Transcript for Reissue: On Trauma and Vegetation Gods

Hi everyone, I'm Josh and this is the Emerald. Currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald, all that's happening on this green jewel and space. Hey everyone, quick update here. So there are a few episodes percolating in the alchemical cooker that I'm putting finishing touches on, but they're not quite ready for release, and I conveniently blame Venus. So instead, I decided to reissue an episode that I know that some of you have heard, but that a whole lot of you haven't since we have a whole lot of new listeners. It's called untrama and vegetation gods, and it goes deep into an exploration of what we now call trauma, but looked at through a mythological and ritual and vegetative lens. So I hope you enjoy this episode, and there are new episodes coming. Also, just a reminder that the podcast sustains itself through patron support. So if you resonate with the work, if you feel it's important, if you want to support the mythic and artistic vision of the podcast and help me pay for things like studio time. then please consider becoming a patron. It starts as low as $6 per month and patrons get access to a vibrant community to twice monthly study group discussions and other benefits. You can find out more about this at patreon.com slash the Emerald Podcast. That's Patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com slash the Emerald Podcast. And finally, many of you know, I think that I have deep connections to the Hawaiian Islands. I have family there, and I spend a lot of time there. And I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the pain that so many of us are feeling around the Maui wildfires. And offer my thanks and appreciation for the many people, many friends I have on Maui that are working tirelessly in the relief effort. and also to encourage listeners to consider donating to these efforts. I have good word from local contacts that to really good organizations to donate to are the Mauna Medix who are on the ground helping where it's needed most and the Pacific Birth Collective. Mauna Medix can be found through the umbrella organization Maui Mutual Aid. And the Pacific Birth Collective can be reached at pacificbirthcollective.org slash donate. So thank you for any and all support. And this is an unfolding story. There's a lot still to come around Maui in the depth of the situation. And so I encourage people to help in any way they can. And now on with our episode. I wish I could show you these Cedar trees. On top of a high mesa in Rio or Yuba County, New Mexico, south of Chama, north of Abacu, up there in the wind and sauton and rain. Up there amidst the raw forces of nature, the harsh, high desert light. I wish I could show you these Cedar trees. Their old grandmother's and grandfather's a few hundred years old some of them at least. Trunks twice as wide as me roots winding torturously towards fleeting water. Here one was locked off completely at the trunk and had to regrow all over again. Here this one that trunk was split when it was only a sapling and it divided into Here, this one all but died in a drought but managed to send a new shoot up and then that new shoot became its own tree. Their narled and twisted these trees, their bodies living maps, maps of what of all the re-adjustments they've had to make. The winding past they had to take. Of all the places they responded to impacts or were deprived of essential nourishment and still found a way to grow, despite the odds. Some grew on exposed rock and reached and reached their way towards better soil. Some were perched on precarious edges. The wind bent them almost back to the ground. and still they found a way to reorient towards the sunlight amidst all they find their way towards vertical. Some had to draw completely inward during cold winter saving every bit of sap and water. Some dried out in summer. Some succumbed, some thrived in their own distinct shape of thriving. Their beautiful these trees, every single one, their bark clad bodies, spirals and the forces that have acted upon them for centuries. Forces, sudden impacts, persistent pressures, directional wind, the presence of light and water, the absence of either or both forces that in this day and age might be cold, traumas, for growth patterns and trauma share a very intricate relationship. So much so that even when I looked very close, I still couldn't see what was the trauma and what was the tree, what was the trauma and what was the tree. We hear the word trauma a lot these days. Once used in medical circles to refer exclusively to physical wounds, it jumped the line to therapeutics about a half century ago, and since has become the foundation of most modern cognitive behavioral therapy systems. Discussions on healing individual minds and cultural wounds and painful societal histories now revolve completely around the word trauma. Trauma specialists like Dr. Gabor Matei have risen to prominence by pointing to trauma as the root cause of a host of modern ills from addiction to depression to anxiety. There's a new film out about him called The Wisdom of Trauma, which is definitely worth watching. Of course, as happens when a word catches on and becomes used to refer to far more than its original meaning and drawn from context and abstracted, it can lose a little bit of its value. These days, the word Trauma is tossed about probably a little too casually in conversation. trauma quotes dominate my Instagram feed. Trauma is the subject of numerous internet meme. Almost anything it seems can be attributed to a trauma response. Trauma has gone from directly identifiable impacts related to specific medical conditions or life events to a buzzword, a form of currency, even. The intended meaning can get lost. So, what is that intended meaning? What are we talking about these days when we talk about Trauma? Author, Reshma Monakum says this in his book, My Grandma There's Hands, quote, Trauma is not a flaw or a weakness. It's a highly effective tool of safety and survival. Trauma is also not an event. Trauma is the body's protective response to an event, or a series of events, that it perceives as potentially dangerous. Bessel Vandrical, who wrote the popular book Your Body, keeps the score agrees, quote, we have learned that Trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past. It's also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain managed perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think. And quote, so Trauma in this vision is an imprint. Trauma is not the bad things that happen to you, says Gabor Mate, but what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you. And this imprint can be visible in very clear terms as in a Gulf War veteran suffering panic attacks whenever there's allowed noise, or this imprint can be much more subtle. How the body braces in certain situations, how the collar bones learn to sink inwards, how the breath habitually shallows, slight patterns that influence behavior magnified over time, the