Return to Greece – May 2010

RETURN TO GREECE—MAY 2010

BECOMING A SEE-ER

This coming May 20-29, 2010 I will once again lead a group of people on a spiritual journey to Greece.

It will be my fourth journey in Greece, and my second leading a group there. Last summer I also had the privilege of co-leading a trip to the Australian Outback with Linda Marson, founder of Spiritual Adventure Tours, and my co-facilitator for next May’s journey. You can see the details and sign up information on the website.

A common thread runs through all this travel, like the rope Ariadne gave Theseus to guide him in the dark depths of the labyrinth (see below). We go not just to look, but to see. Through archaeological guidance, through re-telling the myths, through finding their meaning in our own lives—and through using the Tarot to guide us, as individuals and as a group—we change and become something different than what we were. We learn to see sacred the places, and ourselves, in a whole new way.

The theme of this trip is Initiation As An Oracle Through The Sacred Sites. We will develop our own Seeing, through the temples, the landscapes, the sea, and our own work with Tarot, both individually and as a group.

I have written on this blog of the previous Greek journey, especially in the entry The Opening To Apollo.

So much happened on that trip, from astonishing omens—like the four tornadoes that appeared on the sea when we arrived in Crete—to the overnight healing ritual we did to Aphrodite, Goddess of Love. And there were things that simply cannot be written about, but only experienced. I have taken enough sacred journeys to know with certainty that this trip too will be something you will never forget.

The itinerary for the journey is so exciting I only wish we were leaving tomorrow—though late May is in fact a wonderful time in Greece, before the summer heat, with wildflowers everywhere.

We begin in Athens, where a new and dynamic Acropolis Museum has just opened. Athens is the city of Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, and we will invoke her guidance as we set out.

First stop, Delphi, the site of the great Oracle, with the mountain of the nine Muses rising behind it. Delphi was home to Gaia, the Goddess of the Earth, Apollo, God of the Sun, and Dionysus, God of Ecstasy (more on Dionysus below). The ancients called Delphi “the center of the world,” and there is no more magical place on Earth.

Return to Greece May 2010

From Delphi we go to Olympia, home of the original Olympic Games, and site of a massive temple to Zeus. The ancients described all events, past and present, as contained within “the mind of Zeus,.” Here we will open our own minds to the possibility of seeing beyond our limitations.

From Olympia we return to Athens and the port of Piraeus to head out for the islands. We go for two nights to Mikonos, known for its beauty—and its nightlife. Besides having some time for fun we go there for a very special reason, Mikonos’s closeness to the sacred island of Delos. Delos was the birthplace of Artemis, Goddess of the Moon, and her brother Apollo, God of the Sun. No one lives on Delos, there are no hotels, the whole island is a sacred sanctuary. As well as walking the land and seeing its wonders, we will awaken our own lunar and solar energies.

Return to Greece May 2010

Our final stop before we return home is Naxos, largest of the Cycladic Islands. There are no large temples here (though we will visit a site of strange prehistoric statues), but in the world of myth something very important happened on Naxos.

To understand it we need to know a little of the story of the labyrinth. Ariadne, princess of Crete, helped the Athenian prince, Theseus, kill the monstrous Minotaur hidden in the center of the labyrinth. Ariadne then fled with Theseus but when they came to Naxos he cruelly abandoned her. And there Dionysus, the God of Ecstasy came to her and joined with her in a sacred marriage, so that she was raised from mortal to divine. There are many mysteries around this story, far too many to describe here. On Naxos we will follow some of the lines, through the myth, through the land and sea, and through our own oracular initiation.

This will be an incredible journey filled with wonders. Space is limited, so sign up early.

Please note: since Spiritual Adventure Tours is an Australian company the price quoted is in Australian dollars. With the exchange rate the price becomes very favorable to Americans.

See you in Greece!

Return to Greece May 2010

Blessings for the Major Arcana

One of the more interesting aspects of traditional Judaism is the concept of blessings for almost every occasion. There are blessings for waking up in the morning, for washing hands, for eating various foods, for doing or seeing something for the first time…

It may sound excessive, or tedious, or even a bit silly—and I have to admit I’ve never tried keeping track and saying them all, but it’s way to make ordinary life sacred. My father once spent some time with a Hasidic family in Jerusalem, and I remember him talking about the blessings throughout the day as a wonderful experience.

(At least one of the blessings that men say in the morning is controversial. This is the line “Blessed are You, God, king of the universe, who has not made me a woman.” In an attempt to remove this from its seeming extreme misogyny, some modern Orthodox Jews maintain it’s said out of respect to women. That is, to be a woman is an exalted state, and men are grateful that they do not have to live up to such a standard.

Nice idea—as long as they don’t pretend this was the original meaning—but I prefer the more radical approach of the Reconstructionist prayer book: “Blessed are you, the Imageless, who has made me in your image.”

In my book The Forest of Souls: A Walk Through the Tarot, I wrote how this paradox inspired my one sentence description of the Tarot: “78 images that are gateways to the Imageless.”)

A couple of years ago it struck me that it might be nice to come up with a series of blessings to say when specific Major Arcana cards come up in a Tarot spread. The idea is to make each one reflective in some way of the particular card. Here are my Blessings For the Major Arcana. Cards are from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, unless otherwise indicated.

Fool—Blessed are you, Ignorant One, who leads us forward, in brightness and joy.

Magician—Blessed are you, source of all light, who surrounds us in roses and lilies.

High Priestess—Blessed are you, Silent One, who sits in the doorway of secrets.

Empress—Blessed are you, Mother of Passion, who brings life to the dirt and joy to our bodies.

Emperor—Blessed are you, Planner and Architect, who designs the four corners.

Hierophant—Blessed are you, Holder of Mysteries, who shows us and teaches us.

Lovers (The Shining Tribe Tarot)—Blessed are you, Chooser of Passion, who brings us to life.

