On to the Less Mundane

[perzephone]

I'm reading this 'Healing Your Past With Soul Retrieval' book. It's got interesting concepts. Talks about renegotiating contracts you've made with yourself, with other souls, and even with God. Obviously, the author is both kind of New-Age Christian & into the Grail Cycle. He talks about the original fall from grace & about the story of Parsifal being metaphors for the process of soul retrieval.

I started thinking about it seriously. I cannot honestly say that I see the story of Adam & Eve being cast from the Garden of Eden as a stand-alone story. It's become blended in with so many other myths, legends & metaphors. On one level, it's the tale of the change from a hunter/gatherer society to that of an agricultural society. In another way, well, the Serpent is Gnosis. Speaks to Eve, the primordial female, tells her to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil. Only let's shorten it to just 'The Tree of Knowledge'. Mmm, that's good fruit. The western JudeoChristian's god is mainly omniscient - all-knowing. When Adam & Eve ate that apple/tomato/pomegranate/fruit they became one with the god of the garden. Eve is the gateway to Gnosis. Adam partakes of her knowledge of the god of the garden in a holy communion. They didn't fall - they flew. The Serpent, Lucifer as a Light-Bringer, an Enlightener. Like Raven, like Crow, like Prometheus - he steals fire from heaven and gives it to humans. The all-illuminating Gnosis.

So many archetypes - Serpent, Tree, Man, Woman, Garden, Fruit. Lilith, Asherah & Ishtar were all associated with Trees, Fruits and Serpents. The medicine-man's staff, the Caduceus - Serpents wrapped around a rod - the Serpent & the Tree. When you cut open an apple in the right way, it reveals a five-pointed star. Cut open a pomegranate & it's an ovary, full of seeds, full of eggs. Same goes for a tomato - cut one way, it reveals the five-pointed star, but it's also an ovary, like a pomegranate.

I get all these symbols and archetypes floating around in my brain whenever I think about the story of Adam & Eve. None of it equates with sin to me. Nothing seems dirty or wrong. The western JudeoChristian god didn't cast Adam & Eve out of the garden out of anger - he did it because that's what you do when chicks learn to fly. You kick 'em out of the nest. They became knowledgeable, they raised up to an equal level with their god... and he set them free. Knowing what they did, they were a bit reluctant. They knew what was on the other side of that wall - the great big world, full of Pagans and lions and bears, oh my. So, sensing their eagerness to stay all-wise and all-knowing in their cozy nest of honey and ambrosia, their god said, 'Get the hell outta my house, ya bums!' He also told them, 'be fruitful and multiply'. Now, if you are really pissed at your creations, you smash them into the ground (or eat them) while muttering obscenities, like the Titans, or piss them into nothingness again like a drunken Coyote playing with mud. You don't tell them to go out & have kids.

At work, there is an office door covered in Excalibur stationery, and I walked past it a few times, trying to resist the influence. A bunch of people had added Christmas/holiday greetings to said door. Some tasteful, some in other languages, some kind of stupid... in the middle is a big heart with the words 'Jesus is Lord' in it. When I first saw it, I thought to myself, "Jesus is Lord, huh? His Mother must be so proud." I laughed out loud to an empty hallway. I got my own joke without intending it to be a joke. Yes, I'm sure His Mother is proud - He's gone home to Her already. He'll be back in about a month - Jesus, Dionysus, Horus, Bacchus, Attis, Tammuz... They'll all be back. Towards the bottom, I drew a big yellow sun with orange rays. I wrote in bold green highlighter 'Blessed Yule' & added 'Dies Natalis Solis Invictus' in blue-green sharpie. I'm not expecting it to be there when I come in tonight. Maybe someone will take the time to look up the Latin. I thought about adding a pentagram to the middle of the sun, but I realized, nah, Old Sol is enough.

There was never any Fall. The garden has a hidden gate. It's the gateway to the Summerlands, to the Elysian Fields, to Sha'ol, to the subterranean depths where the Goddess sleeps with Her son, Her lover, Her brother, til Spring.

Comments

[moonvoice.livejournal.com]

You might want to consider the less new age 'Soul Retrieval' by Sandra Ingermann. :)

What got you interested in soul retrieval? It's funny though, there is so much similarities between paths, but for us the sun is definitely a full-bodied female, and the moon is a male. Strange, and it was stranger still to call the Sun male and the Moon female while practicing Alexandrian Wicca.

Re: Old Sol & Soul Retrieval

[perzephone.livejournal.com]

For Norse pagans, the Moon's male, too. I'm fairly influenced by the Mediterranean cults - Cybele/Attis, the Greco-Roman pantheon, Apollo as the Sun God, all the dying/rebirthed solar deities. I think even some of the South & Mezo-American tribes had dying sun gods. I can understand thinking about the sun as feminine in colder climates, but in Australia, too?

