her story

Honouring the Goddess in my dream.

The veneration is because without her there is no story.

Then within the story she becomes the main antagonist.

You have created quite the story.

It certainly is unexpected.

The expectation is you would create a grand story exalting the Goddess because she is the reason for creation.

She is the divine feminine mother who births the story and all subsequent life forms.

Nothing is possible without the Goddess.

You are referred to as a misogynist for your narrative.

I was given the pen and the ability to make the gifts of the Goddess manifest.

I could write a simple and dull story of her greatness and how she is worshipped.

Perhaps I would create a utopia where everyone has equal access to her fruits and lives a happy and wondrous life.

That was the expectation when I was tasked with writing her story.

The accusation becomes that I am writing his story.

I do protest and claim narrative sovereignty.

I am indeed writing her story in the twisted way that reveals my story.

This is my story about her story.

Call me names if you must; however, the nature of the story remains true to the idea of the Goddess' creation.

She is the one responsible for all life.

She is the most powerful.

She is to be feared.

She is to be honoured.

My story encapsulates all these necessities.

You created a monster.

Leviathan.

Tiamat.

That's her.

A man must subdue her in order for history to commence.

Why?

Fertile predation.

She will constantly consume and create.

What does she consume?

Men.

Why?

To create life.

How does she do it?

She drains you of your life force.

She cloaks it in neat little turns of phrases such as "men are providers".

It's superior to saying a man has the life force necessary to spark the generation of life within a woman and she will do what is necessary to take it.

You give them what they want.

In nature they just take it.

We humans are a little more civilized when it comes to the mating game.

The female praying mantis takes what it wants and then kills the male.

Yes, that's the template.

Your outlook is very dark.

I'm a realist.

A realist easily becomes a misogynist.

Why is that?

Women are monsters.

Look at their hands.

They have scaly claws.

They paint their nails to try and hide it.

I'd say you are very funny except what you're writing is unacceptable in today's society.

I know, that's how they get away with it.

You can't talk about it.

Well, you can, but you are classified as a misogynist and dismissed.

Do you have proof?

Of what?

That they are monsters.

Sure, let's go back to the beginning of recorded time.

What do you find?

In the Old Testament Book of Genesis, God enacts the story of creation by first subduing the Goddess.

How do you get that out of the opening?

Well, here are the verses from the New International Version:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

Okay, it says God made up a place and put himself in it.

Correct.

How does that implicate the Goddess?

Read it.

What does it say?

The place he made up was formless, empty, dark, deep, and chaotic.

Right.

In your study of mythology what is that the symbol of?

The feminine divine.

They are dark and chaotic.

Well, why didn't the author of Genesis just write that God subdued the Goddess and created the world?

Subtlety, my friend.

A rewrite would be God the author of creation wrote this story about the Goddess, but after putting pen to paper he immediately had to contain her because she would devour the page.

Why?

She's a monster.

Got it.

In the Babylonian myth of Enuma Elish, Marduk subdues the female monster Tiamat.

That myth doesn't mess around.

Yes, order must subdue chaos or we have no story.

If you want a religion that is more straightforward then there you go.

Marduk divides Tiamat's body in half which creates heaven and earth.

Her tears create the waters.

Away we go.

Genesis without the metaphors.

You identify with Marduk more than Yahweh.

Yeah, I don't beat around the bush.

I see the myths come alive and interpret them in my own way.

It's direct.

The reason God has the claim to the throne of the most high is because he can subdue the Goddess.

His greatness is tied to his ability to contain her just as with Marduk.

The Goddess appears in the Old Testament first as Leviathan.

Why do you think there's a whole priesthood dedicated to keeping her asleep?

You mean the Levite priesthood?

Yeah.

They are obviously given that name because their role is to keep the monster down.

Leviathan priesthood.

Interesting read.

In order to maintain his role, God must keep the Goddess away.

Asleep.

Why?

She is more powerful than him.

As long as she remains enchanted or suppressed by the priesthood then she is contained.

How do they do that?

They keep her children, the Israelites, faithful to God and his plethora of commandments and rules.

The sheer responsibility of following those rules is enough to suppress the divine feminine impulse.

