2. Spermatic Journey

Our snakewalk begins here, at the ordinary world of houses, cars and parking lots. In the background, the Goddess dwells. This is Koko Crater, which from the perspective of Honolulu to the west looks like a typical promontory. Seen from here, at the southeast corner of O’ahu, the cinder cone exposes two coalesced craters, which the first island settlers named Kohelepelepe: the Inner Lips of the Vagina.

The Hawaiian story of Koko Crater actually begins 150 miles away on the Big Island. There, the lusty Pig God, Kamapua'a, assaulted the goddess of fire, Pele. The frenzied Pig God would have ravished his victim if not for the intervention of Pele's sister, the sorceress Kapo, who distracted Kamapua'a from his lewd advances by detaching her vagina and tossing it from the Big Island to O'ahu. The Pig God chased after it. The flying vagina slammed into the earth. And Kamapua'a, unable to stop quickly enough, crashed into the earth, gouging out Kalama Valley, now a suburban community –-- but, until 1975, a pig farm! Kapo retrieved her portable genitals, leaving behind this impression in the land, which is the tuff ring of Koko Crater.

I’ve retold this myth as “Sex, Love and the Mighty Fine Structure Constant,” which you can read here.

Who is the Goddess? Who dropped her vagina here? We are not mythic people, we who invented the printing press and the hydrogen bomb. In the 21st century, the Goddess is where She always was. Her presence behind the mundane experience of life is the creatio continua: the continuous creation of the Higgs Field, the physical process by which the particles of spacetime, including all the atoms of the human body, take on mass (and inertia) --- from emptiness. [You can read a concise and accessible definition of the Higgs Field here: http://hepwww.ph.qmw.ac.uk/epp/higgs1.html]

Names ill define reality. Goddess, Higgs Field, creatio continua … names are slots we’ve painted in the parking lot of the mind. Let’s go beyond the parking lot and approach the Inner Lips of the Vagina.

This is the snakewalk that meanders out of Kalama Valley along Kokonani Street and directly up to the crater. Nowhere else in Honolulu will you find pavement that snakes in this way. Here is the flagellum of our spermatic journey set in stone! The snake of stone is, of course, the erection. On the first steps of our walk, we remember that the phallus is Hermes, often represented in the ancient world with a mighty erection, the god of roads, divine guide to the otherworld.

The motherworld is where Hermes’ erection points, where the snakewalk wanders, and the spermatic journey ends. It’s all too obvious. We are on our way to find the Egg --- the Orphic Ovum embraced by the coiling serpent --- ancient symbol of history becoming destiny: conception.

The way to the Goddess is neither straight nor strait. Her way weaves: a dance. The first dance is the gyration of the sperm. That spiral dance corkscrewed each of us into the womb --- and each of us is a sole survivor among millions of other dancers who died in the darkness of the Terrible Mother. Her diabolically cunning maze enfeebles, disintegrates and devours. You alone of all others who might have been you survived Her hostility to find the Great Mother.

This pavement, this snakewalk, is the concrete situation where we now find ourselves: spacetime --- an immeasurably vast range of blackness, a cosmic void mazed with dark matter and ripped through with dark energy, wherein light shimmers dim and forlorn in its fractional order and minority rank to the dark powers.

The snake is our guide through this anguished night, under the stammering flames of the stars, moving upon the surface of darkness with amplitudes and curves, the same geometry as light. The cyclic movement of the snake marks the wavelength of the photon.

All that we are hangs by this thread of illumination, a filament of radiance oscillating upon the dark earth --- Logos, our rational mind, enlightened by reason, at large in the cosmic womb of Eros and squirming with nervous energy, vagus (Latin: wandering) nerve firing both heart and viscera with the snakewalk that powers us across the curves and concavities of spacetime deep into the mother-night.

We lose half our oneness if we stay on this path. So, we must look down the road to where the snakewalk is taking us:

Ahead is Kohelepelepe, earthly trace of the flying vagina. We approach the primal world, the wilderness that shaped and encloses the Darwinian bubble of perception that is our humanity. The world ahead is surreal, transhuman, psychocosmic, far beyond the measure of the mind … yet well within our experience, if we can endure it. Nightly, we venture there, where we are stolen by the dreaming and delivered body and soul –-- every sleep cycle for hours --- to the great silence beyond dreams. What happens to us in that silence is the unimaginable history of the world.

Our snakewalk will trespass the great silence and confront the entities who dwell there. They are the resemblances. To endure their presence is to reopen where we really came from. Ignoring them is the continuing sickness of our world. Their shadows cast a form of despair so deep that the animal inside us dies and we become as phantoms, unrecognizable even in our exhaustion.

They are worthy of fear, and they are the real reason there are laws against the possession and use of hallucinogenic drugs. The landscape they occupy is violation. We will definitely stay out of their shadows. I repeat the most important fact of the snakewalk: All that we are hangs by a thread of illumination, a filament of radiance oscillating upon the dark earth.

The Goddess is the source of night. In the void is the Higgs Field that gives us our substance. Without the Mother, there is no body. And without the snake, there is no light.

Ahead is the unimaginable history of the world.