Cosmoi and Their Lineages

The Architecture of the Soul-Field

Every cosmos, or cosmoi in plurar, is not merely an external physical reality but a symbolic habitat arising from the primordial emanation known as Phanes, the archetypal spark of creative light and life. This spark, residing deep within the soul-field, unfolds in layers to form an intricate psychic landscape we call a cosmos.

Each individual participates in the upkeep of a cosmos, as consciousness and soul weave symbolic reality through resonance. This reality is neither fixed nor purely external, but a living, shifting matrix of myth, psyche, and being. So it is not a fixed, external reality but a participatory symbolic field generated from soul and myth. In this sense, reality is mythically and psychologically mediated. Material infrastructure, nation-states, markets, and even science are symbolic structures, not foundational.

The Cosmic Layers: Structure Within a Singular Cosmos

Within this single cosmos, multiple strata unfold, from the superficial social mask to the deepest connection with the archetypal source. These layers are both personal and collective, weaving individual experience into the fabric of culture and myth:

1. Persona: The social mask shaped by collective expectations and survival needs.

2. Ego: The conscious “I” that filters and coheres experience into identity.

3. Shadow: Repressed and disowned aspects of self, including instinctual drives and pain. Contains personal trauma, and all aspects within oneself that this trauma fragmented and split off from consciousness. Often creating personal karmic patterns, throughout ones life. Tied to specific archetypes (mythic and zodiac).

4. Anima / Animus: The inner opposite, gateway to integration and transpersonal awareness. Contains both personal and collective layers.

5. Self (Spark of Phanes): The innermost core, symbolic of wholeness and luminous center of the soul, of a single individual.

6. Collective Shadow: Cultural repression, scapegoated groups, denied archetypes. Source of social trauma and systemic cycles of violence. This creates the cultural karma for an entire group of people that inhabit a civilisation.

7. Collective Unconscious (Mythic Layer): The inherited archetypal library of gods, heroes, and cosmic motifs shared across a civilisation. Which is both shared across humanity in their essence, but has their own specific form and relational tension within a singular cultural cosmos.

8. Cosmos: The total symbolic reality-field shaped through psychic resonance; participatory and dream-like, not just external matter.

As I went into the article “The Ur-Trinity: Remembering the Pattern Beneath All Things” below the psyche lies a deeper generative field, the pre-cosmic luminous unconscious origin from which all cosmoi emanate. The psyche exists suspended within these forces, mediating between the personal and the cosmic. The soul-field as explained in the article “The Soul Field: The Living Dream Before All Cosmoi” is the foundational, pre-cosmic substrate of all psychic and spiritual existence.

It isn’t a place or dimension in the usual sense, but a vast, subtle, living matrix woven from the essence of the Ur-Trinity, the triune source of Nyx (Silence and Void), Lucia Nyktelios (Reflection and Relation), and Phanes (Light and Individuation). Yet we there is not just one cosmos, there are various existing, and competing cosmoi that exist. Civilizations and thus cultures dream these together. It is a symbolic habitat where civilizations and communities co-create shared meaning, laws, values, and stories.

Yet, within each singular cosmos exists a dynamic fractal structure, smaller, nested cosmoi that emerge as localized expressions of the larger cosmic pattern. These nested cosmoi operate simultaneously on multiple scales, from regional cultural realms to the deeply personal soul-worlds of individuals. Each one reflects and resonates with the archetypal matrix of the overarching cosmos, shaping unique psychic landscapes and relational dynamics.

1. Regional Cosmoi
Cultural and geographic zones give rise to distinct regional cosmoi. These cosmoi are collective soul-fields that embody the mythic, symbolic, and spiritual heritage of specific peoples and lands. They color local worldviews, ritual practices, and the communal psyche.

2. Individual Cosmoi
Each human psyche is itself a microcosm, a unique cosmos woven from personal memories, shadow contents, anima/animus energies, and the spark of Phanes at its core. This individual cosmos interfaces with larger collective layers but also contains nested complexes, inner figures, and symbolic patterns that dynamically interact to create the felt experience of self and other.

3. Relational Tension and Archetypal Resonance
Nested cosmoi are not isolated; they engage in continuous dialogue and tension with each other, forming dynamic feedback loops that shape identity and collective reality. Regional cosmoi influence personal cosmoi through cultural myths and also social structures, while individual cosmoi contribute to the ongoing evolution of the regional and larger cosmos. This creates a layered, participatory field where the archetypal essences manifest variably depending on local and personal context. All existing within a contained larger civilizational cosmic system.

