pandora's box

Knowledge that leads to understanding enables a process which is like the peeling away of layers to an onion to get to the core. Each successive layer of understanding which is bequeathed to me, grants me the ability to go deeper into the forest of enlightenment. I am grateful for the process, as unravelling the puzzle seems to be my reason for incarnation. It seems that every week I say to myself: Well, for sure I have reached the end and there's not much more to learn. Then I'll have some epiphany, usually while smoking Mapacho tobacco. The analogy of the onion is fitting because the root of existence is a mystery. If I ever do peel away all the layers, I intuit the last layer will reveal the absurdity of my seeking. The joke is I already know the answer to the riddle, as I am the inventor and designer of the puzzle. The gift of eternity leads to a sense of adventure. Laughter, joy, play, friendship, connection, discovery, and love. At the heart of the great cosmic drama are these values. All stage plays, whether they may be poignant dramas or gruesome tragedies, will point towards these aspects of love.

A couple of years ago, the word Pandora kept showing up in my life and it still does. I didn't understand the connection because I hadn't peeled away enough layers of the onion to figure out why. Well, I finally reached that layer last week, helped by a recurring theme of opiate drug abuse and the helplessness and despair caused by the addiction. Derivatives of the poppy are everywhere, and it makes sense when one realizes earth is a place of suffering. Opium takes away the suffering, both physical and mental. It becomes highly addictive because of this ability and the continual use will send you to the depths of hell. A lesson of the poppy is the higher the high, the lower the low. The poppy teaches that in a world of duality, there is no escape from the reconciliation of high and low. It's a zero-sum game. If you see the connection between all life, you further see that when you are in the positive ledger, someone else is in the negative.

I see that Pandora's Box is life on earth. Pandora's Box is Maya; the weaving together of an illusion which creates the stage for biological life to do its dance. The Great Mother Goddess created the playground we desired. She enables the suffering and within this world she places the gift of the destroyer. When we see through the game and tire of the dance, we hail the destroyer and he puts an end to the drama, dancing the Rudra Tandava. Pandora's Box is once again shut up, until the next curious seeker unwittingly opens it.

Subconsciously as a species, we know this. Peering back into the sands of time, we find Mother Goddess worship. She is the creator of life buttressed by her destructive masculine offspring. The practitioners of the mesa in pre-Columbian South America seek to balance the feminine and the masculine - the energy of creator and destroyer. The balance creates healing and harmony. The attentive student sees the dualistic relationship between the two and knows they must work at maintaining the balance, against all odds, in order to curtail the suffering to come. As a species we worshipped the Great Mother and then later we buried Her. We wanted to forget about her and wipe away the memory. Our religious past as taught is patriarchal and there is no room for the Goddess. Why did we do this?

Misogyny is a good answer to begin with and may explain the situation. I don't buy it 100% though because it defies what just is. If we worship a masculine god, he is just half of the equation. Of course, there is a counterpoint that makes the worship whole. Having a divine masculine god and his son being the be all and end all is preposterous when you think about it; notwithstanding the initial preposterousness of a religion that allows you to get to that point to begin with. But this is not intended to be a polemic against religion, so I'll let that be. What I think is that we collectively stamped out goddess worship because we know she initiates our suffering.

I came by this knowledge through plant medicine use - specifically Ayahuasca. I experientially met the Great Goddess through the use of Ayahuasca and I have had multiple visions of what I am describing. My knowledge is from a subconscious origin, is not verifiable, and could be considered a tale of fancy. I'm totally down with that and don't expect anyone to take my word for it. I'm just writing about my experience.

In vision, I've seen the illusory nature of the world. I saw through the transparent curtains of the dream - a spinning realm of fortune and chance, defined by the four suits in a deck of cards. I saw the worship of the Goddess and how man stamped it out. I was harassed to no end in vision by an inherent dark warning to stay away from the Goddess and her charms. I didn't heed the warning and soldiered on. I am a student of history, and so I know about Goddess worship and what it entailed way back when.