Chariot—Blessed are you, Master of Questions, who opens the way.

Strength—Blessed are you, Gentle One, who opens and closes the mouth of the lion.

Hermit—Blessed are you, Lonely One, who shines light from the mountain.

Wheel of Fortune (Visconti-Sforza Tarot)—Blessed are you, Blindfolded Angel, who turns the seasons of life.

Justice—Blessed are you, Weigher of Hearts, who balances Above and Below.

Hanged Man—Blessed are you, Tree of the World, who turns us around.

Death—Blessed are you, Bright Hand of Darkness, the end of beginnings.

Temperance—Blessed are you, Balancer, who flows and combines.

Devil—Blessed are you, Shadow of Morning, who stands guard in the doorway.

Tower (Crowley/Harris Thoth Tarot)—Blessed are you, Destroyer, who speaks to us in fire and light.

Star—Blessed are you, Naked and Empty, who pours out the waters.

Moon—Blessed are you, Shining Face, who makes the wolves speak, and the waters surge and fall back.

Sun—Blessed are you, Fire of Life, who delights in flowers and children.

Judgment—Blessed are you, Voice of the Trumpet, who raises and summons us.

World (Shining Tribe)—Blessed are you, Dancer of Wisdom, who reveals our true home.

Prophet of His Own Universe

As I write this it is September 2, 2009, the 36th anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien. Though this won’t go up for a few days, it seemed a good time to think about what The Lord of the Rings
meant to me back when I discovered it.

There’s a famous line about Tolkien—I don’t know the person who wrote it, but it goes something like this:

How did one man, in the course of a single lifetime, become the literary equivalent of an entire people?

The writer was referring, of course, to Tolkien’s creation of a whole mythology, complete with sacred books, founding myths, pantheons of gods, devils, and heroes. The other day I was looking at The Silmarillion, a book I have not read in many years, and was struck that there are actually competing stories about the early stages of the world. This truly reflects the way mythologies build up, for there is never just one story line, one official version. Different sources find their way into the canon.

(People who take the Bible literally are always getting into trouble, not just because they have to accept that all of it is true as history, but also because they have to begin with the assumption of a single author—God. Thus, the fact that there are two versions of Creation in Genesis becomes a real problem. To the skeptics this simply disqualifies the whole text, renders it empty. But there are creative approaches that avoid either absolute literalism or total dismissal.)

In fact, I would argue that Tolkien did something more than create a mythology. His work reads as if it is the source of all mythologies, the original account of a history that gets garbled and mis-remembered in “later” generations and cultures. And the nice thing is, he was smart enough never to spell this out, never to step outside his created world and explain to us, for example, that Numenor is the actual place dimly remembered as something called “Atlantis,” or that the palantiri are the originals of what we now call crystal balls, or indeed, that the Valar were later confusedly remembered as “gods.”

Something struck me as I started thinking about LOTR again. There is no religion in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. No churches, no rituals, no offerings, no priests. Why should there be? In terms of the book they have the solid reality, why would they create representations?

In my previous entry I commented that I discovered the books around 1961, and that the date was significant because at that time, and for some four or five years after very few people—certainly no one I knew, or even read—had ever heard of it. This was before the first huge wave that led to posters, “Frodo Lives” buttons, and some 100,000,000 copies sold. God knows how many copies have sold now, after movies reignited the fans.

Is it snobbery to make a big deal about discovering it myself? Well, partly. When you’ve found something all by yourself and later it becomes a huge craze you don’t want people thinking you’re just another person caught in the wave. I remember, at the height of that first surge, reading a comment in The New Yorker. The writer said it used to be if you went to a party and discovered someone who’d read LOTR the two of you went off to a corner and talked about it all night. Now, he said, when he went to parties, he pretended he hadn’t read it.

The reason why the book remained a kind of secret for so long was another kind of snobbery. Tolkien refused to allow a paperback edition, and in those days almost nobody—certainly not science fiction fans, the most obvious audience—bought hardcover books. There were book club editions in hardcover, but I’m sure Tolkien wouldn’t have gone along with that idea. And no large format “trade” paperbacks, either, for classy books. What we now call mass market was the only real alternative to expensive hardback, and Tolkien considered that beneath him.

Then, in 1965 (or thereabouts, I’m writing this from memory, not Google) the publishers of Ace Books discovered a loophole in the copyright status of LOTR. Somehow, there was nothing forbidding a paperback edition on its own to appear in America. Not Britain, apparently, but America (Britain and the States have always had parallel copyright systems). So they came out with a cheap edition.

I still remember seeing that. It was in a book rack in Grand Central Station, as I waited for a train to go home from college for the weekend. I was thrilled. The book I’d been talking about for years to my friends was suddenly available!

The Ace edition forced Professor Tolkien’s hand. He made a deal with Ballantine Books to publish an “only authorized paperback” edition, and in fact took the occasion to revise the original publication (I believe all hardback editions since then have been the revised version). Ace withdrew (whether gracefully or not I have no idea), and then, amazingly, the books took off, became a full scale generational mania.

Here’s another interesting bit of LOTR history, that I happen to know about. In that first wave the slogan “Frodo lives” became a rallying cry for the fans, seen on buttons and posters in great multitude. I actually know its origin, and saw the original.

One of the very first (if not the original) campus cults for LOTR, from before the paperbacks, was at Columbia College in New York. In fact, the very first person I met who’d read the books without me pushing them at him or her was a woman from Columbia who was dating a friend of mine.

My friend invited me to go somewhere with them, and when we were in his car together he said to her “Go ahead! Say it!” His girlfriend then said to me “Have you ever heard of a book called The Lord of the Rings?”

That period was not terribly long after the early death of the great jazz genius, Charlie Parker, known as Bird.

