and brought to accountability.
Miller looks most closely at the role of the Grandmother, who he identifies with Rhea, the primal grandmother. It
is hard to see her active role in the story except that her neediness calls Red Riding Hood into the dangerous
forest to meet her inevitable fate.
Why has her mother sent her into harm's way, unescorted? What is she doing while Little Red is away? Where is
the absent father in all of this? Societal constraints and consequences? Is grandma the role-model for the
devouring, the continuity or chronic nature of the ever-recurrent process? If so, it seems neither "great" nor
"grand", but a legacy of inter-generational dysfunctionality, not inflation or idealization, though it is a tale of
disillusionment..
"What is the difference between "Great" and "Grand"? Is it that the phrase "Great Mother," implies a judgement about Mother, even an inflated idealizing of someone who is wife to a man and a mother to their children? Does not the phrase "Grand Mother" (as in "grandmother") connote a less inflated image of one who is mother to both wife and husband, that is, to beings who themselves now have children as she had a generation ago?
Is she ("grandmother") not often seen as confidante of the children of her children, a bit removed from immediate family messes? After all, she is also a Mother-In-Law, the butt of so many jokes. She has already suffered the Mother-business and, knowing how seldom it seems Great, she is simply Grand. To say Great about Mother may already represent an inflated perspective."
Perhaps the most relevant of the few myths connected with Rhea is her role in respect to Demeter/Persephone.
The grim dark god of the underworld, Hades was the son of Rhea, as well as his brothers Zeus and Poseidon His
domain is bordered by the rivers of no-return (Styx): eternal woe (Acheron), a stream of fire (Pyriphlegethon), the
river of weeping and wailing (Kykotos), and forgetfullness (Lethe).
Smitten by her beauty, Hades carried Persephone (child-self) off to his dark world, deaf to the cries of her mother
(parent-self). Psychologically, Hades is a conquest fantasy. More than an underlying fantasy, it gets acted out
concretely, literally if unconsciously, in the lives of millions of people each and every day.
"Persephone, hitherto an innocent maid, suddenly finds herself in Hades. The bottom had fallen out of her innocence. Swallowed by the abyss, she suffered the depths deeply; never again could it be the same for her. She had tasted the soul-food of the Underworld, the rough, niggling little seeds of the pomegranate. Demeter, the Great Mother, wanted her back in the light of life while her abductor and king, Hades, wanted her constantly in the depths. But Rhea had a Grand-er vision than either -- some of the time in the light, and some in the dark. It is as if Rhea knows we belong to both realms."
"But how can she manage this sort of solution where great Zeus fails? How does she accomplish this back-and-forth between 'inflation' in one direction (Demeter) and 'inflation' in the other (Hades).
In a drama by Euripedes, Rhea plays the drum. This motif is not only pre-hellenic and pre-Homeric, it is decidedly shamanistic. Rhea is that shamanistic wise old herb lady living deep in the forest, in touch with the primordial rhythms of night and darkness.
A good example of Rhea is found in the novel and civil-war era movie, Cold Mountain. The wise old woman shepherdess and healer in the movie nurses the journeying hero back to life, making the necessary sacrifices on his
behalf. She seems to appear from nowhere to rescue and tend to him. She honors the cycle of life and death. She brings his soul back up from the gates of death. She is the go-between between what is past and future, between what is known and unknown. Then she sends him homeward, marching to his own drum.
"And it is implied that the go-between rhythms of Rhea are a salvation which comes from below -- soul's beatings." (Miller, 1980).
This is perhaps our attraction to the drone and thumping of rock, disco, and blues, of trance, of industrial, punk,
tribal rhythms, of rap, hiphop, soul, and other primal beat music. It actively drives our internal rhythms and
transports us much as the shaman's drum provides the vehicle for soul travel.
"In shamanism the profound drummings are contexts for the magic of healing...If one could see things in this way, then it would be in her drumming rhythms that Rhea is mother to so many Gods, being in her way Grand rather than Great, as were Athena, Aphrodite, Hera and Artemis. Ever close to the titanic, even loving it in Kronos, Rhea does not totally
identify with either Demeter or Hades, life or death, ego or self, persona or archetype. Her deeper sense of timing dances between these beats. Her way seems to acknowledge inflation without succumbing."
Rhea stands at the threshold of consciousness, the mouth of the cave to the Underworld, beating softly but
rhythmically on her drum. There is a rhythm to the psyche. It is this rhythm that we try to catch in the therapy
process.
"How can we not use the names of Gods without presumption, without puffing up our ideas mythologically, without overstating some mortal sense of things, without beginning to feel that we know something? Is it not always a danger signal of soul when something Grand seems Great?