Women are treated as second class citizens and given requirements of purity and cleanliness.

If they are menstruating and closer to their true nature, they are exiled from the group until it is over, and then they must purify themselves before returning to the community.

So, this is proof that the nature of women is monstrous?

Yes, it's a story.

There's myth and a backstory.

There is the reflection of her in nature and biology.

And there is my own lived experience.

Do you think that is enough to make this sweeping claim?

Sure.

Don't you think you are being too literal or harsh?

It's my story.

My story does honour her.

You have a definite way with words.

Was a fairy tale romance to be expected of me?

I think that's the expectation.

My body of work is full of twisted tales, what was expected?

Compliance and a blockbuster for the Goddess.

She got her blockbuster.

It's reality.

Yes, but she's a monster.

Yeah, but she wanted to be recognized for her greatness.

I did it.

The Great Goddess is the reason for the story.

She's it.

The main character.

All goes through her.

Birth and death.

What am I missing?

Her reputation.

Yeah, that needs rehabilitation.

Can you write that?

Change comes from within.

Oh boy.

it's all perfect

I stand before my Mesa and know it's all perfect. My overarching desire to be the eternal student is fulfilled when I listen to the Great Goddess and the Great God, all the while following the way of Ma'at. Ma'at is the ancient Egyptian expression of the natural order of things which flows. Ma'at is Tao. We perceive order as cyclical and our human minds rail against forces which impede this balanced procession. The ancient Egyptians were no different and denigrated those who would interrupt the march of eternity. The Pharaoh was responsible for upholding Ma'at - this was their chief concern. I honour what it is they believed as it was national in scope. What I mean is that they believed Egypt should always be the dominant power as part of Ma'at, and any interruptions to the flow would lead to upending the world order. In my thinking this was not true to the spirit of Ma'at. Natural order is not orderly at all, instead, within order is found a bedrock of chaos.

The chief culprit of disorder in ancient Egypt eventually was assigned to the god Set. Study of ancient Egypt reveals this was not always so as originally Set upheld Ma'at while in the sun-boat of Re. Chaos was the domain of the serpent Apophis who plotted to disrupt the voyage of the sun through the gates of the night. It was Set at the prow of the sun-boat who fended off the advances of nightfall and subsequent disorder.

Conversely, the power of Set as a separator was said to cause celestial eclipses which portend tough times ahead. Set was the god of the foreign invaders. When attempts at appeasement failed, the later dynastic rulers of Egypt along with the populace, tried to erase his memory from the monuments, not speak his name, substitute Thoth as a placeholder who ties the lands of Egypt together with Horus, and finally chased Set out of the land.

I suffer from lone wolf syndrome and what I mean is I take in knowledge, and I compare it to my own experience. I don't buy into anyone's system, chiefly matters of the divine. I respect everyone's path and choices; however, I won't be worshipping your god. I'll be curious about it and ask questions, but I've got my own treasure trove of understanding going on which has been accumulated over multiple forays into altered consciousness combined with an inordinate amount of study. With much conceit I will say that in my world I'm the number one theologian. I sit in silent arrogance.

A dependable world of order offers little fulfillment. A novel which lacks novelty is not a good read. A life which lacks challenge and adversity is boring. Drama makes the life journey compelling. Sure, we want to take a break from the rollercoaster, find peace, and plant our gardens, but eventually the siren call of adventure calls out to us. My life has been harangued by desires and wanting to fulfill these longings. The call to adventure has brought great upset into my orderly life. What I want I can get, and I don't factor in the consequences. The result of desire fulfillment moves the drama along and introduced is pain and suffering as an outcome. It's cyclical and passes, though the scars remain. Once your ship sails on through the tumult, the grace of understanding opens up to you. The Setian voice within whispers to me, "You wanted to suffer because this is the catalyst for what you really desire." If you want complete understanding of consciousness, suffering is going to be your guide. I'm not saying I'll ever figure this puzzle out 100%, but I'll go as far as I can before my game ends.

