There are only 2 really cool Cathedrals being built on Earth at this time. France may have constructed 500 Gothic church structures in the course of the 13th century but today, this far from the last Incarnation of the Shekhina, there are precious few new large construction projects dedicated to the Spirit. The Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Famíla in Barcelona was begun in 1883 and will likely be near completion 200 years later in 2083. The Cathedral Our Lady of the Ligne was begun in 1995 along the 45th Parallel North and there are no plans to ever stop its construction. A Cathedral is never really finished; they are always burning down or being bombed into dust by Christian nations. Kenny's Cathedral rises and falls as new parts are added and other parts are dismantled, eroded, or are simply pillaged and carted away. So we were not really surprised when we went back to check the Mulmist and found that it was gone. Stolen. Looted by barbarians and/or DNR cops.
So it was time to regroup around another plan. We were going to drop the Morse Code Mirrors and go with a tighter design - the idea of sticking 72 Mirror Rods into Rip Wrap so that passing headlights or the wheeling sun would tap out a code across their faces suddenly seemed fanciful. More and more Kenny drifted back to an earlier idea for the Spike: there is an Island in our waters along the 45th - an island storied with legends about old-timey pirates who would build fires on the island to lure passing ships who well might think that the fire was a burning ship in need of rescue. The island is surrounded by dangerous shallow reefs. This was in the middle to late 1800's. Luring sailors and their ships to destruction, we thought, could there be Sirens on the edges of our Cathedral? There certainly were Sirens & Selkies, Mermaids & the odd Melusine on the walls and choir stalls of Europe's Cathedrals. Slowly we shifted our gaze to the fabled Îlot des Mouettes which on a clear day you could nearly see from our shores. There were broken buildings on it and a million Gulls and Cormorants, but precious little of anything else. Maybe, we thought, we should take our ideas about Rocks & Mirrors off shore to the island. Slag had a plan to trap the Sun as well as clear some Cormorants. Skippy was thinking Shekhina.
When the image of the Siren differentiates her marine half into either a split "tail" or 2 tails then the psychic energy of the Tenor in the image is in motion. Is changing. And since the new image - with its 2 fin/tail/legs is now more "human" - it's a safe bet that the psychic energy is rising towards the surface. Rising towards consciousness which is the arena wherein a necessary change must take place .
Cirlot believes that since the Sea is the lower abyss and an archetype of the unconscious, then the 2-tailed Siren is showing "a duality or conflict within the watery depths" of the unconscious. Something in our minds - either individual or collective - is swimming up from the dark and wants the light, needs the light, since if water and earth are the symbols of the unconscious then fire, air, and light are the primary symbols of the conscious mind.
Skippy was spending 8 hours a day in the Berkeley Library at Trinity College. He had discovered an article called: "Melusine's Hybrid Body and the Poetics of Metamorphosis," by Kevin Brownlee in the Journal: Yale French Studies. It was a deconstruction of one of the most famous books of the Euro-Gothic: Jean d'Arras's Roman de Mélusine written about 1393. The article was a semi-Semiotic take on the text and narrative devices in the Roman and how those textual devices mirrored the structure of the legend of Mélusine. Pooler, meanwhile, was bedding redheads and luring this street artist away from his pastel copy of some comely, young, bergerette. For several days in a row, Pooler would watch the composition of the face on a sidewalk of Dublin and then coax the artist into a pub where he bought him a ploughman's lunch and cranked him full of Guinness.
What would happen, Kenny wondered, if we built a structure out of half-inch steel rods - maybe 8 to 10 feet tall and crowned this frame with a brace of one-foot square mirrors. If we set this on the magic island could we use it to draw down shafts of light and then redirect these Shekhinas to the shore and even into the waters of the bay? There were Selkies in those waters - Orkney Island Sprites who were once so fearsome that the mothers of the Orkney Island chain would "paint the sign of the cross on their daughter's breasts before they undertook a sea journey." Selkies are believed to be either souls of those drowned at sea, wrong-doers, or angels who fell into the sea after their expulsion from god's mind. Could we fructify the waters of the 45th Parallel North with the reflected light of the sun? Like Newgrange north of Dublin, or even Stonehenge in England, or the Temple of Karnak at Luxor - could we set up a Miskan thru Mirrors which could tempt the Shekhina to the island altar?
So the 2 Tailed Selkie/Siren is an image of the unconscious having a dialect with itself over its true nature. When the unconscious mind of the monkey/man is 2 pronged it is arguing with itself about changing the image of both self and god. The Siren can be either half bird or half sea creature. The Selkie is a Seal with a human form, or half a human form. Mélusine is both specific and generic in her myth. She lived not only in a hybrid body but both in History and in Myth. But how did she get 'real`? How does anything break out of the mind and into Reality?
When the mermaid has twin tails - as in the Starbucks Logo - she is a Siren with a difference. She represents the 1st steps towards consciousness, towards the light and out of the depths. Now she is a figure who represents both Intuition and Prophecy. Which is not to imply that she will use these tools for any good. Intuition can be used to malign or to impede. Prophecy - in the annals of World Religions - is nearly always a tool of repression and vengeance. But still ... the contents of watery unconsciousness, now move up to seek a more stable form in the glare of the bright world up top.
Every Code must contain the Spirit of its parts. Message, Sender, and Receiver must share common roots in the materia from which they were formed. A Code cannot escape its elements no matter how many levels of Abstraction. Language is a Code, as are Icons & Images; they cannot help but be connected with the original forces and elements which forged them. Thomas Sebeok pointed out that all human languages share a base structure with the structure of DNA itself and DNA - as a triplet code - shares those same structures with the physics of the Universe.
In Ankara, Turkey a 92 year old archaeologist was arrested and tried for suggesting in his book that the "Islamic-style head scarves were first worn more than 5,000 years ago by priestesses initiating young men into sex." The idea that symbols evolve using the same rules as the evolution of carbon-based life is upsetting to true believers. All costume - and all customs - are a code. They signal things like gender, status, rank, and group affiliations. Today's head scarf is still tied to the Priestess/Prostitue. The Code abides; only the interpretation has shifted to fit the times.
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