Bernard X Bovasso The Wormwood Chronicle, A study of word synchronicities coinciding the Wormwood of St. John's Revelations with the word for it in Russian, Chernobyl

A study of word synchronicities coinciding the Wormwood of St. John's Revelations with the word for it in Russian--Chernobyl.

"...And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called wormwood..."

THE WORMWOOD CHRONICLE by Bernard X. Bovasso
Excerpted from THE WHITENESS.
Copyright © 1987 by Bernard X. Bovasso
Library of Congress TXu 264-337
All Rights Reserved

THE FALLING STAR

Carnate, incarnate or reincarnate, Old Nick, the keeper of the fires of Hell, is lately back in the news as "Wormwood". Familiar as the name given by C.S. Lewis to one of the devils in his Screwtape Letters, Wormwood is otherwise known as mugwort. It is in Ukrainian called "chernobyl", the name for a bitter wild herb used as a tonic in old rural Russia. Since wormwood doubles in name as Satan, this is not a fanciful play on words, or a deliberate design on my part to arm a theory of word- synchronicity. Mr. Wormwood simply dropped in unannounced at a place honoring him by name and with his devilishly typical catastrophic fanfare.
~~~~
On July 25, 1986, The N.Y. Times correspondent in Moscow reported an interview with a "prominent Russian writer" (necessarily anonymous) who not only noted the meaning of chernobyl but was cognizant of wormwood and the apocalyptic company it kept. The writer, apparently self-confessed as an "atheist", was quoted in the Times under a page one headline; Chernobyl Fallout: Apocalyptic Tale...". Producing for the correspondent a "tattered old Bible," the writer turned with a "practiced hand" to a passage in St. John's Revelation: "Listen," he said, "this is incredible: 'And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter'" (Revelation 8:10). The N.Y. Times added; the writer was "...hardly alone in pointing out the apocalyptic reference to the star called chernobyl." [1]
The Biblical quotation is especially pointed because the Dnieper River flows from the north (hence, anciently known as the Borysthenes), originating in the Valdai hills West of Moscow. Passing Smolensk, and just south of Chernogov and north of Kiev, it is joined by the Pripet and then Desna rivers not far from the site of the fated nuclear plant. Apparently this fork in the Dnieper satisfied the alarming condition; "...and it fell upon the third of the rivers...the third part of the waters became Wormwood." The agitation of the Russian writer was understandable, although hardly on grounds that would shake an inveterate scientific thinker. The nominal coincidence has caused a sensation, the Times noted, spreading "with the uncanny speed common to rumor in the Soviet Union." The something satanic about wormwood, serving as the instrument to the wrath of God, was not lost in the Russian grapevine. It without doubt suggested itself as the materialist metaphore to nuclear power. How much more the metaphore was extended in the Russian imagination the Times did not say. It may be guessed that the Dnieper, originating in the north by Moscow and flowing south to Kiev, equally indicated the source of the Ukrainian nuclear misery. Neither did St. John elaborate why he assigned Wormwood as his metaphore for Satan. This pointed to an equally disturbing question: why did the Russians assign a name so problematically steeped in satanic meanings, not the least of which as "wormwood" was the common name for a plant (Artemisia Absinthium) once used to make a hallucinogenic alcoholic beverage?
~~~
Reportage of the wormwood notation offered by the Russian writer to the N.Y. Times also coincides with the period during which I was completing a paper investigating the various archetypal aspects of the Satan image. Apparently I had the devil on my mind when Mr. Wormwood showed up in nuclear form. Prior to becoming aware of the nominal coincidence, I had no reason to locate an archetypal image or mythological motif that could be historically connected to the catastrophe. Certainly such motifs proliferate in world events, such as the ancient German god Woton in conjunction with the Nazi movement; or the hammer (of Teutonic war god Thor) and the sickle or crescent (of moon goddess Artemis) as the Soviet national emblem. In this nuclear case, the coincidence took me completely off guard, no Jungian archetypes were in sight and least of all would I have expected to read into the event any synchronicistic meaningfulness of an acausal kind. But the name chernobyl in itself, as reported by the Times, moved with uncanny precision to link the nuclear accident with the Apocalypse. Since I do not know the Russian language, the word "chernobyl" would not ring any archetypal bells for me. Once, however, the cat was let out of the bag it was impossible to avoid noting the curious relevance to Chernobyl of the recent spectacle of Halley's Comet ("burning as it were a lamp"). Literally the "third angel sounded" as herald to the descent of Mr. Wormwood in mission to poison his namesake place in the Ukraine.
***

THE THREE LATITUDES

The three curiously significant meanings coincided in the Chernobyl event (the wormwood plant, Satan and Halley's Comet) were enough to draw my attention because of a previous series of coincidences that came my way during the late spring of 1982: two lunar eclipses each arriving very close to the summer and winter solstice events. In each case the eclipsing moon was predicted by astronomers to show itself red. This made me uneasy because I was aware of Prof. Gerald Hawkin's observation that Stonehenge, the Bronze Age monument on Salisbury Plain, served the ancient Britons as a computer by which to reckon certain lunar and solar conjunctions during the solistice periods.2 No doubt such eclipses held special importance for the ancient Stonehengers. As I pondered this, Mrs. Thatcher dispatched an invasion force to reclaim the Falkland Islands. During this same period Israeli forces invaded Lebanon.
If two major military actions were commenced just prior to the summer solstice event with its bloody moon eclipse, indeed must I wonder that the lunar eclipse around the time of the winter solstice must certainly anticipate the nuclear doomsday event! That, at least, was my imaginal impression and primary response. But since I have certain scientific inclinations my second take was to further research the subject and document in a paper what I come up with. The fact is, I was a bit rattled by "coincidences" of an astronomical kind with world events of a military kind. My researches, however, offered little comfort if not worsened my anxiety with the discovery of additional unseemly coinciences.
Although trying to think like an ancient Stonehenger interpreting the predictions of their monumental astronomical computer, more disquieting was the fact that the Falklands were precisely situated in the mirror image latitude to Salisbury Plain (51°17 South latitude and 51°17 North latitude, respectively). This coincidence of latitudes was noted by Prof. Hawkins in his book back in 1965.3 But the ridiculous connection of the Falkland Islands to Stonehenge, coming to my attention at a time when the British armed forces went into action, seemed extraordinarilly meaningful. It was difficult not to interpret it as a foreboding omen, especially as the ferocity of the contest and the toll in casualities were reported. The action, nevertheless, realized a beneficial outcome insofar as the British reclaimed the only feasible place in the Southern Hemisphere where a Stonehenge might be erected to perform as Prof. Hawkins said it did (on Salisbury Plain); and the Argentines were faced with the prospect of a more democratic form of government.
Although relieved by the outcome, the calamity of coincidences resulted in a book on the subject. In researching it I uncovered some other ridiculous coincidences concerning the naval aspects of the conflict which were of morbid interest to myself as an old sailor from WWII. Thus I prefered to forget the whole baggage of Mrs. Thatcher, Albion, Stonhenge and the Falklands. I copyrighted the book4 and then placed it to rest in my desk draw. I had no need to have published something that might feed the more occultish appetities of the public or draw myself into such limelight. Yet, along the way it did cross my mind to write to Mrs. Thatcher and inform her that a reconstruction of Stonehenge on the Falklands, a virtual New Albion, and as the only place a Stonehenge could perform in the Southern Hemisphere, may have resulted in a lively and lucrative tourist industry for the British.[5] But this may have upset the Argentines, newly blessed with democracy, and resolved counter-productive to what was to become my primary concern; the nature of serial coincidences.
***
Since the Stonehenge/Falkland Island connection, and before the Chernobyl event, I had therefore taken it upon myself to dutifully serve like Hamlet's Horatio as "time keeper", or chronicler of world-related synchronicistic events, and marking them according to the "order of time" (or how Jung accounted for synchronicities). The phenomenon- and which is the best I could call it- intrigued me. Apparently there was more to the ancient megalithic arrangement than keeping time as a calendrical device. In view of this, I was primed to make something of the Chernobyl/Wormwood connection, especially that the 1986-87 event of Halley's comet coincided with it. Prior to the nuclear disaster the comet had little to do with me or anything else but what it meant to astronomers. The periodic "eye in the sky" comet did not seem in the least to conjure up any synchronicistic acausal connections to tease my intuition and its imaginal manifold. But the singular coincidence of the comet with John's notation about the "star Wormwood" soon enough drew my attention. Synchronicities, I knew, must come in a related series to draw special notice. Exasperated, and as if to say, "why must I be bothered by such thngs", I would have been happy to Soon after I to discover: the common latitudes, 51°17 North for that of Salisbury Plain, site of Stonehenge, and 51°17 south for tthe Falkland Islands, was precisely duplicated by the 51°17 N. latitude of Chernobyl, the site of the nuclear plant!
The damn latitudes, coinciding as they did, would simply not let me off the hook. What possible meaning could I draw from this? Neither Halley's Comet or the coincided latitudes engendered any inspirational insights on my part. Pursuing the matter, the best I could do was come to terms with the "three" and thus satisfy whatever rational shred of causalistic reasoning I could fall back on. This hope was soon shattered when I realized that 3x17 (as in "51°17")=51, and 3x51=153. Not only was 51 cast in coincidental redundance but the latitude tripled read as "153°51 constituted as five and one twice factored with three. Apparently coinciding notations- this time as numbers- were again getting the better of me and in this case according to the obsequious multiplier bringing up an unexpectable share of "51s". And if I wanted to go the whole nine yards of numerology it could be said that 5+1=6 repeated three times was the number of St. John's "Great Beast," or Satan (666)!
How could I resist this? I researched on and now into Holy Scripture as if "wormwood" intended it that way (which etymologically it did!), and again, according to current events. At the time (the summer of '86) the extraordinary events following Gorbachev's internal policy of perestroika and glasnost was not anticipated.
***

3. THE THREE BLASTS

The "three" in the Apocalyptic statement of John disturbingly reminded of three major international events that occurred during the beginning of 1986, and which coincided with the exit of Halley's Comet after its predicted visit. I saw fit to measure them as a set, an inter-related series, after the coincidence of the nuclear Chernobyl and the Biblical Wormwood. The first was the space shuttle disaster; the second was the U.S. Airforce punitive strike at Libya for its terrorist activities; and last, the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. The three events seemed connected only because they shared in a political irony, a kind of transpersonal judgement taking each of the nations involved to task for what appeared as their smugness and over confidence. The events read, at least to myself, as a scenario beginning with what appeared as the unintended sacrifice of seven American astronauts. If the mission had been a success it would have added to the grandeur of President Reagan as he made his State of the Union address. Instead a terrible shock was registered as seven persons, some of them selected to represent a discrete cross-section of the American melting pot, met a horrible death in full broadcast display before the public.
Grandstanding the shuttle mission in Hollywood style seemed to preclude the possibility of failure. It was a first sign the luck of the President was waning, whittled down as if from behind his back by a NASA bureaucracy running autonomous in its relation to private industrial suppliers and contractors. The greater significance of this is the charmed life Mr. Reagan had lead as Chief Executive and his inexplicable recovery when the odds were against him. He was riding what may be understood as the high end of intuition, a soaring ascent that tempted the hard way down.