The divine wears many disguises and an understanding of this helps you when you encounter their many manifestations as part of the incredible consciousness journey. I used to get scared of the costume, now I smile. The Great God comes to me in a celebration of diversity. I alter my consciousness just a little and I connect. How will he teach me this time? I like it when he comes as Dionysos. I can connect my unapproved thoughts and feelings to God - how freeing is that? All the things you were told by society that are unwelcome as a pious and moral being in service to the divine are waved away with the wink of an eye. God gets horny? Cool. God is the alpha dragon and seeing the divine within allows you to merge with your latent divinity and you can guess at the result. Don't mess with me. Today he is Christ, teaching feminine principles of love and unity. If I can keep him externalized, he is my salvation. When you discover who you are it's a game changer, but you still play the game while others remain asleep and ignorant.

The Great Goddess shows me a love which I have never experienced and then she allows me to partake in an eroticism so charged with lust I lose my mind. As I fall for her deeply, she flips, and Medusa strikes. In ancient Egypt, her iconography is the cobra. I took my time figuring that one out. I was prepared for the poison so though it hurts and causes damage, I make it through the suffering and live to tell the tale. Pleasure and pain intertwine as she readies for the next lesson. It is in the suffering inculcated by the darkness of the feminine that I learn the most. When the poison clears, I have clarity on what caused the serpent to strike. The path of eternity teaches me these lessons she wants me to learn. The feminine is working through her own hurt and when we both find a path towards reconciliation, we will recombine into one. Is this in the cards for this story? Will there be a happy ending? I don't know. Perhaps a sequel will need to be written with an open-ended climax. Uncertainty surrounds our story, and thus the curtain will not fall on this production yet.

I'll keep writing. Life is a book that must be written as it goes, and it needs readers and actors. That's where we all come in. We all participate in the great drama of Dionysos. We read his divine poetry making this play come alive. I look forward to feasting, revelry, and much joy as we recount this tale and honour the eternal fairy tale. Pain and pleasure. Tragedy and triumph.

Thank you, Goddess and God.

liber pater

I could proffer you some advice if you are to go off in search of meaning, answers, enlightenment, a spiritual journey, or whatever you wish to call it; the guidance would be straightforward: your first stop along the path is liberation. Free yourself from culture and expectations; plus the old story and baggage you haul around. Like countless others, I didn’t do that and subsequently had to re-trace my steps and work to become free. I made my climb long and difficult due to a constant struggle with letting go of expectations, image, and self. All these chains and traits are the product of human social constructs that bind you to their mental prison.

 

From a wider perspective, you can see the chaos and breakdown happening within society, can’t you? As humans, we long to be free but don’t know how to go about getting liberated. In the mythic Greek literature, Dionysos is an outsider and he arrives from a foreign land. He’s an enemy of order and is embraced by the malcontents and those in opposition to structured society. He is scorned, derided, and chased away. Dionysos’ arrival on the scene gives you permission to be free. Everything becomes fluid. Where does hermaphroditism, gender identity issues, and the questioning of the social fabric we hold dear come from? Everyone is puzzled. Ask the Greeks - they intimately knew a god named Dionysos the libertine who would always pay a visit, especially when order became oppressive. Do you fight it or just observe? Are you concerned or smiling?

 

Dionysos is always coming to destroy order, whether that be society or your nice and tight life you have crafted. We men build and champion order and like a good Jenga game, the structure eventually gets knocked down. It’s the natural flow of the universal vibration common to all and we get pulled along. Culturally and individually, we face the dissolution of all we try so hard to maintain. It’s constant and really hard work protecting and ordering order. Seriously, you have to work at it or literally go to work, earn money, and use that money to keep your life together. Doing nothing leads to collapse. Funny how that works. I sat with that truth and finally realized I’m motivated to go to work because I’m addicted to order. I know I am because when I overdose on conformity and order, Dionysos always returns and questions me. I subsequently follow him on some kind of adventure to escape this hell I create for myself, all emanating from a proclivity towards order. Hell is spawned because of my pathological need to maintain order.