(People assume the nickname came because his music soared, which it certainly did. But in fact it was short for Yardbird, a reference to him being kind of a momma’s boy when he was young and hanging around at home a lot. Again, this is memory, not Google, so I may be off.)

In tribute to Parker’s music, and his everlasting influence, someone came up with the slogan “Bird Lives.” As a joke, someone in the Columbia Tolkien group spray-painted “Frodo Lives” on the wall of the 96th St. subway stop. When the craze began, the expression took off.

Does all this sound like I resent the fan mania that took away my special secret treasure? Actually, I was grateful for it. My fascination with LOTR had become something of an obsession, and the craze kind of eased me out of it.

Which doesn’t mean I wasn’t thrilled when the movies came out. But that’s a subject for another time.

Next: The Return of the Tarot, with an entry on “Tarot Blessings.”

The Mad Anglo-Saxon

Ah, Belknap, is there no word from Howard since his death?
Poem (by Clark Ashton Smith?), addressed to Frank Belknap Long, in memory of H. P. Lovecraft

(My writing, like my speaking, is often digressive. One subject leads to thoughts of another. Usually I try to subtly weave the loose threads into the main fabric. But here I thought it might be nice to put any digressions more than a few words in parentheses and indent them from the rest of the text. I hope this is not too distracting.)

(Oh, and for those who look to these entries for Tarot bits, sorry. This is the first of several that look at works of imagination that have meant a great deal to me. More Tarot soon, I promise.)

A few days ago I checked my magic calendar, the Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints and discovered it was the birthday of H. P. Lovecraft, author of some of the worst-written and most compelling stories in American literature.

Despite the purple excess of his prose, and mostly one-dimensional characters (that dimension being usually “gibbering” horror, or “stark raving” madness) Lovecraft has a deep almost worshipful following. They range from cult fantasy groups (some of whom seem at times to think he was reporting rather than inventing), to such High Literary figures as Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote an admiring article in the New York Review of Books around the time of the Library of America edition of Lovecraft’s work. LOA, NYRB, you can’t get classier than that.

(I confess I hesitated several days before publishing this entry, for fear of offense to HPL’s often fanatic admirers. Literary taste is a matter of, well, taste, and I am in fact an admirer of Lovecraft, just not as a stylist.)

When the LOA (yes, the acrostic for the Library forms the generic name for Voodoo gods—how Lovecraftian!) published its omnibus editon of four of Philip K. Dick’s novels they were attacked for pandering to low culture by publishing a science fiction writer. I don’t remember any such criticism around the Lovecraft volume. Books labeled as horror have a longer pedigree, headed up by Edgar Allan Poe. Personally, I think that PKD was a far better writer than HPL or EAP, but I may be the minority on that.

Lovecraft was a horror writer—terror and revulsion seem to be the primary emotions of his stories—yet he was much more than that. An atheist, he created, or hinted at, an entire cosmology of warring gods who existed long before the emergence of humans. Chief among these were the Great Old Ones, and in the world of the stories even just reading about them, especially in a mythic grimoire known as the Necronomicon, written by “the mad Arab,” Abdul Alhazred, was enough to drive a human being—what else?—stark raving mad.

Chief among the monsters (though some say not the most awful) was Cthulhu, so that the whole thing has taken on the name “the Cthulhu mythos” (first coined by August Derleth). Mythos is a nice expression; it suggests fragments of an implied mythology, sparing the writer from having to fill in all the gaps. It’s as if all we had of Greek mythology was chunks of the Iliad, brief sections of Hesiod, and single stories or rituals of a handful of Gods from different sources.

In Lovecraft’s world, humans exist only because the terrifying monsters are asleep or banished to some other dimension. Attempts to break the banishment or wake them up would seem truly nuts, but without such craziness there’d be no story, and so we get mad Abdul and others like him. And to be fair, if we read “Sinners In the Hands of An Angry God” the most famous sermon in American literature, the God of the Protestants could give Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth a run for their money.

I discovered Lovecraft when I was around thirteen, possibly through a Modern Library anthology titled Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, which published two of his stories (no one hold me to this, please; it was half a century ago). I never cared for the whole gibbering horror shtick, but that idea of creating your own mythos really excited me. I also liked the sound, the feel in the mouth, of Cthulhu. Names are vital in any created myth or fantasy world, they make us feel a substance behind the image in the story. Some of Lovecraft’s other attempts seemed excessive to me—Shub-Niggurath, for example. I read an essay awhile back that claimed Lovecraft was a rabid racist and anti-Semite, the sort that goes on about sub-humans polluting White culture. Perhaps some of his names are projections of his attitude to various ethnic groups. Maybe we should think of Lovecraft as “the mad Anglo-Saxon.”

Something else fascinated me about Lovecraft: the community of people around him. A recluse who communicated almost entirely through letters, he was very generous as a mentor. That, and his compelling imagination, inspired followers, such as Robert Bloch (who later wrote Psycho), the poet and story writer Clark Ashton Smith, and especially August Derleth, who created a whole publishing company, Arkham House, to collect HPL’s work in handsome volumes. Arkham House went on to publish Smith, the fantasy writer Robert E. Howard, and other writers originally published in the magazine Weird Tales. When I checked recently Arkham House was still going strong.

(If the name Arkham seems familiar, the writers of Batman borrowed it for the nice idea that Batman’s villains are all crazy, locked up, when caught, in a place called Arkham Asylum, with the constant suggestion that Batman himself may be a mad Anglo-Saxon who would some day find himself in an Arkham straitjacket.)

I sent away for the Arkham catalogue and ordered a fair number of their books. Rather lonely and geeky (if only I’d known of science fiction “fandom”) I wanted to see myself as part of that creative world. And I really liked the idea that you didn’t need to borrow characters and images from existent mythologies, you could just invent your own.

