The Kabeiroi as Harbingers of Synchronicity

 

Cancer as depicted in Urania's Mirror, a set of constellation cards published in London c.1825.

    I've got a stack of books to my left, and they have a pleroma of quotes all scintillating with bedazzling synchronicities.  Now, synchronicity is a loaded concept and will require plenty of books worth of descriptions to unpack it.  Those descriptions are amply supplied in the afore mentioned books.  In fact, many books have been written on the concept of synchronicity.  Carl Gustav Jung is the man responsible for coining the term synchronicity.  If you go to the Wikipedia article about synchronicity this is the first paragraph:

   Synchronicity (German: Synchronizität) is a concept introduced by analytical psychiatrist Carl Jung to describe events that coincide in time and appear meaningfully related, yet lack a discoverable causal connection. Jung held this was a healthy function of the mind, that can become harmful within psychosis.

    This is not quite what Jung ended up thinking about the phenomenon.  In a book written by renown psychological astrologer Liz Green titled The Astrological World of Jung's Liber Novus she quotes Jung in a letter he wrote:

    Synchronicity therefore consists of two factors: a) An unconscious image comes into consciousness either directly (i.e. literally) or indirectly (symbolized or suggested) in the form of a dream, idea, or premonition.  b) An objective situation coincides with this content.  

    An image from the unconscious becomes conscious and then something in reality coincides with that occurrence.  Yet there is still more to it.  Again, from the above quoted source, this time using Liz Greene's words quoting Jung:

Synchronicity, as the basis for the workings of astrology, needs to be viewed, according to Jung, "partly as a universal factor existing from all eternity, and partly as the sum of countless individual acts of creation occurring in time."  

    Jung was very interested in not being viewed as a quacky kook.  Psychology as a discipline has always been concerned with the exact same thing.  Depth psychology was being birthed into the world at the time by Jung.  Psychology has always been fighting for its place in the academic sector of science.  At best it's been considered a "soft science" until more recently when it started moving into more objective realms such as B.F. Skinner's Behaviorism, and the more sciency science of neuroscience.  In that scientific world view consciousness is presumed to be nothing more than electro-chemical reactions in the meat space of the brain.  I say presumed because science still does not know how consciousness is created in the mind.  The priests and believers of scientism hold that it's just a matter of time before we figure it out, and that will likely be followed by a hilarious sound with an accompanying horrible smell from the Musk Bunghole where the singularity will make it's entrance into reality.  It will explode out and coalesce into an embodied artificiality that will have the miscreants of Swampbook infested bubbleheadland clamoring for a whiff of its ineffable odor!  

    Now that I've thrown the first punch I'll get back to the theme.  What is synchronicity in words that are a bit less concerned with needing to appear scientific and thoroughly rational, and a bit more Woo?  Come along with me while we tour the Woo woods, but be sure to stay on the worn track so as not to get lost.  It's easy to get lost in the Woo Woods (that's the "harmful within psychosis" bit from the first Jung quote).  Well first off let us begin with what I believe consciousness is.  Consciousness is your spirits engagement with your souls engagement with our material reality.  That is, consciousness is a ternary and not a binary.  Now that's a concept that needs it's own book, and perhaps I will write that book, but for now suffice it to say that consciousness is more than a polarity.  It's a ternary.  This is one of the reasons why three is the holy number.  One, two, and then everything else is a good way of looking at the number three.  It takes two things to make a new thing is the easy way to understand this.  Another useful heuristic is Hume's idea of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (at least I think it was Hume).  Spirit, soul, body.  Consciousness is where all of those things coalesce into a pleasant smelling spring breeze with a hint of patchouli as we sashay down our meandering trail through the Woo Woods.  Never mind that crazy cat lady with the crystals dangling from her body.  She stays in shape carrying all of that crystal weight, leave her alone.  

    If you are willing to believe that we have such a thing as a spirit and a soul, than synchronicity need not be such a baffling mystery.  It is quite simply a message that you are on the right path.  It's the way by which spiritual meaning can be transmitted to us.  It's signs pointing the way to your souls overarching mission in this life.  Each bit of synchronicity is showing you the way through the Woo Woods, and we need that so that we don't get lost and bogged down with all of that crystal weight.  What's the alternative?  Does endless coincidence sound more appealing to you?  Endless coincidence devoid of meaning and smelling ever so faintly of that gaseous musky smell of nihilism and electric dreams?  Hey, over here, I've got a ticket to the singularity to sell you.  If you buy the ticket than you get to sit next to Professor Scientism on the giant Musk Penis to space.  Sometimes it's just a cigar my ass.  It's a big giant penis that smells like Musk's bugnhole.  Why is that (and I'm done being a 14 year old now)?  To be clear, I think SpaceX is amazing, and what Elon is doing is amazing, but also it's a big penis.  