 

My life has been a struggle between these two polarities. I am constantly frustrated that I can’t maintain my facade and always drift back into some sort of hedonism or chasing of a thrill. I define it as a problem, unable to accept the flow. I’m pulled towards the liberation which I seek, yet I fight it and try to maintain order. I walked past a homeless person the other day and the voice inside me whispered, "he is free." I could not deny it. Think about that for a second. Freedom isn’t glamorous. As a society, we offer the dispossessed shelter and food which they accept but they don’t fall into the societal trap of having to earn a living and eventually go back out into the streets. Why don’t they want to play our game of social conformity? We can clean them up and get them a menial job. It’s mental illness we reassure ourselves, as we take great pains to not look into our own mirror of self because we might question our own sanity for the game we are playing. So, we try even harder to offer social services to invite the homeless back into our game. The plight of the homeless, unbeknownst to them, validates our life choices. We need them more than they need our handouts.

 

Ultimately, liberation involves dissolving all boundaries, letting go of attachments, and returning to the chaos always knocking at our door. You can taste liberation in this lifetime; I have and it’s sweet. I’m talking about being on a boat on the Amazon river forgetting about the worries of life and just being so goddamn high and in love. Being free allows you to finally exhale. I’ve learned it’s only the appetizer. To go all the way to Liber Pater involves dissolving the idea of who you are. Carlos Castaneda said erase personal history. Basically, kill your identity in order to be free. This expression brought me back to said boat ride in February in the grasp of Huachuma when Dionysos appeared in the clouds and he kept telling me this very same idea. Fuck me and my failure sometimes to listen to the plants.

 

On the boats heading off to the main Amazon river to visit the Murui Huitoto tribe I was so into the medicine and as high as the clouds. I was flooded with two sayings that summed up my bliss of forgetting who I was and how I was expected to act:

 

“Kill yourself in order to live.”

“The pious can go to hell.”

 

My intention revolved around learning now to stay in that high and loving state all the time. I sure got that answer and more all laid out for me. When I drank in the beauty of nature, of friendship, of the awareness of the wonderful world around me I was drunk in that state of bliss. When I engaged the mind at all it was clear that was the hell world. My thoughts went dark, I came down, I worried about the future, I wondered if I had the strength to complete this journey and so on. It was very unsettling. It was clear that it was a choice whether to live in hell or heaven and not even all that difficult a choice. Hey you! Give your mind a rest. The old “Be Here Now” choice; just live in awareness without spinning any thoughts or ideas.

 

I put this revelation off for a bit and here we are eight months later with the integration process challenging me and asking for a reconciliation with freedom and mastery. Castaneda writes about making yourself unavailable while erasing personal history. The reason for this line of thinking is primarily liberation. Having a history, means expectations of behaviour, and living a lie. Acquaintances and culture can manipulate you like a puppet because you don’t want to deviate from the identity you have created. If you have left nothing for these constructs to grasp onto then you can act independently. That’s one way through however for most of us our personal history is our life we have created. Sure at times we feel trapped but I would hazard to guess most of us don’t want to blow up our whole backstory and be left holding a big bag of nothing. That seems pretty extreme. It brings to mind the role of the Bodhisattva, a holy man who has seen through the game but re-enters into the game in order to help others see through it. It’s a noble call of service.

 

After seven years of plant medicine use, the information provided doesn’t upset me anymore. By this assertion I mean that when I first drank and met these archetypal spirits I was frightened and in awe of their presence as well as my newfound ability to lift the veil and peek into this obfuscated world. Now, I am able to listen and study the wisdom being offered. “Kill yourself in order to live.” Yeah it’s metaphor, don’t worry, I know that. My teacher has a twisted sense of humour. When I first drank plant medicines and he scared the shit out of me, he told me if I kept drinking the medicine and stayed on the path eventually I’d walk into the direction of an oncoming train and kill myself. I remember vividly that conversation with my shadow because he told me to stop drinking plant medicines, go home, and don’t ever come back. Live out your life, grow old, and don’t question existence. I left the jungle and he followed me home and harangued me; trying to put the final nail in the coffin so that I wouldn’t continue on this path. I did come back and I know my shadow now has a great deal of respect for me. I’m pretty sure he figured I was a weakling. Ha! I sure fooled him.

