Omega, Omega

The title refers to The Omega Institute in upstate New York.  I have doubled it because I have two things going on there that I want to tell people about.

The first is the annual weeklong class I teach with Mary K. Greer.

Mary is probably the teacher from whom I have learned the most, and much of that is from teaching with her. She is inventive, scholarly, gentle, and incredibly creative in her approaches to teaching. And her books, from the legendary Tarot For Yourself to the brandnew 21 Ways To Read A Card have quite simply shaped our whole modern approach to Tarot.

Mary and I have taught together at Omega for16 years. This year we are doing two classes, a five day, from June 12-16, and then a three day, from June 16-18. Space is available for both. Register at http://www.eomega.org. This year our group includes people coming from Australia and India. It should be wonderful.

The theme of the first class is Tarot Play, one of our favorites. We learn actual games, use the Tarot for stories, create fortune teller identities, try out being clients from Hell and have a wonderful time.

The strange thing is that at the end of all this people not only emerge as powerful readers, they often find their own lives transformed. Mary and I have seen people make life-changing decisions after the work–and play–done in our Omega classes.

The three day class is on the theme of the Tree of Life.  This powerful image from Kabbalah is intimately connected with the Tarot in its esoteric history.  Even more, it is one of the deepest myths in our culture.  I have written a book about this image The Kabbalah Tree, and Mary has studied and taught it for years.  This will be a spectacular workshop.

And if Mary and I are not enough, Omega itself is wonderful. Beautiful wood and lake setting, clean and comfortable, and superb food.  Having a chance to spend a week there teaching Tarot–with my favorite Tarot teacher–is one of the highlights of my year.

And the second "Omega" of the title?  This Sunday, June 4, my third annual Art Show goes up at Omega !

The art consists of framed prints based partly on my original art for the Shining Tribe Tarot, and partly new pictures, based on what I call Mythic Visions and images seen in stones that I find along the road.

Becoming a visual artist is one of the most exciting things I have experienced in the  past ten years.  My writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, has always been based on images and stories, and the drawings have been a way to approach images in a direct and powerful way.

You can see some of my Shining Tribe Tarot art on my website, http://rachelpollack.com/.

Come to Omega.  You won't regret it. 

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Invocation to Hermes

For a long time I was only interested in the Goddesses. As with many women. I saw the Greek deities as at least partly about not only reclaiming the Divine Feminie, but as a way to establish personal connections with that power.

I like to tell a story about a time when someone told me about a conference being held around the theme of the Goddess Athena. My spontaneous response was "Oh, I'd love to go to that. Athena is a friend of mine." Aphrodite is not just a concept or a series of old stories, she is a presence in my life.

Over the past few years I have maintained my strong feeling for the Goddesses while at the same time becoming interested in at least a few of their brothers. One figure that looms more and more in mind is Hermes.

The word "Hermetic," the name for the Western esoteric tradition, comes from Hermes. However, it is a later version than the original Greek God. The term comes from Hermes Trismegistus ("thrice great"), a semi-legendary figure from Hellenistic Egypt who composed a series of great texts.

Our expression "As above, so below" is a short version of Hermes Trismegistus's "That which is above is the same as that which is below, and that which is below is the same as that which is above, for the preservation of the miracle of one thing." (I used that line as the opening for a "keynote address" at Goddard College, where I teach writing–the theme for the keynote was "Form and Content.")

The Hermes of myth is much older, possibly going back to the Stone Age. He is a trickster, a thief, a guide to dead souls, a teacher of Mysteries, and a swindler.  In my opinion, you have to love a religion that has a God of swindlers!

I hope to say much more about Hermes in the future, especially his great staff, the caduceus. When the group of us go to Greece in October we will call on Hermes to journey with us.  Right now, I want to share a poem I wrote as a direct invocation of Hermes. 

I actually wrote this poem while at Goddard, possibly during the same residency (most of the teaching is done long distance, but we meet for a very intense week at the start of the semester) where I quoted Hermes Trismegistus.

A couple of notes: 

1. Moly is a magical plant.  In the Odyssey Hermes shows Odysseus how he can use moly to stop the sorceress Circe from turning him into an animal.  I am convinced that originally moly was the opposite, an herb used by prehistoric shamans to shapeshift.  "Holy moley!" from the old comic book Captain Marvel, comes from moly.

