THE ARCHETYPES AND THEIR TEXTS

IN ENGLISH

I AM THE

CHILD OF

THE EARTH

AND THE

STARRY SKY

__________ 

Note: When the publishers of my first book "Manthraspenta" (1977) asked me for a photo as well as for a biographical note, I gave them as biographical note the phrase "I am the child of the earth and the starry sky”. It is an orphic verse that was to be addressed by a person being initiated to the guardians standing before the spring of Remembrance (Mnemosyne), in order to be allowed to drink, to quench his thirst, to remember the complete life, that is to become Zeus, completely alive and master of all knowledge

Red skirt with your puberty and your smell of love and sleep. I picked you up and left you laying there fainting to photograph, seeing you with the inner vision and not only through my eyes as I saw you until then. And you were the Holy Table’s cloth, the red cloth of Love and Death. And in the middle of you was embroidered the black cross and from its centre sprouted the dark puberty and the green phallus.

___________________

Note: Something exists for us from the moment we become conscious of it and not from the time it really exists.

One thing could exist inside us as it really is, only if we see it through inner vision. One thing could exist inside us, as it really is, only if we become able to give it its name. And the real name of one thing is not of one word, but it consists of many words. It is an enigma, a poem, a whole magic story.

And of course if we look at a poppy, we do not see but simply a red flower, nothing more.

If someone hears the word "poppy", this brings to mind nothing but the red flower named poppy and nothing more.

If we translate the word "poppy" nothing is changed but the sound of the poppy’s name, nothing more.

The poppy itself given to somebody, is nothing but a red flower, named poppy, in his hands.

But if we show to someone the poppy, giving at the same time to him the above poem, which is the magic, the archetypal, her real name, then the poppy is revealed in her wholeness as she really is, consists and constitutes   again a sacred page in the book of Cosmos.

THE

GIRLS:

Frescos of

ancient

Thira?

Geography

or

photograph?

Ariadne and

Dimitra

“The girls,

the vases of

mysteries".

MADONNA SEA AND THE SUN: The red blanket with the Key of The City on it. Madonna and the Sea, Christ and the Holy Sun.

THE CHILD: A child holding in one hand the wheel of the moon faces and catches in the other hand the tail of a horse with the rider Baldur, the solar god of Elder Edda. In the pocket of his trousers the child has sycamore fruits and in his mouth the taste of the mysterious and almighty word "Manthraspenta". The villagers meet the child on the road, greet him but he doesn't speak - they do not see the rider and the horse.

ARIADNE IS DREAMING:            Ariadne is dreaming that Picasso used her thread to embroider or paint this goat. She does not want to wake up, so that she keeps this beauty. This embroidery looks like a constellation. She is wondering if this goat is made truly by Picasso or by the god Hellen.

THE SUN-FISH, HAVING THE HALF-MOON AS A TAIL Ariadne presents herself holding in her hands two branches. In her right hand she holds the branch with the stars. In the other hand she holds the branch with the sun. But she also needs a fish having the roof of a house as a tail. That is what she says. And she takes again her position on the right and on the left of Cosmos.

THORNED SOLES (OF THE FEET): But the time came and vanished this generation. Only their feet with thorned soles and flowered toes remained and are stepping on the sky. And because of this the sky bleeds stars.

PRINCESS ARIADNE: When the sky was still a silver basket with its planets and the magic thread balls of the suns, princess Ariadne, was looking at you, sitting infront of the seven rungs, holding the emblem of the falcon headed god Horus.

TRANSCRIBED FROM THE BOOK OF COSMOS: Totem and mask and pharaonic model. When I saw it for the first time, I noted this: I’ m looking here at an insect and I am thinking that every creature is not but a moving or unmoving hieroglyphic in the unbuilt temple of Cosmos.

ANIMALCULE OR AFRICAN MASK: An animalcule or an African mask? Undoubtedly it is a stamp on this letter being Cosmos, sent by Cosmos through the Cosmos to the Cosmos.

EVEN IN THE PRIMORDIAL: Even in those primordial, horsy, wooden, worm-eaten, looking like lion or tiger masks, -I know them because I am one of them- awakeness was the reflexion of the sleep.

THE

ANCESTORS

OF ALEF

AND

OF

THE

MOON

ARCHAIC

Eyes are

looking

from

everywhere;

faces

are

everywhere;

masks

everywhere.

Nothing

evades

from

archetypes.