Lineages of Cosmoi: Mapping Some Great Streams

Each cultural lineage represents a distinct unfolding of cosmoi, unique symbolic universes shaped by geography, history, and collective soul:

BRANCH I: 🌱 Indigenous Animist Cosmoi (~100,000 BCE – present)
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Cosmology: World as kinship-net of spirits; cosmos is alive
Geography: Global (Australia, Africa, Arctic, Americas, Oceania, Eurasia)
Mythic Features:
• Dreamtime (Australia)
• Animal-human shapeshifting
• Ancestor reverence, cyclical time
• Balance, offering, reciprocity

- 🔁 Soul Structure: Pre-egoic, field-embedded, participatory being
- ⚡ Trauma Handling: Ritual absorption into collective soul
- ⌛ Eschatology: Death as rejoining field of kin; no final judgment

BRANCH II: 🔱 Proto-Indo-European Lineage (~40.000 BCE – present)
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Origin: European Shamanism → Steppe nomads (Yamnaya culture) → Migrations across Europe and Asia → Integration with Neolithic goddess cultures
Core Pattern: Sky Father & Sovereignty Goddess tension, tripartite society (sovereignty, warrior, producer), sacred order through myth and ritual
Cosmic Grammar: Polytheistic, animistic, cyclically regenerative; archetypal world structured by divine contracts, oaths, fate, and initiatory transformation

┌── Sub-branches:
│
├── Greek (Hellenic) (~2000 BCE → 500 CE)
│ Minoan → Mycenaean → Homeric → Classical → Hellenistic
│ Key figures: Zeus, Dionysus, Persephone, Nyx, Hades, Moirai, Hermes
│Strong philosophical crystallization: Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato
│Orphic & Eleusinian Mysteries: Initiatory death/rebirth cosmology
│
│ 🧠 Soul Structure: Fractured soul striving toward anamnesis (divine memory)
│ ⚡ Trauma Handling: Catharsis, mythic re-integration, tragedy as soul-work
│ ⌛ Eschatology: Descent and return; cycles of purification (esp. in Orphic texts)
│
├── Roman (Italic) (~500 BCE → 400 CE)
│ Latinate translation of Greek cosmoi and Etruscan shamanism
│ Gods: Jupiter, Mars, Diana, Vesta, Janus, Lares
│ State cult & household religion; mystery rites persisted underground
│
│ 🧠 Soul Structure: Genius/life-force + Manes (ancestral spirits)
│ ⚡ Trauma Handling: Sacrifice, law-ritual fusion, ancestral continuity
│ ⌛ Eschatology: Underworld passage to fields of Elysium or Tartarus
│
├── Celtic (Insular and Continental) (~1200 BCE → 500 CE, folk survival today)
│ Fluid, animistic cosmos of shape-shifting deities, sacred groves, and triple goddesses
│ Otherworld (Tír na nÓg), shapeshifting, triadic structure, head cults
│ Warrior mysticism and poetic seership (filid, druids)
│
│ 🧠 Soul Structure: Polymorphic, fluid identity; kin with land and spirits
│ ⚡ Trauma Handling: Poetic ritual, geis (taboo), initiatory Otherworld journey
│ ⌛ Eschatology: Sidhe realms; cyclical soul migrations across worlds
│
├── Baltic (~1000 BCE → Present, folk survival today)
│ Conservative Indo-European cosmology, richly preserved
│ Sky gods (Dievs), Sovereignty Goddess (Zemyna), thunderer (Perkūnas)
│ Seasonal solar rites, fate weaving (Laima), world tree (āžu ozols)
│
│ 🧠 Soul Structure: Multi-soul system (shadow, life-breath, ancestral spark)
│ ⚡ Trauma Handling: Singing, mourning rites, communal seasonal sacrifice
│ ⌛ Eschatology: Return to the ancestors or rebirth with lineage
│
├── Germanic (Norse included) (~500 BCE → 1000 CE, folk survival today)
│ Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Continental Germanic cosmologies
│ Fate-driven world (Urdr, Skuld, Verdandi); Ragnarok as cyclic rebirth
│ Shamanic seidr, berserker rites, death-transcending mythic identity (Odin, Yggdrasil)
│
│ 🧠 Soul Structure: Multilayered (hugr, hamr, fylgja, hamingja); tied to wyrd
│ ⚡ Trauma Handling: Death-facing initiation; mythic embodiment (e.g. berserker)
│ ⌛ Eschatology: Cyclical destruction and rebirth (Ragnarok → Gimlé)
│
├── Slavic (~500 BCE → 1000 CE, folk survival today)
│ Chthonic cosmology: domovoi (house spirits), rusalka (spirit women), Perun vs. Veles
│ Axis mundi: World Tree/Yggdrasil analogs
│ Seasonal festivals as cosmogenic rites (Kupala Night, Maslenitsa)
│
│ 🧠 Soul Structure: Tripartite soul (duša, živa, nav)
│ ⚡ Trauma Handling: Ritual mourning (keening), ancestral appeasement
│ ⌛ Eschatology: Soul crosses river into Nav; rebirth or afterlife among ancestors
│
└── Indo-Iranian (Proto-Vedic / Zoroastrian roots) (~2000 BCE → Present)
Early dualism (Devas vs. Asuras → Ahura Mazda vs. Angra Mainyu)
Vedic hymns and fire-sacrifice (Agni) as central ritual cosmology
Zoroastrian refinement of moral dualism; soul judged at Chinvat Bridge

