Best Christmas Present, 1987
Best Christmas Present, 1987
On Christmas morning the year I was three years old, I awoke to find the family room filled with a wonderland of toys. Suzie Scribbles, the must-have doll of the year who could write her name and your name and draw an accurate map of the United States of America, sat in all her life sized glory among giant blocks, Care Bears, Cabbage Patch Kids, and a pair of Skippits – one pink and one blue. The excitement! The joy!
I wanted to see Suzie write and draw with her jointed robotic arm!
While my mother wrestled the batteries and the accompanying cassette tape into Suzie, another present drew my shrewd little eye.
“What’s this?” I asked my father. (My mother was too busy cussing the tiny screws that secured Suzie’s back panel)
“It’s a box”, he smiled. “Open it”.
It was indeed a box, made of reinforced cardboard that closed with a latch. Inside were stones, tumbled and polished bright, each nestled in it’s own compartment. I crawled up on Dad’s lap and listened while he identified and read the description of each one to me.
Suzie Scribbles was forgotten within minutes.
Her talents couldn’t compare with the glowing golden tip of the citrine, or the impossible, fantastic rainbow stairsteps of the bismuth. By the time we sent Suzie back for a refund, I was bringing the box to school for show and tell and gathering new ones for my collection.
Out of all the presents that year, the box of rocks held my interest the longest and brought me the most joy.
Yesterday I was thinking of that box, and the little me that loved it so much, when I visited a local gem and rock shop with friends. The musty, dusty interior was crammed with crystal clusters and tumbled spheres and rough cut gems. Under the glass countertop I found plenty of my new favorite stone: Labradorite.
image credit via Wikimedia Commons
At first glance, it is a murky grey-green stone. When you tilt it into the light, internal fractures cause flashes of yellow, bright green and deep blue irridesence. As light bounces back and forth inside the stone, it disperses and brings more of these colors out to play. Different angles produce variations in the level and brightness. You could sit for hours just turning the stone and discovering new fields of brilliance within it. It reminds me of the lights of the Aurora Borealis.
image credit Trodel via Flickr creative commons
Not surprisingly, given the unexpected light show in it’s depths, Labradorite is considered a mystical and protective stone. In her article on Shamanic Crystals, Judy Hall explains that Labradorite is “a stone of esoteric knowledge, it facilitates initiation into the mysteries. Labradorite aligns the physical and etheric bodies and accesses spiritual purpose. It raises consciousness and grounds spiritual energies into the physical body. This stone stimulates the intuition and psychic gifts including ‘right timing’, bringing messages from the unconscious mind to the surface, aiding their understanding. Psychologically, Labradorite banishes fears and insecurities and the psychic debris from previous disappointments – including past lives. It removes other people’s projections, including thought forms that have hooked into the aura.”
image credit via Wikimedia Commons
I picked out a 1.5″ oval cabachon similar to the one above.
I also brought home two larger pieces: a sky blue Celestite cluster; and Selenite, a naturally fiber optic stone shaped like a cathedral.
Celestite
Selenite
The Life and Works of W.B. Yeats – Online Exhibition
The Song of Wandering Aengus
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lads and hilly lands.
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
By William Butler Yeats. The National Library of Ireland has produced an exquisite online exhibition of his life and works. Each room is a wonder of presentation and a wealth of material. Especially interesting are the room called “The Celtic Mystic”, which includes a case dedicated to his Golden Dawn notebooks and ritual items; and the interactive section on “Crafting the Book”.
Thunder; Perfect Mind.
Image credit nibaq via Flickr creative commons
“I was sent forth from the power
and have come to you who study me
and am found by you who seek me . . .”
All my life I thought that to reach goodness, or attain virtue, or touch the face of the Divine, I had to pass through the eye of a needle called perfection.
“I am the first and the last.
I am the honored and scorned.
I am the whore and the holy.
. . .
I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am shame and fearlessness.
I am shameless and ashamed.
I am war and peace.
Hear what I say.
I am the disgraced and the grand being.”
I was wrong.
“We live under the impression” says Debbie Ford, “that in order for something to be divine, it has to be perfect. We are mistaken. In fact, the exact opposite is true. To be divine is to be whole, and to be whole is to be everything: the positive and the negative; the good and the bad; the holy man and the devil.”
In Thunder; Perfect Mind, the sacred Gnostic poem quoted above, we hear the voice of a Goddess disclose Herself in paradox, antithesis, and riddle. She is Divine, but she is not perfect. She is not an ideal or a paradigm of goodness. She is everything. Dark and light, whore and holy, war and peace, she contains all possibilities at once. She is everything and She is in everything. Her perfection is completion, a Divine immanence that is not “either/or”, but “both . . . and”.