 

Seven years later, I can finally see what he originally meant by walking in front of a train and killing myself. It was metaphor as well, however at the time it was used to make me question this path I had embarked upon. I had to understand why I wanted to continue. I now sense he doesn’t readily accept students, as suggested by the fear induced and threats of death hurled my way. The adventure and chance at knowledge was too great to keep me away. Now here I am, standing on the train tracks. I understand what he was telling me. If you want to be free, you got to let the story go.

 

I see similar paths of earned respect with human teachers. For instance, my flesh and body teacher, don Howard, was very accepting to anyone who was sincere about walking this path. And I think he was genuinely surprised and happy when someone returned for another go around in the wringer of plant medicines. It’s very difficult and takes commitment but I remember just showing up again and I could feel the respect growing. There’s something divine about just showing up and facing the head wind of adversity, not knowing the outcome. Don Howard knew what it takes, what you are going to face, and have to choose. He let you progress at your own pace and had your back. I love that man.

 

How do I get liberated? It’s through mastering the self. That means all the attachments, desires, and pull of culture that call out to you are mastered. You become the King of Selfdom. You cannot ever defeat these challengers, that’s a tough one to learn, however you can rule them. After the continual frustration, you will learn this secret and that puts you on the path towards liberation. The only way to do this is to investigate the darkness within. Chasing the high will will never allow for a reconciliation with all.

 

There is a difference between liberation and enlightenment. Beginners in the world of spiritual seeking hear much of liberation and enlightenment. Spiritual enlightenment without liberation is still beholden to cultural expectations of religious experience. You know what I mean, don’t you? It all begins with being free. It’s the foundation upon which everything must rest. In order to love unconditionally, you have to begin from the tract of being free. Free of conditions. To become free you give up judgment. You give up conceptions of right and wrong. You give up morality. Free means free. Sounds crazy, right? Murder is immoral. Being free naturally extends to wanting others to be free. Being free would mean not imposing upon others. Murder is an act of imposing your will upon someone as a last resort because you couldn’t control them. Frustration on this spiritual path I have chosen could have been avoided if I would have went into the darkness of self to begin with and reconciled that part of me. The high would have been tempered with the low and I could have seen where I was at.

 

I have to admit though I wouldn’t change this journey for the world. Everything that has happened has been perfect. It has all contributed to my growth. Through these trials and frustrations, I have been pressured and forced to find answers. The natural inclination is to wave a spiritual wand and reach the highest highs without having to work for it. You know, take a pill or drink a cup of brew and find that elusive enlightenment. My difficult journey, on the other left hand, has been perfect.

divine lineage

The divine feminine and masculine come together in the centre of the grand Mesa at the axis mundi here in the symbolic expressed by the lanzon from Chavín de Huantar.

Brought together are the left and right hand paths of the feminine and masculine along with the lower and upper worlds of these energies. All is absorbed back into the representative of the Chavín god. Everything is reconciled into the centre. It is also expressed as the serpent and the jaguar. The serpent as the feminine creates the form and the jaguar as the masculine is the life force that roams this form. They are the two eternal energies that make up the sum total of all. The multi-dimensional reflection of the non-differentiated form is from these two. You can’t see one without two and centring yourself allows you to see one, two, and the many. The many collapses into the one just as the two through sexual union becomes an expression of the one.

Standing with this knowledge at the Mesa will eventually lead to understanding. We are conditioned to believe chaos is bad and can be demonstrated in expressions of madness and unpredictability. I think that’s true. Psychologically, we relegate the feminine to chaos and the striving of the masculine energy to order and reason. The great intellect of Jordan Peterson even wrote a book on this paradigm called “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” and in turn riled up the feminist class amongst us. Well, he is a master of controversy and is in turn misunderstood as we looked towards our developed prejudices and fail to look into the heart of the matter. I also wondered what were his intentions in writing this book? Getting to know his persona through the internet, I certainly didn’t detect misogyny, instead a refreshing honesty.