And yet, there was always something that didn’t quite work for me—the emphasis on terror, madness, and disgust, the over the top language. And something else—it didn’t go far enough. A mythos, after all, is still not a mythology, and the need to set all the stories in our world, seen through human eyes, limited the imagination. I was looking for something else and didn’t know it.

Then something happened. In those days I used to wander around the Poughkeepsie Library in search of unusual books. I would look for titles and sometimes authors whose names intrigued me. In this way I discovered some wonderful writers, such as the great Spanish author Miguel de Unamuno or the German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwangler.

One day, around 1961 (the time is important) I came across a book with an odd title, by an author unknown to me. I picked it up and the cover immediately fascinated me. Under the title was a large stylized drawing of an eye, while all around the margins ran letters in two very different but equally unrecognizable alphabets. I opened to the front page and found a poem, a kind of chant,, and as I read it the strange sensation overcame me that I’d been looking for this book all my (short) life, with no way to know that until that moment. This, I later came to believe, was what I’d been seeking in Lovecraft, which was why the emphasis on horror had seemed a distraction.

I literally have not read the poem in decades but I still know it by heart. It begins like this:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,

Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone…

The name of the book was Fellowship of the Ring, and the reason the year is important is because in 1961, and for several years after, no one I knew had ever heard of it.

To be continued…

We Do and We Hear

In the movie Julie and Julia there’s a moment when Julia Child is waiting in a train station for Avis, a friend of many years and many letters back and forth. A bit nervously Julia tells the woman who has come with her to the station that Avis has said she will be wearing a plaid jacket and that is how Julia will recognize her.

The friend is confused. Has Julia never met Avis? No, Julia says, they’ve only written letters.

The friend is amazed, and clearly we in the audience are meant to be as well. How can you have a years long correspondence with someone you’ve never met? To me this is quite ordinary. I have been writing letters for years with nine or ten people, only three of whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting face to face (and them only once or twice).

I collect fountain pens. Some are brand new, others as much as 100 years old.

Fountain Pens

[Group of Wahl pens from the '20s, '30s, and '40s. The gold pen, second from left, inspired my story “Master Matyas” in my bookThe Tarot of Perfection: A Book of Tarot Tales. Look closely and you can see the inscription, “M. Matyas”.]

The pens are not for show, I write with them. I write almost all my books and stories and articles by hand, in journals with blank pages (I don’t want to draw between the lines, why should I write in them?)

And I write letters. There’s a whole community of us, connected by online forums (my favorite— www.Pentrace.net) but then branching off into actual letters, sometimes running eight or nine pages. When I first starting doing this a friend asked “What do you write about?” (considering that I didn’t know any of the people). I kind of mumbled “Well, mostly what pens we’re using, and where we got them.”

That’s changed. With some people I write about politics (including a friend in Baltimore who’s as far right as I’m left), some it’s metaphysics, some it’s issues of psyche and identity, and with some it’s just about our lives. My pen pals include a horse rancher in Texas (formerly of the intelligence community), an Indian-American physicist in Anne Arbor, and a poet and academic in New Zealand (okay, her I met first, before we began writing),

One of my favorite correspondents is a woman deeply versed in Jewish history, Talmud, and other spiritual traditions, including early Christianity. Her name is Myra Love, and she’s one of the people I’ve met (twice now). Myra’s letters are long and rich, covering a lot of territory.

In the most recent, she wrote that when the Israelites heard the divine voice at Mt. Sinai they responded “We do and we hear.” This, as Myra says, is an odd construction, since we’d expect the opposite. I wrote back that what they were being told was not immediately clear to them, and that the only way it could ever become clear, be really heard, was by doing what was asked of them.

Some things cannot be theorized. We have to do them to know what they’re about, and often, keep doing them before we can start to get what they are. Tarot reading is like this. Some people try to study books, and memorize meanings before they try out reading the cards. But reading cards is so fluid and dynamic, changing every time we do it, that the only way to learn is by doing. We do and we hear.

I decided to ask the Tarot about this issue—literally do a reading and see if I could hear what the cards were telling me. Two cards, one for doing, one for hearing, from The Shining Tribe Tarot.

Justice

Doing—Justice. One of the primary attributes of this card is seeing, looking. The Tarot version of Justice does not wear a blindfold. And of course, the first thing we do with a card is look at it. But the seeing of Justice is also a commitment to truth. We do readings justly. In my book Rachel Pollack’s Tarot Wisdom: Spiritual Teachings and Deeper Meanings, I quoted a line from the Torah: “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” Thus, one of the main things the Israelites pledged to do before they could hear was pursue justice.

Chariot

Hearing—the Chariot. The Chariot is a vehicle of action, of will, but not just the will of the ego. By reaching up into the light, the Charioteer connects his will to something higher. The Chariot is a vehicle. Two thousand years ago mystics traveled to heavenly “palaces” through intense visualizations of a divine chariot. “Hearing” is not a physical act but a total experience that takes us to unknown places.

We do and we hear.

The Tarot of Perfection: A Book of Tarot Tales

Tarot of Perfection

The Shining Tribe Tarot, Revised and Expanded

The Shining Tribe Tarot

Rachel Pollack’s Tarot Wisdom: Spiritual Teachings and Deeper Meanings

Tarot Wisdom

Return of the Blog—A Bit Like a Vampire Rising

It’s been awhile since I’ve done this, written an entry.  Mostly it’s my crazy schedule—occasionally I lie awake at night, ponder everything I need to be doing, and conclude, very sensibly, that it’s not physically possible—but I’ve wanted to come back to this, and recently was thinking of what might be a good place to start.

I could write about some really exciting news, a new trip to Greece planned for next May.  This will be my third time leading a group of people on a sacred journey.  But I thought I would wait until the plans were up and running.

Then there’s the year long Tarot course I’ve been teaching, Becoming A Reader.  We’re almost finished with the first two of four sections, and it’s been wonderful. Section Three begins in September, and will be open to newcomers.  I’ll write about that too as it gets closer.

