By linking anthropology, archeology, and mythology with cutting edge work in the fields of consciousness studies and science, it is now possible to understand, for example, the ability to enter the awareness of animals, adopting their bodily image or instinctual sensations and drives. The experience of the horned "Sorcerer of Trois Freres" thus becomes less an image of a hopeful exercise in sympathetic magic dancing out from the mists of the past, but more of a concrete statement of the unity of all life. It is a confirmation of what was long ago deduced by PARMENIDES, the Greek philosopher and lover of ZENO, marking the beginning of Western philosophical thought. His description of the single, eternal, and all embracing, yet undifferentiated state of the universe is the same as what physics teaches us today. It is a physical reality; we can experience it, and scientists are able to measure it.

Stanislov Grof, arguably one of the most brilliant minds in psychology today, has explored what the ancient Sorcerer represented, what the Great Goddess priestesses and Horned God consorts knew, and what the early Mesopotamian priests codified: that the ability to access these nonordinary states exists far beyond eliciting a feeling of relaxation. It can include "connecting with ancestral memories, or drawing upon the memory banks [of that] vast sea of awareness that we have shared with all of life since the beginning of time." Grof concludes that human "consciousness seems to have the amazing capacity to directly access the earliest history of the universe - witnessing dramatic sequences of the Big Bang, the formation of the galaxies, the birth of the solar system, and the early geophysical processes that occurred on this planet billions of years ago."  ¹

The sacredness of the artist's act is parallel to the creation itself and is, as Jamake Highwater writes in The Language of Vision, "so utterly urgent, so utterly linked with the pulse of life, [that it] becomes the singular basis of survival when every other aspect of civilization fails."  ² Martha Graham said something of the same when speaking on behalf of funding for the National Endowment for the Arts: "There is a fragment of poetry which has always had deep meaning for me. It referred to a long lost civilization. They had no poet, and so they died."  ³ Indeed, for the artist to join in with the re-creation he awakens the whole of the world, starting within himself. Quite literally, the artist becomes the creative process. It is a real journey beyond any distinction between male and female, time and space to the enchanted land of "neitherness," found suspended in the middle between all such opposites, and precisely where gaiety starts. As WILLIAM BLAKE put it, "the artist is an inhabitant of that happy country [which he referred to as the garden of Eden]; and if everything goes as it has begun, the world [may] be opened again to Heaven, through Eden, as it was in the beginning."  ⁴

THE DIVINE NATURE OF ART

HERMES is perhaps the mythological exemplar of the world of art, if not the whole of gay people typified as a community of the artists of life. EURIPIDES, one of the "Fathers of Tragedy" in ancient Greece, deemed HERMES the "servant of the immortals," and he is one of the earliest and most primitive of all the Greek gods. As such his nature and functions, like all the Olympians, are mainly derived from much earlier times. He is credited with inventing the lyre, the alphabet, and fire sticks, just as The Children - the historical DAKTYLS from central Turkey - invented the musical scales, introduced fire into Atlantis, and musical instruments to Pelasgian Italy and Greece. It was the later KABIRI magicians, recall, who were in fact transformed into this immortal god. The stories depict HERMES conceived of the divine light, ZEUS, and born of a night-sky nymph, "an independent and fragmentary expression of the feminine character of the unconscious."  ⁵ At birth, he toddled forth to find an early symbol of the universe - the tortoise - which he remade into an instrument of the heavenly songs. That is, HERMES is a source of creativity coming from the ethers, delivered through inspiration, or, as one of the leading operatic composers of all times, RICHARD WAGNER, tells it, he heard the music emanating from his "inner ear." As the inventor of the alphabet, too, HERMES similarly appears as such a "messenger of the gods."

The name HERMES translates in its root form to mean the "one who contrived the use of speech," as in the wise or Original Man. But he also invented the philter, a charm or spell. So HERMES is not just an inventor of the words enabling us to order hamburgers, so to speak, but more of a spellbinder. This close association of language and charm through HERMES leads across the old trade routes of the Bronze Age, just as they carried the prehistoric queers into Egypt, where THOTH (HERMES in Egyptian disguise) called his invention of the alphabet a "recipe for wisdom." The artist's potion mixed up from this recipe is much like the magical act of creating something from nothing - such as the harmonic undertones and overtones of chanting or the transformative qualities of metrical speech. It is an acoustical pattern set into motion through the phenomena of sound waves. And these vibrations literally re-pattern states in the human nervous system and glands, and in the subtle "electronic" or "etheric" forces in and around our physical bodies. Thus, not only is it at the moment of artistic creation that the artist tastes the mystical brew, but in voicing the words, the poet suspends the traditional perception of space and time to elicit a supernormal encounter with the unknown, vaster world - that world of which the physical is but a skin. Anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of a poet like ALLEN GINSBERG, prophet and conscience, mystic, and leader of the Beat Movement, understands this cosmic connection. Such a master of the spoken word, like HERMES, was the Egyptian THOTH, also the ancient god of the moon. And the artist, by drawing down such a moon, amplifies and activates latent forces in man to mediate an altered state of consciousness for everyone in the room - gaiety in its truest form. With HERMES flying, just as the sorcerers and shamans take flight into this lunar sphere of paraphysics, consciousness is disembodied, with the poet leading to the wisdom of rebirth - the "second coming" of the paradisiacal state of mind.

THE ARTIST AS MAGICIAN AND PRIEST