The Center of the Universe

I found out this morning that Depeche Mode is playing a free outdoor concert tonight at 8 pm at...Hollywood and Vine! (See my last post below for reference.) I don't have one of the fabled free passes but there are outdoor cafes near there and I plan to just go hang out and listen, and maybe see if I can see anything.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2009/04/depeche-mode-to-shut-down-hollywood-boulevard.html

There is a surprisingly spiritual aspect to this event. Anyone who reads my Parsifal's Horse blog or my Twitter posts knows I talk all the time about the axis mundi archetype. This concert is part of my stream with that. I will describe a little of this current thread here - the overarching flow is very Tao, a synchronous pattern based in the fractal unfolding of events along the golden mean.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_the_Golden_Mean

My usual work commute passes the Hollywood and Vine intersection most of the time, and I often use that Metro train station. There is a lot of artwork in the station and all of it is stream-of-consciousness archetypal material related to ascent mysticism - stars, Egyptian references, the celestial throne, etc. The celestial ascent involves climbing the heavenly ladder of the chakras, represented by the seven stars of the Big Dipper, to come before the Throne of God, the North Star, which in the internal chakra system is also the Bindu, the hidden eighth chakra. This ascent is why the pyramids of Egypt were built - their entire religion revolves around it and the pyramids were manmade sacred mountains constructed to be used by the pharoah as a ladder to come before the throne of Osiris, the lord of the afterlife - hence the Egyptian motif in the public artwork in the station. The Pole Star is the axis mundi, the center of the world, because it appears to be stationary while the sky revolves around it.

The Derek Jarman film I saw on Tuesday (again, see my last post) was at the Montalban Theater on Vine, just south of this intersection. There is a Pre-Columbian sacred site in Mexico called Monte Alban, White Mountain. The mountain is a symbol of the axis mundi and the ascent to the pole, and the site includes several holy ball courts, which were representations of the structure of the universe with the ball as the sun and the scoring rings as the equinoxes.

http://www.elmuseo.org/taino/ballgame.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame

This intersection is right in the middle of the Hollywood Walk of Stars, a representation of the path of cosmic attainment, and there are pillars at each corner which delineate the four cardinal directions, also important to the axis mundi, the archetype of the central pillar of the world. The location used to be a lemon grove before it was developed, and the prophet Enoch from the Old Testament ascended to Heaven from a citron grove, the citron (called etrog in Hebrew and used in the holy ritual of the Sukkot holiday) being the Old World equivalent of the lemon. He is an archetype of the human practitioner of this kind of ascent. Once in heaven, Enoch became Metatron, the Angel of the Throne.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_and_Vine

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=enoch&fr=yfp-t-501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8

In Islam, Enoch is called Idris, and I saw that name on a billboard this morning. Re: his ascent, the Koran says "We raised him high in heaven" and in Muslim lore, Enoch invented astronomy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_view_of_Enoch

He is also said to have lived 365 years while on earth, the same number as days in the year, which definitely associates him with the cycles of the heavens. He is sometimes identified with Hermes Trismegistus or Mercurius. In some traditions, he is the builder of Zion, the City on a Hill that is the New Jerusalem or the new Paradise. Zion is central to the action in the medieval poem Pearl, and the Bindu chakra is also called the pearl. The human who activates this chakra through the ascent becomes perfected, as are the residents of Zion (remember the old spiritual, "Let me fly up to Zion?").

The streets themselves have mystic meaning to the names - the celestial ladder is called the Vine in some cultures, and Holly is a shamanic tree with profoundly spiritual meaning (trees are always axis symbols).

http://www.unfading.net/holly.html

The concert event is co-sponsored by the W Hotel, mentioned in the press release as returning “Golden Age excitement and lifestyle” to Hollywood. The rune for the letter W is Wunjo, which I’ve drawn a lot lately, and it signifies the shamanic journey of astral ascent. The runes themselves are a synchronous and intuitive natural language and were won by Odin through a shamanic trial on the world tree, the cosmic axis.

