2012: Avatars of the New Age

If in the practice of Tantric yoga one looks into the collective unconscious now, one will see a triptych, something like the Grunewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, vibrating in the ether of the astral plane. In one panel we see a painting of the feminine lamenting the fall of the masculine into time; it is a painting of Isis crying above the coffin of Osiris. In the second panel, we see the dead masculine in the arms of the feminine, Jesus in the arms of Mary.  In the third panel we see neither the Fall nor the Crucifixion but the sacred copulation (hieros gamos) of the reunited young lovers. Once it was physical death and crucifixion which nailed consciousness down into matter: then it was the sacrament of Thanatos; but in the world-epoch about to begin it is a sacrament of Eros, a physical sexuality in which the lovers of eternity give birth to the world on the physical plane. The avatars of the New Age, as the Irish mystic A.E. realized in a vision seventy years ago, will not be the solitary male, but the male and female together.

Myth is the history of the soul. Lest we think that Isis and Osiris, or Jesus and Mary, are only stories from the past, we should look around us to see that a new chapter is being written in our own time. Whatever names these two lovers take, when they come together it will be like the touch of matter and antimatter, the passing and consuming passion of our world. In the origins of civilization is the overture to its end.

(From The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, by William Irwin Thompson)

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Painting:

Gustav Klimt: "The Kiss"

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Music:

Rumi: "Say I Am You"