2. The expression "secret agent lover man" comes from Francesca Lia Block's magical book Weetzie Bat.  Everyone should read it.

 

INVOCATION TO HERMES

I call my brother Hermes,
My snake thief music man,
My dress up dancing man.

I whistle him come to me,
Sliding up the evening
Dripping lies and magic.

Hermes the vampire,
Hermes the conman.
Offers field trips and cruises,
Guidebooks and theater passes,
For lackluster dead.

Hermes!
My razzle dazzle mambo boy,
My scoundrel secret agent
Lover man,
Skin bags full of moly,
Sticks and shiny leather.

My scandal whisper gossip god,
My story serpent mojo man,
My brother,
My Hermes!

Two films, one of which I haven’t actually seen

One of my purposes in doing this is to indulge myself by commenting about the things that come into my mind through the course of the day (or night, I tend towards insomnia). Today I want to talk about a couple of movies and the thoughts they've sparked. The funny thing is, I have not yet seen one of them, so my comment really is about its source. First, the one I've seen.

(Get ready to cue electronic woo-woo music.)

Last night ABC ran Enemy of the State, a very interesting choice for Memorial Day weekend in 2006. Directed by Tony Scott and starring Will Smith, it features the terrifying power of the National Security Agency, the NSA, to target innocent Americans, tap their phones, destroy their lives, all for reasons no one might know, and with no accountability to anyone for such terrible power.

Okay, the film gives the fig leaf of the "rogue agent," who gets caught, but it really shows what the technology can do, and how people might not even know what was happening to them. It was made in 1998, and yet so much of the dialogue could come straight from some melodramatic version of the recent hearings NSA hearings.

And now here's where it starts to get strange. Jon Voigt plays the villain, and in his whole appearance he could almost be a double for Donald Rumsfeld. Remember,this was 1998, when Rumsfeld was a more or less forgotten figure from the Ford administration. Okay, that's just a certain kind of look. But then the heroes find out about him and call up his file on their own computers, and as they scan down they comment that he was born on 9-11-1940. 9-11. They don't mention out loud much else about him, but they say that, his 9-11 birthday, as if it matters somehow when he was born.

Got that woo-woo music going?

Okay, the second subject is more standard cultural criticism. And more serious. The movie is X-Men: The Last Stand. I haven't seen it, but I plan to (as soon as my friend who shares my liking for superhero movies comes back from her weekend trip).

What prompted me to think about it was a comment in a review. The writer said that the plot concerns a drug designed to cure mutants, turn them into normal human beings. Said writer then added that this makes the connection to issues of homosexuality and homophobia fully explicit. And that comment led me to think about when I first realized that in fact the X-Men indeed was about that subject, and not pimarily racism as many people originally thought.

The X-Men originated in 1963, the same year as Doom Patrol, a comic I wrote in a later incarnation, for 2 exciting years in the 90s. Though it definitely did better commercially than the original Doom Patrol, the X-Men languished for some years as a knockoff of The Fantastic Four, for many years Marvel's flagship title.

What made the X-Men unique was that the characters did not get their powers from some freak accident, they were mutants, genetically different. While the book occasionally did stories that suggested an allegory of racism, that theme was never very developed.

Then, in the 80s, Chris Claremont began to write it. His stories were complex and deeply felt, and one of the reasons why I began to read comics again. Claremont brought two qualities to the fore: the idea that ordinary humans hated and feared the mutants, and the image of frightened outcast teenagers finding a home amongst people like themselves.  The idea of the group became central.

For some years, I, like many people, assumed that Claremont was making points about race in America.

And then he wrote a story with very little action, no villains, no grand threat to the world. Instead, it told of how Kitty Pryde (note that last name) hears of a mutant high school student who has committed suicide and decides to address the student body. Now, unlike some of the weirder–queerer–mutants, Kitty looks normal. She can pass. So asking to speak on the subject, and identifying herself as a mutant, is a brave and dangerous action. In other words, she comes out.

It was then that I realized that Claremont, whether consciously or not, wasn't writing about race at all. He was writing about sexual identity. (I probably should say that even though Chris Claremont and I once gave a joint literary reading in New York, I have never asked him about this.)

