No sooner had I started off this blog entry with the word than it arrived in an e-mail from a blog I follow, on that very topic. He described it as a call to the universe for connections, for knowledge; a result of “magical thinking”. I like that. So – synchronicity in progress.
About two weeks ago, as I greeted my beloved tree in the morning, I asked her, “Would you mind very much letting me have a few of your seed pods? I would like to plant them outside of my home in New Hampshire, and have a piece of you there with me.” The response was a gentle, “I will consider your request”, more or less – so I let it go.
Yesterday morning – a small branch – more like a long twig - was there, right at my feet – complete with a number of fuzzy seed pods! I thanked her with all of my heart. I think I need to plant two, for cross-pollination reasons? But I will spend time researching how to best care for them.
Meanwhile, I turned on the television, stumbled across a marathon in progress, this one for “DaVinci’s Demons”, which I’d never seen before, as I’d originally thought it was a bad TV imitation of the Tom Hanks movie. I was wrong – it was actually about Leonardo DaVinci. Within 30 seconds of the first program’s ending, I was searching for the remote, wanting to view the program from Day One. Luckily, it was still available.
Alexander Siddig, from my favorite Star Trek series (Deep Space 9, of course!), saying, “And lo, I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly the cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.”
Before he had even finished the first of those two sentences, I sat up straight and gawped at the TV screen. “OMG, that’s Osiris!” I had been reading about the connection of the worship of Osiris with the annual inundation of the Nile.
The poem wasn’t from Osiris really, but I had just finished reading that very same spell, or invocation – and that’s really what that was – mere minutes earlier, so you can imagine my shock at hearing the words quoted right back at me from my television set. I was still in the middle of packing and had opened M. Isadora Forrest’s Isis Magic briefly before packing it. Opened right to that very passage (page 109), which began, “A later Hellenistic magical formula from Crete combines the Osirian theme of the cool water of renewal with the Orphic desire of the deceased to drink from the Lake of Memory – thus remembering the past life, or as the Egyptians would have said, repeating life.”
OK, so it wasn’t Osiris speaking those words per se; it was a magical formula supposedly found in Crete. However, the dialog in the program instead mentioned Mithras, while the quotation in Isis Magic cited Robert A. Wild’s Water in the Cultic Worship of Isis and Sarapis. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981. Out of print, without even a used copy available, anywhere (of course!), but I did find a partial .pdf online. HIS source cited was Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Jane Ellen Harrison, 1903; pp. 659-660); hers was The Pætilía Tablet (Petelia; Gr. Πετηλία), found in excavations near Petelia, South Italy, and now in the British Museum. (*whew*! At least everyone in this chain had cited their sources.)
So, here it is:
"Thou shalt find to the left of the House of Hades a Well-spring,
And by the side thereof standing a white cypress.
To this Well-spring approach not near.
But thou shalt find another by the Lake of Memory,
Cold water flowing forth, and there are Guardians before it.
Say: 'I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven;
But my race is of Ouranos. [1] This ye know yourselves.
And lo, I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly
The cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.'
And of themselves they will give thee to drink from the holy Well-spring,
And thereafter among the other Heroes thou shalt have lordship..."
The reference to Ouranos: [1] The original translation says "Heaven (alone)." The Greek words are: gænos Ouranion (ΓΕΝΟΣ ΟΥΡΑΝΙΟΝ), "my origin is from Ouranos." Ouranós is the Father. The "alone" is the translator's comment and is not justified. Ouranós is one of the Six Kings (Phánis [Phanes], Nyx , Ouranós, Krónos, Zefs [Zeus], and Diónysos), the evolution of Aithír (Ether; Gr. Αἰθήρ) described in Orphic Kosmogony. He is the Father; Earth is the Mother; two material substances. In the Greek language (both ancient and contemporary) Ouranós means sky, sky = Ouranós. So it must be understood that this is not like the Christian "heaven" which contrasts with the Christian "hell." Ouranós = sky = Aithír. He is the Father because the poem is claiming him as the origin. Ouranos is the origin, the Father, in any case.