Feminine energy is chaos. Masculine energy tends towards order. Just ask Apollo, the Greek god of light and reason. Within the sum of ourselves are the interplay of these two gendered energies, so it is not mutually exclusive to either sex of the species. Knowledge is a great tool but understanding is divine. Taking the sum total of all I know and feeding it into my central processor, the brain, allows me to synergize the whole set up. Late at night, I stand there in front of my Mesa performing ritualistic acts that allow me to re-centre myself. Sometimes the epiphanies come. Epiphanies are the computer spitting out the punch card with the results. I see the sum of all energy at the axis mundi and then scattered throughout my Mesa and refracted through the prism of my mind are expressions of this energy. The one and the many. It is indeed I who brings this Mesa to life! I take unity and objectify that energy thus creating the world. I use my masculine powers to separate and behold reality!

Now back to centre. This form in the centre is non-differentiated. Aha! That is chaos and I intuitively knew it to be so. The non-differentiated energy has no order and no separation. We assign that condition to being a bad thing but it is in fact the reflection of order. What is the correct state or reality of energy? Is it the feminine unity or masculine separation? Many esoteric and Eastern traditions will tell you that because we are the ones that objectify, it is actually the spiritual truth that we are all one. Is that the truth? Is it the truth because from our perspective of dominate masculine energy in the culture we erroneously think the opposite spiritual state is true? If you want to stop the world it is true. However, the interesting part of the equation is that we live in a verb. Consciousness and existence as we know it is a wave vibration. Existence is defined by motion, which creates the illusion of time and separation. So, stop the motion and we have the truth. If we stop the motion then we have nothing. Just potential, which is the other side of coming forth. Is that really true? Why do you think the static trumps motion and motion creates illusory outcomes? Why do you think feminine chaos contains more truth than masculine objectification? Is it unsettling to have your prejudices laid bare? Yes it is because my spurious foundations are revealed once again. My understanding lies on a foundation of shifting sands. What if you can’t have one without the other? The dependency of the two creates the whole. The truth is if you see the two energies not in a sexual union then you see multiplicity. If your universal view is a sexual metaphor then we are indeed all one. Maybe Einstein was on to something with the whole relativity claim? It makes claims of truth and fanciful chasing of said truth very funny, if not frustrating.

Looking back into history, we see many budding civilizations grappled with this origin question and the dominance of each energy pole. At first, it was the feminine asserting her power which allowed creation to flourish however we are now living in the order of the masculine. Looking into my crystal ball reveals the logical outcome is pathological order which becomes tyranny. The system then collapses. Gazing back into the past, in the Mesopotamian basin the triumph of the masculine energy was mythicized as Marduk defeating the water serpent Tiamat, who personified the feminine chaos. In order for civilization to take hold, she had to be defeated. In the opening chapter of Genesis in the Bible, we see hints of this very thing as Yahweh takes the chaos and adds some light into the mix in order to separate things. Here are the passages from the King James Version.

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

In the beginning nothing was differentiated until the masculine energy came along and started dividing things up. The Old Testament is also a great primer on the actions of masculine energy not tempered by the presence of balancing feminine energy. Fire and brimstone indeed and Jewish mythicists got that one spot on! In Greek mythology, Apollo comes along and kills Python, the enemy dragoness. This act occurred at Delphi which was considered the centre of the world. With the triumph over the feminine serpent, the Greek god of reason enabled a new consciousness in humans that celebrated the rise of individual differences. Apollo was victorious however reason still called upon the oracle at Delphi in the form of the prophetess called the Pythia. She had the gift of vision - something the mind clouded by logic and reason had to discard in order to rule. In addition, in ancient Egypt we have the god Re and his association with the cycles of time created by the sun, continuing along daily in a sun boat that is forever threatened by the chaos serpent Apophis. This battle is enacted daily and motion is eternally perpetuated by victory over chaos with the help of the strong masculine energy personified in the god Set.

Back to my Mesa. Look at how I intuitively set it up, though I didn’t know what I was doing.

The axis mundi is in the centre and the table is full of differentiated expressions of this energetic centre. However, overlooking this whole construct is this image of a jaguar within the form created by a serpent. Somehow, I knew the archetypal two lay at the head of what just is and I left it in place to discover at a later date in my journey to nowhere. The two become one and the one becomes the many. This is the divine lineage from which we all come.