PLUTO, PERSEPHONE, PSYCHOPOMPS AND POWER part 6 of the Pluto series

Where Pluto is, there is always Persephone. Greek mythology actually has much more to say about Persephone and her personal transformation than it does about Pluto himself, so we need to follow her story, expressed through lineage as well as actions, closely.  

But we can also find out more about Tartarus, Pluto and Persephone’s hell realm, from myths of Uranus and Gaea, and from Terrestrial Hermès, the psychopomp who guides forlorn souls to damnation and eternal abomination.

Tartarus is the realm to which Uranus banished the Hecatoncheires, the 50 headed, 100 handed destructive giants who were the first children of Uranus and Gaea, the original denizens of the Earth along with the Titans. In my earlier work on the Uranus/ Cronus relationship, I discussed the possibility that these giant multi-headed, multi handed beings were actually a metaphor for whole tribes who were immersed in a quorum sensing, hive mind collectivism or cultism that made them extremely dangerous and destructive to their mother, Gaea. Yet despite their destructive nature, Gaea could not stand to see her children cast to hell and she conspired with Saturn to castrate Uranus and usurp Uranus’ rule.

In the Orphic Hymns, Terrestrial Hermès is also referred to as Bacchic Hermès, the progeny of Dionysius and celestial Venus, “Dark eyelash’d Goddess of a lovely mien.” The Dionysian or Bacchic cults were hedonistic cults of sex, drugs and alcohol who were extremely immersive to their members. The Roman Empire officially banned these cults except in their most tepid forms. We have seen, in modern times, the clear and present echo of these cultic traditions in the Manson family, the Satanic Son of Sam cult, and Jacob Frank’s heretical Judaic cult, among many, many others who may or may not have risen to this level of infamy. 

Many of these cults today are completely mainstream, they just keep a public relations veneer of propriety.

We can infer  that the myths recognize that these cults are, metaphorically, in a type of hell realm.

Bacchic cults have a strange relationship with the “above ground” world of Jove and Ceres. The Goddess of Cereals is mother of grains that can be food staples but are also fermented into beers, hard liquors or possibly psychoactive ergot based soma.  Roots, barks, leaves, stems and flowers can be made into food and healing medicine but can also be made into poisons, opiates, narcotics, psychoactives and psychedelics, and this is true of the fungal kingdom as well. Sex itself is the most potent intoxicant: the totally natural and procreative act always has been weaponized against us. 

There is almost always some effort on the behalf of society to contain and co-opt the forces that degrade, degenerate, corrupt and debilitate the spirit, mind and the body: this may have been the reason for Uranus’ decree to cast out the giants, and it got him castrated and deposed.

The Lords of the Underworld rule the black markets which arise from this dichotomy, usually with a type of martial ferocity and total dedication that borders on or exceeds religious zeal. Organized crime is traditionally fronted by religious organizations: it is the economic backbone of realm of Pluto and Persephone, and the primary drivers of it’s lucrative business model is the avoidance of accountability and the prevalence of degeneracy, deviance and sloth.

 However, the warm glow of established societal acceptance does not necessarily imply moral rectitude. The above ground world is always, to one degree or another, in a shifting state of corruption, degeneration and decay.  We know perfectly well that sex sells, and the behaviorist advertising sorcerers of Madison Avenue and Hollywood have made an art out of selling the public on it’s own destruction and subversion, propelling the herd toward it’s lowest and most base desires, and toward false and perverted  ideas of virtue.  All perfectly legal and above board.

Black markets and underground commerce can also be driven by societies that embrace virtue signaling asceticism and puritanical excess, driving out even healthy and normal expressions of sexuality or relatively harmless experimentation, while normalizing deviance and self flagellation. Healing plants, mushrooms, technologies and whole modalities of healing are regularly cast into the Underworld of illegality, often through extreme and excessive regulation and ludicrous licensing requirements where they cohabitate in strange and uncomfortable stasis with the Pimps, Crime Bosses, Intelligence Agents, Drug Pushers and Weapons Dealers who are ready and willing to sell these strangely cogent rogues and outcasts to the highest bidder if it serves their purpose. 