And of course there’s all the stuff that pops into my head when I’m walking with Wonder (best dog ever), or writing letters with 100 year old fountain pens, or watching Dr. Who.  Dr. Who!  Now there’s a subject, the best treatment of immortality I’ve ever seen (among all its other excitements).

But what I decided to share was a Tarot reading I did with Robert Place’s Vampire Tarot.  Robert is the creator of one of the great modern decks, The Alchemical Tarot.  His new deck is based on Dracula and vampire lore in general.  The art is among his best, which is to say the highest level.  The Major Arcana, or Trump cards, are characters and scenes from Dracula, the Minor Arcana, or suit cards, are based on the weapons against vampires.

Wands=Stakes
Cups=Holy Water Vessels
Swords=Knives
Pentacles=Garlic Flowers (it’s not the edible bulb of garlic that repels vampires but the flower)

The reading was a standard one for a new deck, but it seemed to me to reach beyond that to make powerful statements about the whole practice of reading cards, that strange activity that has captivated me for so many years.

Here’s the spread:

2.        1.        3.

4.

1.  What is the essence of this deck, what is its voice?
2.  How does it speak to us?
3.  What does it ask of us?
4.  What is possible with it?

And here were the cards:

Knight of Garlic Flowers      7 of Knives           2 of Stakes

9 of Stakes

 

7 of Knives

The voice of the deck—Seven of Knives

The Seven of Knives depicts a vampire (based on the 1920s movie, Nosferatu) coming through an open window.  He is sneaking in, and indeed trickiness is quality often associated with the Seven of Swords.  As the essence of the deck, it sneaks up on us, but we also have to let it in.  Tarot in general is like that, we start doing readings for fun, or curiosity, and it takes us over in some way.  Of course, the vampire in this picture is up to no good (“Count Orlock,” he’s called in the movie) but we’re adapting here.

 

Knight of Garlic Flowers

How does it speak to us—Knight of Garlic Flowers

The Court cards in the Vampire Tarot are based on writers and other figures connected to vampire literature or Bram Stoker, the creator of Dracula.  The Knight of Garlic Flowers is John Polidori, who, Bob Place tells us, wrote the first prose vampire story.  Thus, as Place says, he moved “from the ethereal realm of poetry to the more concrete realm of prose.”  Tarot is a spiritual tradition, a complex intellectual and mystical structure.  But in readings a deck speaks to us by addressing concrete issues.  The spiritual is not abandoned, not at all. It comes sneaking through the window of the practical questions.

 

2 of Stakes

What does it ask of us—Two of Stakes

Here we see the character Lucy Westernra from Dracula, asleep as Dracula, in the form of a bat, approaches her window.  The window theme is repeated from the Seven of Knives, and the power of the Count will entice Lucy to open the window, to let him in.  While she is consciously innocent, there is a quality of desire and risk about her.  Place says “This is a card of attraction, hunger, and lust.”  So the deck, all decks, ask of us that we come to them with desire, that we open the window and let them bite us.

 

9 of Stakes

What is possible—Nine of Stakes
Here we see a vampire burning up in the Sun.  Place says this comes more from movies and tv shows than vampire literature.  He also says that the card represents “a burning away of what is unwanted.”  There is a kind of transfiguration implied.  A return of that spiritual dimension as the lower levels are consumed.  Thus, the cards take the ethereal symbolism and ground it in people’s life issues, but they also transform the ordinary, they raise us up.  This is not just a concept, I have seen it in myself and many others, that we start doing readings out of curiosity or excitement, and the cards change us, we become, through surrendering to them, more aligned to the ancient truths that run through all the cards.

The Opening To Apollo

I’m back from Greece, filled with a kind of quiet awe at all we experienced. It’s often said of the Mysteries that the things people saw were not simply secret in the sense of being forbidden to tell, but secret because they are impossible to tell.

In our own way this was what we found on our journey, through the ceremonies and meditations. I could describe what we did and saw, but I know that while it will be interesting, it will not really convey the experience. Still, there is much to tell, and I hope to share some of it here, in the next few weeks.

I begin with with the ceremony I called The Opening to Apollo. Readers of this blog may remember that I wrote an entry before I left called Getting Right With The Boys, about the need to find a deeper relationship with some of the male dieties, in particular Apollo. In my book, The Body of the Goddess I tended to see Apollo as a villain, the detached Sky God who conquers the female powers of the Earth.

And indeed, the myth tells us how the great oracular site of Delphi was originally sacred to Gaia, the Earth Goddess, with the oracle being focused on a great snake, called the Python. Apollo supposedly sailed in, accompanied by dolphins (the name Delphi derives from Greek words for dolphin and–very tellingly–womb).

Apollo killed the snake, a being from the Goddess powers of the land, with the cry “Now rot here upon the soil that feeds man!”  Even so, the oracles were always women, and they bore the title Pythia.

It’s no wonder that many feminist writers have denounced Apollo as the emblem of the patriarchal takeover of ancient Goddess powers.  For the Greeks, however, Apollo represented civilization, and light, and beauty.  And classicist Peter Kingsley has written of Apollo as originally a God of shamanic death and rebirth journeys.

In Greece I came across another aspect of Apollo, one that definitely undercuts his aggressive male image. 

To put it simply, Apollo is very feminine, represented almost as a cross-dresser.  In at least two places we saw representations of what looked like beautiful Goddesses, in flowing dresses with done-up hair, only to find that they were Apollo.  Near one of these images (where Apollo actually was sitting in a row of Goddesses, and was the softest and prettiest of them) we saw his sister, Artemis, looking tough and fierce, in a short tunic, with wild hair.  I remembered how Leto, their mother, was criticized in some myth for having “a manly daughter and a womanly son.”  More about this in a future entry.