Almost as if in compensatory response to an anticipated decline of the presidential luck, the strike at Libya was ordered, and with the full cooperation of Mrs. Thatcher. The target certainly was not Libya itself but its leader whose megalomaniac absolutism so grandiosely displayed, hooked the President in his own shadow side. The resulting cure for Qadafy's well organized murderous privilege was both cruel and heroic, vengeful and rightous. But it achieved its end; terrorism would not be tolerated. Neither was the American action without precedent. Reagan's call for an airstrike followed a Yankee Doodle rule, if the war with the Tripolitanian pirates during the early part of the 19th Century is taken into account, and how it lent probity to the sovereignty of the brand new American nation. Nevertheless, both the shuttle accident and the militant response to Libya's ignoble and unheroic means of warfare may have pleased the Russians for how the actions diminished world appeal for the U.S.A.
***
Then Chernobyl, as if balancing the deck, came into the news giving notice the Soviet Union was not exempted from unexpected calamity. Again, smugness, over-confidence and surety of the technological estate were highlighted in a tragedy that was also dangerously affective outside of Russia. In each of the three incidents, the leader of a nation was blemished, and in a most unexpected manner. None of the events were without their built-in causalities. Each were politically interrelated with regard to their effects and no "acausal meaningful coincidences" were in sight on my part to connect them to the exiting of Halley's comet at the beginning of the new year. But with the intercedence of the Biblical wormwood, some other meanings were implied, interwoven with the contemporary apocalyptical mania.
The three calamities and the chain of events that followed would relate them to the following possibilities: the star of Reagan in decline; Qadafy no longer visible as l'infant terrible of the Arab world; the setback of Mr. Gorbachev in his effort to better the efficiency of the Russian economy. In each case a lesson may have been punitively learned and in causal relation to horrific, although unintended and unexpected human sacrifice. The most I could interpret prior to becoming aware of the wormwood/Chernobyl coincidence was that Lucifer played his hand and with a dirty trick for all concerned. Yet he was even-handed the way the trick was equitably distributed between two opposed super-powers and a third-world nation. Devilishly psychological, yes; but hardly "synchronicistic." Insofar as a sacrificial element appears active in the three events, a psychological causality may be inferred: space travel grandstanded in Hollywood style for political advantage; organized terrorism as a method of warfare; "peaceful" use of nuclear energy endured as simple matter of fact. The added "coincidence" of the Comet, as a kind of "eye in the sky" messenger, "burning as if it were a lamp", is the all inclusive fourth event of the three. It binds them in a way beyond their causal relations.
However it may be puzzled, the greater intrigue remaining was for the nature of the word chernobyl; its relation to the wormwood or mugwort plant; its signature as "satan", and whatever else I could dredge from its wide-ranging ancient etymological and symbolical diffusion. Most troubling in these associations was the use of wormwood in a booze called Absinthe, known for its hallucinogenic effects. At first sight the word compounded as cherno+byl appeared to suggest "black"+"white", and which would satisfy in discription the extremes induced by psychotropic drugs. Without further discrimination I decided the word provided itself as a good example of the coincidentia oppositorum, e.g., light/dark, good/evil, yang/yin, etc. Since cherno meant "black" and byl meant "white" I was content to add it to my collection of oxymorons.

~~~~~~

The word chernobylsoon enough tripped me up. An acquaintance who was a student of the Russian language informed me that it simply meant "blackening" and by no means should I attempt to warp it into "white." Another friend who was in fact Ukrainian and enjoyed the language as his native tongue, suggested it was a suffix conditioning as "place of", "thing of", or "in the nature of" (black or blackness). He then went on to explain with quite vehement nationalistic fervor how the Russians were always raising mayhem in his native land, if not bent upon corrupting and misusing the language. He also shot down my notion of "whiteness" and perhaps, as I suspected, because he had no great love for White or Byelorussians. They were too close to Moscow for his affections. Aside from the whiteness; "Why", I asked, "would anyone assign a nuclear plant with a name that indulged itself in both Satan and a plant known for its psychotropic properties?" He waved off the question and reminded me that the Russians were always changing or altering place names for political reasons, etc. I returned home brooding not only for how arbitrary place names could be but how I could no longer hinge some whiteness to the blackness. At this point my suspicions got the better of me and something obvious came to mind. \par It was always clear to me that poets and writers found it necessary to bend words so that in context they resolved with double meanings. It is a device used so as not to offend the political powers that be. A poet could lose his head for being too explicit. This writing in subtext, or "between the lines", indeed enriches the language, allowing symbolical references their best in ambivalence and hence mystery of meaning. Recently, for example, a Soviet film director complained that the new policies of perestroika and glasnost had taken the meat out of film making simply because there was no longer need to conceal meanings in a work. No doubt such "openness" would have put a crimp in Shakespeare's style as well.With this in mind, could it be that a Soviet official in good standing but with secret dissension provided the Russian nuclear plant with its problematical name? It would be a subtle way of making a point without getting hung for it. It soon became clear that such justifications were interesting but useless. I was simply stuck with the fact that the byl in chernobyl looks and sounds like "white." I did indeed have a vested interest in ing for the whiteness and insisted upon it even at the risk of making an etymological blunder. I had always been quick to pounce upon linguistic oxymorons, such as Moby Dick. Yin/yang also fit in nicely with the meaning of the great white whale. And along came chernobyl to add another "black/white" linguistic example to my collection, except it refused to etymologically fit snugly. Yet, no matter how unfounded my black/white chernobyl, I refused to give it up. It must for me remain in the company of (white), belyzna} (whiteness), belyotzi (whiten), if only because belookha (beluga) means "white whale" in Russian! And if my italic capo tosto must prevail the issue it may justifiably do so only in the light by which chernobyl as wormwood coincide to signify the Devil!
* * *
Obviously I was stubbornly trying to warp the meaning of the word chernobyl to fit with some work I had done on our own Herman Meville and his Moby Dick. In this case the "whiteness" (of the whale) was on my mind. Soon after I was struck from behind with an unexpected turn of word-meanings. The young lady who manages the local bookstore on Tuesdays offered to lend me a copy of the official Soviet Russian-English dictionary. There to my surprise I learned that chern also means "mob". Once again, I was Moby Dicked! I had long suspected that Melville had called his whale by way of predicating a concealed political meaning. The "mobs" as mobility was how the rebellious population in Boston were called during our great Revolution. The "Mobs" stood in distinction to the "Nobs"; the moblity versus the ruling nobility, or in the American vernacular, "dicks". So far I have not been able to verify that Melville deliberately built in such meanings for his stupendous whale. But it takes no great imagination in view of the American rebellious mood to realise that the Nobs are the erected Dicks of the ruling Crown establishment, no less holier in whiteness than the oppressed rabble who as the Mob are in Russian quite Chern! Obviously, where chern is cognate as both mobs and black, the "whites" as proper aristocratic "dicks" stand in natural hostile polarity. How could revolution from America to Russia stand so etymologically consistant? Only later did I learn that aristocratic Polish landowners once reigned in the Ukraine and were constantly disturbed by the rebellious native chern (mobs) objecting to their feudal service.
***
A few days after I resolved to go on with byl as "white", my Ukrainian friend called and gave me the telephone number of a certain old Ukrainian scholar in Arizona. The call proved fruitful. The scholar explained that it was true, byl and "white" are without established etymological linkage. He then surprised me with a valuable piece of information: the place called Chernobyl dated back to the 12th century. I had been under the impression the name was something invented by Soviet authorities for their nuclear plant. This provided another angle, since the etymology would be in the context of the Middle ages (when arcane sybolical meanings enjoyed wide commerce). Furthermore, he added, byl is an old word meaning plant or herb so that "black plant" was the more likely translation of chernobyl. As for the whiteness, the best he could do was suggest the Russian word bylmo, meaning the white veil familiar as cataract of the eye. This left me nothing but the remotely possible association of "white" with "plant". No bells rung here except I thought about Goethe's notion of the ur-pflanzen, or archetypal plant. That was a good clue if only an entree to medieval herbology, and especially those plants and herbs it retained from antiquity noted for their stimulating effects. All in all, I merely had a hunch that chernobyl meant "black/white". And if it didn't it should, according to my symbological rather than etymological understanding. Byl as "plant" rather than "white" along with a historical political implication, put me, at least for the moment, on to another track. Apparently--and all because of a lousy word-synchronicity- I was getting in over my head. Now I would have to investigate the herbological nature of psychotropic substances along with the history and pre-history of Russia. Along the way, it soon became clear, I would also be obliged to consider what is documented on the subject in our Holy Scripture.
***

The Ukrainian chernobyl, the European mugwort and St. John's "wormwood" refer to the herb of the genus Artemisia, a member of the family compositae. "The best known", notes the Brittanica (1959 edition), "is Artemisia Absinthium, one of the ingredients of Absinthe...(which) quickly intoxicates, and its deleterious effects are more serious than those of other forms of alcohol. The wormwood acts powerfully upon the nerve centers, and causes delirium and hallucinations, followed in some cases by idiocy." The psychedelic potency of Absinthe is far greater than that of either Pernoud or Ouzo, and understood to "rot the brain". Accordingly, it has been banned as an alcoholic beverage, although not before Van Gogh and Gauguin suffered the worst for it. Call it the ultimate devil's brew if you will, or a liquid form of "crack"! Perhaps for these reasons wormwood was known Biblically as the "wastelands plant" (Hebrew, la'anah), characterized by a bitter taste (Deut.29:18, Prov. 5:4, Lam. 3:19). As a "beverage of affliction" (Jer. 9:15, 23:15, Lam. 3:19), wormwood is symbolic of bitter experience (Prov. 5:4). \par Since John is especially known in his Revelations for visionary intensity, his assessment of wormwood as Satan, or satanic, poses some disturbing questions. Was he condemning what he found opprobrious and yet secretly indulging (wormwood qua Satan)? It is suggestive, judging by the focus of his Revelations, that John may have done some vigorous spiritual wrestling with the dark fallen angel; that is, Wormwood as both the hallucinogenic substance and Satan. On the other hand, "visionary", or intense intuitive (psychogenic) experience cannot be limited and thus reduced to induction by a chemical agent. John was, after all, in tradition with Jewish apocalyptic visionaries whose mode of religious experience was later evidenced in Gnosticism. In a later day of Church hegemony, John may have been purged as a heretic, as was the case for many deviating mystic brothers of the faith. It was not unclear to the entrenched Church Fathers and the Papacy that individual religious experience and revelation could be herald to radical change. Such was precisely the historical case with John's Revelation; from the Gnostics and other heresies to the Reformation and into the modern age now drummed by its apocalyptic nuclear dreads.
***

The "acid trip" or visionary state it induces is not, in any case, without similarity to the apocalyptic mood expressed by John. Jung observes in his Answer to Job:
"The terrible destructive will that breaks out in John's ecstacies give some idea of what it means when man is placed in opposition to the God of goodness: it burdens him with the dark side of God, which in Job is still in its right place. But in both cases man is identified with evil, in the first case with the result that he sets his face against goodness, and in the second, that he tries to be as perfect as his father in heaven."

The description certainly casts John's psychology as playing the extremes of personality functions; virtually a "black/white" (chernobyl) situation; that is, a polarity of opposites. Apparently, as Jung suggests, both forms of identification are in equivalence because of their psychological intensity and arrive compensatory one to the other. It also indicates a vibrating between heaven and hell, good and evil, white and black, etc. Combined simultaneously in a single fused state, it is a piece of madness, hardly qualified when better directed as the Platonic mania, (inspiration); also familiar to the Greeks as ekstasis and paranous, literally to be out of ones being or besides their own mind ("out of your head"). Plato, nevertheless, required of the poet (in his Ion Dialogue) the necessity of mania; or risk composing in a redundant, imitative way. He borrows for analogy the orgiastic state of the Bacchantes and the Dionysian ecstatic frenzy. In either case, the vine and its intoxicating juice played a strong part, if only as a counterpart, to the raising of the "inner fire" to affective demonstration (as endopsychic stimulation, i.e., intuition. The expression "fire-water" also intends this meaning.
Whether with or without Artemisia Absinthium, the early Christian, Gnostic and Jewish apocalyptic visionaries (such as St. John) were also tuned into inspirational excesses. Thus, the coincidence of the Russian Chernobyl with Satan and the runaway "inner" or nuclear fire (as the fire of Hell, or ignis gehennalis), curiously points to a meaning about the nature of intuition and how it combines the extreme and ultimate expression of consciousness (as heaven) with that of hell, the latter of which has been updated as the modern idea of the unconscious. Since intuition is essentially irrational, it receives the perception of a pair of opposites as undifferentiated, that is, fused, or at best vibrating in rapid flux. On the other hand, reason, especially when dialectically predisposed, tends to polarize opposites as fixed extremes and to the extent that they are competively hostile one to the other. Translated to the context of modern politics, the vision of heaven and absolute perfection (e.g., a utopian classless society) is opposed to whatever may be grasped as the absolute and ultimate imperfection, in the Marxist case, the "capitalist" as in equivalence to whatever Christians project into Satan and Lucifer. On the other hand, whatever heaven on earth as a million dollars--or is it today, a billion?-- conjures for the capitalistically inclined, certainly socialism is the bottomless pit; taxwise and otherwise. This wide disparity displayed as a pair of "good guys" locating the greatest evil in each other's back yard, equally demonstrates the inscrutable reluctance to accept the blackness as in any way blemishing self-rightous whiteness. That there is polarity between chern and byl, and the fact that they cannot exist separately and apart, certainly establishes a field of play with a goal at either end. But it also infers an agency of action between the two. Psychologically, this would point to intuition as the psychic agency, but which is active in an autonomous, vibrating form: as ambivalent, uncontrolled, irrational, and active without mediation by right reason; or however the summum bonum-- whether theologically or materialistically defined--is rendered relativistically ineffective. The polarities of intuited extremes are combined as mania and depression, and which, as I have chosen to assume (and stretched the point), are also nominally expressed in the word-syzygy, chernobyl (chern= "black", byl="white"). In purely affective description, the state of mania is familiar as an "up", or "high. In its spiritualized extreme it is invariably identified with an hieratic absolute, judgement or command, conditioned no less as theFather in Heaven and The Good, both equally without blemish. But soon enough the mania state is left of its heavenly bliss and superior elevation, and plunges to the realm of depression (the "downer"). Tormented by demoniac forces, it constellates the hellish dreads and which Satan--now as Mr. Wormwood--comes to represent.
It is thus understandable how the "terrible destructive will that breaks out in John's ecstacies" and whose horrors permeates his Revelations, marks the Saint, however reluctantly, as on intimate terms with the "great beast", the dark being of the bottomless pit; Old NIck, Mr. Wormwood or Mugwort. The greater dread of this "terrible destructive will" is that it rocks the status quo, upsets the powers that be, and to all extents intensifies the mobility of radical change. After all, the old Roman celebrants of Liber and Libera in the throes of Bacchic and Dionysian manic excesses, were but forerunners to maypole orgies and then the Mayday liberation observances of the unchained industrial proletariat.
***
If St. John were less possessed by Satan's devices, would he have been moved so manically intense in his subject, but remained content to keep the old faith? Or was he himself gripped by an intense intuition, an endopsychic inner fire, instigating him to take the faith to its next calamitous step? Wrestling with a question that Job could not, John's visionary expressions-- and those of other apocalyptic thinkers of his epoch--suggests an active relation to what we now call "mind altering substances." Whether or not this was the case, it would appear that John's naming of the apocalyptic falling star as "Wormwood" forces the causal agent to evil in close association with drug or alcohol induced inspiration. It is thus not difficult to say that John had a remedial proscription of all that was wormwood in mind. Whether or not this judgement was drawn as a repudiation of his own private experience with wormwood and its literal connection to Satan, remains a provocative question. But whether or not Mr. Gorbachev enjoys a private abundance of good Russian Vodka, leaves no question that he was reformationally motivated when he diminished the availability of the liquid "inner fire" to his people. As a result, there was a quick shortage of sugar in the marketplace as blackmarket moonshiners went into action. Whether obtained in the chern market or byl market , the effects of what is personified by Mr. Wormwood & co. was at large to corrupt and immobilize the working class in their re-dreaming the history of labor unions and the right to livable wages. That would be a most deplorable circumstance on the dawn of the reinstitution of capitalist efficiency, redployed to beef up socialist insufficiency; and all of which is punctuated by the event of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. The need for radical change is, in any case, a bitter pill for those that would resist it. Certainly at the time (1986) I had no idea that in a few years the peoples of Eastern Europe, Russia and China would vehemently demonstrate in the name of "democracy." Certainly they were not drugged into action but responding to the barest intuitive spark and brief encouragement for release from the hypnoid state of collective participation in totalitaian regimes.
***

The word "bitter" as used in Biblical syntax refers less to the taste of a substance than its poisonous effect. In Revelation 10:10 the divine offering to John is explicit:
"And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter. And I was told, 'You must again prophesy about many peoples and nations and tongues and kings.'"
Interpreting this in most literal fashion (to satisfy a premise), would the "little scroll" be fabricated from wormwood, or some psychotropic substance like it, pounded and processed to paper? Necessarily, we are today most precocious about such things as "acid tabs", so that the notion of ingested "bitter scrolls" is no more fabulous than that of "magic mushrooms" poisoning the stomach with nausea before they take effect to enter the mind into the realm of psychogenic visions. It is tempting to draw conclusions about Biblical prophets on this basis. Whether or not, however, the intuitions of the prophets were at large because of narcotic inducement is all besides the point. Worse than drugs, if its instrument would bear the blame, is the spectre of change. John's statement about eating the divinely offered scroll follows from Ezekiel's Vison (3:2): "And he said to me, 'Son of man, eat this scroll that I give to you and fill your stomach with it.' Then I ate it; and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey." There is no mention here of the ingested scroll's poisonous effect on the stomach, as John informs us. In either case, however, the digested scroll leads to visionary insights. Whether or not Wormwood, or some other psychotropic substance was involved in the composition of the scroll, its relation to the fallen angel draws the greater importance. There are good reasons, both moral and psychological, for this association: the gift of prophecy however obtained bears with it the sin of hybris, the inflationary high that sees and knows all but shows nothing, i.e., the condition of "whiteness" (the alchemical psychic state of the albedo or calcinatio).
The nature of white as the "all-color" (how Melville called it in his great whale epic) that contains all color but shows none, is here pertinent to indicate the inflated state of identification with the universal of universals; or, in the biblical sense, the Divinity and the empyrean realm. After such ultimate mania} and a taste of heavenly bliss, a fall is sure to follow. It is as if Mr. and Mrs Everyman-Worker demanded and achieved their million dollars before the work was done and retired prematurely to the paradise of leisure-classlessness. Wormwooded otherwise, the welfared and working class are equally welcomed by State run lotteries to the promised estate of u-topos (no-place). John's bout with the fallen star Wormwood proceeds in this psychologically inflationary trend, borrowing from Isaiah 14:14: "I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will make myself like the most high" (shades of Icarus!), and which results in; "But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the pit" (14:15), no doubt the bottomless pit and residence of Satan. The passage is preceded by what John narrows down from Isaiah 14:12 as the final effects of wormwood: "How you are fallen from heaven,/ O Day Star, son of Dawn!/ How you are cut to the ground,/ you who laid the nations low." Does the rising on high "Day Star, son of Dawn" bear any relation to the Satanic fallen star Wormwood? But of course!--the dawn light bringer is Luciferos, associated with the planet Venus!
***
LES ABSINTHEURS DE PARIS

The "light bringing" (luciferos) , on the one hand, may suggest an enlightenment, and on the other, a diabolical curse. The fateful bite of the apple from the Tree of Knowledge is considered in a similiar way. The contradiction is less implicit during this time when drug use has risen to epidemic proportions. The problem, of course, is not one of use but abuse of "controlled substances", not to mention the vast multi-billion dollar felonious underground industry that thwarts law enforcement agencies (and the tax collector!). From a contemporary standpoint the situation may seem unique and without precedent and especially threatening to the public at large and the destiny of the nation. I soon learned that the contemporary drug delemma was hardly singular. The realization arrived with poignancy and in a way that proved to be (another) embarrassing coincidence.
***
\Shortly after the New Year of 1989, I decided to re-edit the material I had already composed dealing with the Chernobyl/ wormwood coincidence. During this period I one day walked into the local village bookseller's shop and Richard, the proprietor, who I kept informed about my current research projects, thrust an old book into my hands. The book was called "Wormwood", a novel by Marie Corelli, an author unknown to myself or Richard, and published in its American edition during 1890. It must here be additionally noted that Madam Corelli remained unknown to me until that time. Later, during a time of a final editing I happened upon a republished (from 1886) work of the author (A Romance of Two Worlds, Rudolph Steiner Publications, Blauvelt, N.Y., 1973) in the esoterica stacks of Richard's bookstore. In it was an introductory biography of the author indicating she was noted in her time for novels devoted to the "veritableness of the spiritual realities..." Notably, of the listed novels to her credit, Wormwood; A Drama of Paris was curiously not listed. Significantly enough, Queen Victoria "...preferred Marie Corelli's novels to those of any other writer of her time..." it is noted in the Introduction. Aside from the spiritualist nature of the novels, the Queen further admired Corelli for her fortitude in a field largely dominated by men (the introduction in the Steiner publication is by Paul M. Allen). I was pleasantly surprised by the offering which, as a first edition, Richard was generous enough to surrender for the modest sum of three dollars. The novel was designed as a cautionary treatment about the Parisian evils of Absinthe and began with the appropriate citation from Revelation viii. 10. I suspect Madam Corelli was an early feminist reformer in the temperance tradition. In her Special Preface to the "Authorized American Edition"she advised:
"With regard to the present story, which I trust may help to arouse public attention to a pernicious Evil which is gradually spreading over all the European Continent, I believe most intelligent Americans who have visited Paris will read it with more or less anxious interest. It was, I think, a distinguished American Senator who quite recently wrote a long and exhaustive practical account of incalculable mischief wrought by the Poison-craze whose dire effects on one individual I have attempted to depict; and if one or two more leaders among thinkers, physiologists and scientists would raise their voices to aid in denouncing this fatal brain-degradation and bringing it well before the consideration of those who are the heads of authority in France, it might be checked in its destructive progress, and, with a little earnest and decisive work, be stamped out altogether, as a disease is stamped out by perfect sanitation. In this hope I have written "Wormwood"; in this spirit I trust it will be received. Marie Corelli London, October 24, 1890"
The noble cure proposed by the crusading 19th Century lady, regardless her trust in "perfect sanitation", appears achieved at the present moment. Unlike ninety-nine years ago, mind- altering substances are now illegal. The piece of historicism was appreciated by myself until I scanned her beginning chapters and was mollified to find out that the protagonist and narrative confessor of the novel, an absintheur of the first order, was named "Monseiur Gaston Beauvais". This startled me. The name Beauvais is phonetically, and perhaps etymologically, in close company with my own name, Bovasso! Since drug-use was not included in my collection of vices, I had to ponder the nature of the nominal coincidence; or wonder my ordinary affection for domestic vodka and tobacco denied me--as a painter and poet no less-- the extraordinary inspirational excesses of Coleridge, Poe, Gauguin, Van Gogh & co. But I have always been imaginally crazy enough for visionary invasions without aid of new or old exotic pharmaceuticals. Left for consideration was the nature of coincidences and how they appeared in these last few years to intrude and disturb my privacy in an extraordinary manner. Otherwise I would cease and desist in my inscrutable persistence to track down the various and vagrant linquistic turnings of wormwood, and how it has appeared from one millennium to the next until now in world events and my own. Yet, aside from her tiresome crusade, Madam Corelli's absintheur-animus struck a chord loud and clear, and not without ontological overtones. Her Monsieur Beauvais, for example, introspects:
"Those cold and quiet stars! What innumerable multitudes of them there are! Why were they created? Through countless centuries bewildered mankind has gazed at them and asked the same question, a question never to be answered, a problem never to be solved. The mind soon grows fatigued with pondering. It is better not to think. Yet one good thing has lately come out of the subtle and incessant workings of intellect, and that is that we need not trouble ourselves about God anymore. Nothing in all the vast mechanism of the universe can prove a Diety to be existent; and no one is called upon to believe in what cannot be proved. I am glad of this, very glad; for if I thought there were a God in heaven--a Supreme Justice enthroned in some far-off sphere of life unseen yet eternal, I think--I do not know, but I think\_ I should be afraid! Afraid of the day, afraid of the night, afraid of the glassy river, with its thousands of drowned eyes below; afraid perchance, of my own hovering shadow; and still more darkly dimly afraid of creatures that might await me in lands invisible beyond the grave-phantom creatures that I have wronged as much and haply more than they in their time wronged me!"
Apparently to the benefit of my re-education, I learned that drug use during the last decades of the 19th Century was not only as epidemic as it is today, but accompanied by a modernly familiar ontological despair. Without the worrying over apocalyptic nuclear finality, three generations ago found people no less disappointed that paradise was not just around the corner to greet mortal limitations. The golden age of Enlightenment philosophers had reached climax in the overworked nihilism of Nietzsche, and complemented by the remedial projections of Karl Marx promising heaven in the here and now of the material realm. In either case, the heavenly estate of well exercised mind and intellect enjoyed by philosophers could no longer keep at bay the gnawing questions troubling mortality. If I were to introspect on this, now as it was then, and locate my own view in the matter, I may only reflect that my senior years as a painter finds me eager to entertain the appearance of cherubic angels in my work (at the moment, I am particularly obsessed to reinterpret in paint Tiepolo's heavenly vistas. To my surprise, however, my angels have something less than idle innocence about them).

Allowing myself to indulge this line of thought, I had further to reckon with the numerological aspects of John's statement, i.e., the "third angel" and "a third of the waters". What was the root of so much three-ness? So far as nuclear disasters were concerned what immediately came to mind was the Three Mile Island nuclear calamity; or how three mice in the San Onofre nuclear plant were alleged to have nearly caused a serious malfunction. Such incidents, however, although significantly coincidental enough, were far too literal as connections. More intriguing was the "third angel." Here the word chernobyl itself provided a lead. What Christians called "angels" and dressed in Roman style (childlike puti, shades of Eros and Cupid), the Old Testament called cherubim: winged, monstrous creatures associated with the Diety. They were assigned the task of guarding divine places and sacred precincts. As the plural of kerub, the word has no known Hebrew etymological root. It may be assumed it was borrowed from another culture and language. Since the cherubim guard paradise (Gen. 3:24) and are noted in the vision of Ezekiel (1:4) as four "living creatures" attendant upon the divine chariot, it is suggested that they have a lowly, earthly or chthonian origin. They are characterized as having four wings and four faces; man, lion, ox and eagle. Apparently such creaturely contrivances representing the variety of Mother Earth's progeny are suitable complements to the spiritual and divine estate. Again, this is a "black/white" (chernobyl) polarization, apparently intending to represent the dark, uterine chthonian realm of Mother Nature in functional, although oppositional, relation to the divine paternal and celestial luminous estate. What, however, draws the greater astonishment is how the roots cher or ker are so appropriately sounded in the Hebrew word kerub! From the Greek Keres (as migrating underworld soul-spirits, ghosts or eidolon), to the Hebrew kerub, a certain consistency of meaning persists, both intending demonic entities of the underworld, death, the cherno blackness. Or with less iconistic conclusiveness; the projected destiny of the flesh rejoined down below in the "realm of the mothers", as Goethe and Nietzsche called what was later psychoanalytically generalized as "the unconscious." Apparently my own painted infantile puti were more (unconsciously) borrowed from the baroque climax of the Renaissance, than designed in the images of brute creatures. I could not explain my affection for the ideal image of an angel cast in puer-innocence, even as I was aware that the tellurgic-chthonian aspect of cherubim is repeated in Christian iconography as a trinity of animal emblems; representing Mark as a winged lion, Luke as a winged bull, and John the Evangelist as an eagle. The Talmudic tradition holds the presence of the two intertwined cherubim over the Ark as representions of divine love, i.e., by God and his consort as Mother Israel. As this translates from Hellenestic to medievale Judaism much of the controversy concerning idoltry was retained. The gold wrought images were certainly modifications of the orgiastic ritual associated with the golden calf. Raphael Patai, in his The Hebrew Goddess (A Discus Book published by Avon, 1978), notes: "From discriptions contained in the Mishna and in Talmudic sources we know not only the ritual detains of this joyous feast (Sukkoth), but also the fact that both men and women participated in it and that on the seventh day of the festival the two sexes used to mingle and commit what is euphemistically referred to as 'lightheadedness.' We can only surmise that the showing of the Cherubim representing a male and a female figure in marital embrace, may have preceded, and, indeed, incited the crowds to, the commission of this 'lightheadedness,' which could have been nothing but an orgiastic outburst of sexual license." (p. 84-5) Sexual orgies, today more politely referred to as "fertility rituals," were equally expressions of a more cosmic meaning, as Patai notes; "...in ancient Israel as well as among the other ancient Near Eastern proples, the great cosmological and cosmological myth cycle, according to which the annual period of vegitative fertility was preceded by a unon of the male and female elements of nature." Such was equally the case in the Celtic (Irish) Maytime feastival of Beltane and no doubt harks back to the matri-centered agriculture societies of the late Neolthic. Amazingly enough, the non-Hebrew root to the word cherub retains the cher indicating "mother" (earth), the blackness, the chthonian underworld, death and (re)generation. The sublime infants depicted in the art of the Rennaissance moves further to remove any deep down under and "hellish" resemblance to such "heavy" meanings.] But of even greater moment is that cherno appears cognate with the Greek kernos; the vessel used during initiation in the Eleusinian Mysteries to distribute a certain concoction to the mystes that stimulated a revelatory hallucination. Jane Harrison quotes the scholiast on Plato's Gorgias; "he says 'the symbols of this initiation are, I ate from the timbrel, I drank from the cymbal, I carried the kernos, I passed beneath the pastos'. He says 'at the lesser mysteries many disgraceful things were done...'"10
***

Evidently both St. John and the Greek philosophers frowned upon what went on during the mystery ritual. At first look it would seem that some incident of erotic display drew their displeasure. Heraclitus, for example, complained about the mystery celebrants parading an effigy phallos through the streets of Ephesus (Ionian seat of the mystery religion). Although left unsaid, it may have been the contents of the kernos were equally problematic. From Athenaeus we learn: "kernos; a vessel made of earthenware, having in it many little cups fastened to it, in which there are white poppies, wheat, barely, pulse, vetch, ochroi, lentils; and he who carries it after the fashion of the carrier of the liknon, tastes of these things..." In a later observation he adds to the mixture; "sage, beans, spelt, oats, a cake, honey, oil, wine, milk and sheep's wool unwashed."11 If any hallucinogen was present in the kernos it may have been ergot, a fungus infection of grain, known not only for its hallucinogenic properties but long used to induce uterine contraction and as an anti-hemorrhagic medicament during childbirth. Various forms of ergot as well as wormwood (Artemisia Absinthium, chernobyl) were known to feminine cults since pre-historic times to prevent hemorrhage during childbirth. Accordingly, it cannot be deduced that the hallucinogenic properties of such substances were unknown. More controversial, considering the secrets held in the transhistorical feminine cult pharmacopoeia, is that such substances were later assigned to the underworld realm of Satan. As with his pre-Christian representation as Hades, lord of the underworld (death), Satan is equally identified with the phallos. Heraclitus makes it clear that Hades and Dionysius are one and the same during his complaint about the display of the phallos. It is thus indicated that both the phallos and the intoxicating substances represented by Dionysius, god of the vine, are combined in meaning for the mystery mother cults. This would include, as the well kept secret of the feminine cults, the effects and use of certain forms of grain infected with ergot if not Artemisia, or Chernobyl. The obstetric uses of ergot was investigated by Dr. Albert Hoffman. As a by-product of this study he discovered lysergic acid. Attendant to this and with regard to the Eleusinian Mysteries, he notes: "We have no way to tell what the chemistry was of the ergot of barley or wheat raised on the Rarian plain in the 2nd millennium B.C. But it is certainly not pulling a long bow to assume that the barley grown there was host to an ergot containing, perhaps among others, the soluble hallucinogenic alkaloids. The famous Rarian plain was adjacent to Eleusis."12
Significantly, the hallucinogenic effects of ergot are common to chernobyl and which tells that the root chern or kern are words intrinsic to feminine mysteries, or the great mother cults in general. This does not exclude the word kurgan, which means tummulus, grave barrow or cairn. It lends name to the Kurgan people of the fourth millennium native to the Steppes and the fertile humus stretching across southern Russia known as chernozem (black earth). The Russian chern and kurgan along with the Welsh cairn all appear cognate with the Egyptian Ka and the Muslim Black Stone (Ka'aba). All point to the realm of the dead and the underworld, but also to the fertile stuff of the mother. The word for "black" and the "blackness" as such seemed less rooted in the Indo-Aryan language group but in a prior tongue. This may account for why cherubim and kerub as underworld creatures raised to guard the divine estate have no known etymologies in Hebrew. It would also place the root word in wide difusion, perhaps from the British Isles to Siberia, some time during the lower Bronze Age.
The Caucasian and Georgian language groups are not part of the Indo-European, Semitic or Turco-Mongolian languages. Since the peoples of the Caucasus and Georgia have ancient origin in Asia Minor and the Mediterranian it may be speculated that the influence of continuous migrations would include those peoples of ancient Malta, Iberia and Britain who were as yet relatively untouched by Western migrations from the North. This would suggest their language groups are related to a late Stone Age people occupying Western Europe and the Mediterranean, e.g., Malta, Spain, Brittany and Britain; or those groups unknown responsible for megalithic structures. The ubiquity of the roots cher and ker having common reference to burial structures, the blackness and death indicate a prehistoric religion focused as the cult of the dead and centered around a maternal figure. This in turn would extend itself to neolithic agriculturists, or those old, Old World peoples emerged from the ice age and the nomadic Paleo hunter way of subsistance. Although it is difficult to reconstruct such links through a word, one thing remains exempliary; the persistance of a mother-centered cult where womb and tomb are iconically combined, i.e., megalithic tomb structures as essentially uterine in form. The Welsh cairn and the Caucasian kurgan to indicate tummulus appear to imply such a link, and both of which are not remote from chern.
The prehistoric language involved, of course, eludes us, although it is apparently not quite extinct in the modern world. Neither is the mother cult, sustained in more pristine terms by the Church (Mariology), although the favorite son of the ancient matri-centered cults and religions has evolved to the worst acclaim as Old Nick for his phallic rudeness in matters of the flesh and psychogenic affairs. Reduction of the animus-essential of the feminine psyche to the greatest evil (Satan qua Hades, Dionysos and phallos) gives evidence to the historistic suppression of not simply "evil", but the woman, per se. And if the inner fire, spark or numen personify intuition, no less ascribed (or proscribed!) as "feminine intuition," what else is threatened but the intellectual fortitude of the pro-rational masculine institution. On the other hand, far more has been expurgated than a root word and its mythos, however they point to a meaning that is disturbingly psychogynogenic. If both cher and ker refer to the uterine function as well as death and the underworld (chthonios), what to do or how to place our own Cherokee Indians in this old (Paleo) world picture? The word cherokee, of Muskogi origin, means "cave people"! The cher in it is certainly consistant with the meanings outlined above, just as the word chert in English dialect is a general name for flint (stone), the main source of tools for Paleolithic peoples.
The American Cherokees, part of the Alleghenian group, were distinctly matrilineal in their tribal organisation. It is thus suggested that cher is a root in a Paleo language long lost to history, if not historically deliberately denied, even as it is retained in remote usage, in this case as Cherokee "cave people." Yet it is hardly feasible to associate American Paleo peoples with their equivalent as Teutonic Battle Ax peoples who occuppied the upper Weser basin of Northern Germany and whose tribe was called Cherusci. Certainly such rude coincidences, merely linked by a common linguistic root, must remain anathema for modern archaeologists, anthropologists and scientists of linguistics, especially any direct link in the matter would upset all known notions of diffusion that took place before the Ice Age reached its climax. More threatening, of course, would be the meaning of cher and its various extensions, to the masculine fortitude regulating Western religion, philosophy and science.
***

After my "Stonehenge/Falkland Island connection", the meaning of Johannisfiere and the ancient summer solstice celebrations were not so remote. Yet, I did not expect to again find the St. John's Fire playing itself coincided with world events. Alerted by the July 25 N.Y. Times report about the Ukrainian word chernobyl, and John's use of it in his metaphor, I nevertheless had a hunch Jacob Grimm would have something to offer on the subject. In his Teutonic Mythology he notes Artemisia is referred to in various dialects of Old German as beiboss: "The meaning must be something like that of beischlag (by-blow), which in the Logau district means bastard...whoso hath beifuss in the house, him the devil may not harm; hangs the root over the door, the house is safe from all things evil and uncanny."13 That may be one way to keep Lucifer, or in classical antiquity, Hades or Hermes, at bay. For Latins Garlic or oregano may do in a pinch when the intuition is vibing out of hand. Intuition, as endopsychic perception, and relative to rational understanding, earns itself reputation as in league with the devil's party; or with less moralistic discrimination, the rising dawn star (Lucifer) and, of course, the Greek Hermes and Latin Mercury.
The original phallic nature of Hermes is first noted in Arcadia on Mt. Cyllene (his mythological birthplace) where his cult worshipped him as an ichthyphallic stone. Indeed, it might be said, as a "rising stone" or menhir (in Welsh, hard and erect)! Hades (death), insofar as it was personified as a figure, is also phallic. He, as Lord of the underworld or maternal "womb-world," is especially noted for his rapine service to Persephone, the ever renewed virginity of Mother Earth (as Gaia, Ge, and then De-meter). In this sense Hades performs as a primordial animus, the self-contained masculine principle in the service of the archetypal feminine. But this is the phallus in its underworld state. It is not yet objectified on earth as were the menhirs and herms, prevailing statically in the chthonian realm. On the other hand, the risen Hermes, when ultimately given full human form (as phallos), goes so far as to sprout wings in his mobility of ascent. Such "rising up" of the animus may be equivocated as a form of "consciousness raising" in feminine context, and no doubt evolves as the modern rocket rising with enough energy to overcome the gravitational pull of (Mother) earth. Hermes, because of his rude image and destiny to overcome the irresistible "black hole" uterine force of earth and underworld (death and entropy), stands in difference to Hades. Although both are originally phallically recognized, Hades remains an underworld figure, the Lord of Death, combined in nature as both a generative principle as well as a finalistic one. He thus settles historically as the ignominious figure of Satan or the Devil.
In all cases, this image and its continuity, remains as representation of the Hell or inner fire (ignis gehennalis); or intrinsic to "woman's intuition," the phallus as primordial animus of the feminine psychology.14 Significantly, phallus is etymological cognate with phos (light), indicating it as an immanence, virtually an ember continuously embodied in the womb/tomb until that time it will rise-up and blaze forth. Some of this meaning is retained in the Lucinda or Cinderella story. The Hebrew Shikinah also embodies an idea of the feminine principle indwelled (in the Ark) as the immanence of the eternal fire or light. In either case the phos is retained as the hidden or concealed inner masculine nature of the feminine, indicating, as such, a time when the feminine psychology was culturally dominant. The phos qua phallus is thus originally (at least from the standpoint of cultural development) a property of the womb in its state as confined to the womb-tomb, waiting, as it were, the awakening of consciousness and what was a revelatory moment of illumination celebrated in the rituals of the ancient feminine mysteries and their cults.
***
In view of this, Wormwood and "by-blow" come easily into association as divine in the old notion that bastards are sacred. In other words, the sacred child is the result of a pregnancy induced by someone or something other than the husband. More likely, and shorn of literalism, such birth is more in reference to a psychic event than a piece of biological generation. The notion is originally inspired by a belief in parthenogenesis, harking back to Neolithic matri-cultures, incorporated in the later feminine mystery cults and finally emerging in the Christian idea of Virgin Birth. In all cases it is by divine or super-natural agency that the woman conceives. And in all cases it is expected that the illegitimate birth anticipates a return of the hero or messiah (as World Redeemer). In a much later time this was translated as the droit du seigneur; where the first night of betrothal (jus primae noctis) for a vassal bride is spent with the local Lord of the land who, by royal assignment, must trace divine ancestry. The marriage tradition later sublimates this in the role of the "best man." In ancient Rome, for example, preliminary to marriage, the piercing of the hymen was ritually performed with a marble phallus that was token of the divinity. In all cases it was hoped the first born son would incorporate something more than what a mortal husband could endow. And if the woman were not a virgin she would not be fit material for divine intercourse. From the standpoints of both the betrothed, they would accordingly be cheated in their hope to generate a sacred and superordinate child. The identity of the transpersonal bridegroom must be vested in a phallic nature that in antiquity was clearly acknowledged as Hermes or Mercury, and then variously as Lucifer (the light bringer) and dawn star of the East. This is later pejorated as the devil and satan and then with amazing coincidence, wormwood or chernobyl used as a remedy during childbirth. But since chernobyl is combined as black/white it includes not only "the whiteness", the seminal divine luminosity, but the blackness of fertile mother chernozem. In turn, the agent of the mother performs as an aid to childbirth both pharmaceutically and mythologically as wormwood (Artemisia Absinthium). *** During the Middle Ages the Church repressed much of the meaning of the Hermetic phallic function and its service of engendering a sacred child. After all, Christ not only came once and for all time in such matters but arrived parthenogenically, indicating as such an animus rising (as His person) for the Holy Mother. Following such an event the archetype of Hermes qua Satan were necessarilly reduced to black magic- and which it always was, taking the cue from chern- but denied its white aspect because appropriated as the exclusive dominion of the Church. More difficult to limit were the pharmacological aspects of wormwood and the nativity of its archetype to the dreaded "woman's intuition;" the "rising up" of the psychogenic animus combined in meaning as both phos and phallus. In either case, although at its peak during the summer solstice, the "whiteness" could not be separated from its "blackness" and association with remedial magic. Subsequently, as Grimm notes: "On St. John's day they gird themselves with beifuss, then throw it in the fire, while spells and rhymes are said; hence the names Johannis gurtel, sonnenwend-gurtel, gurtel-kraut, Fr. herbe de S. Jean. They dig up this root solemnly, twine it into wreaths, hang it about them, and each flings it into the flame along with any grief he may chance to have about him. He that has beifuss on him wearies not on his way: this is imitated from Pliny 26, 89: 'artemisian alligatam qui habet viator negatur lassitudinem sentir...'" 15 (the St. John in reference here is to the Baptist and not the Evangelist.) Apparently among the rude folk the devil's root was homeopathically utilized to ward off a downer. And to avoid the last trip and final wearying on the way, Scotch legend has it, no less on the advice of a mermaiden: "If they wad drink nettles in March/ And eat muggons in May,/ Sae mony braw maidens/ Wad ha gang to the clay." The Scotch water dryad is related to the Russian Rusalki, water nymphs who were supposed aids to fertility and childbirth for Russian maidens. The lyrically pronounced advice may have been directed at the Scotch lass risking childbirth without mugwort in the ready, although as Grimm reports it, it may be used for whatever ails a maiden.
If modern Ukrainian country-folk retain any of their ancient Teutonic, Gaulish, Celtic and Slavonian legends, it may be expected that a chernobyl beverage would, especially in the recent scarcity of vodka, be sought to provide an antidote to radioactive poisoning. This is not so far- fetched. Already reports have leaked out (August, '86) that the Soviet authorities are having a difficult time convincing people vodka abundantly imbibed is no cure for maladies induced by ambient radioactivity. Along these lines, aside from warding off the devil and vagrant evil spirits, folk-medicine recommends wormwood for a weak liver and as a remedy for anemia, although no mention is made of leukemia. Its connection to the blood is significant enough, especially that blood and soul are mythologically synonymous. In the Odyssey, for example, a draught of blood gives momentary life (soul, animation) to the dead, to the effect that they may speak to Odysseus. The Dracula story more recently repeats this notion of re-animation of the dead. Blood, in any case, for what it carries and how it immediately affects the living, animated condition is both medically and symbolically prime.
***
HERBARUM MATER AND URSA MAJOR

It may be presumptuous to suggest the plant Artemisia has a remedial effect on the leukemia produced by exposure to radiation. Yet, if only in its mythological derivation and the nominal signature it draws from the goddess Artemis, the coincidence compounds itself in special meanings. Artemis, for example, is the sister of solar god Apollo, the most radiant (Phoibos) of all the gods. Although the eternal virgin and virtual twin-sister of the solar son, she is also closely identified in name with the Great Mother goddesses of Asia Minor. As the moon goddess, she complements her sun-god brother Apollo, so that when the Great Mother aspect is considered as representing the earth and chthonian realm, a trinity is completed (earth, moon and sun). Again, where Artemis is the extension of chern, Apollo is a ray of byle. The brother/sister union as "moon" is further amplified in the Hermes/Aphrodite union and where Hermes is re-certified as "light-bringer" (Lucifer) in original appearance as the eastern "Day Star, Son of Dawn."
***
Earth, in ancient mythological context, draws the greater importance for its uterine interiority, and where the womb is reckoned equally as a tomb (hence, chern in either case). The sun, on the other hand, embodies an energic, indeed nuclear spermatic principle. The moon, however, remains a wandering orb borrowing its whiteness from the (father) sun and takes on meaning as the measurer (mense). Nevertheless, it is essentially hermaphroditic, and representative of gender in its pre-pubescent state when secondary sex characteristics are nascent. Consequently, the moon earns its reputation as the innocent child fused in gender attributes and utterly dependent upon the courses of black mother earth and white father sun.