twists and turns of the cedar tree. For today's episode, we're going to be talking about this definition of trauma as this type of response pattern. And it's worth noting again that for a long time trauma wasn't defined like this. Once we extend the definition of trauma to be a response pattern, and once we start taking a finer and finer lens to our conditioned responses, we see that this response pattern is intertwined with. everything, pretty much everything that being alive and tales. It's intertwined with joy and longing and grief and hope. It's intertwined with perception itself. The more we describe it, the more it sounds like life. Because of course, life is trauma. Birth is trauma. Having been through it twice now in a minor supporting role, I can say that the birth process is definitely trauma for all involved. and it's the most beautiful thing there is. And a few years later when the child's bones start growing faster than their connective tissue and so the tissue is literally ripped apart and the child can't sleep because of growing pains? Well, growth is trauma. Creation itself in many myths is trauma. The result of an impact of rupture spurred by a lack, alonging the tortoise shell cracks. existence follows. The trauma of this event, Tyson Yokeportis, as in Santoc, caused the Sky Camp and Earth Camp to separate, and the universe to begin deep cycles of expansion and contraction like breathing in a pattern shaping everything. So, once you have a universe in which things are born and grow and die, and matter burns through many forms, and it's journey to become other matter, and mouths must be fed, and usually must be fed on the bodies of other things that die in order to feed them. Once you have a universe in which we're all constantly being composted and repurposed in a mulching cycle that has very little to do with us, you see an inextricable trauma to all of existence. In the Indian cosmology, the only thing outside of this cycle, The only thing truly free of trauma patterning would be non-existence itself. So just to clarify up front here, I think it's very important that what we call trauma is being addressed and that people who are suffering from post-traumatic stress, from deep cultural or familiar traumas now have the opportunity to speak and process and heal. I've personally received therapy for physical, mental and emotional traumas at certain times of my life and I found it very helpful. I come from a family of bodyworkers and therapists who have a very long history of working with trauma. My dad has been treating physical and emotional trauma for over four decades. It's close to home. At the same time, we have to be careful about deifying this new language around trauma. Cultures across the globe have historically had their own forms of trauma work without ever labeling it trauma work. And the primary difference in how we treat trauma now is that we label it as a distinct thing and treat it head-on and an individualized therapeutic context. Of course, this approach can be effective and it certainly might be warranted in a compartmentalized individualized world. But it's good to remember that just because we treat it as its own distinct thing that can be isolated and talked about and theorized and processed and maybe eventually released doesn't necessarily mean we're treating it any better than our ancestors did. for many cultures for many years cathartic ritual practice. ritual that serves to bypass what Mate calls the conditioned mind, has served multiple purposes as it regrow and repattern's brains and bodies and communities. There is a communal ritual way of addressing trauma in which the word trauma is never even mentioned. Many cultures don't even have the word. Because traditional cultures don't tend to tackle things as isolated issues. It's not like, here's the trauma, and here's your hour to talk about the trauma. It's more like here's the regular ritual and the ritual reinforces social bonds and takes us into the deep states of consciousness necessary to repattern bodies and realines us to larger cycles of growth and death and regeneration which have Interwoven within them, trauma and joy, longing and pain, like all the stories of the old gods do. And so, the individual trauma cycle becomes linked to larger cycles of nature and addressed through ritual and actment in contact and communion with these larger cycles of nature. If we start looking through a ritual lens, we see ritualized trauma work everywhere in cultures around the world. And it doesn't always look like we think it would. Sometimes it even looks fairly traumatic. So what I want to explore today is this. As much as there is deep value in isolating a thing and tackling head-on individual to individual, there is also deep value in what I'm going to call them more relational approach. that is built upon a community's connection to larger patterns of birth, growth, decay, and death. Through story and song, and ritualized myth-telling, and dancing, and often through deprivation and pain induction, and these ritual enactments, these communal ecstacies, communal catharsis, these weepings over the bodies of lost gods, are traditionally deeply tied to something very specific. vegetation. There is a profound link between the myths and rituals of the old vegetation gods and what we might now term trauma work. Why? Because the cycle of vegetative birth, growth, decay, and death mirrors our own cycle. The stories of the vegetation gods which often involve death, which often involve tears, which were often accompanied in the retelling by expressions of communal catharsis, these stories get to the very deepest trauma of all, which is that we live in a world in which things die, and what they once were, is lost, and yet in that dying they make way for new life. So in the myths and rituals of the vegetation gods, as people wept for the vegetation gods and sung their stories, and lit their candles and offered their flowers and grew their edonis gardens, they were simultaneously connecting to a larger cycle of nature on which they intimately depended and addressing patterns of growth and change within themselves. The somatic enactment of the myth works on the communal, ecological, and personal levels all at once. So more often than not, issues of regrowth and renewal of re patterning and of resurrection are tied mythically and ritually to vegetation. and vegetation myths in practice allow humans to grieve, to repattern, and to regrow. Because if there is trauma integral to the pattern of existence, then the work is not necessarily to extricate it altogether, but maybe better understood as a work of regrowing and repatterning and mulching and sprouting and coiling and permeating the way that dark ivy covers an old stone wall, infusing all the hidden spaces, repurposing, permeating patterning, as the plant kingdom constantly does all around us every day. On trauma and vegetation gods, this time on the Emerald. Every summer, on a particular moon when the enemy flowers were blooming, the