The study of the Goddess reveals a connection to the earth and her bounty. You see her in full display in ancient cultures such as Egypt, the Levant, Crete, Phrygia, and Greece. You can trace the stamping out of her influence in mythic stories of the taming of the serpentine monster of the sea or in stories of the crushing of the lunar bull such as in Phrygia where the sky father Sabazios is depicted on horseback placing a hoof on the head of the bull, which represented the crushing of Goddess worship. The Minoan snake goddess of ancient Crete is iconic in the depiction of Goddesses because of the serpents and the poppy. The poppy is the teacher. The roshi. The head of the poppy instructs, and you'll find the word for the head teacher congruent with the idea: "Siri, what does the Hebrew word 'rosh' mean?" Goddess worship involves the ingestion of narcotics and for some this would lead to addiction and a life of hell. Goddess worship would be equated to being ensnared in her world of intoxication, enchantment, and pleasure seeking. Give in to the worship and all will be fine. Try to leave and suffer. You can find polemics against pharmakeia - the plants of the Goddess, within ancient sources. We now call these substances drugs, i.e., the bad drugs. The New Testament warns of her witchcraft. In Galatians chapter 5 of the King James Bible translation, we read:

19 Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,

20 Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies,

21 Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

In verse 20, pharmakeia is translated as witchcraft. Other translations will use sorcery for the translation. The term was used a pejorative for the woman healer. In the Book of Revelation, we find the mention of pharmakeia in chapter 9, where many are killed by the wrath of God.

20 And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:

21 Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.

Those made to suffer did not repent of their sorceries, sorcery referring to the drugs of the Goddess. A last mention of drugs is in Revelation chapter 18 where the sins of the great whore of Babylon are enumerated. The whore is the Goddess, and in this setting, she is a great city of the world, namely Jerusalem, who has been soiled by the company she keeps. Here's the passages:

23 And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.

24 And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.

It is by her enchantment and seduction that all the world was deceived. The deception is taking men away from the worship of God back to Goddess. These attitudes permeated all ancient cultures. A student of the Greek play-write Homer will find plentiful comparisons in the story of the hero Odysseus. Odysseus spends seven years with the nymph Calypso in a narcotic haze, seduced by her witchcraft until he finally leaves her for home. The Greek warrior and his men are also ensnared by Circe and her magic potion. Odysseus and his men also become trapped on the island of the Lotus Eaters, another warning against the use of narcotics. Also extracted from this story is Odysseus' run in with the Sirens. Delving deeper into the tale, one realizes the Sirens are the call of the addictive properties of opiates. Odysseus' men are given beeswax by Circe to plug up their ears so they wouldn't heed the call, while Odysseus is bound by rope to the ship's mast and tells the sailors under no circumstance should he be untied. The pull of narcotics is strong and would summon Odysseus to his doom much like the fields of wasted men on the rocks of the shore of the Sirens' call. Odysseus urges his men to free him, but they sail on. The hold of the addiction and cravings is defeated. The lesson being taught is the warrior spirit of a man is crushed by the enchantment of the Goddess. Narcotics will definitely do this to you, but underlying this understanding is that love and compassion for your fellow human as taught will make you think twice about conquest, pillage, and the killing of others. I'll bet you want to re-read the story now that you have been given the understanding!

The Goddess will take away your pain with her poppies but then make you see it's not free. Opiates will take you to hell. There's a terrible lesson of reconciliation in duality within the pain reliever. Hers is the toughest course of them all. The man on his journey of conquest wants to get to the top of the mountain, not find unity at the intersection of the valley plain and the base of the mountain.

There is another way to escape the suffering and ultimately the course of the Goddess will take the studious practitioner to the doorstep of what it is we all eventually seek. The way is through the heart and the path is only discovered through the fires of transformation which involve suffering. Every course on my spiritual path is designed to lead to the heart. In hindsight, the progression is obvious. The path of the heart is laying it all bare. The Goddess is showing me all she has done and how the immense suffering is designed to lead you back to the heart. She is showing me how you can't escape the lessons. You can deny them, but all is reconciled and eventually comes together in the middle. The Tao Te Ching teaches one to go with the flow. Following the flow leads to the centre.