Before these issues, however, came the sense that if we wanted to eperience the power of Apollo, or Delphi, we needed to open ourselves to the light of the God.  I came up with a ceremony I called The Opening To Apollo.

At first we planned to do it at the temple itself.  Our guide knew of a small groundlevel entrance where the Pythia, the oracle herself, used to enter into her chamber, and it was out of the way of the usual tourist run.  So we went there, and the guide stood at the edge of our circle to try and ward off both curiosity seekers and the guards, and we all set up our altar with various things we had brought, and one of our group, Pat, climbed into the chamber and out again. 

Before we could get to the ceremony, however, we got word that a group of French tourists had complained, and the guard was coming, so Nicki Scully, my brilliant co-leader,  swooped up our altar and we all made like good tourists, gawking and taking pictures.

That afternoon we went to the Temple of Athena Pronaia, a marvelous site at the bottom of the hill from Delphi, just far enough that many tourists on day trips from Athens don’t stop there.  While Delphi itself is set against the spectacular rock face of the Phaedriades, or Shining Ones, two high plates of stone on Mt. Parnassus, Athena Pronaia is in a softer setting against the side of the hill.  As well as a range of archtectural features it contains a huge boulder that powerfully evokes the presence of Gaia.

Nicki and I scouted around for an out of the way place to do our ceremony, and found a small double row of stones (most likely broken pillars) with a perfect altar stone at the end, between the two rows. 

There was a couple nearby, a man and woman in their 20s, and we went and told them we were planning a quiet ceremony and hoped we would not bother them.  They whispered something together, and then the woman laughed, and said since the man was the official guard for the site he would make sure we were not disturbed.

The ceremony was simple.  We set up our altar, and then we all did a breathing meditation to enter into a sacred framework.  Then Nicki led each person to  me in turn and I invoked for them the power of the serpent of Gaia, for part of our purpose was in our small way to heal the ancient split of Earth powers and Sky powers, the dark snake and the light of the Sun God.

Then I used one of my magical tools, a Tuareg dagger I found years ago in Paris.  I had been on my way to a conference on magic in the south, and discovered first that my hotel was across the street from La Musee de l’Histoire de Magie (Museum of the History of Magic), and two doors down from an African store where I found the dagger.  It has a decorated handle, with a downward pointing golden triangle (symbol of the Goddess since the Stone Age), just above the blade.

I drew the knife down in the air in front of the person, as if to cut an opening in the fabric of reality.  This symbolized their willingness for Apollo’s light to enter them.   Then I touched the very tip to their forehead, their lips, and their heart, to inspire the mind, expression, and feeling.

What I said was slightly different for each person, but here is a text I later put together as a poem.

THE OPENING TO APOLLO

Welcome, bright one,
to the place of opening.

Feel the serpent of Gaia
rise through your body,
in and out and around your spine,
and through the top of your head,
and into the sky
where Athena shields and protects you.

Alongside you
Hermes and Persephone
guard you and guide you.

Accept the opening to Apollo!

May his glory enter you.

Open your mind with brilliance.
Open your lips with beauty.
Open your heart with radiance.

Know yourself,
and may all your footsteps
bring together
the Earth and the Sky.

Rosh Hashanah/Ramadan

As i write this, some twelve hours after the Equinox, it is the first day of both Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of spiritual focus.

Coming so soon after the cease-fire in the Israel-Lebanon war, this conunction seems to some people ironic, to others a special opportunity, both for Arabs and Jews to get past their violent history, and to remember their common origins. Mythologically (that is, outside historical records), both Jews and Arabs descend from the patriarch of patriarchs, Abraham. The Arab people trace their origin to Ishmael, Abraham’s older son, while the Jews see themselves as descendants of Isaac, the younger son. (The Hebrew Bible has a curious affinity for younger sons–from Abel to Isaac to Jacob to Joseph to Moses, the younger brother always seems the one closest to God).

Last night I went to the Woodstock Jewish Congregation, a place of special meaning to me, for their now legendary Rosh Hashanah service. The WJC puts up a huge tent every year and receives as many as 1500 people for a celebration of joy and spirituality.

This evening service they did two things that impressed me (along with the wonderful service I knew to expect). The first came during a reading. At various points in the service, the rabbi, Jonathan Kligler, asks members to come up and read a passage from the prayerbook in English. One of them this year included a plea for peace for “your people Israel.” The woman reading it added “and your people Ishmael.” At the end, the new assistant rabbi, Miriam Margles, gave a short talk on the conjunction of Rosh Hashanah and Ramadan, and how it gives us a chance to get past the history of violence, and the question of who has suffered the most from the other.

These moments may seem fairly mild, but in the current atmosphere I am sure it took courage to say them in a Jewish congregation.

For myself, I am always most fascinated by the spiritual meanings of sacred days, no matter what the religious tradition. Rosh Hashanah is not simply a New Year celebration. It does not even come at the beginning of the calendar year. Ttraditionally, it is not really a civic event, but rather a celebration of the supposed birthday of creation itself. Each year the earth (and the moon, since this is a lunar event) moves around to (mythologically) the same position they were in at the moment of their creation. Thus it becomes a symbol of renewal and new opportunities.

There is an even greater significance to Rosh Hashanah. It begins a ten day period known as the Days of Awe, leading up to the holiest and most solemn day of the year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. During this period, we are expected to turn our attention to spirituality, but also to consider whom we may have wronged during the year and do our best to make amends. On Yom kippur, we learn, God can release us from the wrongs we have done to God, but not the wrongs done to other people.

The seriousness of Yom Kippur comes out in the fast that is expected of all Jews. For some 26 hours no food or liquid of any kind, not even water, should pass the observer’s lips. In my own experience, this can be extremely difficult if my mind is not focused on spirit, but actually not difficult at all if I give myself to devotion. And this is, of course, the point. We do not fast to punish ourselves, or to go through an ordeal, but simply to help us pay attention to what really matters. Not the satisfaction of the body, but the attention of the spirit.