MASK OR FACE: A butterfly which came at night drawn by the light

(and she calmed down only at dawn when she saw that the light exists      

everywhere).

She sat on the wall as a herald beside the door.

But who is this gentleman who appears as a herald?

Are his eyebrows snakes or horns?

And there are two white forms in both sides of the cloud holding the                     

discs of the eyes.

(Eyes known, so well-known. In which lost dimension I met them for                    

the first time?

His beard, his mouth, his expression, and his style.

Is he the prince of the snakes? Mask or face?

Or if he is an archangel - which star, which troop is he coming from?

CHE YIANG: Like a sun with two moons was the Emperor Che Yiang and his two                     

wives, but one of his friends

was in the zodiac of the Dog and the other

in the zodiac of the Cock.

                                         Che Yiang: He came to mind

when I found a miniature of his solar shield in a tobacco insect;

(an insect among those insignificant ones that simulate the insignificant                 

on purpose

that they may safely bring upon themselves -for the sake of poets-

signs, symbols, secret maps).

____________

Note: In an aquarium of Thessaloniki, in 1979, I saw a fish with a drawing on it looking like an unknown scripture; I read it immediately. In this scripture I was seen the sacrifice of the Solar Logos, his modification into stars-words, his modification in a starry night. The fish of the aquarium (IXÈÕÓ) was of a muddy green black colour and had on it the Archetype of the Sacrifice of the Solar Logos, written in golden ink, the ink of light. Then I stood, and looking at the drawing printed on the fish, I wrote this:

NOTES ABOUT LOGOS SPEAKABLE AND

AT THE SAME TIME UNSPEAKABLE                      

The fish is black; a muddy green black; the black of the dark seabed.

The sun became empty and its light became this magic scripture. The sun became empty and the only thing remaining is its golden ring trembling in the bottom of the flow and the flow carries away its cool shinning.

Which solar creatures, which black spirits, sent me this scripture, this message from the depth of time, from the depth of the ocean? A solar tribe. A solar scripture. A tribe that was writing with light into creatures, onto this black papyrus of darkness, on this skin, on the dark side of a fish.

(Here the night and the day exist together).

In my magic first world, beauty was printed on creatures alive. And now looking at the world, I am reading this poetry made of things. The things are silent; what could they say? They themselves are the word.

                That’s what I noted then. But this was not enough for me. I asked the man of the aquarium to allow me to photograph the fish.

            “What fish?” he asked me, “this one with the strange letters? Its name is Oscar, Oscar of Cychlides family. But of course you can take a picture of it.

            After taking the picture, I wrote down all the details of the “archetype” taken from the photograph. And then I completed the first poem with the manuscript that follows the archetype in this work:

O my magic first world, you that imprint the beauty on live things.

On the black fish (its name is Oscar of Cychlides), I suddenly recognized my mystic papyrus and I immediately read the magic scripture.

The magic letters written with the golden ink of the light and the sun remained aside empty like a ring bearing on it that cool trembling or waving of a thing we see in the bottom of the flow. O yes I didn’t hide my magic scripture in a cave; I didn’t hide my black papyrus into the earth or into a dry well; On an alive creature I imprinted it, on this fish which from birth to birth in deep waters would bring back to me the  message from my far forgotten self.    

From my far forgotten self… O my Sacred Tribe behind the bad and good

behind the day and night where all is one.

THE VEHICLE OF SUN (Heliogram)

And the sun descended voicing

over the sandhill where we woke up

and from the back door of the sun, descended

the angel of Alpha, the angel of Omega.

The Saint Wolf (leaf that I found on the mountain Pilion), having something from Zarathustra or something from John of Apocalypsis. On a page of "the Golden Bough", with the title "The killing of the tree spirit", it was looking at me with two o-letters of its eyes and speaking to me with the o-letter of its mouth, declaring that it doesn’t exist there by chance. When I was holding it in front of the rock, I saw that it becoming the mask of the rock. When I was holding it infront of the sky, I saw that it becoming the mask of the sky. Here I don't know if it is a roaring spirit or a lion.

THE SOLAR PRIEST: Is this solar priest sleeping or is he dead? An ancient sun stands near him or it becomes his halo. Near his feet the known little animal (formed by a fig tree) is awake. The jewelleries are always there; the world.

SON OF MAN:         

There are

faces everywhere, half-hidden, to give you the pleasure to bring them totally in appearance (or to complete them as you want). Green eyebrows on the rock made of moss. You put seeds as eyes, a piece of rotten stubble as nose, a leaf of arbute-tree as mouth and thorns as hair.  And here you have a face similar to the son of man.

