[70.] Goddess Rising
(Read WHITE GODDESS by Robert Graves)
This painting is intended to carry some of the experience of
a curious effect of the feminine on the masculine psyche.
From NEPSIS FOUNDATION Table of Contents, SECTION III: EAGLE ROCK:
See #II below.
But, first
I. Tears of mourning...
February, 2006. After an unplanned drive from the Pacific Ocean to NE Arizona- (the motivations for this drive are too long a story to be included here). As I approach Spider Rock, a huge natural stone tower in Canyon de Chelly, AZ, I find myself to be in tears. Tears of mourning for the deaths of my mother and brother the previous fall. And I’d had a worrisome dream Christmas morning about my mother in the afterlife.
I’d made little offerings at this place because Grandmother Spider, a creator deity, is reputed to live there. I’m a believing Roman Catholic priest, but I still respect old insights and symbols about deity. Many visits in the past produced nothing unusual. This time, Grandmother Spider took over my consciousness, and indicated I should look up the right hand canyon- (Canyon de Chelly splits just there at Spider Rock). I did so. And there Changing Woman, a benevolent Navajo deity, appeared standing behind my mother. My mother was protected (saved) and holding a box with golden light inside. She was well.
Intellectually, it interests me that a believing Catholic can experience a complete transliteration of a salvific moment. That is, my mind and heart were much comforted, but spontaneously translated a salvific intuition into another religion's symbols and divinities.
Its like St. Bernadette when she first envisioned the “Beautiful Woman” Only later did the then controversial teachings about the Blessed Mother’s “Immaculate Conception” become identified with that series of visions.
Psyche of nature: As well, there are what the Irish call “thin places.” That is, the 'other' world comes closer to this world in certain places. Spider Rock is one such place.
II.
My mother, Georgia, and I visited another such place, a place of ‘energies,’ shortly after the summer solstice, 1996. We arrived at night. This place can be approached by car to within 500 yards. I drove slowly, looking for a place off the dirt road to stop. In the summer, this place is all dust and scrubby sage. But, the twilight moments of dawn and dusk are precious and the place radiates a peculiarly pure, psychic energy. As I rolled to a stop, a bright light flashed from the outcrop of rocks that is the center of these energies. The brief flash of light in the night was as tall as a house. I stopped the car pointed towards the rocks. We were anxious about who might be at this forsaken place this time of night to make such a light. Local Indian shamans? There is a reservation nearby. Skin walkers? The Holy Ones? Such flashes of light are said to accompany some shamanistic activities. As I considered this, my companion said, "The car is moving." "No, it's not," I replied. Moments passed. "The car is moving." "No, it's not," somewhat impatiently.
Then, I noticed that the car was moving. Sliding back and forth. Front to back. Without the benefit of gravity! The overwhelming sensation was that of the 'other' world. This was as clear as any other sensation might be; fear, love, joy, who can calculate its measure or prove the experience except by the consensus of witness. This time, someone was with me and shared a significant paranormal event. This had not been the case in the past for other such experience.
Though, the sensation of the moment was powerful, there was no sense of hostility. Just power and otherness. We decided that perhaps we did not need to be there. In fact, should not be there. We were intruding somehow. So, we backed out and drove slowly away. We became anxious to be away from there. Very... Away from that power that seemed so strong and unfamiliar. About ten miles back on that dirt road, there is a farmstead. We both felt that if we could get past that point, back in human surroundings, we would be OK.
But, then, as we drove along, I heard a strong hissing noise. It became louder and louder. I stopped the car to investigate. I had a flat. As I fixed it, it began to rain. We were in the northern Nevada desert in July. Rain is not impossible there, but not likely. Now it poured down. And at that anxious moment! The tire fixed, we continued our escape. We focused on looking for the farm, after which it is another ten miles to the paved road.
Then, all of a sudden, we were at the intersection with the paved highway. We did not pass the farm. We arrived at the pavement much too soon. And as soon as we got there, the rain stopped. Both of us had been looking for the farm. You can't miss it, since the road goes right through the barnyard. It has the only light in the area. Trans-temporal-spatial-relocation? Both of us would not have missed such an obvious landmark as the farmyard.
The spirit(s= Elohim?) seemed to respond most strongly when Georgia was present.
It seemed as if some local spirit or deity laughed in the night. On another, earlier occasion, I perceived in my mind's eye, that the "spirit" of Eagle Rock looked like a series of vertical serpentine rods of golden white light. Like the Seraphim. But on that occasion, they simply hovered above the rocky crag, approving the one I brought there for initiation into these "mysteries." At the conclusion of that initiation, I clapped my hands above his chthonic chakras as he lay across those rocks. Simultaneously, lightening ignited the mountainous horizon in the distance, followed by thunder. Perfect timing, if unexpected.
Now, it was as if the seraphs hovered majestically for hundreds of square miles above the valley. Easily filling that vast emptiness, they "sing the glory of God in creation."
III.
MALE DREAM:
After traveling for a week with a friend in northern California, 1985, I had a surprising dream. In the dream, on a grassy hill there is an exotic pavilion, a tent. I approach. Through the tent flap, I see a young man, lying naked on a bed, legs dangling over the bedside. He seems to be waiting for me. The situation is spread with attraction and danger. The young man lay on some softly lit, rich fabric covering the bed. A boy/man. A young adult. I approach more closely-- I nurse suckle the (energetic) milk from him as I spread further his muscular, no longer hairless, legs.
