All stable cultural forms are “of the past” in the sense that they are residues of a creative process and style of consciousness that “formed” them in the first place. As these residues, they are mute, or “dead”—the unobtrusive objects of scientific or historical research. However, with an appropriate research method, the consciousness that gave rise to these forms can be released i.e., can become a living past, as reflected in our modern minds.[1] Once an object external to our modern mind (e.g. the residue of a once living cultural form) is internalized as image, or reflected through language, it becomes present as the living past and its wisdom or consciousness is made available to us again. It is a breath-taking experience to participate in a style of consciousness that we moderns commonly regard as “dead and buried”. More than this, the now living past holds a hint of an unknown future, and suggests a way for us to begin to engage this future.[2] The following essay is an example of such a methodology.
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Scholarship does not know definitively what the spirals at New Grange meant to the Celts. They remain a mystery. Scholars research the outside of this mystery, studying the empirical facts.
Is there a way into this 5000 year-old mystery, into an experience of this mystery? How can we have any experience of the past, i.e. of the consciousness of the past? There is a way—the way of living language. Modern words carry history within themselves and we call this linguistic history etymology. If we begin an etymological inquiry into words, allowing disciplined imagination to lead the way, then we can reach a place of inspiration where something other may penetrate our modern consciousness. This other is the consciousness or interiority of the past and a seed of the unknown future!
Inspiration! Its very sound has a compelling pull on me. I hear my breath expel softly as the word is spoken. Its sound conveys breathing—mostly breath, with no hard consonant “stops”. So much like “whisper”. I look up its meaning although I already know that “spire” means to breathe.
“Spire” also has two other meanings: a single turn of a spiral and a tapering, rising to a point, like a church spire. All three meanings: breath, spiral, and tapering, are now independent of one another in our daily usage. But their meanings interpenetrate and echo one another in the sound of the word, “spiral”.
An echo of the past? This preliminary “word work” already triggers a memory …
Spirals and vortices have frequently appeared in my dreams over the years. Part of my subsequent research took me to the Celtic world where spirals of course play a prominent role. I learned that Celtic scholarship could not discover any definitive meaning for the many spirallic forms found on Celtic artifacts.
Now another memory surfaces, of an ancient rock carving depicting human figures with spirals emanating from their mouths! I saw it, I swear, yet to this day I cannot find any reference in the empirical world. I am left with the intriguing hint from memory that spirals and speech belong together, somehow.
But the archeological world of buried facts is not the only “portal” to our spiritual heritage—our dead past. It is also buried deep within our language, yes, as the past, but that past still living within our language, or as language’s very within-ness. I return to my word work.
In our modern language, as standardized by the dictionary, “spire” has three separate meanings, each seemingly unrelated to the others—all hidden within the word “inspiration”. Breathing seems so unrelated to spiraling and tapering.
I decide to dig more deeply into the living history of meanings residing in our everyday use of words.
A spire, as one turn of a spiral arises from spira, which means to coil. A coil is a connected series of spirals, as in a coil of rope. “Coil” comes from cooligere, Latin for “collect”. This makes sense since a coil, in collecting spires together, becomes a coil in the first place.
But then a surprise! The word “collect” arises from the Latin colligere and this word emerges in turn from the etymological root, leg-. Leg-, as well as meaning to collect and gather, as in the Latin legere, from which one meaning of religion is derived—a sacred gathering, has a derivative meaning of “to speak”, or logos. Buried within the meaning of the word “inspiration” are meanings of breath, sacred gatherings, speech, spirals, and tapering to a point, as in a church steeple. I have at last penetrated the historical depths of language to the forgotten psyche, the ancient living past, as reconstructed in modern consciousness, and an image is released!
The magnificent ruins of New Grange now appear before my eyes (see front cover). I see a mouth, from which emanates a collection of spirallic forms, directed perhaps to those gathered below, radiating outwards from the center, like a sector of a circle. Now, from the listener’s standpoint, I see a rising and tapering to a point, to the place where speech emanates from the high priest standing at the mouth of the cave. Priest—the cave’s mouthpiece, inspired to speak the cave’s spirallic wisdom out to the people waiting below!
New Grange, magnificent ruin of a long-gone culture, now lies mute, as its former mystery is appropriated to the needs of a growing tourist industry. But the real New Grange still lives, yes, still “out there” in the real world, as the real world—its very Being. It too lies mute. It needs its modern priests, its mouthpieces, in order to speak. It speaks in spirals, vortices. What would such speech sound like, and where would it’s meaning take us if we spoke its turnings as they coil around us?
What would it say, in saying through us, its mouthpieces?
[1] This research method may be called a phenomenology of the soul. Unlike other research methods that engage history as a “dead past”, i.e. “external” to our modern consciousness, this method seeks to release the “inner” or the consciousness of the past and make it available to the modern mind, to come alive within our imagination.
[2] This final aspect to the methodology involves a “leap” that is erotic, connecting some detail or trace, implicit within the image of the known past, with the unknown future. Hence, the future that is thus hidden in images of the past is a future founded on Eros. The researcher must have the courage to follow the leap, when it happens, via some artistic action in order to participate in the “coming-to-be” of this future.
This essay is drawn from my book, Speech of the Unknown Future: