Green Christ: Myth, Mystery, and Mycelia - Part I

"When I lean over the chasm of myself— / it seems / my God is dark / and like a web: a hundred roots / silently drinking.” - Rilke trans. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy

When we move from the monologue of modern theology and patriarchal cultural values to the myco-logue of mythic consciousness and entangled identity, we discover a whole living root-system of ecstatic participation. Deep in the primordial ground beneath the temple stones of power, priesthood and doctrine, something mycelial is silently drinking. In the dark soil can you feel something fruiting up around you? In mythic memory vegetation goddesses and gods who thundered through animistic traditions, once watered particular visionary ways that gave birth to religion and culture. These roots still live, they still weave through the hollow ruins of our empty religious symbols and institutional structures even today.

Western culture was traumatically uprooted long ago from sacred land and place, from storied landscapes that once shimmered with mystery. These once healthy ecosystems of oral stories connected the deep imagination and sacred place, were eventually torn up. Before the living Powers of the cosmos were abstracted and locked away into distant heavens, before the wild goddesses were domesticated and absorbed into monotheism, the sacred Powers were once tasted in plants, experienced in Earth and elements, felt in the ecstasy of lightening and the voice of storm, moved through bodies in dance, held by ritual and story and known intimately in trance states. Many of the Greek gods were vegetal in nature, intimate and embodied they could be touched, handled, experienced—focalized in something alive through myth and story into the practical needs, longings, and mysteries of daily life. As a society of consumers we can no longer touch and taste the Mysteries, or feel the world that is our only home.

In this episode “Green Christ” we will explore an ancient archetype of the divine that takes us “out of the mind” so that we can return to the body, deep in the somatic, erotic, and the instinctual polyphonous flesh of the world, a wilder incarnation. Jesus appearing like a vegetation god, the true Vine of experience cstasy and invasive Life who was seen as a new Dionysus, offering true Bread in the dismemberment and scattering of his mystic body for harvest like the grain cycle of Demeter. One in whom activated something in the deep, unseen mythic mycelia across Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, and Persia alike. An elemental Christ archetype of stone, and fire, Earth and water weaving through Hebraic myth and mystic experience, that grew through the peaty soils and loamy memory of the ancient Celts, and other Earth-based and animistic traditions in which Mystery was truly alive and intimate to daily life and place, livelihood and culture. Human, Animal, Vegetal, Mineral—Green Christ.

Mythic Christ offers online community for exploring mythic structures of story, archetype, dream, and the deep imaginal realm awakening within individuals who are sensing a collective longing a desire to rewild the divine image and re-root our religious institutions in the sacred Spirit-breathed ground of the natural world.

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