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?

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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.

Book done!

There is nothing quite like the feeling of finishing a book.  You never know for sure if it’s going to work, at least if you don’t write to a safe formula.

At a couple of points I even considered dropping the last story. happily I didn’t because I think it turned out well, not just for itself, but as a way to tie together previous threads.

And now the book is done and off to the publisher, Magic Realist Press.

Here’s the current working title:
THE TAROT OF PERFECTION: EIGHT STORIES

Over the next few week I hope to post a few entries here, on subjects that have come to mind these past days while I was focusing on the book.

For now I thought it would be interesting to put in a passage I ended up having to cut from the final story. That tale, called “Master Matyas,” concerns a boy who becomes a magician because he wants to fly.

He apprentices himself to a mysterious woman named Veil, whom he assumes can tell him the secret of flying if only she will give in to his demands.

The omitted passage comes from a moment when Matyas demands the secret. Here it is:

Matyas said, “I want to fly. I was born for it.”

“No one knows why he was born. Haven’t I taught you that? What is the basis of a magician’s strength?”

“His ignorance.” He closed his eyes briefly and he remembered when she took him to the roof of the tower and they looked Above and Below, where all color vanished into light and into darkness, one as unknowable as the other. He quoted her now. “Knowing ignorance is strength.”

“Exactly.”

“But what of the other part? ‘Ignoring knowledge is sickness.’ There are things that can be known and they should not be ignored. I am sick of sickness. I want what I want.”

“There are three levels of knowledge,” Veil said, “and three levels of sickness and three levels of ignorance. Can you really be sick of sickness if you have not passed through all the levels of knowledge?”

These statements, “Knowing ignorance is strength” and “Ignoring knowledge is sickness,” come from part 71 of the Tao Te Ching, as translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English.

I have pondered it many times, and written about it, in particular as two ways of doing Tarot, the way of Ignorance–reacting directly to the pictures–and the way of Knowledge–learning the traditional meanings.

The chapter goes on to say

If one is sick of sickness one is not sick.
The sage is not sick because he is sick of sickness.
Therefore he is not sick.

When I wrote my own passage above, it seemed to me that the idea of three levels of Ignorance, and three levels of Knowledge, and three levels of sickness, came as a purely intuitive leap. Now it strikes me that the lines above imply the idea of three levels of being not sick. This is something to ponder.

Hopefully I will write more about it here later.

Thought Form

This is my first political comment. When I started this i thought how one of the areas I might want to get into would be politics, or rather punditry. Punditry has long been one of my fantasy careers, along with astronomer, architect, archaeologist, sorceress, political operative (if they ever have a reality tv show for running a presidential campaign, I’d sign up), and rabbi.

Apparently, I’m not alone in fantasizing having my own political column. On a recent radio show about the media the panel mentioned how editors are constantly receiving applications for columnist.

So, since I have about 5 times as many writing projects in my head as I have time to do, I probably will keep my political observations down to an occasional commentary right here.

This first one is odd, in that I might call it an esoteric political commentary (how many of those have you seen in The New York Times?). It was occasioned by a discussion on Exoteric-L, my favorite hangout listserve. Exo, as we call it, was started by refugees from a SERIOUS Tarot discussion group, where we tended to get in trouble for not staying on topic.

In the way of such things, Exo has gotten political lately.  Recently, my friend Zoe Matoff referred to the United States as  a “thought form.”

At first I thought of a flippant reply.  Then I thought of simply asking what thought form she thought the U.S. represented.  From that came a long reply, which I give below, with some editing.

What is the United States a thought form of?

Is The United States a collective form of all its inhabitants, or just some?

It often strikes me that conservatives tend to win because they believe that the United States belongs to them, they own the thought form. When Clinton got elected part of the uproar was an affront to what had come to seem a natural law. Liberals tend to feel alienated, tend at a subconscious level to agree that they are on the outside, and so they somehow expect to lose.  They do not believe that they own the thought form.
On the other hand, the United States has enjoyed a special status in much of the world by promoting the idea that it is a (or maybe the) thought form of Liberty.

Some continue to defend whatever the U.S. does primarily on this basis. This is the doctrine of American “exceptionalism”–when we invade countries we do so for good and noble purposes. We do good by definition, not evidence.

Others are outraged that the U.S. seemingly has betrayed the ideal that supposedly produced it.  As the thought form of Liberty, the United States should be better than the rest of the world.