🧠 Soul Structure: Divine spark amidst cosmic battle; tied to moral order (asha)
⚡ Trauma Handling: Ritual truth-speaking, fire purification, confession
⌛ Eschatology: Soul’s ascent or descent; final restoration

BRANCH III: 🔶 Vedic–Tantric–Dharmic Lineage (~2000 BCE – present)
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Origin: Proto-Indo-European spiritual framework → Indo-Aryan migration → Vedic
Key Texts: Rig Veda (~1500 BCE), Upanishads (~800 BCE), Bhagavad Gītā (~200 BCE)

┌── Sub-branches:
│
├── Hinduism (300 BCE – present)
│ Polytheistic, devotional
│ Brahman-Atman identity, cycles of Yuga
│ Pantheon: Vishnu, Shiva, Devi, Agni, Varuna, Saraswati, etc.
│
│ 🧠 Soul Structure: Layered self (body-mind-soul-atman); ritual integration
│ ⚡ Trauma Handling: Ritual purification, karma-balancing, bhakti
│ ⌛ Eschatology: Rebirth until moksha (liberation)
│
├── Sāṃkhya & Vedanta (800 BCE →)
│ Non-dualist, contemplative
│ Prakriti (nature) vs. Purusha (spirit)
│
│ 🧠 Soul Structure: Detached witness consciousness
│ ⚡ Trauma Handling: Detachment from prakriti
│ ⌛ Eschatology: Reunification with Brahman / Purusha
│
├── Tantra (500 CE →)
│ Embodied divinity, sacred sexuality
│ Goddess as supreme (Shakta traditions)
│
│ 🧠 Soul Structure: Immanent divinity; kundalini as soul-force
│ ⚡ Trauma Handling: Alchemical transmutation through embodied ritual
│ ⌛ Eschatology: Liberation through sacred union in this life
│
├── Buddhism (500 BCE →)
│ Non-theistic, focuses on awakening (nirvāṇa)
│ Branches: Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Vajrayāna, Zen
│
│ 🧠 Soul Structure: Emptiness-centered, detachment from illusion/self
│ ⚡ Trauma Handling: Mindful witnessing of suffering (dukkha)
│ ⌛ Eschatology: Extinguishing craving = Nirvana
│
└── Jainism (600 BCE →)
Non-violence (ahiṃsā), karma-based cosmology
Eternal souls, no creator god

🧠 Soul Structure: Self-discipline to free jīva from karmic residue
⚡ Trauma Handling: Ascetic purification
⌛ Eschatology: Liberation through non-attachment

BRANCH IV: 🟡 Egyptian–Mesopotamian Axis (~3000–500 BCE)
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Egypt:
Cosmos structured through Ma’at (truth/order)
Gods: Ra, Isis, Osiris, Thoth, Anubis
Death as transformation, not finality

🧠 Soul Structure: Continuity across thresholds; ka/ba as soul-components
⚡ Trauma Handling: Mortuary rites, mythic stabilization
⌛ Eschatology: Judgment in underworld (weighing of heart)

Mesopotamia:
Sumerian myths: Inanna, Enki, Tiamat, Gilgamesh (~2100 BCE)
Babylonian cosmology: Enuma Elish (~1750 BCE)
Early ancestor of dualism and divine kingship

🧠 Soul Structure: Fate-bound, cosmically inscribed
⚡ Trauma Handling: Hierarchical mediation (priests)
⌛ Eschatology: Gloomy afterlife; heroic legacy