Although Artemis is hermaphroditically boyish as virgin goddess of the hunt, her moon/earth, daughter/mother identity (something repeated in the relation of Persephone to Demeter) is given emphasis in the herb Artemisia. Grimm notes, for example, it is called in Champagne marrebore or marreborc (marrubium?) and which intends the herb as la mere des herbs or herbarum mater, "the first of healing herbs". This maternal primacy of Artemisia suggests its fundamental potency, if not medicinally, mythologically. It is ur in nature and is close to the ar of Artemis whose root identity is as a bear (arktos). At Athens young girls were entered into the cult of Artemis and were called arktoi (she-bears). And although this was a cult of virgins in honor of the eternally virgin goddess, Artemis herself, through her double (cast as her companion Kallisto who represented her great beauty) was visited by Zeus and as a result gave birth to Arkas. Bearish all the way, Kallisto took position in the heavens as the Great Bear, the circumpolar constellation. Although cast as the eternal virgin, it seems Artemis managed a compromise and consummated her virgin nature through Kallisto, her surrogate and alter ego projection. As a virgin Artemis remained a free spirit, a wandering potential; but as Kallisto and a mother she was returned to the mother (Bear).
This may be related in meaning to the Hebrew Shekinah located in the Ark. It may be asked: is not the Ark of the Covenant in proximity to the meaning of the wandering vessel in the same sense as Arktos? And in extention; is not the Artemisian function related to change through generation and transformation, i.e., "wandering" or mobility? Notably, however the Ark qua Arctos never sets below the horizon (because circupolar). In either case what is highlighted is the feminine aspect as most secret and permanent (the Shekinah) and yet as the agency of disturbing change and transformation, e.g., the "wandering Jew" motif of ancient Germany. C.F. Keary notes:
"Another among the customs which belong to spring time is that of dragging from place to place a plough upon wheels. This plough is the changed form of the ship which we have seen carrying the image of Nerthus, a form suitable to settled folk and to agricultural lives. In some places where this festival of the plough takes place the young men who drag about the car compel any girl they meet (who has not previously furnished herself with a lover) to join their band. And in this custom we detect a faint shadow of ancient orgiastic rites. Shrove Tuesday is the day generally set apart in Germany for the dragging of the plough; in England it is the previous Monday, hence called plough Monday...The tradition of the Wandering Jew- he is Odhinn transformed- is that he can rest one night in the year only- namely, on the night of Shrove Tuesday- and that then he rests upon a plough or upon a harrow. Shrove Tuesday is of course the day when all sins should be absolved (Shrive Tuesday); but, in addition to this notion, I cannot but see in the resting of this sinner (who is also the fierce war god) upon the the plough a reminiscence, however faint, of the joyful and peaceful day when the earth Goddess came round drawn in her car."16
The image of the land mobile uterine vessel as transported ark, wheeled ship, wagon or car is repeated in the heavens. Both the heavenly Kallisto and the earthly Artemis as part of Ursa Major are distinctly uterine in nature and were known to the Teutonic peoples as The Wain, or wagon (Carles Waen;) and in southern France as the "frying pan", all references to the container form or "dipper" of that constellation. It is not without symbolic evolution as the everlost Holy Grail that is related in function to the wandering eternal virgin and her immanent potential. Renowned thusly, Artemis is early on associated with matters of uterine urgency, but hardly as a mother herself. She is only in proximity to maternity and thus able to perform as the divine helpmate for women in labor (as Iphigyneia). Subsequently, the plant Artemisia Absinthium drew its name accurately.
Artemis as the crescent moon (not quite waxed full in her feminine potential) stood somewhere betwixt and between the dark earth-womb (chern), and the paternal solar whiteness (byle.) There may be a similar relation here with regard to Carles Waen, Charles, Carl, car, chariot and the word charred. They collectively suggest something of blackening related to chern; that is, sympathetic to the chern mother-realm of the chthonian underworld. The River of Death, or Charon, was thus named appropriately.
Charles, for example, may alude to the reborn hero returned from the realm of death; e.g., Charlemagne as well as (King) Arthur, whose namesake means both "black" as well as "bear". It is thus suggested that the names Charles and Arthur are intimately related. The ar is rooted in ur. As a predicate it indicates "primordial" and also repeated as the cher and char of the "blackness" as place of origin; that is, the hero returned from the dead. "Ar"+"thor" to yield "Arthur" equally combines the primordial or reborn hero with Thor, the Northern war god, and whose name is lent equivalence to the Greek Herm (stone) as the Northern Tor Stone or tombstone which suggests a "rising up" (from the realm of the dead).
Arcturus and Bear (ursa) thus have little to do in figure with the animal and which the Teutonic peoples observed by referring to the constellation as the Wain, or Charles' Wagon. Curiously enough, the Hebrew Ash or Ayish refer to the square in this constellation as bier (Job, ix, 9, and xxxviii, 32) but which St. Jerome took to mean "bear" (Arcturus). Yet even in mistranslation the meaning remained constant. In Syria and among the Arabs it was assigned as Great Coffin.17 In all cases the blackness was retained. The slow movement circumpolar of the constellation suggested a funeral procession. But it would not be overdrawn to say that the circling hearse doubling as both an astro-womb and tomb always contained its spark, ember or numen implying that the hero-king would at the right time be born (in the sense of returning).
During the early Bronze Age period, gods were not so well personified or distinguished but still related to the ghosts of the dead who wander between the two polar realms (of the blacknness and the whiteness). Later on the figure of Hermes, who significantly enough originally arrives from the underworld as an erect (phallic) stone, would be in first generation to what has come to be known as a "god." A mobile car or chariot as well as the name Charles would have something to do with the mobility of Hermes (as god of commerce, exchange and whatever other form of intercourse that requires trafficking between two realms). Hermes as such would be distinctly a god of chthonian origin and properly an extention of the chernian mother-realm. Standing stones and later as herms would thus indicate not only the primordial phallus as a mother-property but the assignment of the feminine as a principle of change. In other words, where "the blackness" underlies mobility (e.g., Melville's "Moby"), change, transformation and temporality, "the whiteness" would represent the immovable heavenly father and ontological permanence (coupled to Moby as "Dick").
With Parmenidies this quality was translated as the Logos; that which is uncreated, always was and contains all; and in extended metaphore, the whiteness which contains all color but shows none (as Melville so vigorously commented about in his epic (Chap. 42). as The whiteness; a fair metaphor to what philosophers call a "universal" (as opposed to "particulars") and in each case representing the climax of an intuitive grasp (rather than its origin in the "blackness"). In other words, where the blackness is utterly phenomenalistic, representing particulars in an unmarkable ceaseless flow, the whiteness portends the universal as fixed idea and is in that sense ontologically concerned. Repeated accordingly, is the relation of Being to Becoming, the latter of which may be accounted for in the river metaphor of Herakleitos if not Melville's Moby (as mobility). In both cases the blackness may be appropriately assigned to indicate ceaseless generation (combined from birth to death and birth...etc.) and endless cycle; or what Giambattista Vico underscored in his Scienza nuova and what modern scholars delight to notice in the structural cycles of Joyce's Finnegans Wake.18
In all cases the agency of The Mother is addressed, especially that myth and cycle are conjoined in the single nut expressed pre-historically in the womb/tomb singularity, i.e., the uterine as a tail-eating circularity, and for which the whiteness (as phos) is but a germ in immanence. Although Joyce was totally indulged in such blackness, Melville extended the Moby blackness of the whale to include the phantom whiteness of "Dick;" the ontological presence, but as ever elusive, awesome and outside the reach of ordinary mortals (of whom, of course, Ahab was not).

The greater significance of the bear in the Chernobyl coincidence is that "Mother Russia" has always been identified as such, in contrast to the western masculine bull: from the solar bull of ancient Britons, The Mithraic bull of the Roman legions, to John Bull and the Papal Bull, but not to exclude bullshit and the Western talent for oratorical rhetoric. In the eastern languages, however, we lose sight of the ur, ars, arktos (that seem, like "Arthur," missing the "K" and "ch"), and must reach problematically to note any primordial mother aspect in the word chernobyl. Its handed down linguistic assignment as Artemisia, however, points to the more ancient reference to the mother goddess. One of the surnames, for example, of mother Hera, wife of Zeus, is Chera; "the solitary one". The name cannot be taken to mean Hera was alone much of the time because her divine, earth-visiting husband was such a philanderer.
The root to chera roughly means "land" as well as "dry", and would point to its association with mother earth as ge, Gaia, de and De-meter. This would distinquish the earth- mother from the original source as Okeanos and the mother goddess Tethys. The original association of mother and the sea is retained in the words mere and mare. Chera, however, is quite specific, indicating "land" in its more contained and internal circumstance, e.g., how a surrounding marchland defines a community, or an island. But as an island unto itself is not quite correct. The roots chera and chero indicate "solitary" and "dry" in the sense of land not submerged but apparent as an island, or connected to the main mother body. In linguistic usage, accordingly, chera (dry) plus neso (island) derive "peninsula"; e.g., in ancient geography, The Chersonese as the Jutland peninsula; or the Chersonesus Thracica, Chersonesus Taurica, Chersonesus Cimbrica, etc.
On the other hand, deep in the heart of the vastest mother- land, Kurgan (tummulus) is the name of a town in another chernozem section of Russia (the Uralsk area). It is not only known for its ancient grave mounds, but the production of Cherries. The Greek word for cherry tree is kerasos (Lat. cerasus), again duplicating the root word. The suffix asus indicates "sharp", or "to the point", as in the Latin acies, and then its use as "ace" to mean first or prime, but more to the point, "fundamental" or radix (as rhizomata). Here the pit of the cherry would draw the emphasis; as atom, seed, kernal, core and korai (virgin).19
The Latin aceae is used as a suffix to indicate, "in the (primary) nature of." Kerasos and "cherry" are thus charged in description of a feminine fertility, if not evermore in crude usage to female virginity, i.e., ker +asos = the prime or original and untouched feminine.
But even more poignantly consistent is the word kurgan, meaning tummulus, geographically linked to a place famous for the production of cherries! In this case an ancient if not pre-historic meaning is constellated; the interior fertile womb-place as equally a tomb-place; birth and death as a single nut. The root chern (meaning "black") is embodied in meaning as the dark uterine and maternal chthonian realm. The addition of death and the underworld, however, amplifies the feminine generative imperative to another dimension, indeed, beginning it at one end with the white virgin feminine (e.g., Artemis), and at the other with the wise old witch (Hekate)- or its Russian equivalent as Baba Yaga- who as "wise" is white but more famously black. The word Chernobyl properly indicates this polarity from white to black.
***
It is with regard to the "redness", however, that the black/white is exemplified in its generating and animating function. This is, curiously enough, also demonstrated both linquistically and chromatically. The word for "black" in Russian is chernyi, whereas one of the words for "red" is cherven. How could red and black be so intimately linked? Indeed, red is as close to black as Artemis is to the mother! The close association leads in antiquity to some confusion of Artemis with the Great Mother, just as Demeter and Persephone (the Kore) are confused in their duality and reciprocity. Their color, however, allows for some differentiation. Insofar as red suggests the virgin daughter about to wax full in her generative potential, there is no question that black refers to the mother (e.g., the "Black Madonnas" still venerated in Slavonic cultures, such as the icon at the monastery on Mt. Jasna Gora in Poland).
From black to red, Demeter to the Kore, tried mother to untried maidenhood, a two-in-one is registered; the woman as continuously both mother and virgin. In other words, each birth, and no matter how many, must prevail as if under the condition of virginity. Obviously, the fruit of the womb demands in its conception a state of mind that is purged of previous traffic so that each new birth arrives as arché, an original entity, a being unto itself. In this way the mother endows her child with what may be truly called its own unique birthright. A virgin birth, i.e., a woman in a state of purification or grace would, as it anciently did, require matrilineal descent above and beyond biological necessities in the matter of generation. This would imply a state of "matriarchy" although hardly in the political sense, but as the mandate of the feminine principle in dominion of a pre-historic mode of social and culture consciousness.