It's a mistake to directly equate racial and sexual minorities. Yet both experience the prejudice of the majority, people in both groups experience hatred, fear, and violence.

One difference lies in the fact that people of color are for the most part visible all their lives. Certainly there will always be some who can pass, but for the most part they have no choice but to be out in the world. Some queer people are so visible they cannot hide it, but most can, and many do, try to look and act "normal."

And there are deeper differences. People in racial minorities belong to their group from birth. They are in the same community as their parents. While some queer people (lesbian, gay, trans, bisexual) are obvious from early childhood, others are much less clear. And in most cases their parents are straight. Their families are from the other side. This is part of what makes queer teens feel so horribly isolated.

And for those who do not even realize their own sexuality until puberty blindsides them the situation is worse. They grow up looking down on the more obvious queer kids, make fun of them the way everyone else does. They are clear that they are part of "we" and the faggots and dykes are "them." Then suddenly, they discover they are no longer "we," they have become part of those people they have learned all their lives to despise.

This is what Claremont wrote about in the X-Men. Some of the mutants are born strange, with blue skin, or animal-like features. But most of them grow up just like any "normal" kid. They learn to make fun of mutants, see them as sick or monsters. Then, right around puberty, strange things start happening to them. They develop odd physical qualities, powers. Suddenly they are part of the people they themselves have hated and ridiculed.

I am not suggesting that Chris Claremont was writing solely about the situation of queer kids. For the most part, it is the common state of adolescence to feel strange, isolated, with fears of not being really human, or at least not like everybody else. But the analogy is powerful.

Remember, this was in the 80s when gay people were not anywhere near as visible as now. And there was no internet for young people to find others like themselves. Even if it never said so specifically, the X-Men gave a voice to a lot of kids who very much needed it.

Okay, now I will go see the movie.

Greece–the addresses!

Did I mention how this is new to me? I just finished a long entry about my trip to Greece (shold be just below this) and forgot to include the web sites for more information, such as how to sign up. There is my own site, http://www.RachelPollack.com, and then there is Nicki Scully's amazing site, http://www.shamanicjourneys.com/. Go the link for Sacred Travel and then Greece. And of course check back here for more information about the trip.

Greece

This has been a busy time for me.

The semester is ending at Goddard College, where I teach writing for the Master of Fine Arts program. I'm putting together an art show (including some pictures that even though I drew them I keep thinking, wow, where did that come from?) for the Omega Institute, where Mary Greer and I will be teaching our annual week of Tarot, June 11-18 (a highlight of the year, we've been doing this for something like 16 years). And I'm finishing a book of short stories (more about that in a future entry).

In the midst of all this excitement–not to mention the blooming of the rhodendron tree just outside my window–I am starting to get very excited about going back to Greece. Information on the trip has finally gone up on my web site (with many thanks to the wondrous Mark Powell), and Nicki Scully and I are putting the finishing touches on our itinerary. Recently I met Nicki for the first time when she was on her way home from leading a group to Egypt. She had a day between flights and I took the train to New York where we spent a few hours that could easily have been days. One of those kind of meetings, like lost sisters.

This trip has been a dream of mine for over fifteen years, and I am so happy it is finally coming together. My love of sacred places, of the Goddess in the landscape and in myth, in the meeting place between nature and story, has infomed so much of my work. My book The Body of the Goddess is about sacred journeys and mysteries, but these subjects also infuse the whole Shining Tribe Tarot deck, and they appear in my novels, especially Godmother Night, a book based on fairy tales.