http://www.geocities.com/cheryl_rune/wunjo.html

Gold is the alchemical symbol of the perfected human soul, and alchemy is itself a depiction of the celestial ascent in symbolic language. The Tao itself is the foundation of Chinese alchemy and the archetypal road map of the ascent. (Incidentally, the Taoist equivalent to the runes is the I Ching, a profoundly synchronous symbolic language originally expressed through yarrow sticks, as the runes were originally carved on twigs to represent their origin in the Tree.) The Wunjo rune refers to the “Golden Age” and corresponds to Valhalla or Paradise (Zion), and the Sumerian version of the ascent literature refers to Pardes, the site of Eden located in the Fertile Crescent, describing it as an archetypal garden by a sacred river. Wunjo represents the sacred dual mountain of the axis mundi where heaven touches earth and the two are united. Runemaster Jordsvin says that Wunjo refers to Vinland (Vine Land), the original name for the United States, and this event is occurring on Vine Street.

http://realmagick.com/articles/78/2178.html

Wunjo is shaped like a pennant or flag, and someone gave me a pennant yesterday, from Universal Studios.

Another nearby business, The Gap, is referenced in the LA Times article as being endorsed by Depeche Mode. "Gap" is a name for Da’ath, the Abyss on the Kabbalistic tree of life, which is the last stop after the seven lower sephirot before one comes into the celestial realms. Da'ath is referred to as a state of unification - a "united state," as it were, and it is associated with the Bindu chakra as well.

http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGkig2AvFJ3cAAdOZXNyoA?p=da%27ath&fr=yfp-t-501&fr2=sb-top

DM's new album is called Sounds of the Universe, and some of the promotional imagery for the record includes the band standing in front of the Unisphere, the huge outdoor globe in Queens, NY, a clear axis mundi symbol. It also happens to be Earth Week right now.

http://queens.about.com/cs/attractions/p/Unisphere.htm

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15434282@N00/2064351847/in/photostream/

http://queens.about.com/od/photogalleries/ig/Photos-of-Landmarks-in-Queens/Unisphere-and-Rocket-Thrower.htm

Re: the Rocket Thrower status near the Unisphere, rockets are also axis mundi symbols and the theme of the entire Unisphere complex is space exploration, the modern equivalent of the ascent. The statue depicts archetypal man launching a rocket into space with one hand and reaching for the stars with the other.

http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/historical_signs/hs_historical_sign.php?id=10758

http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0oGkmgiyfBJOo0A_G5XNyoA?ei=UTF-8&p=the%20rocket%20thrower%20queens&fr2=tab-web&fr=yfp-t-501

Much of the other art in the park depicts a celestial ascent, including spaceships and a male-female pair lifted skyward by birds:

http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/vt_flushing_meadows/vt_flushing_meadows_park.html

http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/vt_flushing_meadows/art_culture.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/foolsparadise/3178899873/

This is also the park featured in Men In Black, where the UFO was parked. The UFO is a symbol of the chariot used in the celestial ascent (it's called the vimana in ancient India and the merkabah in Judaism, more on this below).

DM also has a song called "World In My Eyes" about containing the entire world in one's soul, and in their video for "Enjoy the Silence," Dave Gahan is shown crowned and seated on a mountain, a clear expression of the throne and world axis archetype. The axis mundi is the symbol of cosmic man (in Kabbalah it's the Tree of Life, the body of Adam Kadmon, the archetypal man), and the ascent is the concept that man is divine and can become like God by going up to meet Him before His throne in His house in the seventh heaven. I went to a Jewish wedding this past weekend where the bride and groom circled each other a total of seven times before stepping up into the chuppah, the representation of a house in which the rites of the wedding were enacted. The rabbi explained to the congregants that the circling and ascent of the stairs lifted everyone present to the throne of God. He also talked about how Jewish mysticism posits man and woman as two halves of the same being, separated in the Fall into discrete beings. Where I left the wedding to attend the reception, I walked past a motel called 7 Stars and a restaurant called Casablanca (White House). In Islamic tradition, the house of God is white, and stands esoterically above their version of the axis mundi, the Ka'aba in Mecca. I also attended an Apple software training class last night at The Grove (per the Pardes reference above, what could better symbolize the apple from the garden?), and noticed that their shopping center's sign has seven levels of neon with the North Star at the very top.