"James Hillman has spoken forcefully about this danger in archetypal psychology. He warns against "reducing archetypes to allegories of disease" (Negative Inflation?) and against making "a new nominalism" of the Gods of Greece, a "new (or old) grid of classificatory terms" (positive inflation?). "We are not," he says, "looking for a new way to classify...but for a new way of experiencing..." Hillman reminds us that mythic thinking, like dream-knowing is indirect, metaphoric, and poetic. The Gods are not "things" and we are not the Gods. "They are the likenesses to happenings," he says."
"The mistake...is a lurking ego-perspective that seems to want rational knowledge and psychological control. Thinking or saying, "She is into Hestia," is not better than declaring, "He has an anima problem," if by either I feel I know something. A mythological depth-psychology deficient in poetic sensibility is not better than the behaviorism of
ego-psychologies. Viewing poetically, as Jung seems to imply, puts the emphasis where it belongs, thatis, on likeness, even as one speaks of Gods in relation to self. The attitude in this perspective denies to so-called "ego" the certainty and clarity on which the "I" prefers always to center."
"Rhea...encourages us to see in the images, not literal identifications, neither some actual "this" nor a really real "that," but the rhythm between "this" and "that", between ego and self, between persona and archetype. These betweens take one deep into the beatings drummed in underworlds of soul....."Godlikeness," in the context of Rhea's
mythos, may seem more Grand than Great. Her perspective, though it be divine, focuses less on some "God" and more on a poetizing "likeness."
"What is given us are images and the images are archetypal. They are images of Gods. Soul's task is to let the variety of imaginal experience in life become metaphor, listening for the likenesses. Then therapy and life itself begin to be sensed as underworld poetry, not psychology but psychopoetics, and one connects with the many imaginal likenesses, not as ego's literal identifications, but "as that which he is not."
There is a relationship between metaphorical perception and healing journeys.
Recovery is an intellectual model that mobilizes our recuperative faculties and emotional resilience. Recovery is
best exemplified in the 12-step programs that address addictive behaviors, including sexual predation. But much
of the basic process is the same for emotional wounding. Recovery, whether as sex addict or victim, is about
grieving (lost childhood, for example) and transcending loss, understanding the lifelong impact of grief and how to
make it meaningful.
When we sustain a deep emotional wound we must cleanse that wound and do the psychic surgery that allows it
to fully heal, so we can navigate successfully through life once again without the detours of unresolved issues. The
royal road to recovery is through connecting with our feelings and finding creative ways of expressing them. They
are healed in cyclic giving and receiving of support and compassion. That is one reason that 12-step programs
use the sponsor system, as well as for its role modelling value.
The myth of Rhea, Saturn's Queen, is the tale of the pre-Hellenic, orgiastic cult of the Great Goddess. She is mother or grandmother to the Olympians. She knows their patterns intimately, for they emerged from her originally. She is our primordial instinctual life -- the earth.
She was worshipped throughout the Aegean area, including Crete and Babylon. Her symbols include the moon and swan. In her Phrygian form she is known as the drum or tambourine-playing Cybele. She is said to have invented the primordial drum, at least in the form of the hand-held circular drum with tiny cymbals on it.
Jungian David L. Miller makes an interesting study of Rhea as Grandmother in "Images in a Psychology of Inflation" by examining the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood (Facing the Gods, Spring Publications, 1980). It has been said our favorite fairytale often conditions or reflects our life story. But the metaphors it expresses may come into play in our lives whether we feel any affinity toward it or not. This story illustrates a physical reality of the predatory spirit that lurks in our own neighborhoods, not just the corridors of the mind.
Otto Rank linked Kronos (Cronos, Saturn), consort of Rhea, to Red Riding Hood's wolf, echoing the relentless
devouring nature of the passage of time and life transitions. As Magna Mater, the goddess actually shares in the
devouring nature of the wolf as unsympathetic devourer of souls: "Nature, red in tooth and claw." No one here
gets out alive.
Myths and fairy tales contain many layers of meaning. This one includes the theme of victim/victimizer. It serves
as advanced warning to all that is trustingly child-like in us that the twisted needs of others are to be looked at with
a suspicious eye. These users can inflict incalculable damage, loss, grief. They see what they want and take it.
There are three basic character types, each with characteristic defensive styles: dependent, controlling, and
competetive. The mature personality is an interdependent mixture of them all. Character is shaped by painful
difficulties. The dependent type was challenged by stress early in life, using denial to avoid pain. Dependency is a
passive, helpless, powerless perspective reacting to deprivation and abandonment.
The controller becomes falsely independent by sacrificing sensitivity to the feelings of others. Controllers use rigid
boundaries, manipulative pretense, arrogance and power to protect themselves from abandonment or vulnerability. The competetive type simply must win at any cost. This is a modern version of the conqueror. Even the heroic can have an exploitative nature, exemplified for example by the sexual predation of public sports figures. These are the characters in all forms of sex addiction, male or female.