The scene of the dream shifts to a large procession. A group of aristocratic looking women in medieval or renaissance garb move from behind the tent toward a river below and distant mountains. A thunderstorm is building and threatening above and behind the mountains.
The scene shifts again to the river's side where I am trying to pull by rope, a heavy log, up, over the bottom branches of a large oak tree.
A vast flood charges, dark and thundering down the river
valley. Both the tree and I disappear in the powerful waters. There is a sense that the waters are destiny and great peace...
The metaphor of the flood was not negative at all. I was inundated with something remarkably positive. The important and surprising point of this dream is that when I awoke, I was flooded with an energy of enormous delight. Energy far beyond sexual ecstasy. For hours after I woke, sensations of ebullient joy flowed through me. Not just joy, but energy. Flowing, endless energy. For weeks after, if I told the story or even remembered the dream, I would again be suffused in delight. What enabled me to evoke these levels of light-filled delight? The erotic elements in the dream? Not exactly. I believe that the dream indicated a shift between masculine and feminine poles in my psyche that engaged states of consciousness flooded with amorphous, transsexual (transcendent of opposites) delight.
Such states of consciousness might be the foundation of culture as well, since such dualistic (pluralistic) states and their resolution/transcendence are, I believe, the underlying content and construct of human perception. Homoerotic love is an example since it is able to evoke feelings in individuals as powerful as the heterosexual drive to procreate. The biological urge to propagate in any species, characterizes and indicates a capacity to redirect major elements of human personality. The homoerotic emotion indicates a condition free of otherwise inexorable biological logic. The feminine, the earth, and the storm, are evoked here, I suspect.
The homoerotic emotion is a catalytic strain laced through the psychic structure of human kind, perhaps the whole biological universe. It is a dangerous and invaluable alternative, the experience of which is fraught with endless social problems. If it were not very potent, why would people react so strongly to what really seems to be, otherwise, a minor issue. Only a few topics generate the level of vitriolic bigotry that this topic manages to arouse. The prohibitions against it in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible are vague in that they probably are reactions against flagrant practices in erotic religious cults of cultures surrounding the authors of the Old and New Testaments--the negative reaction thus being as much xenophobic as homophobic. After all David loved Jonathan "more than women." Jesus Christ, who supersedes all previous God/World agreements, for Christians, said little about sex at all--but forgave the one caught in sin by sinners--much less about the homoerotic emotion-- except perhaps secretly to St. John.
What I am treating here is the homoerotic emotion, not Gay culture. That is something else for a different discussion. Here we merely discuss an important, powerful element in human perception.
The problem might be in the deeper construct of culture. Many cultures in the past 5000 years, since the development of civilizations and empires, have been so characterized by masculine domination and willful progress, as to be trapped in their own pathology of aggression. It is a situation increasingly, violently, out of balance. As the corporate, universal order of the world subconsciously tries to balance itself, individuals respond in the most remarkable ways. Perhaps Gay culture is such a response. I believe the more universal, homoerotic emotion certainly is.
FURTHER SPECULATION: The dualistic powers that govern the biosphere are called upon to save it. These opposite elements are but an expression of the inexpressible Godhead. Poisons become elixirs, in the right circumstances, with certain personalities. Sexuality and violence are closely related reactions that inherently seek the Eden of union, balance and radiant beauty in all things-- sometimes they just react. ...the natural world is reeling from traumatic blows being struck against it by militant profiteering and commercial technology. Profit and security are the motives now that dominate the dominant value structures in the world: Security in a world increasingly insecure. Profit in a world increasingly bereft of natural resources, as vast populations, dazed by suffering, mourn their own fruitful increase. Is there a way to respond to this sad demise of the natural world, our deep spiritual relationship with it? Is there a way beyond the rational sanctity of humanist virtue and religion that has so far failed to save us from the raging human heart?
______________
See Also Painting #s 31, 33, 36, 37, 44, 70, 80 on the UC Berkeley site: http://ecai.org/NEPSIS/
[80.] Great Goddess
See #44 and #70.
Before an embryo differentiates into male or female, the sex organs are the same. This painting reflects upon the capacity for coitus and the ecstatic drives that propagate species...
Also, many Christian icons depict the Holy One issuing from such a vertical ovoid shape.
___________________________
Further issues in this vein above for future offerings:
...Some will be completely straightforward and clear. But some such might also be set in a matrix of-- well, I’ve always needed an editor. But few editors would be able to tell what is simply poor literary style and what are necessary excursions (detours?) about difficult, elusive topics. Metaphor is usually the safe harbor for most voyagers on these seas. But mystical experience is literal. The four scenarios above, describe some essential aspects of this most moving topic.
Everything else about religion, emanating from a mystical core, is socializing and politics. We might ...
IV. Further Tales from OLD SISTER MARY AND YOUNG DR. HARTLEY.
V. The Meeting and The Tower- (Permission to Advance
VI. Mazatlan- Another ‘thin place.’
VII. ETC....
