Imaginal Arcadia

May 24, 2022

Before Greece was "Greece" it was, something else.

Arcadia (the domain of Pan)

(Pan, being the embodiment of nature, often described as the god of shepherds, having roots deep, deep in the pre-neolithic dream-time, containing all nature in his being, the Lord of the animals, the animus of the world...)

Arcadia, with her roots in the times before deliberate cultivation, before the plow ripped our mothers' flesh, rises up in visions, art, poesy again and again hearkening to the age when it was golden, verdant, a tumbling world of plant, animal, spirits, and gods... before the times of subservience, neolithic priest-craft, kings and corporations.

Arcadia, the wild hunt, Centaurs chased by nymphs as Hamadryades observe from cool glens and sacred groves... echoed later by the Dionysian frenzies of the Bacchante. Classical scholars look backwards to a past surpassing their present, to an age not forgotten, but hidden, dormant, sleeping.

Pre-Religion, before priest-craft before alphabets stealing essence of the ancient tales, un-tonguing bards striking vision down to dusty tablets, then rotting pages over the ages.

Rivers churning with fish, herded by naiads through channel and rapid, swimming languorously in pools of emerald purity. Children playing in streams, the sunlight slanting down through the canopy, letting fish slip through their hands, laughing.

Before the Πελασγοί, Pelasgoí, before the Mycenaeans and Doric hordes streaming southward into the mother country with their jealous Olympians ousting an older world; an older order of Goddesses & Gods, who had walked upon the earth, titans, dragons, the Great Mother all encompassing.

Bear Clans, Wolf Clans, Deer Clans, Lion, Leopard Clans, the Horse Clans/Centaurs running on ridges high above the vale, ages before the Pythian mysteries were seized by Golden Apollo, long before Persephone's descent. A chaos of green, a riot of divine madness, endless, ancient.

There was Colloquy and Chaos, nature unbound untrammeled, un-subservient to plows & plunder, a world still wrapped in wonder. Arcadia...

Rites before religion, it rises chthonic again and again in the collective memory, through literature, art and inebriation. The world as it was, the world as it should be, the world in its original context, dreaming and full of life, infinite. Every child is born in Arcadia, and then dissuaded from their inheritance, to wander as orphans until the journey home.

Stars wheeling in the skies above forest and meadow, dolmens newly risen cave dwelling tree beautiful in the twilight. We ran with the packs, the herds, the tribes, chasing the moon, her maidens her shadows..

A moment suspended in aspic: Aurochs graze in meadows of poppy and anemone that sway in drowsy summer sun, stirred by afternoon zephyrs before the harvest of acorn and berry, so long ago. Epimelides wander past wild apple and herds of sheep.

Mortals commingling with Goddesses and Gods, celebrating through divine inebriation, and the rites of love and season.

The sun scuttles across the sky followed by the moon. Time spirals in the ever present now. Seasons come and go, now is all there is. Arcadia still sleeps beneath the surface of our every thought, rising out of plants in human guise, humans transforming into animals, animals into plants, mineral, water stone. Unclad, beneath the sun and moon.

So, I have let my imagination flow backwards to ancient before ancient times, and savoured the imaginal in the ravines and valleys of my mind...

I was brought up on the classics. The first two books that I remember were illustrated versions of The Iliad, and The Odyssey. Of course, these are tales of the Mycenaeans and Pelasgian peoples, who were cohabiting Greece at that time. The Olympians were just making their appearance, subverting the Elder Goddesses & Gods of the Pelasgians and older tribes by seizing shrines and places of spiritual and ritual importance. You know the stories that have informed the West for the last three thousand years at least.

Little did the Mycenaeans and Pelasgians know what was to befall them with the (supposed) incursions of the Ionian & Doric waves... Although the archaeological evidence could be deemed, "scant", something indeed occur in the years/century after the fall of Ilium/Troy. Cities abandoned, palaces burned, a return to smaller communities, a loss of script, etc bringing in a dark age of at least 300 - 500 years. There are no records, only tales passed down through the years dimly.

The fading light that was Arcadia outside of the heartland was certainly quenched in the more... "civilized" cities, Thebes, Corinth (most ancient!), Athens, and mother Knossos. Did Arcadia still continue? Perhaps in the hinter lands, the mountain and hill country where the plow and serf were not yet introduced by the emerging lords of the land, whether the old ways and old Goddesses & Gods were still held in high esteem, where the Centaur tribes still rambled. It has been said that Pan would still manifest/visit the sacred groves and flocks up to the time that another dour faith appeared, with one jealous god, a god who forgot his origins as a mouse daemon amongst the grain, one who forgot he was but one of many.