    

    

    
    I've noticed that the more I pay attention to synchronistic happenings, the more synchronicity happens.  I suppose it's a positive feedback loop, and there is a skeptical part of me that thinks it's just a psychotic delusion.  That's probably why we nail the mystics to dead tree parts and let them air out a bit for all to see.  A walk through the Woo Woods is not for the faint of heart.  You've got to have a lot of courage in the face of the mass formation psychosis that the heard mentality calls normality.  Just because they all agree to something does not mean that it's the best of possible worlds, nor that it's advisable.  Lest you think I'm anti-science, I am not.  We got our children vaccinated (although we don't get the flu shot, and we don't get every single possible vaccine either).  I'm all for scientific discovery, but also I think science needs to stay in it's lane.  It's called metaphysics for a reason.  

    

    How are we to know what reality is?  How are we to define it?  Well we are to define it with words of course.  It's the only possible way that we can define it.  Otherwise we are dealing with art and image.  That is, we are dealing with the master in the right brain, not the left.  Another way to view synchronicity is a dialogue with the right brain.  We know that the brain is a great reducing valve (I'm speaking scientifically, the royal we of science).  We know that we only perceive less than 1% of reality just by knowing about the electromagnetic spectrum.  We don't see the whole thing.  We have instruments that see the whole thing (we think).  One of the epiphanies we've had with psychedelics and the brain is that if we're to engage with all of reality nothing will get done.  We can't go around perceiving all that is to be perceived and still go about accomplishing things in the material world.  Have you ever tried to do anything while tripping balls on hallucinogens other than tripping balls on hallucinogens?  It's very difficult to do anything other than having your mind blown while in the middle of a psychedelic experience.  Does that mean that all you experience during a psychedelic experience is not real?   Our brains have to eliminate a lot of the incoming sensory input so that we can function in the world.  If our brains don't do that for us, than we don't evolve, because while we are tripping our nuts off that saber tooth tiger comes along and bites them off, along with your meatspace.  

    

    But we can "cleanse the doors of perception" as William Blake did.  We can see more than what that mass psychosis formation of society allows for.  It doesn't make you crazy or unscientific to engage with a reality that is beyond Newtonian physics and Cartesian duality.  Now I will get into the anecdotal bit of the show (read "unscientific" to those of you worshipping Scientism).  At the end of my last blog post I mentioned the mysterious dwarf crab smith people of the ancient Greek Lemnians.  I had never heard of these mythic beings before researching for that last blog post.  I was just following a Promethean trail past Hephaestus and Athene when I ran across them.  I knew nothing at the time other than that they were fascinating to me, and I paid attention to what their emergence into my life may well mean.  Not a week before this my lovely wife came home from her duties as a librarian and handed me a book.  I had told her "good luck" when she said she'd try to find me some Liz Greene books to read from our Spartanburg SC library system.  Well she went all inter-librarian loan and found a Greene book in Charleston SC at the university.  They probably have it due to a rogue Jungian psychology person in their psychology department.  It's probably for the cautionary "Studies in the peripheral Woostinian woods" class to teach their undergrad students the dangers of even looking in the direction of the Woo Woods.  

    

    Well she handed me that book and I was all "I'll be damned, not only did you find a Liz Greene book for me, but you found me one that I don't have in my personal library."  I've got around 15 Liz Greene books, I've read them all, and I've read some of them multiple times.  I very carefully and reverently placed The Astrological World of Jung's Liber Novus on my leaning pile of astrologicus and went about finishing the three books I was presently reading.  In fact, receiving that book prompted me to go about reading the other three more quickly (that is, to spend more time reading).  

      As quickly as I could I jumped into Jung's world of Liber Novus.  To give some frame of reference as to what this book is about, it's basically Jung's personal gnosis about his astrological birth chart, or nativity.  He paints a mandala called the Systema Munditotius which is basically an image depiction of Jung's understanding of all the archetypical and magical themes running through his own personal journey with astrology.  The book I read, The Astrological World of Jung's Liber Novus, is Greene dissecting exactly what was going on in Jung's work titled Liber Novus.  It's a very in depth analysis of a very in depth journey of a very complex mind.  Jung's book Liber Novus only came to light in 2007 because he had to keep his astrological world view hidden from the likes of his mentor, Sigmund Freud, along with the rest of polite and sane society.  The important piece of information for our present purposes is the passage I came to on page 74, 

    

The old prophet then transforms into a dwarf: a figure whom Jung associated with the mythic Greek dwarf-gods known as the Kabeiroi, as well as with the Nibelungen of dwarf-smiths of Teutonic myth

    

    The "old prophet" in the above passage is a personal daimon of Jung's who he's called Elijah in Liber Novus.  