Here we return to the Terrestrial Hermès archetype.  

While Terrestrial Hermès is portrayed as the ferryman of the River Styx, this dynastic lineage of Hermès to (dark) Bacchus and (light) celestial Venus implies that he is more than just a messenger or courier. To be a child of two Gods is to manifest the combined characteristics of the parents. The psychopomp role is one of the traditional shamanic roles, and the shaman was the keeper of mind altering psychedelic and psychoactive techniques that yielded the “epiphanies” that Bacchus or Dionysius was reputed to provide.  Yet in order to be of use to society, the shaman must be able to come back from the underworld and not succumb to it’s temptations. The shaman must not “die” and be totally immersed in the Underworld, nor can he be captive to or blinded by the light.

Hermès is the god of commerce, the psychopomp of profits and profiteering. His Bacchic lineage betrays his real orientation. There’s excellent coin to be made from taking those voyages between the dark and the light, much more than just the tips one might receive as the ferryman or Uber driver of lost souls. This is especially lucrative when the people on either side remain in the dark as to what you’re really doing, and what’s really happening on the other side of the divide.  It might become embarrassing if the consumers actually follow the money trail you leave behind, or find your vile, slime encrusted laptop.

With these immersive cults and addictive behaviors, we are also swimming deep into Neptune’s territory. It should be no surprise that Pluto and Neptune cohabitate closely in the birth chart of Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda and corporate advertising as we know it. We know plenty about it, yet the herd seem happy to immerse themselves in it’s 24 hour news cycle psy op machine that Bernays pioneered. Bernays  had a remarkable and uncanny creative alchemical ability, an incredible psychological mastery that allowed diverse and even antithetical ideas to co-mingle, coagulate, and re-emerge into epic weaponized scams. He used this genius to corrode, confuse, corrupt and kill as the psychopomp dark sorcerer in service of the power elite, the salesman of the deep state corporate psy op, the invisible architect of the Big Lie.

Pluto steals, but he steals what was not yours to keep; he will take your innocence, but he will also take your ignorance and your illusions.

As the Lord of the Underworld,  he will eventually take your life. 

Death is the ultimate transgression: Tartarus is the realm of death and transgression. The true shaman is a psychopomp, he will bring us face to face with our own mortality to get us to see that we do, in fact, live in a moral universe.  The dark sorcerer does the opposite, playing upon our fear of death to retreat from morality and consequence. 

From this mortal coil we shall eventually depart, and yet life is full of more meaning and beauty and joy than we can possibly understand. There are consequences to allowing violations and transgressions against our own gnosis, our body, our innate moral compass that go far beyond our limited existence in 3 dimensions. Immersion in the hive mind is the death of the psychopomp, yet the symbol of the bee is one of the most prevalent to be found in ancient cultures. Masons use the beehive as a reminder of their hidden collective allegiance to the Goddess, the Queen Bee whose honey is antiseptic, nutritive and preservative. The Norse Eddas speak over and over of the Mead of Wisdom, mead being a ferment of honey, which the transgressive psychopomp Odin lies, cheats and steals to obtain from an underworld Giantess so that it is not hoarded away, returning it to the gods and making it accessible to humanity. 

The shaman inhabits the semiotic world of Neptune, the heartbeat rhythm and vibration of the drum and the chant return us to the heartbeat of the mother and we feel her and long for her womb.  And of course, even drumming has been made illegal and driven underground on the slave plantations of the American South, and also in Finland to control and decimate the Sami traditional spiritual practices.

The psychopomp patrols the borders of the gates of hell, entering and leaving at great risk to his own safety and sanity. 

The true psychopomp is not Pluto, nor is he Persephone, but he knows them well and has commerce with them and their many minions. He knows that the boundaries of Hell are always shifting and the currents of the River Styx are strong and unpredictable.

The question is, can he do this without leaving his soul behind?