I've started studying the theory (and hopefully I will be able to evolve these studies to some form of humble practice) the so-called "Dance of Utter Darkness" or the Ankoku Butoh. I am only beginning to delve into the subject, but I'm already finding much beauty in how this dance deals with very difficult energies.Cancer wrote: ↑Wed Jan 22, 2020 5:15 pm Le Guin’s description seems, on the one hand, to align with the idea of the dragon as ego. This is suggested by her connecting dragons with amoral, ambiguous force, that is as dangerous as it is beautiful. Much like the individual genius sought and harnessed for spiritual growth by LHP occultists, dragons are not in themselves good or evil, only terrible in the original sense. Sublime.
One of the orginators of Butoh was the Japanese goreographer Tatsumi Hijkata (1928 - 1986). I have recently read how Hijkata was inspired in creating this dance form by observing some situations that are quite disturbing. He grew up in a community where adults had to work in the field for much of the day, and they had the habit of tying very young children (like three year old) to poles while parents were laboring, apparently so that the childrean wouldn'wander off unsupervised. Hijkata observed how some of these children begun to treat their hand as separate entities from themselves. The other movement he observed was his father hitting his mother.
There is a Japanese concept of liminal gap between two states, called ma, and the above mentioned movements he saw as energy between two states in the context of underlaying unity. These are just some of the dynamics Butoh studies. There are much larger themes behind Butoh, like Japan's nuclear destruction in the 40's and the coming together of the West and East in Japanese culture in the 50's and the 60's.
I hope I got this introduction right. Remember, I am very new to this topic. But in context of the Dragon that is All, I am more interested on the first two movements of the smaller scale - the child becomen mentally disintegrated with his or her hand, and the moment of approaching fist. The paradigmatic model of this kind of movement would be the condemned criminal walking to the place of his or her execution.
I sort of see in these energies that travel across the intermediary abysses of the cohesion - and, paradaoxally, the disintegration - of the Dragon as the immense dark force. And thus Butoh (and similar workings) could perhaps be seen as a method to understanding the essence of the Dragon, by realizing it (instead of succumbing to the lesser darkness of its parts) by the act of love that seems like spearing the Dragon...