Now, quite honestly, having read a little on both of them, I am not fond of either Ouranos, or of Mithras – both strike me as appallingly violent and ugly. Ouranos loathed and was castrated by his children at the bequest of his wife (making them the first John and Lorena Bobbitt in known history); Mithras followers slaughtering bulls and opening their doors only to men, calling themselves “Fathers” and “Sons of Fathers”, and women, apparently, being utterly irrelevant*. Such an endearing bunch of phallus-obsessed yahoos, generally speaking. Some ancient deities we’re probably better off relegating to the dust bins of history.
*The Mithraic details came from A Mithraic Ritual, (G.R.S. Mead, Theosophical Publishing Society, London, Benares, 1907.)
The photo, by the way, came from:
http://www.heavenlyascents.com/2009/06/18/instructions-for-the-netherworld-the-orphic-gold-tablets/
And I’m not sure what any of it means. What magical thinking of mine was behind this particular synchronicity? I focused on the “Lake of Memory”, which was, the remembering of a past life. I’ve already told you about one, where I was the wife of a seaman/soldier who was killed when Venice went to war with Constantinople.
The second one: I suspect this preceded the Venetian lifetime. I was a boy, of about 8-10 years of age. I was in a group of boys, all sitting in a semi-circle on the ground facing an older man (salt & pepper hair and beard, obviously an instructor or teacher of some sort), who was seated on a rock. I came into this lifetime from a dream almost as though I had leapt through the air and landed unexpectedly in my previous body. However, I was so at home in it, and so familiar with it, the strange leap didn’t seem odd to me at all, and considering that I was an adult woman experiencing this – the fact that it wasn’t strange seems awfully strange in retrospect.
But there I was: a young boy. When I arrived, the man had just drawn the symbol for “infinity” in the dust with a stick he had in his hand. I had just said something out loud, that made all the other boys laugh. The man looked at me, and I knew he was thinking that I had reminded him of something he had said or done when he was the same age. Nonetheless, he reached out and cuffed me on the side of my head. When he did that, I suddenly saw through the teacher’s face to another face I was familiar with. I said, “I know who you are! You’re ----“ , and I named a man I knew in my current life as an adult woman. However, as soon as I said that, I stopped, looked very confused and said, “What? Who? I don’t know anyone with that name.”The teacher’s reaction was equally odd: he put his finger to his lips and said, “Sssshhhhh.” As soon as he did that, I fell over backwards from my cross-legged seated position, as though I had been pushed – and woke up in my adult-woman body.
The problem was, in my mind, I was still a boy, who just awakened in a strange bed, in a strange place, in a very strange time, surrounded by all sorts of strange, unfamiliar noises (traffic, for one!) and worse, with a woman’s body. I did what any boy would do, I screamed in terror, and tried to back up from myself in the bed. I was yelling, “Help me, help me, help me!” like a lunatic. A second or so later, my present day consciousness caught up with me, and I slowly began to remember who I was. Oh yeah. I WAS supposed to have two bazangas, after all. But I had been so badly frightened, I was nearly sick to my stomach. The horror and fear had been that intense.
About 6 months later, the man whose name I had spoken calmly told me that a psychic had told him that I had once been his student in … naturally I can’t remember it now. Macedonia? Thebes? Thrace? Something like that. Well, technically, what she SAID was, “Do you know someone who has these physical characteristics? She was your student in …” And he knew it was me she was talking about. So there you go.
Was I supposed to remember that life? The life in Venice? Another life I didn’t remember? Was that the “Lake of Memory” I was supposed to be drawing from? The last episode I saw suggested that “The Lake of Memory” was a method of being able to travel anywhere in time ... which brings me back to my longing to travel via lucid dreaming to participate in the Eleusinian Mysteries.
I guess I just have to trust that it will make sense … sometime.
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