Where Heaven And Earth Touch

(What a jumping-off place this turned out to be)

The mythic title of the post was so grandiose, it actually made me think of archetypal dualities, as also happened in the previous post "Puffball And Shadow".  Like:  Father Sky and Mother Earth (instanced, for example, by the union of the god Zeus and the human Danae [leading to the birth of the hero Perseus]; the union of the Titan Helios and the nymph Clymene [resulting in the birth of the tragic antihero Phaethon]; even the angel Gabriel (acting as an agent of, or a kind of stand-in for, God the Father) and the human Mary in the Annunciation.  Some other dualities/polarities that deserve mention would be:  rain fertilizing the soil, the dragon who threatens the virginal princess and the knight-errant who slays him, the chaotic mutability of the air vs the fixity of ground structures, rational man vs the beastly savage (or should I say the beastly potential inside the rational man), the Sun and the Moon, and of course, man and woman.

Which just reminded me -- this is strictly a bonus -- that there is a parallel (ha, "parallelism" itself being a concept requiring two comparable elements feeding off each other -- but now I'm starting to sound a little obsessive) to be recognized in the foundation mythology of Korea.  It is said that HwanIn, the god-figure in heaven, sent his son HwanUng down to the earth to found a kingdom -- which may well be considered a figurative act of fertilization, reiterating the aforementioned archetypes of Father Sky and Mother Earth;  this is even doubly confirmed when HwanUng, the heavenly being, enabled a she-bear, a crawling creature strictly bound to the earth, to be transformed into a woman -- likely symbolizing, in part, [WITH APOLOGIES TO C. G. JUNG] the transition from the womb of the collective unconscious to individuated ego in the evolution of the Self (a tiger also wanted to become human but he did not have the patience to complete the hundred-day ordeal involved and thus remained a beast;  surely this is the Shadow in "beastly" guise, all the more so since the hundred-day ordeal took place literally in the womb-darkness of a cave) -- and took her for his wife and begat TanGun, the progenitor of the Korean people.

By the way, the place where HwanUng first touched down was said to be the summit of TaeBaekSan ("Mt. TaeBaek"), whose exact location is not known, as the name has been used to refer to different mountains in ancient times.