NOTE: The commentaries on Translations from the Andromedan present snatches of an alternative myth of the prehistory of the earth. The myth is not complete or sequential in these notes, but it can be gleaned from the highlights. Selected themes are indicated in the table of contents in assist in navigating through these notes.

Sloka One: Sweet Talk in the Syrene Limb

1  So  enter  by  the  living  dream  the  secret

Orphic Elm: Variation of Ygdrassil, the mythic world-tree in Nordic mythology, usually identified with the ash. There Woden (variants: Wotan, Odin) hung in a nine-night ordeal to divine ancestral memory and receive the runes, a set of nine mantric formulas.  If the runes are aural-tonic keys to the generative syntax of all possible languages, then the Tree must be a medium of sublime articulation.
According to Barbara Walker, Ygdrassil

shows many parallels with birth-giving, fruit- or milk-producing mother-trees of the Near East, under its older name of Mjotvidr or Mutvidr, “Mother-Tree.” Sometimes it was Mead-Tree, like “the milk-giving tree of the Finno-Ugric peoples, a symbol which must go back ultimately to  Mesopotamia, and be of great antiquity.” It was said “the tree was the source of unborn souls, “which would give birth to the new primal woman, Life (Lif) in the new universe after the present cycle came to an end. (The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets)

The tree that gives birth to primal woman becomes the tree-woman who gives birth to language in the ear of the tree-hung shaman. In the Icelandic Eddas the illumined poet says “with water white / is the great tree wet.” (Volupsa, v. 19).

Among the Yakut shamans of Siberia the young male hero on a vision quest finds himself alone in a milk-white vastness. There he meets the High Mistress who sends milky rain that melts the tree she embodies into the form of a woman who suckles the hero with wisdom. Among the Celtic bards, the white water manifests in a many-branched flood of illumination called “the tree of learning.” The wellspring the White Light brightens the brow of whoever beholds it; hence  the master bard of the Welsh is called Taliesin, “he of the shining brow.”

In Andromedan lore arboreal nymphs are central to the legend of Gaia,  the Earth Dreaming. The fateful encounter of the Gaian women with their lost counterparts, the Men from Orion, is partially and misleadingly preserved in myths known to humanity, but vividly remembered in Andromedan legend. Endlessly recounted on M31, the Earth Dreaming provides stock motifs for local poets. The whiteness of the tree, mysteriously linked to the power of poetic utterance, is no secret to Andromedan natives, yet on earth it remains a subject of immense confusion. Elaboration of the tree-light-woman tropism belongs to specialist lore of poets from a region of the Syrene Limb where the Wending Sea enfolds a series of sheltered inlets and niche-like coves. The Taliesins of Andromedan tree-lore are locally known as estuary bards of the Wending Sea.

Aeon's pooling glow  In Gnostic teachings that reflect some aspects of Andromedan physics, the cosmic powers that produce all world-systems are called Aeons. These are super-animating Divinities congregated in the Pleroma, a generic name for the core of  a galaxy, any galaxy. Pleroma means “matrix of infinite Fullness.” Aeons, the Pleromic Gods, are paired within the boundaries of the porous membrane that seals the Pleroma in a ten-dimensional matrix. In Gnostic cosmology these dyads radiate outward in dual-veined purling currents that pool down into the dance of strange attractors that produce the entire range of natural phenomena. Earthside technological magic reveals the ecstatic play of the Aeons in images of dancing galaxies photographed by the Hubble orbiting telescope.

the roaring ear-locked spiral  

There arose a tree. O pure transcendency!
O Orpheus singing! O tall tree in the ear!
Sonnets to Orpheus, I, 1 (Trans., M. D. Herter Norton)

In a Late Romantic of invocation of the Muse Rilke celebrates the feminine inspirational spirit whose gift of clairaudience produces lyric poetry. The voice of the Muse is manifest through selfless reception: who hears the voice carries the power to sing it.  In the Sonnets to Orpheus this capacity is gender-shifted to the consort of the Muse, the male poet-seer, as if Orpheus were the source of the inspiration rather than its instrument; but the shift works because lyric inspiration is transferable through Erotic bonding.

Rilke may have been subliminally affected by the Andromedan signal of 1885, when he was ten. In later life the poet sensed that Muse and tree are one.  Atavistic insight allowed him a glimpse of the remote prehistory of Gaia, back to the time when tree-nymphs first embraced the hunters from Orion.

“the almost pathological dimension of the affect” In The Modern Poetic Sequence, M. L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall (Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 167). The translator’s gratitude goes to Terry (Professor C. F. Terrell, University of Maine at Orono) for directing him to the wonders of the open sequence.

elision from stork to swan  Consistent with Andromedan ethics, Gnostic  initiates of the Mystery Schools rejected procreation (stork) in favor of lyric, transsexual mutation (swan). In Hindu Tantra the swan is called Ham-Sah and represents ecstatic fusion in the sexual embrace. Ham-Sah is also a mantrum, a sound-formula used in the rite of maithuna (mystical intercourse).  The Pra-Panca-Rasa Tantra says that the Eternal Seed, Parabindu, “divides into two parts of which the right is Bindu, the male, Purusha or Ham, and the left is Visharga, the female Prakriti or Sah.” (John Woodruffe, The Garland of Letters). This is a veiled description of occult anatomy, but equally so it represents the Aeons conjoined dyadically in the Pleroma. For millennia in prehistory and down to roughly 2400 BCE, this sexual/cosmological schema guided humanity  on the mystic quest, the return to cosmic origins. Among the constellations visible from earth, Cygnus, the Swan, glides in the direction of the galactic center.  