In this tale of passage through the dark forest of adolescence toward maturity, the innocent child becomes prey to
sexual or other abuse at large in the world. The flower of innocence is calculatingly devoured by the ravenous
hungers of the predatory consciousness who seeks entry through disguise, deception and compulsion bent on
fulfilling his own twisted or compulsive needs. Red Riding Hood is a metaphor for loss of innocence, the needy
vulnerable child, devoured by predatory forces. She is consumed just as her grandmother was consumed.
But we do not have to be adolescent for the tale to grip us. Myths and tales are always happen-ing. It happens
any time our innocence is assaulted or threatened, when we are victimized by the mindfuckers of the world taking
what they want at our emotional and spiritual expense. Three basic components of the personality include the
Parent, Child, and Adult.
When we are lured into our innocent child-like state, even the mothering parent cannot save us from the emotional
deflowering by the Big Bad Wolf, the conquest fantasy of the predator, the victimizer. Real evil does exist out
there in the world at every level. At the collective level, corporations and governments rape the earth, mercilessly
grabbing what they want, using up the resources of future generations, and exploiting the masses to serve their
unquenchable greed.
Sociopaths, manipulators, controllers, and addicts can prey and feed without conscience, consuming us in their
own hideous distorted vision. Malignant narcissists, soulless individuals play with the lives and sanity of others,
even those they claim to love, without remorse. When the well runs dry, they simply move on to another vulnerable victim they have yet to drain. They leave a trail littered with tears and "bodies."
Miller notes that the tale itself seems somewhat inflated, that no one -- however innocent -- could be fooled by the
big teeth and eyes of the assailant. But in real life, how often are smart, honest people fooled by calculating
misrepresentation, by the wolf in sheep's clothing? It happens, and our prisons and divorce courts are full of the
small percentage who are caught in the act and brought to accountability.
Miller looks most closely at the role of the Grandmother, who he identifies with Rhea, the primal grandmother. It
is hard to see her active role in the story except that her neediness calls Red Riding Hood into the dangerous
forest to meet her inevitable fate.
Why has her mother sent her into harm's way, unescorted? What is she doing while Little Red is away? Where is
the absent father in all of this? Societal constraints and consequences? Is grandma the role-model for the
devouring, the continuity or chronic nature of the ever-recurrent process? If so, it seems neither "great" nor
"grand", but a legacy of inter-generational dysfunctionality, not inflation or idealization, though it is a tale of
disillusionment..
"What is the difference between "Great" and "Grand"? Is it that the phrase "Great Mother," implies a judgement about Mother, even an inflated idealizing of someone who is wife to a man and a mother to their children? Does not the phrase "Grand Mother" (as in "grandmother") connote a less inflated image of one who is mother to both wife and husband, that is, to beings who themselves now have children as she had a generation ago?
Is she ("grandmother") not often seen as confidante of the children of her children, a bit removed from immediate family messes? After all, she is also a Mother-In-Law, the butt of so many jokes. She has already suffered the Mother-business and, knowing how seldom it seems Great, she is simply Grand. To say Great about Mother may already represent an inflated perspective."
Perhaps the most relevant of the few myths connected with Rhea is her role in respect to Demeter/Persephone.
The grim dark god of the underworld, Hades was the son of Rhea, as well as his brothers Zeus and Poseidon His
domain is bordered by the rivers of no-return (Styx): eternal woe (Acheron), a stream of fire (Pyriphlegethon), the
river of weeping and wailing (Kykotos), and forgetfullness (Lethe).
Smitten by her beauty, Hades carried Persephone (child-self) off to his dark world, deaf to the cries of her mother
(parent-self). Psychologically, Hades is a conquest fantasy. More than an underlying fantasy, it gets acted out
concretely, literally if unconsciously, in the lives of millions of people each and every day.
"Persephone, hitherto an innocent maid, suddenly finds herself in Hades. The bottom had fallen out of her innocence. Swallowed by the abyss, she suffered the depths deeply; never again could it be the same for her. She had tasted the soul-food of the Underworld, the rough, niggling little seeds of the pomegranate. Demeter, the Great Mother, wanted her back in the light of life while her abductor and king, Hades, wanted her constantly in the depths. But Rhea had a Grand-er vision than either -- some of the time in the light, and some in the dark. It is as if Rhea knows we belong to both realms."
"But how can she manage this sort of solution where great Zeus fails? How does she accomplish this back-and-forth between 'inflation' in one direction (Demeter) and 'inflation' in the other (Hades).