streets and alleyways of ancient Athens were filled with the sound of crying. Deep, mournful, wailing, shrill allelations of grief. The women of Athens wept and sang and cried aloud. For whom were they crying? It was for Adonis that they cried. Adonis. You've heard of him the most exquisitely beautiful God of all, the pinnacle of radiant manhood we still talk about him today. NFL commentator Al-Michael says wide receiver Torella Owens is built like Adonis. rapper Drake names his boy, Adonis. Adonis, Adonis, the most beautiful of all. But do you know his story? The story of Adanas is a story of trauma and beauty and vegetation and how vegetation heals trauma and trauma births more vegetation and how even beauty is part of a larger pattern of trauma and trauma is part of a larger pattern too. The goddess of beauty herself, Afrodite, cursed the family of King Thias for failing to honor her. She cursed his own daughter, Smyrna, to fall in love with him. And in the darkness of deception, the incest took place, and in horror it was discovered. Then Smyrna fled weeping as her father sought to kill her. And she begged the gods to help her, and so she was transformed into the murder tree. And her tears became sap they crystallized into sap and the sap was potent medicine and from that vegetable womb of trauma and medicine was born the most beautiful boy in the world. The most beautiful boy in the world ripped from the living tree that was familial grief and horror and fear and medicine and beauty all at once. And then, of course, Aphrodite fell in love with the product of her own curse. Beauty and trauma and beauty again woven all throughout the familial line, and Adonis and Aphrodite became lovers the most beautiful lovers in the world. Beauty upon beauty, unbearably bright beauty upon beauty gone in an instant. For Adonis was lost, gourd horribly by a wild boar run through with a gleaming white tusk. And he died in Aphrodite's arms bleeding as she wept. And her tears mixed with his blood. and became a flower with the name, anemony. The brightest of all the summer flowers, trauma and beauty intermingled anemony. So when the anemony flowers bloom, the women across Greece, and all the way across Asia Minor, and to Lebanon, would meet for an honest. And they also did this. They took all the broken pottery in the house. and they filled the broken pieces with soil and they planted lettuce and fennel seeds. And then soon after the plants sprouted they stopped feeding them and the plants withered and they took the wilted plants in a wailing procession to the seashore and offered them back to the sea. You can analyze the overlapping layers of trauma and beauty in the Adonis myth forever. You can scoff at the ritual as a waste of time as some of the local philosophers of Athens did. You can say, why plant something just to let it die? Or you could say, look, something grew from what was broken. I stopped feeding it in it withered, and now I cast it to the sea. You see, this is trauma work. The time it takes to collect the broken pottery and carefully arrange the soil and plant the seeds and water them and wait until the sprouts grow and then let the sprouts die and then walk to the seashore together. Crying, crying each other into a state of deep empathetic flow, chanting the story of Adonis, the story of horror and beauty and death and regeneration. and cast the shards and wilted plants into the sea. This is trauma work. It didn't necessarily involve each person talking about their trauma. It's a deeper acknowledgment of communal trauma, and of the trauma at the heart of the cycle of nature that is addressed ritually, communally, in heightened states of empathy, away from the state of discursive thought, somatically, and it directly involves plants. Studies have shown that persistent interaction with vegetation has a deep effect on the body's ability to repatter and trauma. Nearly all indicators of human thriving in fact are enhanced by the presence of plants. Concentration goes up, crime goes down, healing happens faster, relationships improve, the more plants are around. So what we call trauma is closely tied to and reflected in our relationship with vegetation. Historically, one of the primary ways that we've processed trauma is through rituals that center on vegetation. The very familiar human journey of growth and loss and regeneration of re-patterning and response to forces and impacts. Avango and realignment towards vertical, of rooting and rising, of gathering in at the core and shedding at the periphery is contained within the vegetation cycle. Every part of our human journey of being is mirrored in the vegetation cycle, upon which we utterly depend. and so ritual engagement with the vegetation deities, with their stories, their songs, their rituals, is in fact trauma work as much as it is anything else. When thousands wept and wailed for Persephone in the cruelty of her abduction and the horror and beauty of the cycles of vegetative death and renewal that came with the seasons, this was work that was simultaneously personal and communal and cosmic. When her story was repeated in droning chant in states of trance year after year, it allowed for mourning for renewal, for individual regeneration within the context of community. As participants in states of heightened ecstasy sang about the trials of the body of the goddess, they were singing about their own bodies without ever having to name it. The rituals, harness, trauma, harness collective grief, harness cycles of regrowth and joy and longing without ever using the word trauma at all. So, vegetation, trauma, transformation, and trance go hand in hand in the myths. Many are the mythic protagonists whose journey of trauma and bliss and grief and longing results in an eventual transmogrification, a transformation into a plant. Tristan and Isl separated in life by tragedy grief and despair intertwined forever as the hazel tree in the honeysuckle vine. Ulu, the warrior, allows his wife to dismember him so that he may become the breadfruit tree. The young maiden Kava dies and regenerates as the Kava plant in order to heal her despondent brother's grief. And her plant body, with its soothing, sedative effects, comes to be used in Polynesian peacemaking councils. And then there's Daphne. Daphne fleeing the forceful advances of the God Apollo is transformed into the Laurel Tree. In Bernini's famous sculpture, Daphne's hands have already leaped out. The finger is branching in delicate translucent marble. And what is that look on her face, the ecstatic horror of succumbing to the larger cycle? A heavy numbness seized her limbs. Thin bark closed over her breast. Her hair turned into leaves. Her arms into branches. Her feet so swift a moment ago stuck fast and slow growing roots. Her face was lost in the canopy. Only her shining radiance was left. Daphne becomes the laurel tree. Whose psychoactive properties offer seers the way back. to Apollo. The trauma transformed becomes the very vehicle through which unity is