EVERYWHEN
HYPNAGOGIA Gr. ‘hypnos' (sleep) & ‘agōgos' (conductor, leader) : Transitional state from wakefulness to sleep, also defined as the waning state of consciousness during the onset of sleep. Its corresponding state is hypnopompia —sleep to wakefulness. Mental phenomena that may occur during this threshold consciousness include “spontaneously appearing visual, auditory and kinaesthetic images; qualitatively unusual thought processes and verbal constructions; tendencies towards extreme suggestibility; symbolic representations of ongoing mental and physiological processes; and so on”.
Such transitions are usually brief but can be extended by sleep disturbance or deliberate induction, for example during meditation.
JUDGEMENT : A man, a woman and a child rising from their graves (as much a liberation as it is a responsibility), representing the entirety of human experience. An initiation ; a symbolic death and new beginning ; the completion of one phase of life and the promise of a new path ahead ; a paradigm shift or a peak experience that happens suddenly. This is the energy of taking stock before stepping into something new. Judgement represents that moment where a new chapter is ready to begin, but first you need to check your inventory. What are you carrying? What needs to stay? What needs to go? The portal is opening. The question is whether you're ready to walk through it.
Creation Myths of the World
By David A. Leeming
“ Creation myths tell us how things began. All cultures have creation myths; they are our primary myths, the first stage in what might be called the psychic life of the species. As cultures, we identify ourselves through the collective dreams we call creation myths, or cosmogonies. [...] Creation myths explain in metaphorical terms our sense of who we are in the context of the world, and in so doing they reveal our real priorities, as well as our real prejudices. Our images of creation say a great deal about who we are. "
The Dreaming, also referred to as Dreamtime (though some scholars suggest that the aboriginal word's original meaning is closer to eternal, uncreated.), is a term devised by anthropologists to refer to a religio-cultural worldview attributed to Australian Aboriginal mythology, and used to represent Aboriginal concepts of Everywhen. An era “preceding” the creation of the Earth ; a time when everything was purely spiritual and immaterial. Baiame, the First Being, then gives birth to the world by dreaming it. Through the Dreaming, it is believed that one can communicate with spirits and interpret the meaning of bad omens, illnesses, and other misfortunes.
“The Dreaming conjures up the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past, such a time is also, in a sense, still part of the present [...] One cannot ‘fix’ The Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen. ”
W.E. Stanner, The Dreaming (1956)
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🜁 represents the classical element Air, a cornerstone of ancient Greek philosophy and medieval alchemy. Visually, it is an upward-pointing triangle bisected by a horizontal line, signifying the element's qualities of lightness, expansion, heat, and moisture. Alchemists historically used this symbol in their texts and diagrams to denote the airy principle, often associated with the gaseous state, intellect, and the celestial realm.
Air to the alchemist represents the mind & soul of mankind. It also represents the breath of life. Air’s principle is mobility & the creative facilities of the mind, giving life to new ideas & the possibility of a world reborn.
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“The river of time may have its rapids and its calmer stretches, but one thing would seem to be certain: it carries all of us, willy-nilly, in its flow. Irresistibly, irreversibly, we are being borne toward our deaths at the stark rate of one second per second. As the past slips out of existence behind us, the future, once unknown and mysterious, assumes its banal reality before us as it yields to the ever-hurrying “now.” [...] Einstein, through his theory of relativity, furnished a scientific justification for a philosophical view of time that goes back to Spinoza, to St. Augustine, even to Parmenides—one that has been dubbed “eternalism.” Time, according to this view, belongs to the realm of appearance, not reality. The only objective way to see the universe is as God sees it: sub specie aeternitatis. We should all be like William Blake and say, “I see the past, present, and future, existing all at once/Before me.”
Jim Holt, The Grand Illusion (1999)
Edmund Dulac - The Dreamer of Dreams (1915)
CREDITS
Everywhen theremin improvisation, originally recorded on july 16th, 2020. Released as Initiation on ‘Dark Exits' (2020). Remixed in 2024 by Sébastien Dumontier, mastered by Laurent Roussel.
Synth Theremin, percussions, keyboards & Mellotron played by Finrod Artîwelë.