I think what probably got me thinking about the whole soul retrieval thing was that I saw the book in the One Spirit book club catalog & its blurb mentioned the author as being involved with shamanism. I had a few free book points to splurge with & decided, 'Eh, what the Hel, I'll check it out'. I know people usually go to the libraries to get books to check out, but all the really good books in our libraries are usually stolen.

The book has a lot of guided meditations - traveling to the underworld through a stream & speaking to the characters in your subconscious, asking them why they did what they did when they did it. The kind of thing where you change your inner dialogues manually. I'm not good at using my imagination anymore, but it comes with a CD that takes you through some of the exercises. I'll probably work with it when I finally get my semester break, see if anything happens.

Re: Old Sol & Soul Retrieval

[moonvoice.livejournal.com]

In Australia, the Indigenous views of the Sun / Moon differ per local tribe / peoples and it's not universal. For me though, it makes sense regardless that the Sun be female. Predominantly because without sunlight, a mother cannot birth her baby and we cannot live, and without sunlight, the universal symbols for the womb and female fertility (fruit and flowers) would not grow and show us their bright colours. Spring and Summer are 'her' seasons, when the wombs of most creatures get full (no matter what country) and the flowers and fruits burst forth under her giving light.

In Australia, bushfires are explained as her wrath. And the strong, mother's rage that sometimes ignites the land itself to share in her fury. And as for hotter climes, I believe Sekhmet has also been viewed as a sun goddess, and I wouldn't consider Egypt to be a cold place to live. :) It actually makes more sense to me now in Australia to view the sun as female.

As for soul retrieval, it's a fundamental part of my practice (I've had formal training, as well as whatever extra I've picked up from books), so if you ever have any questions or anything like that feel free to ask. It's funny though, the book must be new age, meditations don't take you to the underworld - journeying does - and for me they're not the same thing. Meditating is like going within to a fantasy land, where you meet archetypes and things pretty much happen the way your psyche wants it to. Journeying is like astral travelling to literal other dimensions, where the laws are firm, but not 'human.' Granted soul fragments can travel within, but in my experience most of them go without to other dimensions, which we don't generally reach just be slowing our breathing down and listening to a cassette or CD.

It sounds like the book you're reading has a very psychological take on it - especially if it involves changing dialogue (kind of reminds me of cognitive behavioural therapy). At any rate, the CBT will be useful of itself. :)

Re: Old Sol & Soul Retrieval

[perzephone.livejournal.com]

I think it's just what you become comfortable & familiar with. To me, the Sun is masculine, the Earth is feminine. The Sun transmits the seed-energy, the Earth receives and is fertilized. I guess it's really more the Sun/Earth relationship... but whenever I think 'sun' the next thing I always think is 'moon' (M-O-O-N that spells MOON, sorry... fell off my track) - I never think 'sun' then 'earth', when it's really Terra that's the polar opposite of Sol. I'm always open to hearing new ways of thinking about things, but that's something that's ingrained in me to such a point that it would never feel 'true' to me. All the planets' sexual orientation are kind of hard-wired in my head... except maybe Mercury and Uranus - they're kind of androgynous.

The Villoldo book is, well, it's the book I'm reading in the bathroom. I keep buying books, even as I'm trying to get rid of books. It's pathetic, and I may need a BA group (Books Anonymous). As I've been getting rid of my witchier tomes, I keep buying more herb books, cook books... and books on shamanism. Books that are connected to someone who is connected to shamanism, no matter how marginally. I've heard of soul retrieval before, but Villoldo's was the first book I've explored that deals with it specifically.

Soul retrieval reminds me of one of the later Castaneda books. I don't remember the title, but it involved a woman who was a painter - she went searching for Castaneda, ended up camping out at his house w/some old gardener or handy-man or something & he started her on a process called 'recapitulation'. She would suspend herself in a sleeping bag in a tree (a low-budget sensory deprivation chamber) & relive moments from her past. In the process, she was removing psychic threads from people in her past & reclaiming herself.

I know it's probably not the end-all-be-all book on soul retrieval. I already know that I am probably not going looking for bits of myself that are stuck in old plays. For some reason, I think as I've been writing my 'life story' (all 32 years of it, what I can remember), I'm finding out that I can grieve now for dead cats and feel better afterwards. I'm writing about people I knew who affected me negatively for the most part - and I really don't feel anything about them - not hatred, not love, not grief. It's all in the past - and I've kind of integrated my past selves with me in the here-&-now. I get the feeling, simply because Villoldo talks about time being continuous, he's going to probably get into changing FUTURE dialogues, troubleshooting upcoming contracts BEFORE you sign the bottom line - that I'm kind of curious about.

I know I'm not the poster child for mental and emotional health, but I accept myself with all my flaws & demons. They're my demons, dammit! (LoL!) I also seem, as the years pass, to be more accepting of other people's flaws & demons because I can recognize myself in their mirror. I am still working on acting like I'm as accepting and tolerant as I'd like to think I am - sometimes, I'm surprised my karma doesn't kick my ass on a daily basis.