Dictynna is a Cretan goddess, and two things about her images are unusual enough to want explaining.
She holds axes. And she is dressed in nets.
Bodri reads both as the same force at two different points in its cycle. The axes are kundalini working — "kundalini can cut through any channel obstruction in the body." The nets are kundalini at rest — "the resting phase of kundalini in the root chakra."1
One figure, two states, held together.
The dormant state is the more useful half, because the corpus spends far more time on the active one.
Before anything wakes, the force is described as present and coiled at the base of the trunk — at hai-di, the perineum, with the root chakra sitting just above it. See Hai-Di, the Ocean Bottom.
Bodri's cross-reference is Indian: the net is "the same phenomenon being represented by a coiled snake with scales in Indian symbolism."1 The sleeping serpent at the base of the spine — the standard Indian image for exactly this condition.
And the equation between them runs through the body rather than through resemblance. His footnote: "The snake scales, usually that of a cobra, are equivalent to the pattern of the nets if they were impressed upon the skin."2
Not netting looks like scales. Netting worn against a body leaves a diamond lattice pressed into the skin, and that lattice is what a cobra's dorsal scales look like. The comparison is mediated by what a garment does to a person wearing it.
[SPECULATIVE] and 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE, under the standing caveat at Iconography as Attainment Record.
The practical content of the resting-phase image is a distinction the corpus otherwise makes badly.
A practitioner two years in with no heat, no channel events and no phenomena of any kind is, on this reading, not empty. They are pre-ignition. The force is there, coiled, in a named location, in the state everybody starts in.
That is a materially different message from the book's usual answer to a null report, which is that you have not practised far enough — a sentence that is never wrong and therefore says nothing. See You Have Not Practiced Far Enough.
It also fits the closed-circuit model. Nothing is being supplied from outside and nothing needs to be acquired; the whole path consists of unblocking and ceasing to spend what is already present. See The Ouroboros Is the Microcosmic Orbit.
What the image does not license. Trying to wake it. The deliberate route to arousal — forceful breath retention, fixed concentration on the base of the trunk — is the route Bodri says produces the severe version of everything downstream and continues for years. See Forced Versus Natural Arousal.
The active half belongs to a larger family. Anything in an accomplished figure's hand that cuts, splits or pierces stands for the force clearing obstruction: "swords, axes, tridents, pokers, staffs, arrows, phurbas, vajras, curved knives or choppers."3 See The Wrathful Implements Are Tools.
What an axe adds to that set is its specific mechanics. Not a blade's slice and not a spear's penetration — downward force through something that will not yield to pressure, applied repeatedly.
That matches the mechanism Bodri gives for the yin phase. Obstructions "must be melted, for heat always accompanies the process and helps soften and quicken" it,4 and the pain is friction against blockage rather than a property of the energy. See The Fierce Woman and the Yin Phase.
An axe is what you use when the material is hard, and you use it again tomorrow.
The netting is one of several devices for the same location, and having them together shows what each is emphasising.
Netting or scales — the force at rest there. Dictynna's garment; the coiled cobra.1
Red, or a red triangle — the force as fire. Bodri: because the root chakra gives rise to kundalini "it is often represented by the color red, a red triangle (symbolizing fire), or a four sided pyramid."10
Four sides — the chakra's structure. Four petals, rendered as the four sides of a square: the empty square cut in a Chinese coin, and the four doors of a square Tibetan mandala.10 See The Three-Legged Toad and the Coin and The Mandala Is a Chakra Diagram.
Ocean bottom — the location, in Chinese anatomical vocabulary. See Hai-Di, the Ocean Bottom.
Four devices, four different aspects: state, quality, structure, position. None of them is redundant, and a figure carrying more than one is saying more than a figure carrying one.
It also explains why the root chakra is the most heavily marked location in the whole vocabulary. It is where the sequence starts, it is where the du-mai, jen-mai and lateral pair all interconnect,10 and it is the one junction every practitioner will meet.
Dictynna carries the whole cycle at once, and the way it is distributed across her body is the interesting part.
Hands: the active phase. Axes, cutting. Body: the dormant phase. Netting, coiled and waiting.
An image is static and the process it depicts has a before and an after. The solution is to put the two phases on different parts of the figure — the doing in the hands, the waiting on the torso.
Compare what happens when a tradition does not do this. The Indian material splits the phases across separate images: the coiled serpent for dormancy, and the risen serpent or the lingam's ascending column for the active phase.5 Two objects for two states.
So Crete compresses and India separates, and both are encoding the same two-state cycle.
What the compression costs. A viewer looking at Dictynna sees axes and netting and has no way to know they are the same substance at different times. Nothing in the picture supplies a time axis. The reading requires knowing the cycle before you look.
Which is what Bodri says these images are for: masters "represent the same phenomenon a bit differently in order to better connect with their cultures and make it easier for individuals in their lineages to recognize that particular stage of attainment when they reach it."6
[n=1 OBSERVED] — one figure, one distribution. The vault's observation rather than the source's.
Nothing here is a practice. The content is a set of expectations.
If nothing has happened. You are in the state the netting depicts, which is the ordinary starting condition and not a deficiency. There is no separate technique for waking the force; it arises when the mind stops gripping.
If something has started and it is uncomfortable. The axes describe it accurately — cutting, splitting, repeated, and directed at obstruction rather than at you. The corpus's instruction is to keep sitting, because the phase completes by being worked through rather than by stopping.7
What not to do with the two-phase model. Locate yourself on it daily. It is a description of a cycle, not a progress bar, and the phases are not clean — Bodri's own account has channels at different stages simultaneously, with a region clearing while others have not begun.