Why is Arcadia, or the idea/ideal of it important? If you have spent time in wilderness, made love in a sun drenched meadow, or in moonlight, swum naked in a stream, lake or ocean it would not even be needed to ask.

I do not hold with Marija Gimbutas that all was copacetic before the "Kurgans" appeared (still being debated btw) but I will say that even up into the times of the Pelasgians & Mycenaeans melding of cultures, the Great Goddess perhaps known as Eurynome (Εὐρυνόμη) or by some older name held sway over cultures in Greece and the Balkans for thousands of years. There was inter-tribal conflict buy not necessarily like what came after with the Sea Peoples and the fall of the mother civilization.

It is a dim memory now, but Arcadia is also a dream of possible futures. Perhaps we will finally shed the barbarism that the later neolithic brought into being with its hierarchies and concepts of division from nature. I sit outside, and on one hand listen to the frantic sounds of mechanized transport, but yet the wind still blows the branches, the birds sing, and at night the frogs join together in choruses that echo into the darkness. The river flows near, and we are surrounded by the green and tumbling world still. It is here, just under the surface, ad we have just to awake to the world as it was and to what it really is.

Civilizations fall, this we know. This one will as well, even though it spans the entire globe. We can hope and work for a better one to follow, emerging out.

We tend to dream futures. You see it in literature. Arcadia as a concept came back into the western mind with the advent of a poem in 1504 written by Iacopo Sannazaro "Lament of Androgeo" (Arcadia). This poem influenced Milton, Shakespeare, Philip Sydney and others. It's publication is cited as the beginning of the Renaissance, and for good reasons. You can feel the longing for Arcadia in the stories and poems since. Glimpses of that age appear in art, literature, in secret societies that welled up trying to overturn the direction of civilization in those times and since.

This reawakening was not an accident by any means. Nothing happens without deeper resonance. Dreams & realities will lie dormant until the time of awakening is right. We are now in such an awakening, we have a road map that leads us to where we are destined.

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Arcadia is both past and future. - Gwyllm Llwydd

Lament of Androgéo (Arcadia)

O BLESSED soul and sweet,
From mortal bonds set free,
Naked unto th’ eternal choirs didst rise,
And there thy star didst meet
And joinest in her glee;
Mocking our cares, now showest in the skies
A bright sun to our eyes
Among the purest loves;
And ’neath thee canst behold
The wandering stars unfold,
And by clear springs, in sacred myrtle groves,
Heaven’s flocks agrazing, whence
Scornfully thou dost cast earth’s troubles hence.
   Now other hills and plains,
And other streams and groves,
And fresher flowers thou seest in the sky;
Down peaceful summer lanes
Moved by more passionate loves,
By other Fauns pursued the Nymphs flit by;
Where shadows softly lie
And fragrance is distilled,
Daphne and Meliboeus nigh,
Androgeus sings, the sky
Burdening with tender sweets, while stirred and stilled
115The winds are by the sound
Of unaccustomed accents wafted round.
   As unto elm the vine,
As bull unto the herd,
As to the happy fields the waving corn,
Even so art thou the wine
And fame our hearts preferred;
Who may escape from thee, O Death forlorn,
If hills thy fire hath shorn?
O who can hope to see
So gay a shepherd again,
Singing so sweet a strain,
Stripping the woods as he,
And scattering everywhere
Shade on the waters with green branches fair?
   The Goddess divine
Thy passing did deplore,
The streams, the caves, the beeches mourned thy plight,
The wan, frail grass did pine,
Bewailed the verdant shore,
Full many a day the sun concealed his light;
Wild beasts lurked out of sight
Nor to the fields did go,
Nor flocks o’er hillsides pass
To drink and crop the grass;
Untoward fate had aimed so dire a blow
That in or sun or shade
“Androgeus, Androgeus” thrilled the glade.
   Hence garlands fresh we lay
Thy sacred tomb a-nigh,
And these with husbandmen who’d honour thee
Thou shalt behold alway;
Like tender dove shalt fly
117From shepherds’ lips; O everlastingly
Be cherished thy dear name
While snakes in brambles teem
And fishes swim in stream!
Nor shalt live only in my accents tame,
Shepherds in myriad ways
Shall wreathe their rhymes and pipe unto thy praise.
   If in your midst there dwell a soul of Love,
O leafy oaks, give shade
To the quiet bones here laid.