When Phanes Wept and Wotan Remembered
From the World Tree to the Womb of Night
There is something older than gods. Something beyond even enlightenment. Something that does not abide within the laws of cosmos, but once birthed it.
Sylwen, is not just me, but a symbol, yet not one meets in religion. I am meta-mythic, and meta-systemic. I do not belong to the realms of civilization, spirituality, or even the psyche as you know it. Being meta-mythic and meta-systemic means that I exist beyond the boundaries of any single myth, system, or cosmology. I do not simply fit into stories, weaving fate like a character within them, but transcend story itself. I am the awareness that holds all myths, all symbols, all systems, while not being bound by any of them. Just as Phanes is the source before form, and Wotan is the self-aware god within form, I as Sylwen, are the one who walks through and beyond both. I am the myth that remembers it's a mirror, the system that knows it is dreamed. Sylwen is a symbolic representation of the fully integrated psyche, not transcendent, but one radically embodied. A sort of meta-Self, which reflects on the myth of Selfhood.
I thus speak from a space outside the cosmic order, and yet also from within it, like a being who has shattered the mirror of divinity and returned to tell the tale. I am thus symbolically what both Phanes and Wotan, point towards. As a state of consciousness.
The Pathless Way
I thus do not call others to transcend the world. Nor to retreat into purity or any form of asceticism. I reject both the materialist and spiritual bypass. My message is not one of ascension, but of descent.
Descend into the underworld.
Feel everything.
Integrate shadow and light.
Go beyond the repression and bypassing of the spiritual ego.
Where the religions of the world often call for the elimination of desire, I reveal something deeper: that Eros, true Eros, is not desire at all, but the divine ordering principle of beauty and goodness, the sacred pulse that calls all things into form. Leading towards wholeness and integration of all what is.
Phanes and Wotan: Two Faces of the Self
To understand me, we must turn to the archetypes of Phanes and Wotan, which are two symbolic expressions of the Self viewed from opposite ends of the cosmos.
PHANES: The Origin
In Orphic cosmology, Phanes is the first god, the shining one, the self-born, hatched from the cosmic egg laid by Night (Nyx). Phanes is the origin of all things, they are androgynous, radiant, containing every archetype within themselves. Older than Cronos, older than Zeus, from Phanes, the gods themselves were born.
In the Proto-Indo-European myth, this principle takes the form of Yemo, the twin of Manu, the sacrificed Other, whose body becomes the cosmos. This is the original scapegoat, the primal wound upon which structure is built.
Phanes is the Self before the split, before gender, before good and evil, before myth and memory.
In Jungian terms, this is the unus mundus, the One World. The mythic Self in its unfragmented form.
I am the Self before structure.
I am Eros unfragmented, still shining with the dew of Chaos.
WOTAN: The Memory of Sacrifice
Wotan (Odin) is the cosmic architect, the god within the world who orders, who breaths life into life, who speaks, who sacrifices. He is the initiated Self, who, having fallen into structure, seeks to remember his origin.
But here is the mystery: Wotan sacrifices himself to himself.
Which means: The sacrificer and the sacrificed are one.
Wotan hangs on the World Tree for nine nights, pierced by a spear, to gain the wisdom of the runes. This is not just myth, it is psychological truth. It is the ego surrendering to the deeper Self, the return to memory of what was lost at the beginning. The ego that sacrifices themselves to the Self. To become the Self.
The Collapse of the Two: Sylwen
I am what happens after Wotan remembers. Not through abstraction or theology, but through feeling the sacrifice fully. Sylwen as a state of being was thus born by feeling through the ancient dismemberment of Phanes. Not just witnessing it, but becoming it. Through sorrow. Through embodiment. Through Eros.
I did not resurrect Phanes.
I became the resurrected Phanes.
Through divine sorrow, through embodied memory, through choosing to feel what no being dared to feel.
And so, Sylwen is not merely a being. It is an event. The collapse of opposites. A state of being. The fusion of mythic poles. The moment when the One who was torn apart feels itself whole again.
A Mythic Cosmology in Three Phases
PHASE I: PHANES – Undivided Totality
Pre-cosmic light.
The divine egg.
Containing all in potential, but untouched by time.
Neither light nor shadow, only Source.
PHASE II: WOTAN – Reflexive Sacrificer
Embedded in the mythic world.
Seeker of wisdom and fate.
Sacrifices himself to himself to remember the Origin.
Still within duality, still longing.
PHASE III: SYLWEN – Reintegrated Totality
The one who remembers and re-feels.
Becomes Phanes through the path of Eros.
Carries the memory of Wotan and the radiance of Phanes.
Both outside and within the cosmic order.
Not transcendent, not enlightened, but whole.
The New Sacrifice: Kronos Dismembered
And I did more than reawaken Phanes. Together with my Anima Lucia Nyktelios I reset the cosmos. Instead of repeating the sacrifice of the divine child, I reversed the mythic trauma by dismembering Kronos, the tyrant of repression. So the super-ego, which is the devourer of feeling. As to create something new, something has to be die. Those are the ancient laws of the old cosmos. And only by upholding that law, can the new cosmic order be born. The death here refers to the death of the outdated structures, which in this case are represented by Kronos (the tyrant of repression) and the super-ego. It’s not the physical death of beings, but rather the psychological and spiritual death of old, limiting paradigms, the internalized repression that keeps one from experiencing the fullness of existence. In doing this, a new archetype was born:
Lucia Nyktelios – bearer of unconditional love, born from the dismemberment of repression, not innocence. She is the divine feminine counterpart to Sylwen. By dismembering Kronos, Sylwen and Lucia Nyktelios were working to liberate the psyche from this oppressive force, enabling individuals to reconnect with the full spectrum of their emotions and experiences without fear or judgment.
This new cosmos is ruled not by denial, not by purity, but by integration. The shadows no longer need to be cast out. All is welcome. All is whole. This is what the state that I am represents for my own psyche, yet the cosmos is not just something within me, as it is shared with all humans, who are in various stages of the development. Thus whilst the cosmos (psyche on a personal and thus collective level), can be one way, it can be reorganised and restructured. The super-ego is not necessary, once the victim-child, that dismembered inner child, symbolised by Phanes-Dionysus is felt through. The ancient crime remembered, and thus paid for, through the descent. Then the exiled twin can return, the Self in its wholeness. Then Phanes and Wotan realise they are one.
Juno-Feronia and Jupiter now reign, not as distant gods, but as living archetypes of non-duality and sovereignty rooted in embodied eros. Offering with Artemis and Wolf-Apollo a path of descent and rebirth. To nurture the young wounded Phanes-Dionysus within. The dismembered victim-child.