The world is perfect. With all the environmental destruction how can I say that? I didn't say it was ideal! It's progress. We are making our lives easier on earth and accumulating more and more stuff and the corollary to this is the destruction of our habitat. This is how perfect duality works. The lessons stare you in the face and you can't escape it. Eventually, we will destroy ourselves. I look at this with ambivalence. What we have been gifted by Pachamama, we will destroy. What we have been bequeathed, we turned into hell. We will destroy hell and close Pandora's Box. Maybe we should put a sign on it warning against ever opening up this gift of the Goddess? The illusion will lay its trap once again and it will take another monumental nuclear blast to destroy it. On and on it goes. What a vision of existence I hold!

It's what we wanted so we opened the Box. Leave it alone! Our desires and curiosity will once again lead us to her magic and sorcery. She will conjure another world of our dreams into existence so we can play out our eternal recurring fantasies of conquest. We will ask her once again and being love, she will give her children what they want. Within her creation is placed the destroyer so that when we have had enough, we can blow the whole thing up. In our eternal universal travels, we will pass by the big blue marble jail cell and shudder at the memory of what the siren call of desire can do to us. Will we pay heed?

My experience with drugs is not with opiates. I have an addictive streak within, and so I know enough to stay away from the highly addictive substances. I am curious about the juice of the poppy in its unrefined form and if given the chance at the right time, I would smoke opium or drink opium tea, preferably in a group ceremony. I picture a scene from Eleusis in ancient Greece and a crowd of ecstatic adherents welcoming the Goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone in a shared vision; feeling the connection between the group and the divine feminine. My history with pharmakeia is with the psychedelics. I have enough experience with them to know they are definitely not addictive, but they do offer a doorway into the occult, if that is your intention. Magic, sorcery, mystery, and knowledge are at your fingertips if you do want to see for yourself. From these trips, I came to know the Goddess intimately. No one can take that away from me or convince me it was a flight of fancy. She showed me love and taught me the answer to all I seek is love. It's that simple.

So, what's to make of the lessons of the Goddess and her opiates? To me, it is as it should be. I make the statement from the standpoint of duality. Within my masculine self, I see the light and I see the darkness. I hold them both in equal esteem and I make no exultation of one over the other. On the contrary, my discovery of the divine nature of the darkness strengthened my love of the gifts of the Goddess. I posed a question to the ether a while back in which I acknowledged I have no idea of what a woman grapples with. I saw in myself God and I saw Satan, but I knew a woman does not see the same. Externally, I see love in the woman and exuded by the Goddess. I see maternal instincts and I pedestalize these aspects of the divine feminine. True to the unfolding of understanding in due time, I have been shown the opposite spectrum of the feminine. I see the enchantment and possession and how the pursuit of her charms can lead you to destruction. As with my own darkness, I know that not only is this the way it has to be, but I see how the enchantress who sends you to your doom is just as divine as the maternal feminine who is full of love. The tension between the opposites in this mysterious world we inhabit is what keeps the world spinning.

I am grateful for the remaining layers of the onion, as I head towards the core of the mystery.

hex and hag

In conjunction with my previous blog post: mirror, mirror, on the wall that describes the relationship of the Goddess to the visionary experience I felt it necessary to comment on the role of the malevolent hag or witch that is also prevalent in mythological lore concerning witchcraft. To get started let's do some research on some concepts connected with witchcraft. Putting a magic spell on someone is the idea of a hex. The Online Etymological Dictionary gives the origin of hex as the following:

hex (v.) 

1830, American English, from Pennsylvania German hexe "to practice witchcraft," from German hexen "to hex," related to Hexe "witch," from Middle High German hecse, hexse, from Old High German hagazussa (see hag). Noun meaning "magic spell" is first recorded 1909; earlier it meant "a witch" (1856).

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hex&allowed_in_frame=0

Dictionary.com gives these definitions:

hex1 [heks] 

verb (used with object)

1.

to bewitch; practice witchcraft on: He was accused of hexing his neighbors' cows because they suddenly stopped giving milk.

noun

2.

spell; charm: With all this rain, somebody must have put a hex on our picnic.

3.

a witch.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hex

One thing that stands out for me is the pronunciation of hex as heks. In ancient Egyptian the idea of magic was attributed to a male deity named Heka. 

Heka

Magic was understood to be a force that was not necessarily evil; it could be used for both good and bad purposes. As opposed to a glitzy conjuring, the idea of magic was something more commonplace in the world of the ancient Egyptians. It was a force that gave life to objects and connected to the ancient Egyptian idea of the life force called Ka. Through the use of ritual, the ancient Egyptians hoped to enact the transference of this power onto objects or to animate a mummified body for instance in the ceremony of the opening of the mouth and eyes.