The Kulanarva Tantra attributes the mantra Ham-Sah to the “highest path, the heartway.”  The Tantra says: “This mantra is performed, O Beloved, so that with each exhalation one makes the sound ham, and with each inhalation, one makes the sound sa, repeated by all breathing beings, from Shiva all the way down to the worm.”  Earthside, only yogis and yoginis of high accomplishment understand that mystical (non-procreative) rites of sexual mating resonate equally into the wide dimensions of the cosmos and down into the molecular structure of matter.  This knowledge is routine “love lore” to natives of M31.

In Gnostic rites, the sigil of eight (8 = infinity) represented the hieros gamos, sacramental sex, and “the number eight was called ‘the little holy number’ by the Eleusinian initiates and by them was associated with the Kundalini and the spinal fire.” (Manley Palmer Hall, Man - The Grand Symbol of the Mysteries). The identification of 8 with the mystic swan – or, more precisely, the spiraline figure of the Kundalini current that propels the Swan – was known in the Mysteries where it provided the basis for orgiastic cells of eight pairs of participants. In Asia Nyingma adepts like Long Chen Pa used the same grouping of eight yogis and eight yoginis for elaborate feats of Tantric divination. 

In Greek myth a swan is the mother of two pairs of twins. Leda was visited by Zeus in the form of a swan and she bore two sons, Castor and Pollux, and two daughters, Helen and Clytemnestra. In both Tantric and Gnostic settings the swan is implicated in occult operations of doubling, biformation, bilocation.
Also in Greek myth, “Orpheus chose the life of a swan, since women had done him to death, and he did not wish to be born of woman again.” (Walter Wili, “The Orphic Mysteries and the Greek Spirit,” in The Mysteries, Eranos Yearbooks, 1978). This motif hints at deep-seated enmity between the sexes, the consequence of eons of turgid enmeshment. Originally sexual encounters between arboreal nymphs and the Orion Men were non-procreative.

How did sexual union in the Gaian paradise degenerate from mystico-erotic play into a soap opera of male domination versus female manipulation?  Andromedans believe that humanity does not know, and cannot know, what really happened, as long as the true outlines of sexual mythography for the human species have not been recovered.      

Lake Manasa Variant of Lake Manasarowar of Hindu legend, known in Tibetan as Mapham Yum-Tso. This lake is widely cited in Tantric lore as the most sacred site dedicated to Shiva, the pre-eminent shamanic deity of Dravidian India. Master shamans of the Bon Po and Dzogchen traditions are also closely associated with Lake Manasa. It is situated beneath Mount Kailasa in the lower Kangri range of the Himalayas. Its reflection on Andromeda appears on the nether side of the inner loop of the Syrene Limb.

Asuramaya In Hindu mythology and Indo-Tibetan prehistory, a court astrologer during the eighth incarnation of Vishnu, Lord Krishna of Vrindavasi. With her usual penchant for hyperbole, Madame Blavatsky makes Asuramaya out to be an immortal sage in the legion of the Luciferian demi-deities who guided humanity in the remote epochs of Lemuria and Atlantis. More likely, he belongs to the company of the nahuales, sorcerers who walked the great Pajonal of Brazil 20 million years ago, according to Ashaninka traditions recounted by Cesar Calvo (The Three Halves of Ino Moxo). 

Be it noted that sorcerer’s time is not ordinary time.

Krishna’s advice to Arjuna on heroic conduct is recorded in the Bhagavad-Gita, a section of the epic poem, the Mahabharata, compiled around 600 BCE from long oral recitations, but his occasional exchanges with Asuramaya on the vertiginous twists of human fate were cut from the script by poncy Brahmins. Credited with the invention  of astrology (no mean feat, perhaps), Asuramaya was also known for calculating the length of Kali Yuga, the Age of Darkness said to have begun with the death of Krishna on February 16, 3102 BC. By his reckoning the duration of Kali Yuga (about 5320 years) is the last fifth of the complete precessional cycle of 25,920 years. At 2000 CE there remain some 216 years to the end of Kali Yuga and the end of the complete cycle, called a Kalpa in Hindu chronology.

M31  Andromeda, the Fallen Woman, is a long V-shaped constellation of the northern skies, located above the Fishes and northwest (left) of Pegasus which shares its head-star, Alpharetz.  M31 is a spiral galaxy in that constellation, the 31st object in the Messier list, designated NGC 224 in the New Galactic Catalogue.

Hence, Andromeda is both the name of a constellation and of a galaxy located in that constellation.

M31 is the most distant object visible to the naked eye. Calculations of earthside astronomers put it at a distance of 2.2 million light-years from earth. A perfect lenticular spiral, the Andromeda Galaxy is thought to be the mirror image of the Orion Galaxy that harbors the solar system where the earth is situated. It appears to be locked into a mutual gravitational vortex with the Orion Galaxy, which it “guards,” mythologically speaking. The Greek name Andromeda may mean “she who guards manhood,” but scholars are not wholly certain of what that means. 

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