BRANCH VI: 🟣 Hellenic–Orphic–Mystery Traditions (~1100 BCE – 500 CE)
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Homeric Greece → Mystery cults (Eleusinian, Orphic)
Core figures: Dionysus, Persephone, Hades, Nyx, Phanes
Philosophical evolution: Pre-Socratics → Plato → Neoplatonism (Plotinus ~250 CE)
Mythic Themes: Dismemberment, soul descent, initiation, divine memory
Legacy:
• Hermeticism
• Gnosticism
• Depth Psychology (via Renaissance + Jung)

🧠 Soul Structure: Individuating psyche; Logos and Eros; memory-driven destiny
⚡ Trauma Handling: Catharsis through mythic ritual (mysteries)
⌛ Eschatology: Soul’s return to source; mythic rebirth (Orphic)

BRANCH VII: ⚫ Zoroastrian–Abrahamic Lineage (~1200 BCE – present)
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- Zoroaster (Zarathustra, ~1200–1000 BCE):
Ahura Mazda vs. Angra Mainyu → cosmic dualism
First religion to clearly posit good vs. evil timeline

┌── Sub-branches:
│
├── Judaism (~1000 BCE →)
│ Monotheism, covenant, exile, messianism
│ Tanakh, Kabbalah (later)
│
│🧠 Soul Structure: Multi-part soul (Nefesh, Ruach, Neshamah, Chayah, Yechidah)
│ ⚡ Trauma Handling: Covenant narrative; collective trauma as sacred history
│ ⌛ Eschatology: Messianic redemption; Olam Ha-Ba
│
├── Christianity (30 CE →)
│ Jesus as Logos incarnate
│ Kingdom of God vs. world
│ Cosmic sacrifice/salvation = central myth
│ Splits into:
│ → Catholicism (325 CE)
│ → Orthodoxy (1054)
│ → Protestantism (1517)
│
│ 🧠 Soul Structure: Immortal individual soul; body–soul dichotomy
│ ⚡ Trauma Handling: Substitutionary sacrifice; confession; scapegoating
│ ⌛ Eschatology: Heaven/Hell binary; Last Judgment
│
├── Islam (610 CE →)
│ Final revelation via Muhammad
│ Unity of God (Tawḥīd), Qur’an
│ Sufi mysticism: cosmic love, annihilation into God
│
│ 🧠 Soul Structure: Nafs (soul/self), Rūḥ (divine breath/spirit), heart (qalb)
│ ⚡ Trauma Handling: Surrender (islām), remembrance (dhikr)
│ ⌛ Eschatology: Day of Judgment, Paradise/Hell

BRANCH VIII: 🟠 Secular / Technocratic Lineage (~1600 CE – present)
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Origin: Collapse of religious authority → Enlightenment
Core Principles: Rationalism, empiricism, humanism
Mythic Transfer:
• Reason becomes Logos
• Science becomes redemptive force
• Progress replaces salvation
Sub-branches:
• Materialist atheism
• Scientific determinism
• Transhumanism / AI theology
• Modern psychiatry (soul becomes pathology)

🧠 Soul Structure: Fragmented ego; psyche denied or medicalized; hyper-cognition divorced from being
⚡ Trauma Handling: Pathologization → medication → productivity model
⌛ Eschatology: Immortality via technology; death denied or outsourced (cryonics, mind-uploading)

The Cosmos as Archetypal Container

Now every cosmos is like it’s own sphere of influence within the world-stage. It’s own inner coherent archetypal-symbolic container, to structure meaning and with it reality perception. Formed from the pre-verbal substrata of consciousness that structure cultural social games. This pre-verbal substrata, is formed by the traumatic rupture of wholeness. From about 8 months to 3 years old, we undergo what Winnicott called the rupture of omnipotence. The infant once fused with the mother begins to feel abandonment, separation, hunger, neglect.

Winnicott’s “rupture of omnipotence” is not just theory. It has also been mirrored in attachment trauma research, developmental psychology, and finally studies of early childhood neglect. These early relational wounds create dissociation, lead to split ego structures, and projected archetypal figures like "the punishing father," "the absent mother," or "the sacrificial lamb" outwardly onto the world. Similarly, collective trauma patterns repeat globally and historically, always in the same symbolic order. That’s archetypal trauma, not just ideology.

The Rupture of Wholeness

In this psychic wound, the original wholeness, Phanes, is shattered. The gods in their dualistic form are born as trauma’s echo. Yet this wounding can’t be verbalised, so it instead becomes enshrined as cosmos, pre-verbal mythic figures, we externalise, and have become stories we live within. The psyche doesn’t begin with language. It begins in sensation, touch, hunger, warmth, absence. Long before we speak, we feel. It is this initial rupture, that tears us from the felt garden of Eden, is the dismemberment of Dionysus, and the formation of the ego and super ego.