            HORNED BOOK: Book with horns and eyes; is there anything strange with it? Near this an orange or a sun; the stone flower and cyclic jewelleries declare (perhaps) the eternal return. All together and each one separately says with their presence: "There is no question; I am here; I am always here”.

THE REMAINS OF AN APPLE: The remains of an apple; hornheaded  animals, good or bad, with eyes of seeds.

THE SAINT: Has he his roots in the moon, or in the Aeon, or in the sun? The hallo is the bulb of the saint; the planet of the hermit; the place of him who has no place.

THE DRAGON-COCK AND THE SUNSCRIPTURE: A thousand cocks that warble to wake up the Sun. Between them the first cock I saw, the cock of golden combed of Elder Edda.

The birds are trees that fly the dragons are roots that move.

SIGNS OF IMMORTAL MEMORY

____________

Note: Heraclitus calls “Signs of Immortal Memory” the Minor and Major Ursae, which are separated by the constellation of Draco. In this drawing that I made for the cover of my book “Signs of Immortal Memory”, I tried to restore their archetypal aspect and not to imitate the constellation itself. So, Minor Ursa is surrounded by the Draco’s Constellation which seems to be a golden fold, a ring or Ouroboros. On the other hand, Major Ursa is presented pasturing in the field of stars. I also want to add here that when I was making this drawing, I saw the following dream:

I was holding a huge felt pen as a plough, drawn by both Ursae. While I was ploughing I saw behind me lilies sprouting in the middle of the tillage. But I don’t know if all these happened on the earth or in the sky.

THE CROWNED LITTLE GOD: The crowned little god. The old crescent he holds it could be a feather or an icon. The book laying on his foot is a tombstone of the waste land. The little god or angel, brings to the waste land the fruits of Aphrodite and Persephone.

IN FRONT OF THE ANCIENT MIRROR

The anax, whose oracle is in Delfi, neither reveals nor hides but gives signs.

____________

Note: I want to point out here that the difference between the Greek language of the 6th century B.C. is almost the same as in the modern Greek language. So we read:

We see that the ancient Greek language, particularly the Ionian dialect, is modern Greek, if we express it briefly, in exactitude and wisdom.

THE OLD HALF-MOON: A very old half-moon with traces of beings that inhabited it and beside it the fruits of Aphrodite and Persephone. No dead nature; There is no dead nature.

TULIP PETALS: Who remembers now the tulip? Three penguins touch my typewriter; three spirits; three holy men from Tibet or three vulture-headed Egyptian gods wearing light as vestments.

THE SUN; THE MOON: Even on the branches of the pomegranate tree, the archetypes of the sun and moon. Before a hand or the wind passes and takes them.

LEAVES OR MASKS: Leaves or masks? Human, animal figures or maps? Since they fell from the tree, they ceased to be leaves and only leaves. The road of return is a travel of metamorphoses, that leads to the unshaped, that is to say in the beginning.

A PLAYING CARD FIGURE

____________

Note: Let us say here that the nature will always surpass its copies. A living cyclamen is always superior than a cyclamen in a drawing. So, it is foolish and vain to try to compete nature. But if we see the cyclamen as an winged eye or an inflamed crown rendering this in the drawing, then the cyclamen is not only a cyclamen any more; then a painted cyclamen stops to be simply a copy. A drawing that reveals the many meanings of a being, this, of course, is worthy of the living thing; because this drawing reveals the archetypal and eternal nature of the living but ephemeral being.

WOMB OF THORNS:

... Green sea urchins on the chestnut tree and in autumn a womb of thorns bears the fruit. Thorned womb of nut what do you call to my memory? A thorned womb is my thorned crown, a thorned womb is the Sun. Oh pregnant day you cannot keep me any more inside you; I know the secret of the goddess Athena I know the secret of the owl. Oh pregnant day you cannot have me ever inside you. I have escaped from the cycle of mourning and of complication. I am he who is born from my thorned crown: The night with all it’s stars; a blooming silence.

MANUSCRIPT-CROWN: And this manuscript looks like a thorned wire, that fences the empty, or, crowns your mirror.

TRACES OF LIGHT:

First the cyclic rhythm of petals, the absolute time of the flower. And then the cycle running. The petals become traces. Twelve traces of a solar creature. And I don’t know if it goes or comes.