reached. The divine appears in a way we're not ready for yet. We must repattern first. We must shed our old form. We must leaf out and grow. So, serings has changed into a river read, a hollow tube which becomes an instrument, a pen pipe. And that instrument with its breathy hissing, it's sound that mimics her name, Syrinks, provokes the trance state in her devotees that takes them to pan, to mystic unity. The transmogrification into a plant is the journey by which we ourselves are re-grown into instruments. Point of trauma becomes the vehicle through which the transformation takes place and the music pours through us. As the Yohuna of Colombia tell it, the boy Milomaki is too powerful, his singing too beautiful for the people to withstand, so they burn him alive. Now I die, now I die, now I die. and from his ashes grows the palm tree from whose wood all of the musical instruments are made that offer the way back to that brightness. So there's a common theme in the stories of plant transformation. Something is unreachable through ordinary means. And so a metamorphosis must take place. Something is too great to ponder or behold if we look at it directly. We must change shape instead. We address the thing at the center through a constant process of ritualized shapeshifting. And the trauma not only provokes the transformation, but becomes the doorway through which the transformation takes place. Because these myths of plant transmogrification weren't just abstract stories. The rituals that surround them, the storytelling, the repetitive verse, the singing, the droning, the chanting, the dance, created the conditions for somatic regeneration, re-patterning, and renewal. The deity's story embodied in trans ritual becomes a method for our own regeneration. And ritualized trauma is part of the re-patterning itself. Many rituals were often purposefully painful. Ritualized pain as Jamie Wheel explores in his book recapture the rapture is one of the most effective ways to bypass the condition brain in a chain of state in which trauma patterning can be reshaped, rebranced, regrown. Brains regrow when we get out of the condition state, and one of the primary ways to get there historically is through repetitive ritual pain. rituals surrounding the vegetation deity is almost always involved some form of ritualized pain. So yeah, this is a different model than one that wants to treat trauma as something to be perhaps only comforted or soothed away. And of course, comfort is important. Soothing is important. I'm not a no pain, no gain kind of guy. Like, you know, you've got to suffer to achieve anything. But it's really worth looking at how many rituals of communal healing and repattoning involve pain. The goddess trans rituals I've seen involve people suspending themselves by hooks pierce through their skin, shoving tridents through their tongues and swords through their cheeks, submitting themselves to fire and heat, carrying heavy burdens for extended durations and sacred pilgrimage, fasting, going without water. In the celebrations of goddess Maria Man, devotees wear heavy garlands of neem leaves for hours on end. The neem tree, of course, is the goddess herself, who both brings and relieves the pain. At Kamakya Devi Temple in Asam, the annual Deodani goddess festival features intense trans-practice. quote, the deodus when possessed not only scream ferociously, some also beat themselves with a stint. Some jump maniacally, some beat their chest violently, some thump their forehead against a wall or a pillar. Often it leads to bleeding and extreme bruising. It's a disturbing sight, especially for the first time observers. I found that many observers, including researchers, were petrified, if not traumatized for a long time after, upon witnessing such sessions. In the Philippines, modern-day penitente is where crowns of fresh green leaves and whip themselves with tree branches until their backs bleed. Notice, again, the interweaving of plants, trance, and trauma in service of transformation. Now, it's easy from the outside to say this type of austerity is some kind of body denial or self-punishment, it's not that simple. It's very specifically about reaching a certain state beyond the scurs of thought, and it's everywhere in global culture, even amidst those cultures that we now consider to be embodied. Among the peoples of the Kalahari for example, extended exhaustion through dancing is the way to tackle communal trauma. The deeply defined trans-states the dancers enter, allow them to see afflictions and causes and cures. Healing, repatterning happens right there at the height of the dance. Trans-stance is trauma work, but the dance itself leaves participants doubled over, sometimes with gushing nosebleeds. It's exhausting, it's painful, and blissful, that place beyond the thinking brain. It is both at once. So, it's good to question our assumptions about what trauma work is. We have to be careful of thinking that the only approach to trauma is through comfort or safety or familiarity, because more and more research is showing what our ancestors seem to have known, that extremes take the brain into the space where trauma can actually be repattern. Right now, I'm raising two boys. Is my work as a father to try to create some kind of totally trauma-free environment for them? Is trauma the thing to be avoided at all costs? Or maybe it's about seeking an appropriate harnessing of extremes to temper that male persona. Giving them ritual outlets for the intensity they feel so that it doesn't translate into violence. In nearly every traditional culture on the planet, when boys are a certain age, they get put through some form of pretty serious communal trauma. This could be, you know, the trauma of having to listen to your relative speaker, your bar mitzvah, or it could be something more like Melanese and Land Jumping, an unquestionably physically traumatic ritual deeply tied to the harvest. of the YAM plant. A 60 to 90 foot leave off a high platform with only a vine tied to the ankles. The precursor to bungee jumping without, you know, the benefit of elasticity. And the goal is to scrape the ground just ever so slightly on your way down. Quote, when a boy is ready to become a man, writes Zoltan Ishtavan, he land dives in the presence of his elders. The higher the jump, the more bound to full the harvest. In nearby New Guinea, young boys face a bloodletting initiation in which plants are used to stab the initiate repeatedly in the throat and nostrils and tongue and face. Reading him of all the negative aspects of childhood, trauma, trance, vegetation, together again. Whatever the ritual the young testosterone fueled ego is put in its place in the context of a tribe of elders who've all been there too, and who understand that the youngins need to know that it's not all about them. So yeah, you don't have to worry about my sons or anything. Don't call child services. I'm not planning any land jumping or ritualized bloodletting for them. But we have to look at these things with