Personally, I believe that the United States was built on 3 pillars, of which the most prominent is undercut by the other two, but also hides the other two.

That prominent one is personal liberty and the chance for individual people to create their own destiny. The other two are slavery and genocide (whether deliberate or de facto). To some extent, the first is a thought form while the other two are economic and political realities. For many, the thought form has the most power.

My rabbi, Jonathan Kligler of the Woodstock Jewish Congregation, once suggested to me that sometimes a document states an ideal that is actually beyond the reality of its people, even the person or people stating it. But then the ideal takes on its own power and people strive to make it real.  This is part of what we mean by a thought form.

He gave as an example the Declaration of Independence. Its principal author, Thomas Jefferson, certainly did not live up to the statement “All men are created equal.” Clearly, he did not actually believe this.  If he did, owning other human beings would have been impossible, not simply uncomfortable.

And yet, once the statement had been made it became something that the country has tried, intermittently, to strive towards. Thought forms can have that kind of power.  To a large extent, the Civil Rights movement gained its moral authority from the thought form created by “All men are created equal.”

But there is a shadow side to such forms. People come to believe that it is reality, and therefore any negative facts are either trivial, or do not even exist.

They believe that America and liberty and virtue are all the same thing, and anything that America does must be by definition good and noble and idealistic. Instead of striving to make the thought form real we assume it already is.  A lot of terrible things can happen when a thought form displaces reality.

Back home again in Rhinebeckana

That’s Hoagie Carmichael singing in the background.

In the last 3 weeks or so I’ve been to the Omega Institute to teach Tarot, Goddard College to teach creative writing, and Readercon, a science fiction convention near Boston, where I sat on panels to discuss the work of Jorge Luis Borges and metafiction (fiction that plays with the idea of fiction, that allows the characters to talk to the readers and so on). Now I’m home and hoping to finish my book of fairy tales/ghost stories/mystical tales, Simon Wisdom.

On a recent post here I described the nearly universal experience of writers that something is moving through them when the writing is going well. The Greeks called this the Muse. For the last story in the collection, Master Matyas, the Muse has been flirting with me, showing up in all her dazzle, filling me with ideas, then dancing out of reach when I try to make the ideas work together.

Teased by the Muse. Part of the problem is that the story did not begin with a plot idea, or a what-if, or a character, but simply a name. I collect fountain pens. I use them for letters, and paying bills, and also for stories, every one of which is written by hand, one thousand words a day in large unlined journals.

One of my favorite vintage makers is Wahl, a company that fluorished in the first half of the 20th century but did not survive the onslaught of the ballpoint pen. Their pens are elegant, graceful, with amazing nibs. Some time ago, maybe a year, I bought a gold Wahl pen from an online dealer. The online description gave a glowing account of its quality, but then warned the buyer–there was a name engraved on it.

Now, you need to know that among serious collectors (not me–I’m what’s called an accumulator or a user) the more unused a pen the better. If they can prove the pen has never been taken from the box (let alone been violated by ink),

they can charge much more for it. A pen with a name on it–well, that’s a disaster. Which is nice for me, since not only are engraved pens cheaper but I find them more interesting. I like to buy them without asking what name is on them and then see what turns up. One–a smaller Wahl in a black and gold mosaic–showed up with the name Louise Pollock. It made me wonder if my Uncle Lou might have had a secret life!

When the gold Wahl arrived, the name on it was M. Matyas. I thought of a story about a magician named Master Matyas, and then, as I stared at the name and held the pen, the Muse whispered in my ear a kind of prophecy: “Master Matyas steals the soul of his brother.”

And that was the beginning.  The story has progressed since then, with a good opening, a good closing, and some really nice middle bits.  But the tying together–  Mama Muse is being coy about that part.

That’s it for now.  I’m glad to be back doing this, and hope to keep up with it better.  And respond to people’s very interesting comments (I’ll get the hang of this blog thing sooner or later).

Greek Itinerary

Hello, everyone.  I've been away at Omega with Mary Greer, and a wonderful group of people, from as far away as India and Australia.  What a terrific week.

And now I'm off to Goddard College for the MFA Writing residency.  When I return I will respond to everyone's wonderful comments of the last couple of weeks (sorry, folks, for the delay). 