EOSPHOROS (SATAN): "In the beginning was Logos and Logos was near God and God was Logos". It is the knowledge of Eosphoros who is starfaced, hornbearing, seedhaving, forkhanded, leaf wearing and drawn to fork himself, acrobating on the curve, because there is no straight way in the Universe.

OUROBOROS: …The wolf eats the hare and the hare eats the grass and the grass eats the ground and the ground eats the wolf. The terrible cycle from which nothing ever escaped. All are born and die in this cycle. Nothing can get out of this cycle. All creatures are enclosed in this; all the world is enclosed in this. Black-bad, white-good, day and night; but the white is fed by the black just like the black is fed by the white. Day and night, good and evil eat each other. That’s why the Greeks (Hellenes) have said that All is One and they engraved on papyrus, on skin, on paper, the Ouroboros....(a symbol of the mystic supper which always exists and everywhere in Cosmos)... Delight ineffable that only the god of love can know it. Because then, we are not two persons enclosed in the mirror’s heart. Then we are a cyclic animal; the magic Dragon-World that bites its tale

THE GARDEN: How much I love the gardens. Every garden that I have seen, has been always the first one.

THE PICTURE (PAINTING) OF 1974

THE CARDS: A man and a woman on the right and on the left of the cycle that forms the deck of Tarot; this deck with the Fool in the middle forms a mandala. But card deck in Italian means a trap.

HAROULA SAYS: My body moves around my centre. I live and I always move around my centre.

THE WOODEN SPIDER: Glances and stars catches in its web the Great Spider. Sometimes this spider is the Sun.

THE CREATION OF THE NIGHT: On the cycles of a wooden sky, the Minor Ursa. Upon the Ursa and the other stars, a shadow of a child’s hand. Perhaps the child wanted to create the night. And the night was created to look like his hand.

ARCHETYPE

OF LOVE (EROS) AND DEATH: Leaf of the sprouted dragon-plant, you are the archetype of the woman sex and your shape, o lance, is the hornbearing head of a green dragon.

LILY AND ROSE: But see here, in that blooming universe of the mountain epitaph, where Jesus was lying alone, looking that I might recognize other faces, I saw the flowered phallus of Gabriel and the middle-open rose of Mary.

APRIL: Is it an astronaut? Or is he the flower called “april” with his tale and with his wings closed round his head? Is he an adamic male-archetype? Earth remembers. Bringing it every spring, perhaps it wants to say Seg Tsan’s words: "There is no here nor there. The eternity is infront of our eyes.

    TEMPLE OF COSMOS

THEY DID NOT BECOME ANGELS: They did not become angels, women or birds; they became wild solitary flowers.

THE FIGURE: The yellow paint drawn on the blue table by a hand that is led by the charmness of a figure. Next you can see eye cavities of wooden knots and flower-eyes, flower-hair, leaves and shells and all these that complete the figure. In how many things is every figure scattered?

POPPY: In which page, in what red handkerchief, o magicians of the soul, did you wrapp this sacred green vase with the life seeds? O magic vase, your seeds have made immortal no one, but very often sent the death to sleep.

THE GOD OF WASPS: The Presocratic philosopher Xenophanis says that if the oxen could paint their god, they should make him as an ox. Similar the horses should make him a horse and the lions a lion. The Ethiopians (simi) should make him dark, as they are. The Thracians should make him blue-eyed, tall and blond as they are. Above we see the crucified god of the wasps.

AH (AX in Greek): Ah (Áx)! The scream of delight and pain; the pre-eminently human scream opposed to the root Cha (XA) of Chaos (XAOS). With the letter A which is pronounced when the mouth opens so much as for no other vowel. With the letter h (x) pronounced so deep as no other consonant. Ah (Ax), with the letter A of the mAn and the letter h (x) of the deletion (crossing off) of the Man when he is united the Unknown X, called God, Nature, Love, Death, or Great Self.

THE GOD PAN

______

Note: The name Pan in Greek means the Whole. The god is half human and half animal; this declares that when the human conscience increases separated by the natural laws, it becomes denaturalized, it declines; it becomes a private conscience diverged from the universal consciousness. But when the human conscience develops being always connected with the instincts and the natural powers (symbolized here by the god’s animal aspect), it consists the self-conscience of the Whole.

THE CIRCLE AND ITS CENTER: Anaximandros Praxiadou, from Militos... It is said that he was the first who wrote in a book the whole world...When Anaximandros saw freely the shape made by the free men in agora polis, then he discovered the shape of the free bodies in agora of the universe. And wrote on a papyrus the circle with its centre. (This circle with its centre is the writing of the universe on a papyrus, the wisest say).