In a drama by Euripedes, Rhea plays the drum. This motif is not only pre-hellenic and pre-Homeric, it is decidedly shamanistic. Rhea is that shamanistic wise old herb lady living deep in the forest, in touch with the primordial rhythms of night and darkness.
A good example of Rhea is found in the novel and civil-war era movie, Cold Mountain. The wise old woman shepherdess and healer in the movie nurses the journeying hero back to life, making the necessary sacrifices on his
behalf. She seems to appear from nowhere to rescue and tend to him. She honors the cycle of life and death. She brings his soul back up from the gates of death. She is the go-between between what is past and future, between what is known and unknown. Then she sends him homeward, marching to his own drum.
"And it is implied that the go-between rhythms of Rhea are a salvation which comes from below -- soul's beatings." (Miller, 1980).
This is perhaps our attraction to the drone and thumping of rock, disco, and blues, of trance, of industrial, punk,
tribal rhythms, of rap, hiphop, soul, and other primal beat music. It actively drives our internal rhythms and
transports us much as the shaman's drum provides the vehicle for soul travel.
"In shamanism the profound drummings are contexts for the magic of healing...If one could see things in this way, then it would be in her drumming rhythms that Rhea is mother to so many Gods, being in her way Grand rather than Great, as were Athena, Aphrodite, Hera and Artemis. Ever close to the titanic, even loving it in Kronos, Rhea does not totally
identify with either Demeter or Hades, life or death, ego or self, persona or archetype. Her deeper sense of timing dances between these beats. Her way seems to acknowledge inflation without succumbing."
Rhea stands at the threshold of consciousness, the mouth of the cave to the Underworld, beating softly but
rhythmically on her drum. There is a rhythm to the psyche. It is this rhythm that we try to catch in the therapy
process.
"How can we not use the names of Gods without presumption, without puffing up our ideas mythologically, without overstating some mortal sense of things, without beginning to feel that we know something? Is it not always a danger signal of soul when something Grand seems Great?
"James Hillman has spoken forcefully about this danger in archetypal psychology. He warns against "reducing archetypes to allegories of disease" (Negative Inflation?) and against making "a new nominalism" of the Gods of Greece, a "new (or old) grid of classificatory terms" (positive inflation?). "We are not," he says, "looking for a new way to classify...but for a new way of experiencing..." Hillman reminds us that mythic thinking, like dream-knowing is indirect, metaphoric, and poetic. The Gods are not "things" and we are not the Gods. "They are the likenesses to happenings," he says."
"The mistake...is a lurking ego-perspective that seems to want rational knowledge and psychological control. Thinking or saying, "She is into Hestia," is not better than declaring, "He has an anima problem," if by either I feel I know something. A mythological depth-psychology deficient in poetic sensibility is not better than the behaviorism of
ego-psychologies. Viewing poetically, as Jung seems to imply, puts the emphasis where it belongs, thatis, on likeness, even as one speaks of Gods in relation to self. The attitude in this perspective denies to so-called "ego" the certainty and clarity on which the "I" prefers always to center."
"Rhea...encourages us to see in the images, not literal identifications, neither some actual "this" nor a really real "that," but the rhythm between "this" and "that", between ego and self, between persona and archetype. These betweens take one deep into the beatings drummed in underworlds of soul....."Godlikeness," in the context of Rhea's
mythos, may seem more Grand than Great. Her perspective, though it be divine, focuses less on some "God" and more on a poetizing "likeness."
"What is given us are images and the images are archetypal. They are images of Gods. Soul's task is to let the variety of imaginal experience in life become metaphor, listening for the likenesses. Then therapy and life itself begin to be sensed as underworld poetry, not psychology but psychopoetics, and one connects with the many imaginal likenesses, not as ego's literal identifications, but "as that which he is not."
There is a relationship between metaphorical perception and healing journeys.
Recovery is an intellectual model that mobilizes our recuperative faculties and emotional resilience. Recovery is
best exemplified in the 12-step programs that address addictive behaviors, including sexual predation. But much
of the basic process is the same for emotional wounding. Recovery, whether as sex addict or victim, is about
grieving (lost childhood, for example) and transcending loss, understanding the lifelong impact of grief and how to
make it meaningful.
When we sustain a deep emotional wound we must cleanse that wound and do the psychic surgery that allows it
to fully heal, so we can navigate successfully through life once again without the detours of unresolved issues. The
royal road to recovery is through connecting with our feelings and finding creative ways of expressing them. They
are healed in cyclic giving and receiving of support and compassion. That is one reason that 12-step programs
use the sponsor system, as well as for its role modelling value.
Copyright © 2010-2015 Iona Miller, All Rights Reserved.
FAIR USE NOTICE
This site may contains some copyrighted material which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. This constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law, in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
FAIR USE NOTICE
This site may contains some copyrighted material which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. This constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law, in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.