“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
William Butler Yeats ‘The Second Coming’
W B Yeats’ poem The Second Coming (above) has been coming up again and again (Third Coming? Fourth Coming?) in the way that raw onions have a habit of repeating on you. It started for me within the first 24 hours of this latest proving (I’ve no idea what the substance is yet). I mentioned it on a list I subscribe to and then started hearing from people all over the place that the poem had been coming up for them too. So obviously it’s not unique to the proving energy: rather the proving energy is demonstrating its sympathetic resonance wth the energies of these times.
Some explanation is perhaps needed here. Over time, participants in homeopathic remedy provings have come to notice that concurrent events well outside the sphere of the proving frequently conform to the same themes as emerge in the detailed symptomatology. This is not to say that provings have the power to influence what happens beyond their immediate sphere, rather that the time in which they happen to externalise their energies is one in which they are in sympathetic resonance with mass consciousness.
Provings for me are always an adventure. The experience of playing host to another energy form is a bit like a voyage of discovery crossed with a detective story. I get to be Agatha Verne, or perhaps Jules (rather than Julie) Christie. Themes and images present themselves with a quiet insistence, and I’m driven to pursue them until the insistence goes away, usually at the point where I’ve made some connection or derived some meaning and relevance from the thread.
With The Second Coming, it was specifically the first 4 lines that kept intruding. Then I kept getting snatches of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock … “‘Twas brillig, and the slithey toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe” … so it then became clear that “gyre” was the word I should be focusing on. I had a reasonable sense of the word from the context and from “gyrate” but looked it up to check. A gyre is a vortex, spiral, a series of concentric circles. Most often (evidently) used in the context of ocean currents.
Then, like Yeats, “hardly are those words out when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight”. I see a massive vortex within the ocean of the spacetime-consciousness continuum which, at its narrow-point, connects to a mirror-image vortex so the two together appear like an hour-glass with the direction of flow passing from one to the other through the narrow-point. A sense that some kind of inter-dimensional boundary exists at the narrow-point, and that the vortex is a means of penetrating that boundary.
The vortex imagery made sense of the present energies – the sense of increased velocity and compression that many people have been experiencing. Today I discovered that Yeats himself had formulated an entire esoteric system over a period of 10 years based on material channelled by his wife George via automatic writing. It is contained in his book A Vision. Gyres feature as a fundamental structure within the system. Not only that but hour-glass double vortices as well. Sympathetic resonance in operation again!
While all this was going on, someone was posting their experiences with an energetic vortex in California. Thanks to an amusing “accidental” truncation of the subject line of the post which rendered the chapter numbering only as “chap”, a conversation started up around the English word “chap”. This quickly led on to the derivation of the American “guy”, and its imputed origins in the English Guy Fawkes and the annual custom of burning effigies of the man in a celebration of his attempt to send the Houses of Parliament into the stratosphere on November 5 1605. I Googled [guy etymology] and in the 4th URL to come up – again purely by “chance” by virtue of the two words I’d chosen to search on – Guy Fawkes got mentioned in the same paragraph as gyre! This was not the sort of “coincidence” to ignore, especially since the “guy” thing had originated in a post about a gyre. (Has this got you spinning yet?!)
So what is the relevance of “guy” to “gyre”? A guy is an effigy, a simulacrum, a superficial representation of something which in itself is not authentic, yet serves as a guise (!) in which we recognise the idea of something. This means that the gyre, the image of the vortex (whether in macrocosm or microcosm), is the representation of what is happening in these present times, but has no authentic reality of itself.
As Fred Alan Wolf so succinctly puts it in the movie What the #$BLEEP*! Do We Know!?, “There is no out there out there!”
Tags: Guy Fawkes, gyre, W B Yeats