It's funny, I cannot say exactly when the Greek Goddesses (and some Gods, especially Hermes) became so important to me. Perhaps it was when I discovered their ancient roots beyond the kind of sitcom images that have come down to us in the standard books of mythology we read as children. Artemis, for example. In the stories commonly read she appears as a sort of tomboy Moon Goddess, wandering the woods with her bow and arrow, a minor figure in the Greek pantheon compared to her brother Apollo or Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom, and protector of Athens. Yet Artemis is very old, so old no one really knows the origin of her name. Though she spurns men, and certainly marriage, she is the protector of women in childbirth. And she can be seen in the landscape. There is a kind of mountain formation known as Winged Artemis, for like the Egyptian Isis, or the Babylonian Ishtar, or the Hebrew Shekhinah, Artemis was often pictured as having outstretched wings. The landscape form is simple, it is two mountain peaks with a third mountain, or simply a hill, in the middle (often in front of the other two), so that the two peaks look like unfurled wings. Once you see this, and really bring it into yourself, really feel the physical presence of the Goddess in the landscape, you can see it, feel it, so clearly in so many places. Almost the best example I know occurs when you take the train down the Hudson River to New York. There is a place south of the city of Beacon where you can look across the river at the Catskills, and see mountains that look like wings unfolding in a series of steps.

To be in Greece, where the figures of myth emerged thousands of years ago, where they still seem a living presence, produces a sense of opening and transformation.

This trip will be about "The Earth, the Temples, and the Gods," to quote the title of the book by Vincent Scully that first made me aware of the sacred power of the landscape.

But it also will be about a particular story and a nine day ritual that was the most important spiritual event of the ancient world for thousands of years. The story is that of the Goddess Persephone, who as an innocent maiden is kidnapped by Death to be his bride, and yet returns not as a victim but as the great and powerful Queen of the Dead, giver of new life to her initiates. The event is the celebration of that new life, the Greater Mysteries.

To follow this ritual, to become modern Mystai (the word for those who took part in the nine day ceremony), we will follow the story from Athens (where the Mystai set out, under the cry "Mystai! To the sea!") to Delphi, magnificent site of the world's most famous oracle, to Epidaurus, stunning temple of healing and dreams, to Eleusis, site of the Mysteries themselves, and then to Crete, site of a civilization older than the Greeks, and quite probably the origin of the rites. There was a saying in the ancient world about the Mysteries: what is done secretly in Eleusis was done in the open in Crete.

Obviously I could say a lot more about this trip, and what the Greek Goddesses and Gods mean to me personally. At some point, I want to answer that tricky question "What's a nice Jewish girl like you doing in a myth like this?"

But for now I'll end with a Tarot card, pulled at random from the Shining Tribe, the deck that is so connected to the Mysteries. The card I got was the Eight of Rivers. Fittingly (my students tell me that whatever card I get I always respond "Oh! Perfect!") this picture shows a group of people in ritual costumes, dancing together. Like the Mystai traveling from Athens to Eleusis, they have left something behind, an old life perhaps, an old way of being, or simply, for a time, their normal consciousness, to enter the world of myth, to travel physically into the landscape of stories.

Mystai! To the sea!

starting out

This is something new for me, computer funtional illiterate that I am.  My hope is to do this to talk about what's going on with me, what's coming up (right now the big things are my annual Omega Institute weeklong class with Mary K. Greer, a monthlong art show at Omega, and my trip to Greece in October), and also just to share ideas and experiences. 

Subjects here may range from Tarot, to fiction, the teaching of writing, sacred texts, fun books and cool movies, travel, music, and anything else.  These are the kinds of things I can't do on the web site.  Well, truth is, I can't do much of anything on the web site without someone else helping, but even if I could, well, you get the idea. 

Maybe next time I will write something about my favorite books.  Or the relationship of slavery to the Ten Commandments.  Or weird Jewish myths.  Like the Yemeni story where Eve has the Devil's baby –the Devil is called Samael in Jewish tradition–and then she and Adam kill the baby and eat it, and when Samael comes and asks where her baby is, Adam and Eve say "Baby?  What baby?  Did you see a baby?" until the child calls out from their bodies, and Samael says "Because you have taken my son into your hearts he will remain there forever, and the hearts of your children, and your children's children."

Or maybe I will talk about The See of Logos, the set of surreal fortune-telling cards I'm doing with the amazing artists of Magic Realist Press (creators of The Tarot of Prague, and the Fairytale Tarot).  Or the short story collection I'm doing for Magic Realist, and perhaps what it's like to read work in progress to a writing group (we meet once a week and share our work–if you're a new writer, or experienced–I've published 28 books–a writing group is a great help).

Or maybe just Spring in the Hudson Valley, and walking with Wonder Girl, my sweet dog.  As you can see, there are lots of possibilities.