http://www.globalgraphica.com/022305_grove_cinema_w498.html

It's also shaped like the architectural detail on the old Pan Pacific Auditorium which was located near there. It's now torn down but Xanadu, whose story concerns a human man who travels to the sacred mount of Olympus in pursuit of a goddess, was filmed there. That detail is also shaped like the tet of Osiris, the pillar sacred to the Egyptian god mentioned above and which is of course a representation of the axis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Pacific_Auditorium

http://www.touregypt.net/afterlife3.htm

And there is a statue on top of a tall pillar in the very center of The Grove called The Spirit of Los Angeles, with a male angel supporting a female angel as both fly. The message of the ascent is that men are like angels in their true nature.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/snuffy/451637521/

The Bindu chakra mentioned above is supposed to be able to make its own sacred food for the ascent initiant once he has awakened his Kundalini and traversed the channel of the chakras to the highest attainment. The food is cibus, the sacred sustenance made of light that is referenced in traditions ranging from esoteric Christianity to tantra to Taoism. The lead singer of Throbbing Gristle, the band who performed the soundtrack to In the Shadow of the Sun on Tuesday night at the Montalban is Genesis P-Orridge – whose stage name means something on the order of “Primal Food” (and the lady who deeded the land for Hollywood and Vine from her lemon grove was named "Beveridge" - beverage - the cibus is also often likened to nectar). And Genesis and his deceased wife, Lady Jaye Breyer, undertook an esoteric experiment to reunite their two separate beings into the original syzygy of male-female union, as referenced by the rabbi at the wedding this past weekend.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_P._Orridge

That is what the axis mundi is about - the union of opposites: heaven and earth, male and female, light and dark, all restored to their original primal Oneness. My personal view is that the entire cosmos was, is and always will be a sacrament - the Fall refers to our woundedness that makes us unable to see that, but it's just an illusion of separation, not a reality. The cosmos is still held together by the pillar of the World Tree, which is also the human body, the physical reflection of the divine order. I feel that all of these related references are different cultural expressions of a common archetypal thread which describes a process rooted in the human body and points the way to divinizing one's perception of that body. The chakras are physical and metaphysical intersection points that when activated make a form called the merkabah, or the chariot of human consciousness. It is symbolized by the flaming chariot holding the enthroned figure of God or Metatron which appeared to Ezekiel and to John in the Revelation. My housemates have been working on their own axis mundi, the Lightning Temple, based on the Jewish merkabah and detailed here:

http://parsifalshorse.blogspot.com/2009/04/lighting-temple.html

And I have been writing about the axis mundi, ascent mysticism and the seven heavens in my Holy Grail book (re: the Grail, the Unisphere is near Silvercup Studios in Queens) and many of my poems and songs, for some time now, and before I knew that they were working on something also involved with it. This is all what in Jungian terms is called constellating, when energy around an archetype builds and builds with the accretion of symbols until it reaches some kind of critical mass and comes into conscious form. Archetypes are sacred, because God is conciousness and the archetypes are His primordial thought forms.

Lastly, I had a deeply spiritual experience once with Depeche Mode's Violator album, and that energy has carried through for me ever since. "Enjoy The Silence" is one of my favorite songs, and I've heard it several times when the universe was reassuring me that I was on the right path (the path of ascent, apparently). Tonight's show should be very interesting. I'll be sure to give a report.

For anyone interested in further reading on the ascent, I highly recommend this book - it explains it perfectly.

http://www.amazon.com/Stairway-Heaven-Alchemists-Kabbalists-Transformation/dp/0826428509

And Mircea Eliade wrote extensively on the axis mundi in his studies of shamanism - here is a wiki entry about it, and below is a link to further reading.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_mundi

http://www.bytrent.demon.co.uk/eliadesp01.html

http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Profane-Mircea-Eliade/dp/B000NSSZA6 (the review on this page by Oakshaman is especially awesome)