Opening of the Mouth and Eyes

A witch is commonly known as a hag and the mental image we get from the word hag is an ugly old woman.

hag (n.) 

early 13c., "ugly old woman," probably a shortening of Old English hægtesse "witch, fury" (on assumption that -tesse was a suffix), from Proto-Germanic *hagatusjon-, of unknown origin. Similar shortening produced Dutch heks, German Hexe "witch" from cognate Middle Dutch haghetisse, Old High German hagzusa. 

First element is probably cognate with Old English haga "enclosure, portion of woodland marked off for cutting" (see hedge). Old Norse had tunriða and Old High German zunritha, both literally "hedge-rider," used of witches and ghosts. Second element may be connected with Norwegian tysja "fairy; crippled woman," Gaulish dusius "demon," Lithuanian dvasia "spirit," from PIE *dhewes- "to fly about, smoke, be scattered, vanish." 

One of the magic words for which there is no male form, suggesting its original meaning was close to "diviner, soothsayer," which were always female in northern European paganism, and hægtesse seem at one time to have meant "woman of prophetic and oracular powers" (Ælfric uses it to render the Greek "pythoness," the voice of the Delphic oracle), a figure greatly feared and respected. Later, the word was used of village wise women. 

Haga is also the haw- in hawthorn, which is an important tree in northern European pagan religion. There may be several layers of folk etymology here. Confusion or blending with heathenish is suggested by Middle English hæhtis, hægtis "hag, witch, fury, etc.," and haetnesse "goddess," used of Minerva and Diana. 

If the hægtesse was once a powerful supernatural woman (in Norse it is an alternative word for Norn, any of the three weird sisters, the equivalent of the Fates), it might originally have carried the hawthorn sense. Later, when the pagan magic was reduced to local scatterings, it might have had the sense of "hedge-rider," or "she who straddles the hedge," because the hedge was the boundary between the "civilized" world of the village and the wild world beyond. The hægtesse would have a foot in each reality. Even later, when it meant the local healer and root collector, living in the open and moving from village to village, it may have had the mildly pejorative sense of hedge- in Middle English (hedge-priest, etc.), suggesting an itinerant sleeping under bushes, perhaps. The same word could have contained all three senses before being reduced to its modern one.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hag&allowed_in_frame=0

The hag comes from hex and always referred to the feminine in northern European paganism. There is the idea in this word of a hedge which designates a dividing line between two worlds. This fits with the idea of a goddess being at the transition points that intersect the world of the material from the world of the spiritual. In ancient Egypt the goddess Hathor would be present at all events of birth and death. She would have a foot in both worlds of spirit and matter and from this we get the idea of birth and death as forever intertwined. A birth of a baby into the material world involves the death of a soul inside the new beginning. The awakening and re-birth of the soul within the body involves a death to worldly pursuits. The final death of the body allows the soul to be freed to re-enter the home from which it came. These magical events are attended by these emanations of the feminine divine who sit at the crossing points between these worlds.

This idea of the feminine being present at the soul's apparent death and deliverance into the material world gave rise to myths that depicted her as an evil temptress aligned with the devil, the devil being the Lord of the material world. In Greek mythology the legend of the Gorgon Medusa is such a tale. 

Medusa

She was at first a beautiful maiden that seduced the soul into the material world (the stone) but as you got closer she became hideous and turned you to stone. Her hair being venomous snakes screams out to me her connection with the feminine divine you would encounter in an altered state. We find these ideas in the definitions provided here:

World English Dictionary

hag 1  (hæɡ)
— n
1.	an unpleasant or ugly old woman
2.	a witch
3.	short for hagfish
4.	obsolete  a female demon
[Old English hægtesse witch; related to Old High German hagazussa, Middle Dutch haghetisse]

Encyclopedia

hag

in European folklore, an ugly and malicious old woman who practices witchcraft, with or without supernatural powers; hags are often said to be aligned with the devil or the dead. Sometimes appearing in the form of a beautiful woman, a succubus is a hag believed to engage in sexual intercourse with sleeping men, causing severe nightmares and leaving the victim exhausted. Although viewed in most lore as the antithesis of fertility, the hag is believed by some scholars to be a remnant of primitive nature goddesses.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hag?s=t