a more intricate lens than this is cruel or desensitizing or macho or primitive. We love to share memes with indigenous quotes about healing trauma, and we often romanticize indigenous approaches to trauma, while at the same time ignoring that indigenous ritual across the world regularly involves deliberately inflicted pain, and that there might actually be a deep wisdom to this. We have to question our own attitudes towards pain in the face of increasing neurological evidence that pain, trance, and trauma-re patterning. are very closely tied to one another. Gabor Mate says the attempt to escape from pain is what creates more pain. What he doesn't say is that sometimes carefully harnessing pain may actually be what gets us past. So, trance and trauma share a deep relationship. The trauma ecstasy overlap and trance ritual allows for re-patterning and regrow. Just as trauma and joy and longing and loss and plenty and lack are inevitably linked, just as they are present in the body of every tree we see. So the ritual structure which often centered around a sacred tree or plant at the very center is one of regrowth, repatterning along the entire somatic spectrum. The tree at the center of the ritual is at once the world tree and the actual tree at the center of the community. and it is the tree of the nervous system. The tree of the nervous system. The ancient Egyptians directly equated the nervous system with a tree. Nerve cells are even called what? Dendrites, little trees. And again, the correlation of the nervous system with a tree isn't just a metaphor. The nervous system is directly built around plants. Hundreds of thousands of nervous receptor sites are sensitive to specific plant compounds. This means the tree of the nervous system evolved in relation to plants and is literally constructed around vegetation. With our systems directly structured around vegetation, why wouldn't we use plant substances as an integral part of how we seek to repatter in trauma? The human system is patterned to be sensitive to numerous plant substances, and some of these plant substances can literally repatter in the nervous system. Whether we admit it or not, we use plant substances to repattern our nervous systems every day. Sugar and caffeine and alcohol and tobacco and what George R. Martin termed milk of the poppy, which is sadly popular these days, but some plants are better at repatterning nervous systems than others. Some might give us a temporary relief, but operate via nervous suppression rather than true repatterning. Other substances on the other hand, and theogenic substances are being shown to literally regrow after feed neurons in the prefrontal cortex. One NIH study demonstrated that, quote, psychedelic compounds such as LSD, DMT, and DOI, that's Iboga. Increase dendritic arbor complexity, promote dendritic spine growth, and stimulate synapse formation. Listen to the language here, dendritic arbor complexity. It literally means that these substances regrow the intricate tree patterning of nerve cells. The nerve cells grow more branches. Networks revitalize new connections are created. Transport is facilitated atrophied areas are nourished. Am I speaking of the brain? Or am I speaking of a tree? The Cedar trees on that high high mesa, after 300 years of growing at the whim of the punishing wind and frost, suddenly find the conditions to sprout new green branches. Branches, branches, verdant, verdant green. Within the influence of anthropogenic plant medicine, people commonly experience visions of branching vegetation, of coiling vines, a feeling of the body being subsumed, consumed by plant life. Maybe you felt it. Green shoots erupt within and around the body. Tendrils wrap around the limb. vital sap courses through living vines. Are they there to nourish her to destroy, to regrow us or to consume us entirely, seeking surrounding, wrapping, encompassing, they do their work. In circling the scalp and the skull, the climbing ivy cracks open the palate, new leaves emerge from the eye socket. Searching roots grind bones to powder, the cells are infused with life. The tissue is mulched into soil. mythological resurrection has always been vegetable in nature. I'm going to say that again, mythological resurrection has always been vegetable in nature. Right at the heart of the Christian tradition is a regrown sacrifice of it, them nailed to the world tree whose journey is deeply tied to plants. In one Renaissance vision, the flowering world tree of the crucifixion grows right from Mary's naval as she dreams. The walls of the medieval churches grow with stone, ivy, and vines. In the midst of the vines, it's a strange figure. His face sprouting with leaves, is he plant or man? He is the green man. Growth, death, decay, resurrection. Once we start looking, his face is everywhere we look. In this age of D animated Christianity, it's easy to forget how entwined the life of Jesus was with plants. He was born receiving gifts of potent plant medicine, frankincense and mure. As a carpenter, his hands would have touched Cyprus, cherry, mulberry, willow, tamaris, and Lebanon cedar. His parables transmit in the language of wheat and figs and mustard seeds and date palm shoots. His final epiphany was in the olive groves, his procession among the palm leaves, his crucifixion on a dogwood tree, but perhaps his deepest vegetable affinity was, with the grapevine. I am the true vine, Jesus says, in the gospel of John, the most dyonician of all the gospel, and my father is the Gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes, so that it will be even more fruitful. It's hard to adequately convey what that simple, simple sentence says about repattoning and trauma and conscious embodiment and right relationship with the larger cosmos. The branches within us that bear no fruit are cut and the ones that do bear fruit are carefully pruned so that they bear even more. The journey is one of Cultivation. I wish I could show you this grapevine, I know. I wish I could show you this grapevine. In far northern India, along a section of the pale green in this river, in a valley called Dahanu, the people there, the brookpa, they're called, have gardens that might just be two or three thousand years old. They've been gardening there a very long time amid the dry hills and the late afternoon honey colored light, cultivating vibrant flower and vegetable gardens and apricot groves and apple orchards and grapes on the vine. Some say they're descendants of Alexander the Greats Army. Others say they're from bacteria. Some say they're darts. Who knows how long they've formed in that valley, but this grapevine. The trunk of the grapevine. twice as big around as me. Winding, coiling, how many winters is it endured? How long can a grapevine live? I read of one grapevine in Slovenia that's 400 years old and still producing grapes. I think this one might be older. This one right in the heartland of an ancient vegetation god whose muted cries still echo in the dry canyon wall. Of course, we can't speak