Fasting is, of course, the most well-known attribute of Ramadan. For an entire month Muslims eat and drink nothing at all between sunrise and sunset. As with the Jewish fast, the purpose (as I understand it from my very limited knowledge) is not self-punishment, or what people sometimes call “mortification of the flesh,” but rather to focus all the attention on our connection to God. Of course, it is not possible to go an entire month without food or water. Therefore, people are allowed to eat and drink after sundown, and among some Muslims these evening meals take on the quality of a joyous celebration.

In a sense, then, observance of Ramadan means that we we fast in the light and feast in darkness. This idea, or image, fascinates me, though I cannot really say what it means!

A couple of years ago I found out that according to tradition, Ramadan marks the time when the archangel Gabriel revealed the Qur’an to Mohammed. This makes it a season of revelation and discovery.

Readers of my book The Forest of Souls, as well as the columns I did for two years for the webzine The Meta Arts (www.themetaarts.com) will know of my practice of making Tarot spreads from sacred days. Here is one to mark both Rosh Hashanah and Ramadan. There are seven cards laid out in the following pattern:

1   2   3

4

5   6   7

1. W hat is renewed in my life?

2. How do I get right with other people?

3. How do I get right with myself?

4. How do I get right with God?

5. What is revealed?

6. How do I fast in the light?

7. How do I feast in darkness?

Getting Right With The Boys

For those of us who are dedicated to female divine energy, to Goddesses, what is our relationship to the Gods–to the masculine?  This subject is something I have had in mind for some time, and as the Greek trip approaches, it becomes more significant.

In the 1980s I found myself very drawn to the ideas, and scholarship, and passions of what is sometimes called the Goddess Movement, or more poetically, the Return of the Goddess, or the acknowledgement of the Divine Feminine. I delved very deeply both into Goddess history and contemporary spiritual practice.

My book, the Body of the Goddess, expressed the idea that religion originated in awareness of the divine in nature and the human body, and that in such a state of awareness the female is very important, for new life comes out of the female body. Even today our language describes the Earth and the Sea as female.

The book drew on a great deal of scholarship, about such subjects as pre-historic cave art, mythology (my lifelong passion), ancient temples, and sacred buildings created in the shape of a woman’s body. As well as study, however, I went to many of these places, for as Heloisa wrote (quoted below in The Body In The Land),

One thing is to know by books that the Goddess used to be worshipped in those lands.. And another thing completely stronger is to actually go there, and, with a mixture of surprise, emotion and astonishment, see that it was really real.

During this time, I tended, like many women in the Goddess movement, to see the male deities, the Gods (or God, as monotheists quaintly refer to the divine) in something of a villainous role. A great deal of evidence suggests that in some places in the world a Goddess centered culture existed for thousands of years, without hierarchy of slaves and rulers, and without largescale violence. Excavations of very early cities and settlements find them without fortifications, and on sites that would be very difficult to defend. In other words, they were built without fear of attack, and an in fact existed for hundreds of years without mass violence.

The establishment of patriarchal social structures changes this. We find, instead of egalitarian societies, all the wealth going to a king, with slaves buried alive in his tomb. We find in some places a state of constant war between tribes that lasts–well, up to the present. Some people have argued that while a “Great Mother” culture (a misunderstanding of what Goddesses are about) is very comforting and stable, a dynamic male-dominated culture is necessary for progress and technology. This idea ignores the fact that the Goddess-centered Neolithic (“new stone age”), was the most creative and longest sustained period in human history. It saw the development of agriculture and cities, writing, astronomy, engineering, and all of these to a highly sophisticated degree. By contrast, when the warrior God Dorians invaded and conquered Greece, they ushered in a 500 year “Dark Age,” socalled because culture and technology came to an abrupt stop.

So it is easy to see the Gods as a force of dominance and destruction. The mythology seems to encourage this. The Egyptian God Horus cuts off the head of his mother Isis because he considers her disloyal to his military campaign against his uncle Seth. Zeus, the patriarchal ruler of the Greek Gods, seems to spend a great deal of his time raping women and nymphs up and down the countryside.

In the writing of The Body of the Goddess, Zeus’s favorite son Apollo emerged as a particular villain. I’ve tended to think of Apollo as Zeus’s enforcer, sort of like Sonny in The Godfather. My dislike of The Gods has never been absolute. I’ve long been interested in Dionysos, the God of ecstasy, who actually took over Apollo’s chief site, Delphi, in winter, when Apollo presumably went south to someplace warmer. And as you can see below, in “Invocation To Hermes,” I feel a strong kinship to that Greek God of magic, invention, divination, con artistry, theft, lying, and guidance to dead souls (I tend to ignore his main function in Homeric myth, Zeus’s messenger). Recently it struck me that it would be fun to get legally ordained from one of those Ordain-Ur-Self websites and then open my own “church,” The Temple of Hermes the Swindler.

Ah, but Apollo? Not only does he assault as many women as Zeus, not only did he attack and conquer Delphi from the Goddesses who ruled there, but his main attribute, rationality, seems to me a way to narrow the wide spectrum of reality. And yet he also is the God of poetry and music, and even prophecy. Delphi, called the world’s navel, was the site of the great oracle, while behind it rose Mt. Parnassus, home of the Muses. And recently, a scholar named Peter Kingsley has been making a strong claim that Apollo is misunderstood as the calm rationalist lord of light. Kingsley describes Apollo as the ruler of initiations of death and rebirth. In Kingsley’s book Reality, he links Apollo to Persephone, the Queen of the Dead, whose Greater Mysteries are the theme of the trip I will be leading to Greece, now less than a month away.

