I am frequently visited by Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory. She sparks a remembrance so deep in the collective psyche that only what Socrates calls anamnesis or the practice of pratyabhijna (re-collecting gnosis, Sanskrit) can resurrect it. In Hades, the dead drank from the river Lethe to forget this life. If you followed the Orphic/Pythagorean mysteries, you would drink from Mnemosyne, also the mother of the Nine Muses, to remember the pieces of the Self. Thus, begins a remembrance of things recently passed, of a journey to the British Isles where the mists of Avalon lift momentarily to let us peek into HER mystery.
Mnemosyne was one of those goddesses who had to be
“forgotten” to establish the Olympian patriarchy. This worldwide forgetting of
the source of our being has serious and terrifying consequences. But one can’t
quite forget a Titan because she sings within us, sometimes as vague unease;
sometimes she charts a delightful path leading to pre-historic stones whose
memory cannot be eradicated. While the beleaguered Great Britain was changing
guards to assert its lost supremacy and Brexiting, she was helping erstwhile
colonial subjects discover its treasures for their own creative usage.
The British Museum is brimming with imperial loot. Sacred
objects like this undulating, double headed turquoise Aztec serpent represent an
inner truth -"the way upward
and the way downward is one and the same." This fragment from
Heraclitus is one of the epigraphs that begins T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton.” The
first poem of the Four Quartets that Eliot, an American who embraced
Britannia, chanted to redeem himself. His deep memory revealed the mystery of the
eternal spiraling of time within the circular womb: “Time
present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future, /And time future
contained in time past.”
Our journey was serpentine, serendipitous and spiraled
through the magic isles. Tower of St. Mary Magdalene welcomed us to Canterbury
and brought me to the pilgrimage point I read in Chaucer during my college
English days. The Church was demolished in 1871 and a baroque monument from
1680 was established there. Miriam of
Magdala has remained until very recently the most misrepresented Lady of
Christianity since the saga of Jesus was truncated by patriarchal Christendom.
Yet the land retains her memory in more ways than one can imagine. I was pleased
that it was her tower/tor that launched our pilgrimage, a journey mainly conceived
by my husband, an avid lover of history and Arthurian tales.
Canterbury Cathedral was the first sacred site on the way
to a philosophy conference in Bath - my excuse for the voyage. I recalled Chaucer’s
“Wyf of Bathe,” a scandalously sharp woman with at least five husbands who
tells the tale of “what women truly want” on her way to Canterbury. Through the
tale of a rapist, an Arthurian Knight no less, whom Queen Guinevere saves from
execution and sends on a different kind of quest, Chaucer shows how women desire
sovereignty over their bodies. It was set
in the backdrop of a recently buried Avalonia under patriarchal Christianity that
reveals medieval England’s unease with independent women.
Hence it was fitting that we stopped at Glastonbury on
our way to Bath and paid tribute to the mystery of Magdalene’s Chalice and the
Tor, the legendary entrance to Avalon. History, mythology, religion and our interior
landscape, marked by sacred symbols of the people who inhabited this land, effortlessly
intermingle here. The Chalice Garden below the Tor and Glastonbury Abbey are
magical places where the ancient tale of the Holy Grail blended with the new
religion. Joseph of Arimathea is supposed to have traveled here from Jerusalem
with the famed vessel.
Glastonbury Abbey also allegedly contains the tomb of
Arthur and his unforgettable Queen. It houses the most ancient ruins of a Lady Chapel.
A dove at a ledge near the Virgin’s altar sat still as if rapt in meditation
like Wordsworth’s nun. William, a singer of Lyrical Ballads and lover of Nature’s
mysteries once sang: “With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the
deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.” He, like his fellow poets
of the land, must have been intoxicated with the waters of Mnemosyne.
This Abbey reveals how many women like Jean Shinoda
Bolen, and some men, unknowingly “Cross into Avalon”, the gateway to the land
of the dead that the Tor signifies, and remember their birthright. That
birthright awakens them to their full humanity and creates a seamless entry
into the Kingdom with no rancor between Nature, divinity and humanity. While
truth remains elusive, our mythic imagination creates enchanting tales that
speak to the wellspring of our being - the Mother Principle that gives birth to
and balances the masculine and the feminine within us.
Given the imbalance in the world and the loss of the
feminine, it was fun to discover the balancing Star of David, two intersecting
triangles, an entangled Yin/Yang symbol from the Jewish world, hiding in plain sight
in Winchester Cathedral. The Rosslyn
Chapel that we visited later hid many pagan symbols in its Lady Chapel
including the Green Man but discovering the star as an anomalous design at this
most ornate cathedral, the seat of medieval Britain’s royal power was delightful
and auspicious. See if you can locate it!
We entered the World Heritage Site, the city of Bath
on the wings of philo-Sophia and were enchanted by the Celtic and Roman
goddesses that often disguised themselves in various forms. Seneca wrote in the
first century: “We…. erect altars at places where great streams burst suddenly
from hidden sources; we honor hot springs of water as divine.” We need such
wisdom today so we can see how we pollute our own being as we desecrate the waters
of life. The temple pediment in Bath sites these lines from Solinus in 3rd
century CE: “….in her temple the eternal flames never whiten into ash, but
rather, when the fire dies away, it turns into rocky round masses.” Was the
writer referring to the rocky round barrows we saw all over the place?