But meanwhile, I wanted to pass on the exciting news that the itinerary for the Greek trip is set.  I'm so excited.  Here it is, with my notes of what each of these places mean.  And I will be posting more about Greece, and especially the special qualities of the Goddesses and Gods.

For more information on the trip see my web site, or Nicki Scully's great site http://www.shamanicjourneys.com.

 GREECE!  OCTOBER 1-12

Sunday, October 1 — Depart from your gateway city to Athens, Greece.

Monday, October 2 — Arrive at Athens airport and proceed to our hotel. As folks are arriving from different locations at different times, we will try to meet for tea in the evening, after dinner, and have our welcome meal at lunch tomorrow. (This is flexible according to final arrival times.)

Whenever we have it, the first formal meal at the start of a sacred journey is more than a get-together (though it certainly is that as well). It creates a bond and a shared purpose in the joy of a feast. It will be wonderful to meet everyone!

Tuesday, October 3 — Morning visit to the Acropolis. The Acropolis is probably the most famous monument in all of Greece. It is the fitting place to begin our journey, for not only is this magnificent site sacred to Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, it also was the starting out place for the Mystai, the seekers who experienced the Mysteries.
After lunch and walk around Athens, we will take a late afternoon bus to Delphi for overnight.

Wednesday, October 4 — For the ancients, Delphi was the Center of the World. Set among stunning mountains, it was the place of the great Oracle. Just below Delphi, the temple of Athena Pronea allows us to continue the energy begun in Athens as we bring ourselves to the place of purification (the Castalia fountain) and then Delphi itself, where we will seek our own oracular truth in preparation for the Mysteries. Delphi was sacred to Apollo, whose shrine the Mystai passed as they left Athens. It also is a powerful opening to Gaia, the Earth, oldest of all the Deities. We will invoke Gaia and join ourselves to the Earth at the great boulder that has represented Her since before the temples.

Thursday, October 5 — Parnassus is the home of the Muses, the Goddesses who bring inspiration and beauty. Since the Mt. Parnassus site is closed to the public, we will have a rare and special opportunity when we visit and perform ritual there. In the afternoon we will visit the Delphi museum.

Friday, October 6 —Leave Delphi for Epidaurus. We will stop at Andirion down hill to Galaxidi (short stop) and cross the bridge to Rion as we drive to Nafplion, a beautiful seafront town. Mycenae is rugged and powerful, with roots going back to one of the oldest civilizations in Greece. It is a journey back in time, as we pass through the Lion Gate and climb the hill to a vision of Winged Artemis, the Goddess of the Mountains looming over the site. After some free time to walk around this beautiful town, we will overnight in Nafplion.

Saturday, October 7 — Morning Leave for Epidaurus and visit the site of the Aesklipion and the famous theatre of Epidaurus, the temple of dreams and healing. Here we will ask for our own healing and dream power, using oracular work to enter into and understand our own dreams. We also will visit the shrine to Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, for the ancients understood that there is no healing without Aphrodite.

After Epidaurus we make our sacred way to Eleusis, the site of the Great Mysteries themselves. Eleusis is surrounded by a modern industrial city, and most of the buildings were broken in 400 C.E., when Alaric sacked the Sacred Precinct. When we are there, however, all of the modern world falls away and we are transported back to the ancient rites, held at Eleusis for 2000 years. Here we will show the sacred objects, do a ritual to Demeter, and tell what is possibly the most powerful of all Greek myths, the Abduction of Persephone. We will literally breathe into ourselves the spirits of the Ancient Goddesses.

We will stop where dinner is available before boarding our overnight ferry which departs for Heraklion, Crete, at about 9:00PM. On the ferry we will have twin cabins inside. This may seem like simple transportation but it is much more. Crete was a magnificent civilization that predated Greece itself by a thousand years. This journey over the water, in the dark of night, is a journey back in time.

Sunday, October 8 — Arrive at Heraklion at around 5.30AM, and be met and transferred to the hotel Marina beach and bungalows, about 20Kms from Heraklion. After breakfast we will leave for Skotino cave. This cave is closed to the public, and requires special permits.

Evidence shows that much of worship of the Goddess in Crete was done in caves, not temples. Crete actually was the last flowering of the great Neolithic Goddess civilization, possibly the most creative period in human history. The sacred cave of Skotino is the perfect place to begin our experience and to continue to honor Persephone in the Underworld.