The identityof She who speaks is unknown and indeterminable, but also beside the point. The answer to her riddle is within us who listen, in how we engage her words and in how her words change us. Instead of analysing her declaration to parse out a meaning that makes sense, we hold her opposites in lightly in each hand until we become the meaning.
Like Her, “each of us possess every existing human quality. There is nothing we can see or conceive that we are not, and the purpose of our journey is to restore ourselves to this wholeness.” The female voice of Thunder; Perfect Mind is the divine exemplar of our restoration to wholeness. She leads us on our journey back to this state of completion in the Pleroma, the Empty Fullness where all is held in the indivisible union of potential.
“Be careful.
Don’t hate my obedience
or love my self-control.
When I am weak, don’t forsake me
or fear my power.
Why do you despise my fear
and curse my pride?
I am a woman existing in every fear
and in my strength when I tremble.
I am a woman, weak,
and carefree in a pleasant place.
I am senseless and wise.“
This wise and senseless Goddess is scattered throughout the world of matter, scattered and fragmented and stirring within us. She is the ugliness and the beauty we see all around us, She is what we find sublime and horrible in ourselves.
“The key is to understand that there is nothing we can see or perceive that we are not” emphasizes Ford. “If we do not posses a certain quality we could not recognize it in another. If you are inspired by someone’s courage, it is a reflection of the courage within you. If you think someone is selfish, you can be sure you are capable of expressing the same amount of selfishness. Although these qualities will not be expressed all the time, we each have the ability to act out any quality we see. Being part of the holographic world, we are all that we see, all that we judge, all that we admire.”
When we reclaim both our baseness and our magnificence and reconcile our opposing qualities, we dissolve the duality between this and that. When move from “either/or” to “both . . . and”, we can encompass our crudest urges and our capability to do horrible things. This is valuable because if we can realize that, we can also encompass our highest aspirations. Just as we make the choice not to murder and mutilate and live out the lowest human potentials, we can make the choice to live out the highest human potentials as well.
What if everything bad you ever thought about yourself was possibly true? And what if every good quality you hoped to cultivate within yourself was equally also possibly true? What if the only difference was the choices you make?
That is the lesson the Goddess of Thunder; Perfect Mind holds out to me.
Magdalene Circle beginning 8.31.09
Beginning Monday, August 31st, the Magdalene Circle will serve as a weekly touchstone of reflection and sharing to inspire our personal and collective journeys with the Magdalen.
We will meet on Monday evenings from 6-8pm at Ahahra Divine Healing and Creative Arts Center for readings, discussion, and meditations centered on our experience of the Divine Feminine principle embodied in the life and mythos of Mary Magdalen. Seekers of any faith or gender are welcome to attend to deepen their connection and expand their devotional practice.
Participation is by donation, but group size is limited to 10-12 to foster an intimate atmosphere. To register, or for more information, email me at sarahcpeters@gmail.com.
What: Magdalene Circle
When: every Monday evening beginning August 31st, from 6:00-8:00 pm
Where: Ahahra Divine Healing and Creative Arts Center
422 SE 79th Ave.
Portland, OR 97215
How Much: participation by donation
How to Get Updates from Sub Rosa
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Want to know more?
I’m going to refer you to Darren Rowse, Problogger, who has a great article explaining RSS feeds, why they are better than bookmarking, and how to set up your own feed reader. You’ll be glad you did!
Symbol of Selfhood Emerges from Coffee Cup
"The Land Baby" by John Collier
A new artifact has surfaced from the cloudy pool of my subconscious where the fetishes of personal gods rise and break into awareness and sink again. This one is the Mermaid, who I recognized first not in a dream, but on the plank shelf of an open air shop. Next to the ubiquitous abstract, faceless statues that surrounded her, she was a masterpiece of composition and detail, carved in Bali from suar wood with meticulous attention to every scale. She was posed like an icon emerging from the mandorla that framed her, facing front at full length with her fanned tail curled behind her. Her hands held a small bowl and her face was serene and graceful with half-lidded eyes.
I left the shop without this mermaid statue (she was too far outside my budget) but I have carried her image, emblematic of long-forgotten secrets, with me ever since. The focal point of the sculpture was the humble, unassuming bowl. Her wavy hair framed it, and the stylized water current spiraling ingeniously around her tail cupped it. Even the mermaid seemed to be gazing down into it. This puzzled me. Mirrors I’ve seen, and combs, but I’ve never seen a mermaid depicted holding a bowl before. What was that about?