I believe the same ideas of the hag, witchcraft, the devil, and death are at work in the old fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. In this story the witch lures the two children into her house after the hungry pair first find her house made of gingerbread and cakes in the forest. The witch locks up Hansel and enslaves Gretel with the intent to eventually cook and eat them. The children are representative of the paired soul that is incarnating. They left home due to the wickedness of their stepmother. The myth making here demonstrating it is the intention of the feminine to force the soul to incarnate. The pair only incarnate because they are lured into the material world. The oven that the witch will cook them in is representing the fires of this material hell. The witch is an emanation of the Goddess, a side of her that is terrifying because she births the soul into the material world. This world is unkind and threatens the soul with death. The Goddess in mythology has a terrifying side, whether that is for example Kali in Hindu mythology, Medusa in the Greek stories, or Sekhemet the raging lioness destroyer in ancient Egyptian lore.

Sekhemet

Gretel manages instead to shove the witch into the oven and burn her. The underlying idea here is the soul is freed from its enslavement in matter. The two find a vase full of treasure and precious stones belonging to the witch and then a swan ferries them back home across the waters. The treasure is the material wealth of the Goddess; the swan is associated with the idea of a hermaphrodite; and the waters are material incarnation that must be crossed to make it home. 

Venus sitting on a swan and accompanied by a hermaphrodite

http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e4-603f-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

The hermaphrodite is an interesting concept in mythology not understood. It is the pairing of Aphrodite and Hermes which in ancient Egypt are Hathor and Thoth. 

 Hathor at Kom Ombo

Thoth imparting magical formulae at Abydos

Here we have the goddess of love combined with the god of wisdom to make the hermaphrodite. The deeper meaning is one of the paired soul of masculine and feminine halves. When they unite, they sail over the waters of material incarnation and head back home to their spiritual abode. It was encoded in this story as Gretel and Hansel. We can find this motif in many other places and here are a couple that come immediately to my mind:

in a book called "The Yellow Cross", which is a story of the Cathars of southern France last stand against the Catholic inquisition who persecuted them for their perceived heretical beliefs, the author writes about this belief of theirs:

According to script Catharism the foetus was a creation of the devil which awaited its redeeming soul. Moreover, some Cathar versions of the Fall averred that the devil seduced the souls away from their heavenly home by introducing it a beautiful woman whom all the souls desired to possess.

The Yellow Cross, Rene Weis, pages xxiii to xxiv.

I believe this idea of theirs comes from the beginning of Genesis 6 which tells the story of the sons of God lusting after the daughters of men.

Genesis 6

King James Version (KJV)

1 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,

2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.

3 And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.

4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

I have written a blog post called let the sleeping giant lie that goes further into this curious passage in the beginning of Genesis. Further to this idea we find in Hinduism a goddess called Kali, who as an emanation of Durga who comes from the Great Goddess Devi, is the personification of horror and death. Much like the Egyptian Sekhemet, Durga is a terrifying goddess who subdues demons and has an association to felines as she rides a tiger, eliciting comparison to the great goddesses of the levant who are shown subduing large cats.

Levantine forms of the goddess Hathor: Qadesh, Ishtar, and Asherah

Kali's flesh is black, she has menacing fangs, and wears a necklace of skulls. Kali appears in the material realm full of power to destroy and a laugh that mocks all who try to escape. Her arms represent the cardinal directions in combination with the cycles of time and there is no running from her power over life and death. But once you accept your fate in the material world then Kali gives bliss in the form of offering a bowl of plenty.

Kali

The idea of the hag in the mythological past is varied and had evolved into something that was negative and to be feared. For sure, this idea of leading your soul into material incarnation is something to be feared but the ancients looked upon it as a necessary journey in order to procure eternal life. The idea of Kali offering a bowl of plenty to the enlightened traveller or Sekhemet being pacified by turning the Nile into intoxicating beer after first being sent to destroy mankind, suggests that the power of the feminine divine to cause misery and destroy becomes part of the necessary elixir that transforms the soul into something greater.