In the afternoon we will visit the Heraklion Museum, which contains wonderful objects that help bring the ancient culture alive. We will see the great variety of double axes, which were not weapons but instead votive objects, sacred to the Goddess. The double axe represents both the waxing and waning Moon, and the butterfly (our word "psyche" is a Greek word that means both "soul" and "butterfly").

Dinner is included upon our return to our hotel.

Monday, October 9 — In the morning we will have an extensive visit of the Knossos Palace. Greatly restored, Knossos shows us the splendor of the pre-Greek "Minoan" civilization. We will learn of the special qualities of this site, the true meaning of the famous Labyrinth, and learn to orient ourselves to the landscape.

After lunch we will drive back to the hotel, or those who wish could stay in town. Town shoppers and explorers can pick up a taxi to the hotel (not very expensive). Buffet dinner at the hotel.

This evening we will prepare for and begin a special ritual along the beach. This is a special ritual to Aphrodite for emotional and sexual healing, combined with an Eleusinian ritual of “searching” for the Goddess. We will complete the ritual the following morning at dawn.

Tuesday, October 10 — After our early morning ritual, Rachel and Nicki will work together to offer a unique and spontaneous day. Among other things, Rachel will offer some Oracular exercises with Tarot. She has some other surprises up her sleeve, which will be worked out in the moment and according to available terrain.

Wednesday, October 11 — 8.30AM leave the hotel for Festos for a gracious visit to this important site. Even more than Knossos, Festos takes us directly into the heart of the ancient power of the Goddess in the land. With the horned mountain of Ida looming over us, and other powerful features the Cretans understood as the Goddess's physical body, we will join with the landscape as a living presence. Here we will follow the winding path of the labyrinth into the heart of the sacred chamber.

Lunch will be on your own in Heraklion with time for a bit of last minute shopping. After lunch, we will return to the land one land last time to celebrate the end of the Mysteries! Here we will experience the return of Persephone from the Underworld, the reunion with her mother, Demeter, and the rebirth of nature and our own spirits. We will give the ancient cry of renewal and celebration, "Hye! Kye!" Rain! Conceive! as the Earth itself comes back to life.

We then will return for our closing buffet dinner, the feast of celebration that properly ends any true life-changing ritual.

Thursday, October 12 —Transfer to the airport in time for flight to Athens, to connect with your flight back home.

Something in the way She moves through me

It is almost a universal experience of writers, painters, and other artists–and, I suspect craftsmen, and cooks, and anyone who creates–that when the work is going well the experience is not "I am doing this," but "something is doing this through me."

Like others, I had experienced this for myself, but vaguely thought of it as special, maybe reserved only for those who are "serious" about their writing. I found out how pervasive it is through an odd source, the late and largely unlamented magazine for mercernaries, Soldier Of Fortune.

During the 80s, in the period I lived in Amsterdam, I worked in a wonderful American bookstore, American Discount Center. The owners believed in selling anything someone wanted to read, from feminist manifestoes to porn, from gay books to Fundamentalism.

One evening I had little to do and so picked up SOF. They had an interview with a popular writer, someone who turned out book after book in a violent action series, with titles like Exterminator 32. In the the interview the writer said something like "When the writing is going well, it's like I'm not doing it, something is doing it through me."

If this sense of artistic creation is nearly universal why do we insist that I have written my book? Is the "I" who works on a book really only a channel for an energy?

Then what is the energy? Does it have a purpose? That is, does it want to tell a particular story and find me for that need? Or is it just available for any story, and I get to choose what tale will receive the energy? For writers choose the subject, which is often their own life history.

In older cultures, people seemed clear that a divine figure was telling the story. The Iliad begins "Sing in me, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles… " The energy that passes through the poet was personified as a Muse (nine of them, actually).

And yet, at the same time, Greek tradition attributed that poem, and its companion piece, The Odyssey, to an individual poet, a legendary blind singer named Homer.

The more important the text, the more extreme are the two positions. The founding text of Judaism is The Torah. Jews (and Christians) refer to it as The Five Books of Moses, on the absolute belief that a founding figure named Moses, for whom there is no historical evidence outside the Torah, wrote it all down.

At the same time, they insist that God composed every word, with Moses actually a sort of secretary. If we take this literally (as Orthodox Jews and Fundamentalist Christians do), Moses is writing down things that will happen after the event of writing them.