And odd signs have been coming to me of Apollo somehow entering my life.. Often, when I teach a Tarot workshop I lead an exercise in creating what I call your “fortune teller identity.” This involves a series of steps in which you make up a fanciful name for yourself, a “tribal history,” outlandish claims of your past successes, and then speak in a stagey “foreign” accent, all of which allows you to get past your rationalist–Apollonian–filters and say things you normally would not dare to say. When I did this a few months ago (I always do it myself when I lead the exercise, it’s too much fun not to take part), and it came time to call myself something, “Dr. Apollo” immediately came into my head and refused to leave. I tried to think of something else, “Madame This,” or “Lady That” but Dr. Apollo was it. Later, I used this name for a mysterious fortune teller in one of the stories in my just-finished collection The Tarot of Perfection: Eight Stories (see below, Book Is Done).

Most recently, I attended a workshop from the wonderful Tarot artist, psychic, and teacher Johanna Gargiulo-Sherman (presented by Zoe Matoff, founder and director of the Rhinebeckian Institute for Tarot and Esoterica). One of the decks used was a very intense Tarot created by a German artist named Margarethe Petersen. At one point I pulled the card of The Hierophant. Now, this word is the name of the priest who officiated at the Mysteries, held in a city named Eleusis. The picture shows a powerful dimly glimpsed man, half in bright darkness, half in blazing light. He seems to be moving towards us, emerging from the cosmos itself, while at his feet, hard to see at first, lies a giant snake. As I looked at it I was struck by a powerful sense that this was Apollo, in all his complexity and power. And I remembered that the Mystai, the initiates in the Mysteries, passed two shrines as they left Athens, city of Athena, Goddess of Wisdom. One was to Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Passion, to whom I self-initiated at a retreat many years ago. The other was to Apollo.

The Body In The Land

The trip to Greece is getting closer and things are starting to come together in that strange way that happens whenever we commit ourselves to a sacred journey. In the past week I have received a letter and two emails about these subjects from people who had no idea I was leading a trip to celebrate the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone.

The first was from a woman in Crete (where we will spend close to half our time) writing about the very meaning of the name Demeter. Working from the sounds and meanings of ancient Greek she made the case that it does not mean “Grain Mother” as often said, but something akin to “Powerful” or “Great” Womb.

Today I received an email from a student and friend who has been studying alchemy and wrote that the author he has found most beneficial is Nicki Scully. When I wrote him “I assume you know that Nicki and I are leading a trip to Greece together” he wrote back and said he had had no idea.

In between, I received a remarkable email from a Brazilian Wiccan woman living in Berlin. She wrote about my book, The Body Of The Goddess, and her own experiences visiting Greece and Turkey, where she came to understand the power of the Goddess’s body being alive in the landscape and the sacred places. Her letter was so eloquent on just the experiences I hope we all will find in the October trip that I asked her permission to quote it here. She too had no idea I was returning to Greece with a group of people.

Her name is Heloisa, but she is also known as Lulu Saille, her Pagan name.

Hello Rachel,

My name is Heloisa and I am a Brazilian Witch who lives in Berlin. I am a great admirer of your work, with special consideration to “The body of the Goddess“. I had read this book before when I was in Brazil, and I already thought it was a-m-a-z-i-n-g. Ok, you probably heard that a lot of times (although it is always nice to receive a deserved compliment for a beautiful work), so here is the actual reason why I decided to write you this time.

In the last days, I decided to re-read this book again, for the fact that I was going in vacations to Greece and Turkey. And it was for sure at least a delightful experience – more than I expected. Unfortunately, I couldn’t necessarily go to the places you listed on the book, but I could be more “aware” of the region around me and also of the informations I read in the book.

I have a few unusual happenings related to travels and airplanes. Sometimes, for some reason that I couldn’t explain myself, I have a feeling on what’s going to happen as soon as the plane arrives on the place. And this time, when we landed in Greece, I knew that I would have an experience that would be over everything that has ever happened to me before.

I could have the opportunity to visit a few sacred places. Although they are mainly in pieces nowadays, they still carry the power and makes us being taken by the simple thought of what they could have been in the old times. I went to Lindos, and could see the acropolis and the Temple of Athena Lindia, and also another of Her Temples (and one of Apolo, also) in Kamiros. I have also been in Letoon, in Turkey, the lovely place dedicated to Artemis, Leto and Apolo. It is said that that was the first place where they could have water to drink after long days of walking. I don’t know if you have been there, but it was wonderful to read about their myth in your book – saying about Leto transforming the priests in frogs – and then go to Letoon and see, in the little fountain near to the temples, tiny little frogs jumping from here to there, everywhere. The good news is that they apparently are trying to re-settle the ancient temples with the stones they found, and, unlike a lot of other places where they simply replace the old stones with new ones, they have been able to find a lot of the old stones – the temple of Leto has a few whole columns and nearly a whole wall already, with none but maybe 2 or 3 new stones. It was truly a blessed experience.

It is undeniable that the Goddess still have a body that binds us all together – and it is impossible not to think that when you are able to see with your own eyes things you have heard long time ago, about several civilizations. One thing is to know by books that the Goddess used to be worshipped in those lands.. And another thing completely stronger is to actually go there, and, with a mixture of surprise, emotion and astonishment, see that it was really real: the aggressive, dominant cultures may have tried to lie to us and make us believe in the things they wanted, but She remained. And we will always have in our hearts a glimmer of rememberance of the days when we used to know that we are part of Her own sacred, embracing body – also because we have the blessing to have people like you in this world, who, definitely, make the difference by giving us hope and courage to believe in the dreams that, we know, are just memories that we were never able to forget.

Thank you, Rachel Pollack. May you always be blessed by Her powerful breath of inspiration and wisdom.

~Heloisa

The Greek trip runs from Oct. 1-12 (including travel days). There still are a couple of spots open for those who would like to join us. For more information go to my website, or the website for Shamanic Tours. See also earlier posts on this blog, including the day by day intinerary.