about sacred vines without speaking of him. Discussions on trauma and vegetation lead us inevitably to Iakus to Dionysus. The old old vegetation god of Asia Minor. The spectrum of practices available for the Dionysian trans-practitioner were trauma-re patterning in their clearest and rawest form. You see, Dionysus rules, mental afflictions, and also offers the way out. The troubled Seekim for he is Lieber, the freer, and the freedom he delivers comes from repetitive ritual enactment that involves plants, and music, and dance, and trance states. These things are all the domain of Dionysus, who rules the sacred pharmacon, the pharmacy of psychoactive and medicinal plants that deliver the human nervous system from trauma. This pharmacon of nightshades and vines were mixed together in a sacrament that bears no resemblance as Brian Mura Rescu says in his book The Immortality Key to what we today would call wine. Because plant medicine and vegetation are the domain of Dionysus. He's called Dionysus Dendritus. And there's that word again. Dendrites, nerve cells, trees, Dionysus of the trees. We could call them Dionysus of the trees or Dionysus of the nervous system. For he suites and heals and frees. It's important to understand that there wasn't such a thing as a psychological approach to life that was removed from ritual and ecstatic states and plant medicine and worship. All of this was sacred. All of it was communion with the vegetation god. All of it was what we would call mental health. The ritualized and highly systematized Dionysian ecstatic dance rituals were designed to take people out of their thinking brains into rapture where regrowth and re patterning is possible. He harnesses song, shouting, vocalization, group catharsis, dancing all within a matrix of vegetation. In the old stories, troubled protagonists reject Dionysus, and then find one night that the walls of their houses have started to grow with climbing ivy. The ivy is irresistible. It covers every inch of space. It covers the kitchens and halls and bench chambers, re-growing our mental spaces, finding the hidden cracks and pores, crumbling away the barren walls, infusing what was formerly stuck with new life, the God of winding ivy, the God of nervous systems. Rilka had a vision of such a god, quote, when I lean over the chasm of myself, it seems my god is dark and like a web. A hundred roots silently drinking. This is the ferment I grow out of. More I don't know because my branches rest in deep silence stirred only by the wind. And Dionysus also rules something else, too. What is it? Dionysus rules theater. Our entire modern Western legacy of performance and acting and movies and screenplays and three acts, all of it comes from Dionysian ritual. Theater, the great ritual enactment in which the droning singing chorus becomes a type of group conscience, and the audience follows cathartic storylines and states of trans themselves. This is trauma-re patterning. How? Well, how many of us have had a movie affect us? How many have left the theater changed or left reflecting on something in our lives a little more deeply? How many times did we feel that a particular character's arc reflected our own journey? And then maybe we learned something about our own journey through the character's arc? And even that there was an alchemical shift by accompanying that character's arc and recognizing our own within it? Yes, you too? And imagine... Even with all our postmodern cynicism and bias, theater cuts through. Imagine what it was like then. In the stone amphitheaters with the old gods still alive, with the grinning and howling masks by torchlight, with the droning haunting sound of the alos and the booming drone. The Apologna Theatre and what is now Libya. Look it up. The Apologna Theatre is right on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Imagine 2800 years ago the great tragedy is in Lament's song in chorus, as you gaze across the wind arc sea at twilight. Imagine.

This feeling, this is exactly what theater was meant to do. This is ritual repattering that dates back to the oldest paleolithic shamanism. Ritual enactment in states of ecstasy transforms. As Nadia Berberovich says in her paper, ritual myth and tragedy origins of theater and Dionysian rights, quote, in the deep dark forests and in the lush green valleys, worshipers of Dionysus celebrate the eternal cycles of death and rebirth, symbolized in the sacred mask of the wild God, intoxicated wearing the mask of Dionysus. The actor is at once the Shaman in the priest, channeling the presence of the fearsome divinity. In this eternal moment he becomes one with the God. Within ancient Greek culture the sacred rights of Dionysus were appropriated and transformed theater performances. The Shaman became the actor. The participants became the audience. The sacred altar became the stage. And it's interesting isn't it the use of the mask, because nowadays in psychological terms sometimes we talk about taking the mask off, right? And in traditional ritual theatrical enactment that dates all the way back to the Paleolithic, it is the pudding of the mask on that allows the Shaman participant to enact the God and therefore to repatter in the Trump The songs of the Dionysian festivals, the stories of the gods sung in meter, these grew to become theater. Some scholars surmise that anti-agenic substances were consumed by the actors in audience alike. The play funnels the audience towards an experience. an experience deeply tied to the cycle of birth, life, and death that is ruled by the vegetation gods, catharsis, trauma-re patterning. Both performers and spectators experience a sense of integrative unity, says Anton Biro. Cohesion and inner meditative centering, the Bacchic chronotope conveys the subjective impression of being included in a greater whole, a feeling of oneness with the cosmos among the performers and participants. The medium, so to speak, becomes the message. A sudden miraculous expression of a holy time and place in Synasthesia that extends on to the cosmic. Eruptive energy and ecstasy, often associated with fire, pure music and dance, pre-linguistic noise and cry. With its enactment of these cycles of living, its growth and death and inevitable sacrifices, theater lives squarely within the sphere of the vegetation gods. We use the word tragedy a lot these days. It's a tragedy. Something is a tragedy. It's a tragedy that midnight bear bakery ran out of chocolate quesons this morning. Lord's new single is a tragedy. Tragedy, do we know what we're saying? Tragedy? Tragedy, the song of the goat. More specifically, the song of the sacrifice victim you see the goat is on his way to be sacrificed at the festival of Dionysus. And the tragedy, the goat song is the hymn and lament to the god who rules the cycles of birth and life and death. Life that by its very nature contains the inevitability of sacrifice. The goat is going to die and there's nothing that can be done because that's the cycle. When we watch a tragedy, we know someone is