And do not go looking for a lattice. The net is an interpretive claim about a garment. Nothing in the corpus says a practitioner feels a mesh anywhere.
Tomorrow morning. Sit.
Bodri gives an account of why the same phase is depicted so differently from place to place, and it is a design claim rather than an accident.
Masters choose imagery for two things: cultural fit — use what the audience already has — and recognisability on arrival — the symbol has to be the kind of thing a practitioner will later match to an experience.6
Crete is maritime and bronze-age, so it has nets and axes. India has cobras. China has fire. Each tradition reaches into its own stock of objects for something that will do the job.
Which means the variation between traditions carries no information about the underlying phenomenon, and the corpus is explicit about that: "While they may represent things differently, however, accomplished masters across traditions refer to the same phenomena time and time again because everyone who cultivates sufficiently ends up experiencing the same phenomena."6
It also means the symbols are optimised for a reader who is inside the lineage and some years in — not for a scholar, not for a devotee, and not for someone meeting the image cold.
Evidence. [PRACTITIONER SOURCE], [SPECULATIVE]. No Cretan source is cited and no object identified. The scale-impression claim is 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE. The Indian coiled-serpent comparison is standard in that tradition and carries independent weight; 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY on the handling of both.
Tension — the attribute has a local explanation. Dictynna's name is bound up with nets in Greek, and her own myth is a net myth — Britomartis saved by falling into fishermen's nets. The netting is her etymology and founding story rendered as costume, which accounts for it fully without any anatomy.
Tension — a static image for a two-state process. Nothing in the picture tells a viewer that axes and netting are the same substance.
Open question — how long is dormancy? The corpus gives a thirty-day figure for the first arousal in the Hercules material and says elsewhere that ardent practitioners of forty years may still lack the basics. Nothing reconciles those, and a practitioner in the resting phase has no way to know whether they are weeks or decades from anything.
Open question — does the force return to rest? The cycle is presented as dormant-then-active. Whether a region that has been cleared goes quiet permanently, or the force resettles, is never stated — and it matters, because the two predict different long-term experiences.
Hold the netting image and the force is patient. It has always been there, it is waiting, and nothing is wrong. That is genuinely consoling, and it is the best thing about the dormancy reading.
Then hold the axes and the same force is doing something violent to the same body, repeatedly, for as long as it takes. The corpus's own description of the extreme case is flesh being cut into small pieces, sore all over, hot everywhere.8
Both are the same substance in the same person, and the transition between them is not something a practitioner chooses or schedules.
Which leaves an odd asymmetry in the reassurance the corpus offers. Nothing is happening is fine — the force is coiled and present. Something is happening and it hurts is also fine — that is friction against obstruction and it declines. There is no state the model treats as a problem, which makes it consoling and also makes it impossible to use as a warning.
The convergence, and it holds across every version of this material: the force is never described as hostile. Fierce, clumsy, cutting, blundering — but not aimed at the practitioner. The discomfort is a fact about the route, and the axes are working on the blockage rather than on the person.
Embodied Presence and the Somatic Unconscious — psychology.
The psychological material concerns material held in the body outside awareness — patterns of holding, guarding and restriction that are entirely real, entirely physical, and unavailable to introspection until something loosens them. Its central claim is that the body carries accumulated history in a form the mind has no access to.
Bodri's dormant phase is a claim of the same shape, made about a different substrate, and the pairing sharpens both.
Both locate something present and inaccessible. The netting says the force is there, coiled, before anything is felt. The somatic account says the holding is there, in tissue, before anything is noticed.
Both make the discomfort of release the evidence of what was held. The axes cut through obstruction, and the severity measures the blockage — not the force, and not the effort. The somatic account says the same about what surfaces when guarding relaxes: the intensity is a report on what was being held, not on what is happening now.
And both forbid the direct approach for the same reason. You cannot decide to release somatic holding, because deciding is a form of effort and effort is what holds. Bodri's prohibition on steering the chi is the identical structure. See Never Guide the Chi.
The insight the pairing produces: in both accounts, the dormant state is not neutral — it is actively maintained, and it costs something to maintain. That is worth making explicit because Bodri's netting image suggests placid waiting, and the rest of his own material does not. Obstruction accumulates from a life lived in a body; it is held; and the heat of clearing it is the price of what was being spent to keep it there. Which reframes the resting phase from nothing yet to something ongoing — and explains why the corpus insists that stopping practice preserves the obstruction rather than merely pausing progress.
The open question is whether the two phases are really a cycle or a one-way transition.
The Cretan figure carries both simultaneously, which suggests they alternate — a force that works, settles, works again. And the corpus supplies a mechanism for that in its alternation account elsewhere: yang chi arises, clears channels, transforms to a new degree of purity, and works again on what remains.
But the dormancy image is specifically about the root chakra and about the state before the first arousal. Once the force is up, nothing in the corpus describes it returning to coil at the base. The trajectory after ignition runs the other way — toward smoothness, then toward not being felt at all, then toward a body that seems non-existent.9
So there may be two different things being conflated: a once-only dormancy that ends at the first Labor and never recurs, and a recurring quiet between bouts of clearing.
The difference is practical. If dormancy is once-only, a long quiet stretch after years of phenomena means something has finished or stalled. If it recurs, the same stretch is an interval. A practitioner cannot tell which, and the corpus does not distinguish them.