***
FROM CHERNOS TO KORAI

Since chern, kern and ker were tracked to meanings combined in mother, fertility and the realm of death, it must be noted that they were only preliminary assignments on my part. The first clue was gained in the reference of wormwood, or mugwort, to marrebore or herbarum mater, the "mother of all herbs." As previously noted, wormwood is conceived in folk- medicine as an aid to a weak liver, but more importantly of imperative use during childbirth. It is also said to help regulate a woman's menses. Perhaps this is another function by which wormwood derives its name, Artemisia. Artemis is also the moon-goddess and which brings up the subject of the lunar cycle as a prime article of measuring (mense). Unlike the sun, however, the moon is noted for its irregularity (because of its cyclic "wobble"). The moon-mense, or lunatic way of thinking (from the male standpoint), therefore assigns itself more to the psychic, feminine or soul aspects; or where periodicity and predictability do not follow the more linear (masculine) regularity of whatever is measured according to the solar course. Naturally, for the solar way of thinking, moon mensing is simply crazy; merely a "borrowed light" reflecting the solar fire, a proper animus as it were; e.g., the "man in the moon" as lunatic son and consort of the Great Mother (Earth).
Although measuring calendrically by the moon has been left behind to a greater antiquity, the Luna male/female gender fusion retains its mythological and then psychological perspicuity. Both Hermes and Artemis are known for their androgynous attributes insofar as both are constellated and retain an original child-like view of reality. Consequently, the lunatic hermaphroditic brother and sister coniunctio although complete with incestuous and homoerotic aspects, cannot be put through the wringer of axiomatic moralism. It relates, rather, to the world of the child and its innocence, i.e., the before-the-fall Adam and Eve state.
Short of such inherited bias, and however the devil qua wormwood may be equated with the moon goddess, the name Artemisia, a much later designation of wormwood, has extended the womb/tomb, black/white function of the archetypal feminine. This leads to the provocative subject of Artemis as both virgin and amazon; the young girl as essentially hermaphroditic in her infantile erotic expression. In view of this, and its remedial consequence, the organization of "Girl Scouts" took form for the ancient Greeks as the cult of Artemis and the arktoi, the "little bears" (the young maidens constituting the cult). The premature loss of virginity for a young girl was for the ancients a catastrophe, as was the subject of rape, if not retained in its sacred context. It in effect aborted the reservation of the feminine potential for its fuller expression in the individual destiny, i.e., love and marriage. Only the gods were allowed rapine liberties (e.g., celestial father Zeus, underworld lord, Hades, etc.) and to that extent as transpersonal visitations imparting the divine origins of the race and its evolutionary continuity.
In the Christian development, however, such archetypal behavior had little acceptance and where virginity is upheld as the higher estate and by which humans rather than gods- who are in any case immortal- may foster mortality to its generative fulfillment. Gods do not enjoy (or suffer) the mortal condition of generation and transformation, but simply change little but their names as they move on from epoch to epoch fixed in their archetypal function. Aside from this understanding, the divine nature, particularly of male gods, remains "strange" or projected into the figure of an actual male stranger, traveler or wanderer who takes on as such the quality of the phallic Hermes, god of traffic and commerce, or simply coming and going.
A married woman, for example, might with impunity have a brief affair with a wandering, nameless stranger—as was often the case in the sexual liberties enjoyed by the ancient Irish during the Beltane season. If she became pregnant accordingly, it was not to the chagrin of her proper husband, especially that "stranger" implied a "god", more likely in the forebearance of Hermes or his equivalant (as "messenger of the gods"), and by which a sacred child or divine bastard would be born. Here it may be observed that Hermes—by his very function as psychopompous—is a personified precedent to a later idea of the Holy Spirit. Since the Virgin Mary was impregnated by the Spirit, something of an archetypal motif is registered and which would not be foreign to an ancient Celtic housewife. In the Christian case the Paraclete remains without personified image, retaining in numinous abstractness its identity as spark or numen. In this manner the Christ and the Spiritus Sancti remain one, joined in the Trinity with the Father, yet nominally differentiated. In the Hebrew case the Shekinah in its Ark containing the numen remains as an immanence, or the promise of an objectified Messiah to come.
***
Veneration of the virgin nature is not universal in ancient cultures, or at least how "virgin" is intended later on. Briffault in his The Mothers notes, for example; "The Great Mothers have no husbands. They are 'virgins'. This word meant, originally, not a woman who had no sexual experience, but one who was independent. (The correct Latin expression for an untouched virgin is not virgo but virgo intacta.) Aphrodite herself was a virgin, and the term was applied to all goddesses of the early Aegean cults. Thus it was that the Virgin Ishtar was frequently addressed as 'the prostitute'. Children born out of wedlock were called parthenoi; the Greek word 'parthenos' has the same meaning as the Semitic 'bathur', or 'unwed.'"20 In North Africa and Ionia, for example, it was often the custom for a maiden to offer herself as a prostitute by way of earning her dowery. The "independence" (today we say "liberation") was achieved through pre-marital intercourse with a stranger, or more ritually observed, by a temple priest. In the more archaic case an animal served this purpose, such as a he-goat. But in all cases parthenos was requisite simply so that first intercourse would be consummated as a sacred marriage, or hierosgamos, i.e., by a god (as a "stranger").
Maiden (parthenos) goddesses accordingly proliferated in the early Greek religion, without compromise of what to later expectations would be the paradox of virgin mothers. Eventually, however, the emphasis shifted from mother to virgin, enough so to draw special comment by Kerenyi: "It is as though the Olympian order had thrust the great Mother Goddess of olden time into the background for the sole purpose of throwing the divine Korai into sharper relief."21
The developmental move forward from great mother to untried virgin daughter realized itself although in recursive steps. Comparing, for example, the virgin goddess Athena in distinction to the virgin Artemis, Kerenyi notes; "In the outer circle of the Olympian hierarchy there reigns yet another maiden- Artemis. She too is both Kore and Parthenos. But her maidenhood expresses something different from Athene's. Her world is the wide world of Nature, and the brute realities balanced in her—unsubdued virginity and the terrors of birth—have their dominion in a purely naturalistic, feminine world. Athene's maidenhood excluded the possibility of her succumbing to a man; with Artemis, on the other hand, her maidenhood presupposes this possibility."22
***
Mother and Kore, black and the red, in any case, are ritualized in their relationship during the mystery celebrations. Less distinct is the priestess who officiates. She is more likely, because her "blackness" impinges in the area of the whiteness, the weis, "west" and its correlate as the subject of death. The priestess provides or serves the necessary ingredient which induces in experience the demise, if only as ritually violent rape, of the virgin nature. If psychotropic substances were distributed by the priestess to accomplish this, it is only in measure to the transfiguring experience it incurs for the mystae. It must be stressed here that the term virgin (or kore) indicates any state where the subject is unawakened but must experience revelation. Obviously, the mystery revelation was not reserved for young ladies with their hymens intact, but for young or old regardless of gender, who would experience entrance into themselves of the god.
***
WORMWOOD WISDOM

Grimm astutely links chervioburgus to chervio as wise-woman or witch and burgius as her porter, attendant, or he who carries her cauldron (kettle-bearer). The witch, as known during the Christian epoch, is a remnant of the priestess charged with concocting and distributing the hallucinogenic brew. Although the essentially Celtic derivation of chern apparently holds, it is through Chernobyl as reference to wormwood that it survives in the Slavonic languages: "Boh. chern-byl, Pol. czarno-byl, Sloven. zhernob (black herb); Serv. bozhye drutze, God's little tree."23
The black herb wormwood, the drutze (Celtic drus= oak), as "God's little tree", all point to the plant endowed with the magical potency of the earth. Grimm (citing Mullenhoff) then proceeds to link chervioburgus to the kernophoros of the mysteries.24
From magic witches' cauldrons to the Mystery Kernos and sacred little black drutze, the route to the chthonian chernian earth is clear, and in which is harbored the original treasure or magic potency endured as wisdom. From the hamadryadic wormwood "tree" which rises from the bowels of the earth, the serpent offers the forbidden fruit (of wisdom). There is an ancient Egyptian notice that chernobyl or wormwood was found growing in the furrow left in the path of the serpent from the Garden of Eden. The previously noted ingested "Bitter Scroll" may be related to this in the same sense of the "apple" from the Tree of Wisdom.
All of such references point to the raising of intuition as something associated with the wormwood plant, and in turn, Summer Solstice or St. John's Day. Touchstones, or St. John's coals, may be found, observes Grimm, "from noon to vespers of St. John's Day under the beyfuss" (wormwood). A touchstone is a black siliceous stone related to flint (what else but called "chert"!) used to identify silver or gold, and no doubt a tool for alchemically inclined hermeticists. The folk notion both anticipates and includes the alchemical quest to free the Mercurious from captivity in the saturnine blackness, and which is often resembled as an obdurate stone; or we would say today, the "black hole" of ultimate gravity, density and entropy.
Dissolution in the nigredo, or state of blackness (chern) necessarily precedes the effort. In all cases, matter is conceived in its most finalistic state of singularity, and whose metaphor would equivocate as "death." But if alchemy, and now modern physics, seek to raise to consciousness the ultimate material condition by freeing the nuclear and mercurial "inner fire" (intuition), the effort superficially appears counter to the Johannine message.
What must be remembered about the feminine ritual mystery process is that it was soon enough appropriated in the masculine psychology. Or with better qualification it should be said, the more introspective type of male; those recognizable as shamans, priests, seers and ultimately philosophers. Parmenides, for example, appealed to "the goddess" for his wisdom. This inversion, or what is first evidence of the masculine contrasexual function—or anima—constellated a distinct problem because the feminine experience of revelation, the coming of the light (Luciferos), was inscrutably combined in the phallic image. Nevertheless, and aside from a more sensitive introspective maleness, Herakles, the archetypal macho-man, found need in his heroic career to don womans' clothing and submit himself as servant among the maidens in the court of Queen Omphalos of Lydia.
However literally expressed in the masculine nature, the feminine psychism would prevail at odds with the actual male and his seminal function, and the feminine appropriation of the phallos as no less something of an evil. Accordingly, following the feminine rising up of the inner light, the male would by necessity reverse the process. With John, for example, we find Satan initially confined to the bottomless pit and more the dread he may be freed or turned loose. This would appear quite antithetical to the alchemist's intention to free the Mercurious from its material (maternal) prison, or prima materia. The process that John projects, however, encompasses itself historically insofar as he described a process of descent and confinement to the "black hole" underworld of death reality. This cannot be overlooked in the paradigm of Christ descending to Hell. As Christ rose in his time, Satan is anticipated to rise a thousand years hence, and which in fact commences the modern age. Christ and Satan are thus posited as the two sided coin of a single reality; the ambivalence of intuition, the inner fire defined in its polarity from the blackness of chthonian ultimate gravity to the whiteness of celestial luminosity; which is to say, from feminine to masculine psychism. It equally defines the relation of psyche to spirit, both required, however, of the material and maternal metaphor as their vessel of confinement; the Earth (Mother) as chern, the Saturnine vas, car or ark in which her phos qua phallos "inner light" (e.g., as Shekinah) waits in darkness.