Taking a sip from the holy waters of the spring must
have awakened Mnemosyne in me and reminded me of Goddess Kamakhya in the hills
of Assam. Kamakhya inspired me to write my first book: In the Beginning IS
Desire. The waters of the sacred hot spring at Bath were meant for pilgrims
to cleanse and heal themselves before paying homage to the Celtic and Roman
goddess Sulis Minerva. A painter sought to give vision to Cignus the Swan which
is the sacred constellation of the Celtic goddess Brigid, and a Catholic saint.
After all goddesses do not care about religious identity; they simply point the
way to the still center of our spiraling mind.
Geometric circles, spirals, tors and triangles- markers of goddess
religions, are much older than Greeks, Romans or Avalonians. If one end of our sojourn had the fragrance
of the two Marys, the Virgin and the Magdalene, and the complex aroma of Morgan
Le Fay, the other end was imbued with the grandeur of grassy barrows, stone
circles and the most magnificent natural monuments from Dover’s white cliffs to
the Isle of Skye’s Old Man of Storr. Deep memory triggered by Mnemosyne’s
blessings and the texture of the land led my imaginal mind to a past when
humans knew that the Sun and the Moon are not just external entities but
intricately connected with human evolution.
We showed up at a newly curated Stonehenge surrounded
by an empty landscape and ancient mounds. We passed through Old Sarum and
Salisbury. All over the place Ravens were singing of the void at the center of this
famous sanctuary. They were pointing to Amesbury and innumerable others all the
way to the Scottish Highlands. We ended up seeing the 12 apostles in Dumfries, Callanish
stones in the Outer Hebrides in the Isle of Lewis and many others before
reaching the summit of our stony trip in Orkney. One takes hazardous single lane
roads through the breathtaking Scottish Highlands and Lochs to encircle the sacred
stones that dot the land.
The Mists of Avalon take a completely different tenor as
one enters the dangerous waters that separate the Orkneys. From the ship one
can see the Old Man of Hoy rising out of a misty rocky landscape. Then we were
in the heart of Neolithic Orkney with Skara Brae, Europe’s best-preserved
Neolithic village, the Standing Stones of Stenness, the massive Ring of Brodgar
and the over 5000-year-old chambered cairn of Maeshowe. The cairn was visited a
thousand years ago by Vikings who left their runic graffiti for us to inspect. Maeshowe
is aligned with the standing stones and the winter solstice. It could very well
be the cave of Merlin, the master magician of Avalon and restorer of the
Giant’s Dance.
A circular journey around the British Isles also bared
the depths of its ecclesiastical history. Its chronicler Venerable Bede’s 7th
century Saxon monastery is still standing; so is the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.
However, the dissolution of monasteries carried out by King Henry VIII had a
peculiar effect on the land. We found the ruined abbeys, including Fountains
and Whitby, more beautiful in their stark emptiness than the sumptuous cathedrals
that were saved by various alliances. However, the ruins of Lanercost priory
next to a parish church of Mary Magdalene reminded that Magdalene is awake in
the land.
Journeys require guides and sometimes they show up in
strange guise, a boatman or a charioteer.
One of the hidden gems we were led to was a hermitage behind Warkworth
Castle. To reach it you had to cross the river Coquet with the help of a
ferryman. The chapel was carved out of
the cliff rock and some stones were shaped to make a recumbent Virgin with
child. A serene and resolute Joseph was
standing guard at the foot of the rocky bed. Like the ruined abbeys this hermitage spoke
the language of silence, and here lies a sort of the Virgin of the Rocks.
Goddess rituals, ancient and contemporary, include
circle dances, labyrinthine trances and incubation inside darkened cave shrines. As we descended from the top of our journey
in Orkney, I suddenly found myself joining a circle dance they call Taizo in
Findhorn and recognized how traditions remain alive in many forms. It must be
the Great Goddess spinning her magic sitting at her loom. When I asked my unknown
partner her name, she said Kali; did I hear it wrong? I asked again; she
uttered the same sound. My Kali saturated ear probably misheard the European name
- Kallie or Callie!
British philosopher Peter Kingsley has been writing
about incubation rituals in goddess temples that Greek philosophers from
Empedocles to Parmenides participated; Plato too was linked to Eleusinian
mysteries. Sleeping in a dark cave could lead to cleansing dreams of dying to
one’s ordinary life. Entering and exiting a sacred circle or a spiraling labyrinth
is a way to enter the depth of one’s being and encounter death and
resurrection. Resting inside a grave like
structure next to the magnificent ruins of Whitby Abbey reminded me of the
cremation ground meditation that the Buddha taught.
I somehow come full circle to the Buddha who lived at
a time when the Greeks still worshipped their goddesses. It was a magnificent
day and the landscape was changing from pasture lands to deep forests. We
passed through a pre-historic site and reached the Kagyu Samye Ling monastery built
by Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche in the heart of Scotland. A magnificent Tara and
the murti of the second Buddha Padmasambhava filled the landscape with
color. The river Esk was flowing behind
the monastery and a soft grassy spiral adorned a corner of its garden.
Tibetan prayer flags and wheels felt out of place; so did
the statue of Mahayana philosopher and for some, a tantric master, Nagarjuna wrapped
in a spiraling stony serpent whose cobra head was protecting his meditating
body. I momentarily sat in the shrine and encircled the monastery wondering
about stranger gods comfortably inhabiting this ancient land of stone circles
and mystic magicians. As I conclude this reverie about our sojourn on this magnificent
island, contemplate the vagaries of history and my strange affinity with these
isles, I watch my Muse, Mnemosyne, dissolve into the reflecting pool that
mirrors the mind of a master along with a blue sky and its fleeting clouds.