That is, the giving of the Torah–the dictation–happens about a third of the way through the story, in book 2, Exodus (followed by Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy).

The later part of the story includes serious mistakes that Moses will make. If he was writing them down before they happened, in the book that declares free will for humans, wouldn't he know not to do them?

This is a kind of time paradox. If Moses learns, from God's dictation, of a mistake he will make then he can avoid doing it. But if he avoids doing it, then it won't appear in the text. If it doesn't appear in the text, then Moses won't know to be careful, and he will do it, so that it should be in the text.

This mental merry-go-round arises from taking literally the two contradictory claims, that a person who is part of the story is writing the book, and at the same time God is really writing it, so every word is infallibly true.

Today, we have the cult of the individual creator. Despite the fact that almost all writers and artists say that "something" is moving through them we still insist that I own the book I write.

We prize originality. Instead of telling cultural stories, as "Homer" or anonymous poets and village story tellers did for millenia, modern writers not only claim authorship for their work, they write about their own lives.

Maybe modern writers should begin their work "Sing in me, Muse, of the pain of my childhood."

So what, then, is the relationship between the writer, her life that is being described, and that energy that moves through her and makes the actual writing possible?

Is the energy–the Muse–a kind of delusion? Is it just the subconscious–safely a part of me–that somehow just feels like something outside of me?

But what is a subconscious? You can't see it or touch it, you don't find it in the brain when you do an autopsy. I suspect that terms like subconscious, or higher self, are simply modern terms for old names we no longer feel comfortable saying, such as muse, angel, daimon. But substituting "subconscious" for "muse" doesn't actually tell us anything about what it is.

My friend, Callan, brilliant essayist and blogger (callan.wordpress.com), writes the following:

"Writing is like any choice, it lets us make ourselves visible in the world. We can no more see our true selves than we can see the back of our head. We need either mirrors or models, and when we make art we expose ourselves."

I love this. i will quote it to my writing students. And yet how does it happen? Who is revealing these things? Am I just tricking myself, getting past my filters?

Or should we take seriously that powerful sense that writing opens the way for something else to move through us? I will leave the last comment to Callan:

"I am a piece of her, a facet of God, connected & separate, unique & the same.

And that's what we feel when we tap into those inner voices."

Friends and Bloggers

This is all new to me.

My dear and brilliant friend, Callan, introduced me to this wonderful service, and helped me set up an account.  She has been making suggestions, and adding links.  Her own blog, callan.wordpress.com, is a model of honest (& painful) insight.

Now, as i have begun to post a few ideas, others have begun to come forward, and I am very honored to have their comments.  Alex Chee very kindly mentioned me on his blog. 

Alex is the author of Edinburgh, a novel about healing from child molestation that is simultaneously very sad and very passionate. It's one of those first novels that leaves many of us oldtimers figuring it's time to put away the pen and get a job as a dishwasher.

I met Alex teaching at Goddard College.  It has been a pleasure of the job getting to know him.  He is warm and brilliant, with eclectic tastes (like me, he likes comics and fantasy novels as well as more "serious" literature).  The first semester we were there together he passed around some great photos of his wild younger days (I'll leave him to describe them).

The next semester was my Alex Chee residency.  At Goddard we do most of the work of the semester from home, through the mail, but we all meet at the beginning of the semester on the campus in Vermont.

That semester Alex and I were on the panel to open the residency with a keynote address (if I ever do my book on writing–i already have the title, Fearless–I will include some of the keynotes I've given).  We then went on to do a "publishing panel" together.

At the end of the week I was scheduled to give the commencement address for the graduating class.  I was unsure between two topics and I asked Alex.  He said "why don't you read the cards?"  So I did, and the images spoke powerfully to the subject.  I'm sure some of the spouses or parents of graduates were thinking "They have a Tarot reader give the commencement address?"

Alex has moved on to a real teaching job, and all of us at Goddard will miss him. 

I plan to do a  post on Goddard, and its amazing program for the Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing.  For now, I just want to say that if you are serious about writing, and want to challenge yourself, and even more, transform yourself, think about coming to  Goddard, http://www.goddard.edu/academic/MFA_Writing.html.  It's an amazing experience.

One final comment.  I will be at Omega for a week starting two days from now, so things might be dormant here for awhile.  But I look forward to coming back, and especially look forward to your comments. 

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.