The inner light as an unconscious immanence is strictly a feminine property; that is, in contrast to the solar luminosity. It may, in Jung's terminology, be called a most radix animus (of the feminine psychology). It also, however, incurs the meaning of phos, which in Greek is etymologically cognate with phallos, suggesting a phallic or "rising up" of the internal little Cinderella spark from within its womb/tomb place of darkness, the ember of char or glowing coal of the chern place. In other words, the darkest blackness indwells a point of light that is germ to solar and star light; a notion that may be considered in violation to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and whatever finality attributed to a process of entropy and the theoretical possibility of astronomical "black holes." (Note: Stephen W. Hawking might agree with this except in his cosmological view he manages to conserve the 2nd law.)

The metaphoric anodos (rising up) was displayed in Greek antiquity as the phallic Herm, signature of Hermes who is known for his vibrating coming and going from the underworld realm of the dead. This has great significance with regard to another name for Satan; Lucifer (the light bringer). Neither is it inconsistent with a dream reported by C.G. Jung that he remembered from when he was three years old; of a giant ichthyphallus rising in a cavernous underground space. In view of what has been above noted, this may have well been little Carl Gustaf's mother's dream.25
How "metaphoric" this is as a mere imaginal fantasy culled in the language of myth and psychic archetypes remains questionable. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster oddly enough demonstrates in actual event much of what John and the Alchemists were about, if only following remote notations lingering from the ancient feminine mystery cults. The symbolic references remain, in any case, alarmingly consistent. For example; at this moment (August 18, 1986) the Eastern Bear is desperately at work to confine the still generating nuclear reaction to its Hadean bottomless pit. Tons and tons of cement are being poured to isolate the reaction in a concrete tomb, a modern day Ukrainian kurgan. Old Wormwood is nevertheless loose in no uncertain terms and the Russian success at confinement remains problematical. Ultimate "matter" apparently is defying materialists in a way that is having a world effect. Yet the Russian effort is no less Johannine in its attempt to lock the devil in its cherno hell (note: during the summer of '86 when the above was written, the world worried about the possibility of a nuclear meltdown. The threat of a runaway "inner fire" did not, however, materialize. Mr. Wormwood was safely retained in his bottomless pit).
Would this indicate the liberational phos and phallos in the feminine compartments of the psyche are yet to be realized in Russia? Are perestroika and glasnost fair beginings? If so, certainly will Mr. Gorbachev be remembered as the first genuine saint of the Russian revolution. (Note: The above was written quite before "democratization" had become something more than rhetoric, and instigated by the Chernobyl event and my subsequent wormwood investigations. But at this writting and re-editing [April 15, '90] it becomes clear that the chapter isn't finished as yet.)
***
From the feminine psychic standpoint, the anodos or "rising up" is charged until this day with the motifs of "consciousness raising" and in effect something revelatory and liberational for the woman. But from the masculine psychic standpoint the event is more problematical and resolves as the mockery of his own phallic function. After all, the feminine psychic impression of the phallos is quite different from the actual masculine use of it. What performs in the reference of tool and weapon for the man is an awesome divine creature for the woman. However such differences may be defined in the modern psyche, the primordial phallic nature of Hermes is early on represented as a rising up from the earth as wood or stone menhirs and herms; virtual in-place gods complementing the tummulus mounds that were the signatures of the early matri-cultures. (late neolithic and early Bronze Age).
As properties of the mother cults such phallii in fact anticipated if not designed the macho-heroic masculine psychological development from the Iron Age (of Homeric Greek heroes) to the present, e.g, The name of the Greek hero Herakles literally means the fame or brightness of Mother Hera. On the way, the Christian Fathers responded vehemently to such "mystery" inclinations of women, condemning not only the feminine cult pharmacopoeia but its principle performer by then assigned as the devil himself. But we may be suspect here that visionary men, or those given to intuitive predilections (as "prophets") surreptitiously infringed (as did Socrates and Plato) on the methods, manners and instruments of feminine mysteries.
The homoerotic appetites of the Greek philosophers would indicate the inversion of the functional masculine psychology; where the anima, or psychogenic soul-lady for the male, is literally personified and identified (with), in the case of the philosophers, as a mystic seeress; e.g., Plato's Lady Diotima, priestess in the mystery cult. Only by such inversion could Plato, in the example of Socrates, transcend rational discourse and reach for the inner fire source; the superordinate "wisdom", or more correctly, the endopsychic intuition, native to the feminine psychology and imaged as the primordial phallic animus. Again, and quite as a literalism, the animus as both phallos and phos was the "rising up" instrument to the inscrutable inner intuition and whose affectation as mania (inspiration) excluded masculine thinkers limited to thinking empty abstractions.
How else to gain the seminal whiteness but imbibe it in the act of fellatio and thereby allow it penetrate and fertilize the soul. In other words, the inferiority of the male with regard to the feminine psychism left no other alternative but mimicry.
There is an implicit contradiction here that compromises the actual male function and psychology. If the celestial father (as Zeus, and later, "God") was supposed the seminal source of wisdom, why the greater emphasis placed on God's fruit as offered receptical of the inner fire? Simply enough, it would indicate—and long before Christianity—that God's Son, and only through the agency of the mother, could embody or incarnate His wisdom. The Son, unlike the already in being Father, must emerge from the chernozem, the earth-womb (in Adam's case as the red clay). The new-born male babe as if parthenogenically the exclusive property of the mother is elected for this mythological role. Hermes, for example, of all the gods, is emphasized as a wizened and clever infant, indeed a thief and a trickster who outwits his solar (and closer to the father) big brother, Apollo.26 But even prior to such infantile personification, the wonder-child Hermes appears in a greater Greek antiquity as a phallic stone on Mt. Cyllene where he is especially venerated.
Interestingly enough, the blind seer Teiresias ("reader of signs") of the Oedipos myth was assigned a mother by name of Chariklo, like the wife of the wise Centaur Chiron. Again, we fall upon the ker and chern root signifying the blackness. Consistantly, it was told that Tieresias was a descendant of Udaios, "man of the ground," or better say, "underworld." In one story, as Kerenyi reports it, the seer paid for his wisdom with blindness (again, the "blackness") on Mt. Cyllene where he killed a snake which represents the chthonian realm. Part of his obligation for this crime at the place of the phallo-serpentine god was to live as a woman. Thus blind as a seer to regular male seeing, he was allowed the inner vision of chthonian mysteries, or what is strictly the property of the feminine psychism. This would account, long before Plato, for the necessity of the philosopher, or man of wisdom, to somehow sacrifice manhood (in the case of Oedipos by blindness) and assume the feminine nature and its special endopsychic insight. Much later in history we find Tertullian, the early Christian Church father, literally perform the sacrificium phalli, no doubt in order to grasp the feministic insight, the better to serve the Mother Church.
In all of the above cases, however, it must be observed that it is the blackness and the Mother that is stressed and hardly her separate instance as the redness and the virgin. As a result death, the underworld, and the nigredo state draw the emphasis, but which soon enough evokes the virgin nature as a major influence in Western historical continuity.

If the newer, more personalized emphasis on the feminine nature had set the pace for the future development of Western Culture, does the collective psychology of the East lag behind and remain tethered to the mother (quite chera and cherno and all to her transpersonal self)? Certainly from the Bosphorus to the Altai mountains there are no black madonna goddesses promoted in the red Marxian epoch. Nevertheless, the trans- historical Russian culture-body distinguishes itself according to Eastern and Western cultural polarities: The East (qua Eastre or Ostre) points to the mother realm in a European orientation; the place of birth and the direction from which the new-born sun rises. The West, on the other hand, is the place of death (wies or white qua West), and where the sun enters the underworld. Here the old notions of "Mother Russia", the "Russian soul," the hibernating bear and arktos coalesce. Where Germany "the wolf" and natural enemy of the bear is the Western fatherland, in no uncertain terms is Russia the Eastern motherland. It is thus not so curious that the original Nazi (National Socialist) movement drew much of it psychogenic impetus from a mystic cult of the time called Ostara!
When the Encyc. Britt. notes, for example; "The principle use of the calendar is to locate Easter..." more is said than a technical calendrical problem for Christianity, split between Eastern Byzantine and Western Roman modes of calculation. Indeed, has Easter, the East and the mother become lost, or simply left behind the Western cultural progression? The problem is; Easter must fall for Western Christianity on Domenico, the Sunday or ruling day of the Father. It would not do to have Easter fall on the Sabbath, the day of Saturn (Saturday), the darker side of the Jovian God. That would put it too close to the Eastern ostara and aspect Chern (of the mother).
In terms of the wormwood/Chernobyl synchroncity it is suggested the mother bear has been unable to safely—or fruitfully—contain the germ of the Western zeitgeist, the whiteness as it were, yearned for but reluctantly received by Mother Chernyi still coveting the soulful (cherry!) redness of her virgin potential. On the other hand, by importing a Western greybeard philosopher's spiritualized patristic whiteness and its promise of heaven on earth, Mother Russia is stood on her head and in effect invaded successfully by the geist of the Western Reich. Marx was, after all, the last in a tradition of German transcendental philosophers, breaking tradition by simply standing Hegel's spiritualized dialectics on it head and reframing it as "materialistic", i.e, Dialectical Materialism. In effect, the transcendental "whiteness" philosophy of the West was in one quick spin (revolution) plunged face to face with the "blackness" (a metaphor for the "masses", the "mob" (chern) and their repressed dissatisfaction for alienation from material, maternal abundance).
The greater significance of this is that Marx himself retreated West to Albion, the legendary utopian land of Hyperboreans (England, the land of angels). His scientific utopian philosophy, however, migrated East. It was as if the whiteness (in his head) sought its dormant and untried mate in the body of Mother Chernyi; and her historically turbulent serfdoms of the chernozem. And this is quite the same direction the Nazi advanced, as promoted by the Fuhrer, no doubt in search of the lost mother!
The spirit-suitor, as the whiteness inverted, moving from West to East, was subsequently reconditioned as the adopted Russian political and economic philosophy. The marriage revealed itself as a most compulsive affection perhaps reflecting a similar exogamous trend going back to Peter the Great and his zest for albanized Western culture. It thereafter takes form as the dynastic family of Czars and culminates in the fatherly forbearance of modern-day Soviet dictators. But the paternal pretense is merely provisional and superimposed on the maternal dominion of the Russias. In this sense, if we care to "read signs", the Chernobyl nuclear event marks another great (after the Marxist infusion) transition for Russia; an awakening as it were, to what is its more immediate need and native destiny. Certainly it is not to be realized in the exportation of Marxism—borrowed from the West in the first place—or a Caesarian plan for world domination. On the contrary, the Cherno-soul of Mother Russia appears ready to give way to a first Artemisian mense; a chernovian cherry ripe for a home-grown liberation (although this prognosis was inspired during the Chernobyl nuclear event, it would appear now, three years later, implied in the recent Russian election results).

The black mother (earth) and rosy red daughter (fruit) as the subliminal chromatic emblems of Russia, long precedes the bloody revolutionary redness of its more recent political importation. If the chromatic emblem of the Soviet Union has remained red, its color was chosen in tradition. But a tradition going back 6000 years! And if the politically appropriated redness shows as the color for revolution, it does so in the name of the archetypal Kore preparing for her anodos. This is not inconsistent with the antique mythological and mystery religions' use for the image of the virgin. After all, the popular goddess appropriated to represent the American Revolution was the militant kore Artemis (along with the Virgin Mary), just as Lady Liberte' (Marianne) with her Phyrigian cap- shades of Artemesian Taurean Amazons- came to personify revolu