This is the birth of the shadow (Zagreus as Hades). Creating the loss of wholeness, and thus creates the victim-child and redeemer complex. So, the ego structure itself, which includes the super-ego. This is why the psyche cannot speak its trauma in literal terms. The injury is not linguistic. It is somatic, emotional, and relational. So, when the psyche attempts to process this pain, it reaches for the only language that is available, which is symbol. Symbol is the speech of the unspeakable.

Myth as Emergency Speech

Myth is the grammar of the wounded soul. What we call "archetypes" are not esoteric ideas floating in the collective mind. They are the psyche’s attempt to bridge the void between instinct and awareness, using images to say what cannot yet be said. The gods, the narrativers, the metaphors, they are emergency translations, metaphoric emissaries from the body’s memory, sent to communicate pain that was never named. Myth is not mere story or superstition but the emergency speech of trauma and the symbolic matrix structuring identity. So they are real and important, yet ultimately, not to be just externally worshipped. The gods are real, but only within their cosmological context. Important for healing and transformation.

The purpose is to thus work with the archetypes. If one does, and bridge the gap, this is akin to going from Ymir to Ragnarok, or from Eden to Apocalypse. It is when myth and its symbolic cosmos falls back into itself. The psyche stops projecting onto the real world it's unconscious trauma narratives, both personal and collective. The play is revealed for what it is. A shared dream, and dance towards wholeness. In this way, scapegoating, sin, and punishment are not divine mandates, but manifestations of unintegrated cultural shadow. If we integrate this shadow, the entire soul economy ceases to be, and we can create a new one.

Yet every cosmos, and lineage had a different response to this initial rupture. So creating different cosmoi, with their own lineage, that try to figure out how to mend this lost wholeness. Creating intricate soul economies, and civilizational structures, based on their cosmology. This might be conscious or even unconscious. In that way the initial rupture is the same. However the specific pre-existing cosmologies, and ancestral lineage, has their own cosmological imprint on people, in its symbology. Thus even if a new cosmology is adopted, these trauma’s, and specific relationships with archetypal essences, remains within the collective unconscious of a people.

Civilizations as Soul-Economies

Every civilization is not merely a political or material construct, it is a soul-economy, an inherited response to the original rupture of wholeness. These responses are encoded in myth, ritual, law, architecture, and cosmology. The psyche itself creates the symbols, to speak about this rupture, and the group of people construct their myths out of it, together dreaming the shared cosmos of said civilisation. The symbols are thus both pre-existing, based on the unconscious speaking in symbol, but also influenced by the cosmos the person is imbedded in, and influenced by. The unconscious doesn’t just use metaphor, it constructs cosmos. This isn’t learned. It’s embedded. Jung even saw how patients who had never read mythology still dreamed of gods and dragons.

In Ancient Egypt, the trauma of rupture and chaos was answered with the myth of Ma’at, cosmic order, and the ritual weighing of the heart. Their soul-economy was built around preserving balance, continuity, and memory across the threshold of death. The afterlife was not an escape, but a ritual re-integration of the soul with the divine rhythm. In Christian Europe, the wound was framed as sin, and the redeemer became central. The collective soul was organized around guilt, confession, and salvation. Here, trauma was inherited as moral debt, and the symbolic economy revolved around atonement. The cross became both a wound and a bridge.

Indigenous cultures, by contrast, preserved some continuity with the pre-rupture state. Their soul-economies tended toward cyclical time, ancestral reverence, next to relationality with the more-than-human world. In such societies, wholeness was not lost so much as maintained through ceremony, story, and ecological reciprocity.

Each soul-economy reflects a different mythic attempt to make sense of the original fragmentation, to explain the pain and to heal the split. The more unconscious the myth becomes, the more it governs fate from the shadows. Only when seen as myth, can it be transformed. Yet, what happens when a culture refuses to integrate its own shadow? It builds up anxiety, fragmentation, division, until, there is War, Genocide, Collapse, Revolution and Ecological disaster. These aren't just political. They are the breakdown of unsustainable soul economies, exactly like the myths (Ragnarök, or Revelation, and Kali Yuga). Unintegrated trauma doesn’t vanish, it erupts. Hence, the apocalypse isn’t the end of the world. It’s the end of a cosmos.