going to be sacrificed. The audience follows in a state of focused rapture as the sacrifice unfolds. The chorus may warn us ahead of time of the deadly trajectory that the sacrifice victim is on, and we watch horrified as they ignore the signs and succumb to the same old patterns and end up on the sacrificial block. There's nothing more uncomfortable than watching that inevitable slide. There's that same pattern again, are they really going to forget again? Are we really going to forget again? So a tragedy allows us to watch from the outside as the sacrificial cycle plays out. and offers us the opportunity because we're far enough removed. We're linked enough to the enactment through rapture that we feel it, but we're far enough removed that we can see it for what it is. Tragedy allows us the opportunity to shift our own patterning. This is the power of an acted ritual. It fulfills the deep seated need for sacrificial cycles and allows through the cathartic experience the opportunity to transcend these cycles so that we don't go down the same rabbit hole again and again and again. ritual, enacted theatrical ritual, repannence, trauma. In the modern world, we don't recognize how often we enact these same sacrificial cycles. How bound we are still today to the vegetation gods. How this world of growth and decay in which we plot a tenuous course has always demanded sacrifice and we'll get it one way or another. We enact tragedies whether intentional or not. So if I were to say something like, it's a tragedy that modern discourse has gotten so focused around the culture wars. It is, in fact, literally a tragedy. It is the song of the sacrifice victim playing itself out because we have no ritual outlet playing itself out in how we tear each other down. in how we weaponize discourse, even in how we deify trauma, it is tragedy, a song of sacrifice, that should be enacted ritually and instead is enacted societally. Society blindly stumbling towards the chopping block. What a tragedy. So, trans, tragedy, trauma, transformation, see a pattern here? The enacted theater of ritual allows for something to transform within us even as we enact the stories of others, of heroes and goddesses, even as we put on the mask. Theodore, the sacred right of an old vegetation god, realizes that addressing a situation by placing oneself both inside it and outside it at the same time is very powerful stuff. The pharma con the plant medicine allows for transformation by getting us beyond the condition brain into a vaster space in which deep repatterning can happen, where the seemingly impenetrable stone walls of old patterning can grow again with new IV. The sung stories of the vegetation gods in their cycles allow us to transform through the simple alchemy of, as above, so below. As I sing, of the body of Adonis, or Sati, or Ulu, I am singing of my own body. In India, the Sindur, the blessing powder, is ritually placed on the gods' joints and forehead on their wounds on their foes wounds. This is directly addressing the devotee's body. Devotion does something outside the body addresses patterns within the body. All of this works outside of the sphere of what we usually call eye. It gets the eye conveniently away, which is what more and more neurologists are finding is key to trauma-re patterning. This vision beyond eye is an inherently vegetative view. Ecosystems don't care about eye. A forest mulch is 100 individual eyes a day. Writer and mythologist Sophie Strand wrote this, quote, Andrea's Weber asserts that life has a tendency to transform all available resources into a mesh work of bodies. This mesh work of bodies goal is a liveness of the whole. and not aliveness of the individual. An aliveness that in its innermost core carries the plea that there be more life, not that I am fine, putting the desire that there be life first might even provoke my own destruction. Which brings us to modern trauma discourse. And as I said, for our postmodern culture of individuals, it may make total sense that we address trauma directly as its own isolated thing in a one-on-one setting. Again, I've benefited from this direct one-on-one approach to trauma. And don't get me wrong, trauma therapies are also increasing dramatically in their scope. More and more somatic visual tactile communal therapies are emerging and leading, I believe, inevitably towards ritual. Dr. Robert Scherr, author of the trauma spectrum, had a conversation with my parents in which he said that three things were necessary in the treatment of trauma, a safe container, downregulation of the amygdala and ritual. In his book, eight keys to brain body balance, he speaks directly of the power of ritual. He says it is key for all the other keys, which include empowerment, Crossing the cerebral hemisphere, the healing process of releasing the freeze response and restoring perceptual boundaries. Ritual also provides the safe container that scare is talking about. There's a safety implicit in the ritual structure in which one sings the story of a transformed God along with a hundred other singers, or grieves over an abducted vegetation goddess, and combines that with deep states of rapture that override the condition brain. This allows us to enact and address individual trauma through the story and song without having to label it as ours, to hyper focus on it, to get fixated on it as its own thing. Because that can be tricky, an increasing number of trauma specialists are questioning the modality of simply talking about individual trauma over and over again. As Vendercolk says, quote, for a hundred years or more, every textbook of psychology and psychotherapy is advised that some method of talking about distressing feelings can resolve them. However, as we've seen, the experience of trauma itself gets in the way of being able to do that. No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality. As with many things in the modern world, there are potential pitfalls that come when we isolate the word trauma, extract it from context, and then are free like all abstractions to use it however we want. Trauma discourse can be used to elevate certain groups over other groups, just as it can be used to diminish or invalidate others' experience. Comparing trauma is actually a thing now, and where does that road lead? Trauma discourse can be used to write off entire sets of cultural practices like possession, trans practices or just trauma responses. Trauma discourse can become almost religious. When trauma becomes the thing that is sacrosanct in the victim, But that must be extricated and purged from society at large, then trauma discourse reveals some deeply puritan undertones. Taking it further, trauma can become shorthand for anything we want to justify in ourselves and condemn in others. It can be used as Tyson Yokeportis had an recent conversation as currency.

I mean, ritual historically and in living culture, like ritual is pleasure and pain. It's ecstatic and traumatic. And the ecstatic traumatic is often what takes you into that.