The mermaid represents the Divine Feminine who lures us from our charted course into the realms of mystery and adventure – often at our peril. In The Mermaid and the Minotaur, Dorothy Dinnerstein calls her “the treacherous mermaid, seductive and impenetrable female representative of the dark and underwater world from which our life comes and in which we cannot live, lures voyagers to their doom”. She is sublime and monstrous, a messenger from the waters to the land, moving through both yet not belonging entirely to either.
She is the Star of the Sea, whose instinct and fluid adaptability appear as the tail that propels her through the ocean of disquieting dreams. Her dangerous beauty and beguiling voice ensnare the imagination. She drowns the waking consciousness in order to drag us down to our own depths and rescues from the sunlit world our sense of who we really are.
Digging through my underwear drawer – a fitting place to conceal and discover the feminine Mysteries, I guess – I found an old velvet tarot bag embroidered with a pattern for my sun sign, Aquarius. It shows the Water Bearer as a crowned mermaid pouring the double waving lines of the Aquarius glyph out of a jar.
Aha! The jar, the bowl, a vessel of the spirit, the waters of wisdom, the water bearer in the form of a mermaid, half-woman, half-fish, come to pour the waters upon the burning world. It all came together in a flash.
Walk down almost any street in urban or suburban America long enough and you’ll see her, too. Smiling down with her twin tails and beckoning you with her siren song into Starbucks for a latte. She is everywhere, like some divine joke incorporated into the fabric of our everyday lives. Whenever I see that mermaid logo I get a tickle of awe and wonder.
Logo, property of Starbucks Coffee Company
My fixation with mermaids lately illustrates how symbols constellate for me, how they flesh out and grow in importance through curiosity and engagement:
1. An initial encounter strikes some chord.
Here it was the mermaid statue that I couldn’t take home, but couldn’t stop thinking about, either.
2. The reverberations of this symbolic image haunt me until I start researching them. Mostly, I start with Google (a great modern oracular tool, if you ask me), and progress on to written resources to uncover the hidden life of the symbol.
Google led me to an illustrated essay called The History of Mermaids and Sirens – Symbols of Transformation, and to Margaret Starbird’s thoughts on The Little Mermaid and the Archetype of the Lost Bride. From there I read excerpts of The Mermaid and the Minotaur by Dorothy Dinnerstein on Google Books and consulted Starbird’s full-length works The Woman with the Alabaster Jar and Mary Magdalene, Bride in Exile.
3. Through the course of the research the symbol develops some personal meaning, i.e. – I trace it through the myths of world culture until I find where it intersects with my own personal mythos.
For me it was the connection of the mermaid with Mary Magdalen via symbology of medieval watermarks that Starbird explores in the books listed above.
4. Alongside the research, chance encounters and synchronicities happen to deepen the meaning of the symbol for me and make new connections.
Finding that embroidered bag nestled amongst my unmentionables that showed the Aquarian Water Bearer as a mermaid was my epiphany. It made my connection with the image even more intimate, since I’m an Aquarius, and elaborated on the presence of the bowl in the wooden statue.
5. Some broader application will show me how the life of the symbol continues here and now, giving me a sublime reminder of it’s resiliency and applicability to our present age.
Realizing what is right in front of my face – the mermaid reproduced endlessly on Starbucks logos throughout the world – makes my jaw drop with sheer wonderment. Forget what you feel about Starbucks as a corporation or whether you like the taste of their coffee, and contemplate the layers of meaning inherent in this symbol that proliferates on the coffee cups right under our noses.
I give the Divine Intelligence behind that mad respect for sheer audacious capering fun. It’s a joke, a wink, a reminder that wisdom is immanent, transcendent, pervasive, and hilarious!
Why “Sub Rosa”? Isn’t that just for Clergy and Clandestine Ops?
Sub Rosa, Latin for “beneath the rose”, denotes the secrecy and confidentiality enforced in Roman banquet halls and medieval council chambers alike, where the emblem of the rose was often painted on the ceiling to bind those conversing below to it’s mythological attributes of silence and discretion. In Christian churches, roses were often carved on the confessionals as a seal of sacrosanct privacy. More recently, sub rosa refers to covert operations carried out by security services.
The rose’s long history of use in esoteric imagery illustrates the flower’s exalted position in the Western Mystery tradition. The Rose is sometimes called the Lotus of the West. Especially when it bears five petals, it is a powerful visual shorthand for the Divine Feminine principle.