    

Jung referred to Elijah as a figure representing 'predetermination' or 'forethinking'.  This quality, according to Jung, is associated with the mythic figure of Prometheus, an earthly Titan like Kronos-Saturn, whose name in Greek means 'foresight', and who 'brings the chaotic to form and definition'.  Elijah inhabits and embodies a recognizably Saturnian universe; stones, scrying, prophecy, and the bringing of form to chaos all traditionally belong to this planetary god.  

    

    As I've already mentioned, I had never heard of the Kabeiroi before finding them while doing research for my last blog.  Unbeknownst to me, my wife had already dropped a book in my lap from the College of Charleston's library with references to the Kabeiroi contained within.  After finishing my last blog it was my intention to go digging around the internet to see what I could find out and yet I had the next step in a book sitting on my table waiting to be read.  That, dear reader, is synchronicity.  That is a sign from the gods that one must pay attention to the matter at hand.  In this case the Kabeiroi.  Then on page 87 the Kabeiroi come up yet again, and this time its in reference to one of the paintings Jung did for his work Liber Novus.  

     That is the painting.  In the image legend for this painting Jung had written:

    

This is the caster of holy water.  The Cabiri grow out of the flowers which spring from the body of the dragon.  Above is the temple.

From The Astrological World of Jung's Liber Novus:

This enigmatic pronouncement does not clarify the identity of the figure, other than that he casts 'holy water'.  But he is clearly a representation of the spirit of Aquarius.  The numerology of the painting - seven plants, seven concentric circles - hints at the figure of a noetic cosmocrator who nourishes the seven planetary spheres and their earthly counterparts.  The sunthemata are once again Saturnian.  Aquarius is Saturn-ruled; the Cabiri (Kabeiroi) emerging from the flowers are the dwarf smith-gods of Greek myth, whom Jung associated with Saturn; and the green dragon, ubiquitous in alchemical texts, is the Saturnian prima materia out of which they grow and flower, nourished by both water and the light of the Sun.  

    Now here the Kabeiroi are being associated with the astrological sign of Aquarius which happens to be my Sun sign.  Not just my Sun sign, but also the sign where my natal Mercury, Medium Coeli, and moon's South Node are located.  Mercury also happens to be my chart ruler as I have Gemini ascending.  Mercury is also the dispositor for my natal Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn all in Virgo which is another Mercury ruled sign.  If you aren't well versed in astrology all of that just means that the sign of Aquarius is a very powerful sign for me.  It was for Jung as well as he had Aquarius rising.  How many levels of synchronicity have I reached at this point?  Honestly I'm starting to lose track.  Am I lost in the Woo Woods?  Also, I need to point out the reference in this painting via numerology to Pallas Parthenos Athena, or Pallas Athene Medusa (I'll be exploring that particular triple goddess epithet more in other blog posts).  Now we have the Kabeiroi in reference to both Prometheus and Athene within the contents of Jung's Liber Novus.

And lastly the Kabeiroi come up yet again in Liber Novus in reference to Hephaestus:

...and referred to the Mercurial youth as 'Loki or Hephaestus with red flaming hair'.  Loki is a trickster-god, the Norse version of Hermes-Mercury; Hephaistos, the father of the dwarf Kabeiroi, is an artificer-god whose surpassing skill was referred to by Homer as 'trickery.' 

    What are the chances that Jung would come to associate the Kabeiroi to all three of the deities worshiped together in ancient Athens?  Namely, Prometheus, Athene, and Hephaestus.  That is precisely where I landed with reference to them myself.  I got to the place of the Kabeiroi via researching a blog about Prometheus, Athena, and Hephaestus.  Just like the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming,  said "once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action."  Well, maybe not enemy action, but definitely intentional action.  As in how could one argue that such a happening as I have delineated above is nothing more than happenstance or coincidence?  Maybe it's just coincidence in the Musk Hole, but in my reality it's divine messaging.  As this blog post is starting to get a bit long in the tooth, or keyboard as it were, it's time for me to wrap it up.  Yet here I am again, close to the same spot I ended at last time.  What are these mysterious dwarf, smith, crab handed gods of ancient Greek Aegean Sea culture?  What do they mean to me?  You?  Any of the inhabitants of planet Earth in 2024 CE?  Join me next time here in the digital pages of The Serpent Drawn Chariot as I continue to plunge headfirst into this mystery.  

Marble relief of Triptolemus, Demeter, and Persephone at the Archaeological Museum of Eleusis, Greece