All this gets to a reductionism, a mono-directionality and modern trauma discourse that exists in contrast to how natural ecosystems actually transform, grow, change, and repattern, which is multidirectional, which is the mesh work of bodies that Weber speaks of. So what do I mean by mono-directionality? I mean quite often in modern discourse, trauma is treated as a thing that lives inside the individual and that thing is something to be extricated, released or discharged. As if it were like an impurity almost, tarnishing an otherwise pure vessel and the trauma is the object that just needs to be extracted. Take the problem out of the individual. For example, it's very popular to talk about releasing drama, and I've definitely felt the release of energetic burdens and old patterning. It's valuable, but this is just one directional aspect of something that is far more multi-directional, as multi-valent in fact as climbing IV. Expressing or releasing trauma might not be the full picture. In traditional Chinese medicine, a good friend recently told me, trauma might not manifest always as something bottled up that needs to be expressed outwards. It might be something that is energetically hemorrhaging that actually needs to be short-up and contained. Containment is trauma work just as expressing is. Rooting is trauma work. Consolidating is trauma work. Gathering, collecting, steeping, nourishing, regrowth, all the vocabulary of the actions of trees. So what if we take a more vegetative lens to this? What if we see trauma as part of a larger ecosystem? A vine-like pattern of growth that is omnidirectional intertwined with varied textures of experience. intertwined with breath and longing, enjoy and want, and much, much larger than the individual. A response pattern then addressed through all five of the directional pranas, as we would say, in yoga. Gathering in words towards a core of rich sap, expressing outwards to the tips of the leaves. Rising through high branches, rooting into deep soil, connecting and re-growing whole systems within a pattern, a pattern that is one of breath and sorrow, and loss, and longing, and partings, and reunions, and peak experiences, and lulls, and wrong turns, and freedoms, and false hopes, and sudden stops, and the turnings of seasons, and the shifting of relationships, and the growing of gardens. A pattern of branching dendrites, a silver gold tree, the tree of trauma, the tree of the nervous system, the tree of life, which is the trauma, and which is the tree. So I'm in favor of people continuing to explore trauma or however make sense to them. I'm simply adding this to the discussion. The group ritual, the sun laments, the dances, the stories of the gods who became plants and the plants became instruments and the instruments led back to the gods. The theatrical enactments of tragedy, the putting on of the mask, the harnessing of pain and the deprivations within nature, the regrowing, all of these are trauma-re patterning. The nervous system is, as a tree, it operates along the language of vegetation. So much so that if we were to sing together of the body of the goddess. If we were to sing of her scars, if we were to sing of her longing. Of where she wandered, of where she gathered in our quesals flower and the fields, fingers waving over fine late summer grass. If we were to sing of all she endured, if we were to sing of the goddess and all she lost. All the months she spent in darkness, All those tears lost in damp ash in the underworld before clawing her way back to light. If we were to sing of the body of the goddess, supine on the forest floor now. Here tangled in the autumn grass. Grass all around her. Fresh new grass all around her at the grass of springtime. If we were to sing of her skull sinking back into soil, her skull settling into soil. If we were to sing of her palate relaxing, her skull mulching in the forest floor. If we were to sing of the body of the goddess new life sprouting all around her. If we were to sing of her bones and the green, green, arrow, and vines slowly losing. Fibers dissolving. If we were to sing of her skin, if we were to sing of her skin and scars or scars growing now with shoots and tendrils. Her body re-woven with shoots and tendrils, her scars, crowding, dark ivy and summer blossoms, and growing of herself a garden of herself. If we were to sing of her now, the viruses and violets and anemony. and Mediterranean crocus, and a blazing halo of St. John's Epiracum, the scent of wild time all about her, and rosemary, the scent of wild oregano, if we were to sing of the body of the goddess, and how she was again made whole, if we were to sing of the body of the goddess, and how she was again made whole. We would be singing, we would be singing of life. We would be singing of life. We would be singing of trauma. Regrown as a tree. First off, many, many thanks to Serena Bixby for providing the beautiful singing vocals. Thank you so much Serena. It sounds wonderful. And Max Brumberg, who has given permission for me to use his beautiful haunting alos music, the alos, the double read flute that was used in so many ancient Greek trans rituals. And you can find Max Brumberg's work. online. He makes these custom instruments. You can find them at maxbrumbergflute.eu. That's maxbrumbergflute.eu. As always, this episode contains reference to many books, articles, songs, etc. These include the wisdom of trauma, new film featuring abormate. My grandmother's hands racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies by resume monocompt. The body keeps the score by vessel Vendor Kolk, Tristan and Issel, the classic Celtic tale, sand-talked by Tyson Yokeporda, Sunday night football with El Michael's and Chris Collins' worth. The dead speak a case study from the Tua tribe highlighting the hybrid world of Shakti Tantra and Asam by Shravana Borkataki Varma. The work of mythologist and writer Sophie Strand, you can find a lot of her beautiful writing in the way of the Rose Facebook group, the song Turn Turn Turn by the Birds. The health and well-being benefits of plants from the Ellison Chair and International Flooric Alter at Texas A&M University, ritual myth and tragedy origins of theater and Dionysian rights by Nadia Burberovich, Ovid's metamorphosis, psychedelics promote structural and functional neural plasticity, Calvin Lee and team in cell reports featured on the NIH website, eight keys to brain body balance by Robert Scher, The Dionysian Gospel, the fourth gospel in your rippities by Dennis Armick Donald, recapture the rapture by Jamie Wheel, the immortality key by Bryan C. Murorescu, the green man by Kathleen Bassford, God of many names Dionysus and the light of his cult epifids by Anton Biro. And also by Anton, an article entitled The Bacchic, Correic, Cronatope, Dionysus, Korra, and Corrality in the 5th Stasimon of Sophocleses Antigony. That's a mouthful. The Mass of God series by Joseph Campbell, South Pacific ritual Bungie jumping by Zoltan Istvann and Nat Geo November 2002. I'm offering an ongoing mythic study group for patrons of the podcast. If you're interested in becoming a patron and taking part in these twice monthly sessions, you can go to patreon.com slash the emerald podcast that's patreon.com slash the emerald podcast. For as low as six bucks a month, you can get access to two to our conversation sessions in which we talk about the myths on a little bit more of a deeper level. And there's other benefits that patrons enjoy as well. Until next time, may our lives be driven forth by imagination, vision, and wonder.