I chose the name Sub Rosa for these associations with secrecy, esotericism, and the supernal feminine, but also to evoke the rose’s mystical identification with passion tempered in service to a higher calling:
The passionate red rose of earthly desire and carnal love mirrors the pure white rose of sublime devotion and divine unity. Each rose is enclosed in the heart of the other, and their attributes both express and transcend the duality they represent.
There’s certainly nothing private about a weblog, but the above associations and the Rose’s prominent place in my own inner life have demanded that I write under it’s bright and storied crest.
Sub Rosa- the secret club you already belong to, by virtue of your human experience and spiritual yearning. The secret is you didn’t know it until now.
Receiving the Seed of Light
Sketch by Leonardo da Vinci
As I sat on one of the few intact stone benches in the Rose Chapel watching the sunlight cast the patterns of green leaves over the floor, a long shadow appeared from the doorway to my right. I hurried to follow the retreating figure making it’s regal way through the rose thicket. She, for when I drew closer I could see her long, loose copper hair, led me through the briars and over a hill to a park-like garden orchard.
The woman, gowned and cloaked in heavy red and gold brocade, was a young Queen crowned with a circlet of fleur-de-lis. Her skin was dark and smooth like polished wood with no grain. She held a gold scepter shaped like an open flower in her left hand. She indicated the garden around us that bloomed with a riot of flowers and budding trees. In the center of each glowed a seed of potential.
As we moved along the pathways, she instructed me to tend this garden. A glowing oval seed rose from her scepter and floated in the air between us. She bent and put her mouth on mine, blowing the seed between my parted lips with a puff of inspiration. It tasted like honey and melting snow.
I come to the Rose Chapel often and remember this encounter – when her shadow fell across my life and she imparted to me my seed of light. I pray for her help and blessings that I might tend my life as flower in her garden.
Image credit to Ecstaticist via Creative Commons on Flickr
Welcome to the Rose Chapel
Image credit A. Rendle via Creative Commons on Flickr
A faint track winds its way through a vast thicket of red and white roses. The bushes are overgrown and bountiful with crimson and ivory blooms that exhale their perfume in the dense weaving of thorny vines.
I walk slowly through the tangled labyrinth to avoid the pricking, stabbing thorns. After many careful steps, the walls of roses give way to a narrow green glen where the ruins of a white stone chapel stand. Inside, only a spring trickling through a mossy crack in the stone floor interrupts the holy hush. Rose vines of earthly red and supernal white climb through the empty windows and roofless ceiling to the open sky above. The bare vaulting arcs like ribs through the air. Looking up through them, I realize I am standing in my own heart!
The flowers, alchemical red and white like the cells of the blood, are slowly augmenting the damaged structure, creating a sanctuary of stone and living rose vines. Each time I return to the Rose Chapel I notice the vines have engulfed a bit more of the ruins and some change has taken place.
Maybe the nave has expanded, or a column displays beautiful ornamentation carved in it’s once battered stone. Sometimes faces of gargoyles and green men appear and recede along the walls, or I arrive to find the spring has overflowed it’s basin in the sunken floor and now streams down the center aisle.
The Rose Chapel is organic and wild. While it is my own, unseen forces of regeneration and revelation transform it while I am busy elsewhere, living my life. I could take it in hand and institute changes of my own willful imagination, but I prefer not to disturb this sanctuary of my heart and instead watch what unfolds there.
By envisioning myself in this place and witnessing it’s growth, I attend to the deepening of my capacity for feeling and for love. As I meditate, I witness my heart growing green again.
Mirth and Reverence
“We thus call upon the Holy Sophia, the supernal mother of our souls, and celestial bride of our spirits: Daughter of Infinite Light, born of enlightened love; merciful and compassionate, embodiment of perfect wisdom; begotten in Eternity, beyond time and space.
With what words shall we praise Thee, or with what thought comprehend Thy majesty? Utterance must profane Thee; Silence itself can but bear witness to Thee. How shall we extol Thee? In what shall we shadow forth Thy great glory among us?
And our Lady Sophia answers, saying: Ye shall dance, sing, feast, make music and love, all in my praise. For mine is the ecstasy of the spirit, and mine also joy on earth. Let my worship be in the heart that rejoiceth. Wherefore let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you, now and for evermore.
Amen.”
~ Collect for the Assumption of the Holy Sophia, August 15
P.S. – I’m really fond of the parts from the Charge of the Goddess in here, like a bit of Pagan petticoat peeking through the Gnostic vestments.
Sarah Peters
I am an earthbound goddess with a day job; a lifelong intuitive empath who chooses to use her powers for good; a fledgling student of the Western Mysteries; and a Gnostic pilgrim wending through an unknown country, home.