ENDLESS LIGHTNING

__________

            Note: A Finnish friend called me on the phone. She told me that she likes very much the covers that I made for my books. She had just translated Kazantzakis’ “Ascetic” in Finnish. So she asked me to make the cover for this publication: “It would be so nice for two Geeks to co-exist in the same book translated in Finnish” she told me. 

                I explained to her that the covers of my books are nearly made by their own, such as the material of every one of my books takes its form in the course of time. So I had to refuse with sorrow, asking for her understanding.

                After the phone call, I brought in to my mind some phrases, some quotations of “Ascetic”. The spirit of this book took over me. I took a piece of paper and a colour and almost without thinking, I put the colour on the paper, on a certain point, and I started to draw an orange spiral. My hand was moving round and round and round, searching desperately for the end, until I felt the spiral to return into its centre, just like being suddenly satisfied, like being able to enclose the absolute into the relative, finding finally an endless end in its beginningless beginning.

                Did I have again infront of me, the circle? Yes, but not in that simple form where the circle reveals completely its secrets, so that they become absolutely invisible. I had the circle, but in that evidently dynamic spiral form, the spiral one, where the eternal movement of the self-feeding cosmic energy, which I call Endless Lightning, is evidently traced.

                “That's it” I thought, “that's it”. I called immediately my Finnish friend. “The cover of the Asketic is ready” I said. “In three minutes?” “Yes in three minutes” “Yannis send it to me right now”. I sent it immediately”.

THE LETTERS OF THE HELLENIC ALPHABET: From the letters I and O derive all the letters of the Hellenic alphabet. And with them you can create even a human couple. A woman and a man. Verifying the phrase of John the Evangelist:  “And the word became flesh”.

A HORSE OF SUNFLOWERS: And when I put the old wooden forks under the tall sunflowers to hold them from falling, I left. And as I was turning to see them, I saw a horse covered of huge, so fresh, so bright eyes. I was in front of an angel. I was in front of a horse more beautiful than that horse of Death.

Yannis Yfantis was born according to his willing in Raina (a valley of Etolia, west-central Greece). He studied agriculture, cattle-breeding, the art of riding as well as astronomy and the art of weaving (his name Yfantis means weaver).

            When he was 22 years old he left his studies in Law in order to study undiverted the book of the World.

He lived 32 years in Thessaloniki. Now he lives, sharing his time between Raina (his birth-place) and the island of Lefkas.

Works:

Manthraspenta (poems, 1977),

Mystics of the Orient (an anthology of Sufi, Hindu, Taoist and Zen poets, 1980),

Elder Edda (a translation of the icelanding Poetic Edda, 1983),

The Mirror of Proteus (poems,1986),

Signs of Immortal Memory (poetical and philosophical essays about Oedipus, the Oracle of Delphi, the Cards of Tarot, the poetry, etc., 1987),

Poems Embroideries on the Skin of the Devil (poems, 1988),

Temple of Cosmos, (poems, 1996).

Eternal Fire (a documentary of Christos Aronis, with the poet and his daughter Ariadni in the first roles, 1997).

The Garden of Poetry, (4.000 years of foreign poetry, 2000),

Archetypes (containing compositions of photos, drawings and manuscript poems, 2001),

Coq the Erotic (Love poems of Y.Y. and love paintings of Giorgos Stathopoulos, 2002),

The Ideogram of the Snake (legends and their meaning, dreams and their meaning, real stories, articles, speeches, reviews, sms, etc., 2003),

Love Unconquered in the Fight (love poems, 2004),

Masks of the nothing, (Poems, a book of clay, made by Marie-José Armando, 2005),

Under the icon of stars (poems, 2006),

The transformations of the Zero (all his (seven) poetical selections in one volume, 2009).

Yannis Yfantis recites Yfantis (a CD during 73 minutes, Lyra, 2009).

In the shores of Homer (3.000 years of Greek poetry, - to be published soon).

            He has been also invited to present his work in several festivals in abroad (Egypt, France, Finland, Cyprus, Germany, Bulgaria, Algeria, etc.).

Although he believes that the books are made by themselves, he received, unexpectedly, for them, the Cavafis Prize for 1995, in Egypt.

In November of 2003 he has been invited by the Bavarian Ministry of Culture, for three months, in Feldafing, near the lake Starnbergerzee.

He has the Web Site: www.yfantis.gr