"Why Me Goddess?"

The Archetypal Experience

When I was fourteen years old I began my spiritual journey with the study of Astrology and became fascinated  early on with the esoteric sciences although I was not old enough at the time to really understand or identify what it was exactly that I was drawn to.  All I knew is that it was "familiar" somehow, like I knew it before and I had a sense of "going home" to something I already knew. 

At nineteen years of age shortly after leaving home and graduating high school, I was blessed to find a wonderful mentor who took me on as an astrology student.  Our meeting was one of those classic synchronistic comedy of errors to say the least. 

The Late Ambrose Hollingsworth Redmoon, then 60 something years old and paralyzed from the waist down from  a car accident many years previously, took on his young naive and very intellectual protégé who had very little experience of life in the big world in those days.  

Gradually he introduced me to the Occult sciences and Wicca formally after some conservative lessons in classic Astrology and he proceeded to pour everything he had into me.  Before he had taken me on, he had spent some amount of time sizing me up, while lying on his bed recovering from varied and sundry illnesses, kidney infections, flu bugs and all other complications paraplegics ,must deal with.  I still have in my collection of treasures the hand written letter he sent to me describing his final decision.  "He had awoken with the remnants of a dream he could not remember, but only had the knowing it was time to call her.  In a condition like this?  Ye'es Ma'am he saluted the Goddess smartly which then brought on a fit of coughing and he had to sleep for an hour to recover." 

For the price of my lessons in occultism it was negotiated that I would do his grocery shopping for him once a week especially when he wasn't feeling well.  He only liked CRAFT macaroni and cheese, (imagine that?) nothing else in the mac and cheese department would do and I trotted all over town looking for goats milk, chicken soup with rice, boxer magazines, ballet magazines, rolling papers for his tobacco and Civil War magazines.  Needless to say at nineteen years old, the sales clerks couldn't quite figure me out with my assorted lot of goods and I received many strange looks from the cashiers more then once but they didn't ask, they just didn't go there.   There were rare times he was a miserable pain in the ass especially on those times I had to backtrack all over town taking something back because it wasn't what he wanted PRECISELY.  Or when he convinced me that I really did have to drive an hour to his house because someone else hadn't shown up to get him a carton of milk.   He couldn't EAT chicken soup.  It had to be chicken soup WITH RICE.  But I loved him anyway.    And I'd do it all over again without question. 

Countless hours I was to be found perched in his wheelchair which was quite comfey, after having raided his kitchen for a cup  of hot  almond or earl grey tea, or a cream soda.  He introduced me to the joys of raw sugar as opposed to processed sugar and I never put anything other then that in my tea ever since.   Pen and paper in hand throughout the evenings in his dimly lit room until his death seven years later by bone cancer, there I was a captive audience. His death was  a perfectly heartbreaking trial as he had become my best friend by that point.   He was my own personal Merlin.  Every one on earth should be so lucky.  I couldn't have gotten through many of my trials at that point in my life without him.  He changed me forever. 

I made runes out of fimo clay in his kitchen and he tried to teach me Indian sign language.  He berated me endlessly for my boredom with regards to American History, and at any given time at least a third of his personal library was on my own bedroom floor having spilled off the shelf that had no more room in a section marked:  "borrowed, have to return".  He was better then the local library and I didn't have any deadlines to return the books.    We had a competition once he and I over how many books were piled on the side of the bed and on the floor.  I counted fifteen, he counted twenty three.  Funny thing, they were all HIS even at my house.  

I endlessly reported my weird and far out dreams to him from my journals and we puzzled over their meanings.  We discussed every weird and far out thing there was to talk about. 

He was a play writer as well.  He produced a small brilliant little play and I was blessed to be chosen as one of his actresses.  Our production after six months of rehersal was held at the local Scottish Rites Temple.  (He loved that).  It was a complete flop by closing night because another actress managed to  show up not only late but drunk having just returned from a wedding reception.  Having stage fright is challenging enough.  But try having stage fright when your companion actress is in scene one and reciting lines from scene four while reaking of alchahol.....  At the end of our play, a man was shot in the final scene (as part of the script) and no one in the audience had any idea why.  It was a nightmare.  And of course it was the only night that the local newspaper had shown up to do a write up.  He had intended to keep producing small productions, but he was never the same after that having been let down so badly.  After that major failure of the work he had poured so much of what was left of his good health into, he went straight down hill for the next few years until his death.  

He was a historian and a scholar and an ex Korean War veteran as well as an astrologer who wasn't ready to die yet because he hadn't seen his grandkids grow up.

He made it perfectly clear to me he was not a priest, but only a warrior for the Mother.  (Mother Earth and the Goddess), his duty was not a religious one regardless of his occult knowledge.  My apprenticeship with him was 99% intellectual.  My hands on ritual experience came elsewhere in other environments with other people save for the few personal hands on things I learned from him in an eclectic way.  He laid the foundation for me however to take it wherever I would be destined to take it the next level.  I couldn't have had any better preparation for was to lay ahead of me. 

After all that... after seven years of formal education in occult sciences, laughing, crying, philosophizing , astrologising, and conversing, grocery shopping, acting, spilling my guts and drinking his cream soda.... I still knew nothing.  I had book learning up the wazoo... I could look up most anything but I was only beginning to start even vaguely grasping the concepts in any meaningful way.  He kept telling me I had metaphysical amnesia.  The knowledge was all there I just wouldn't remember it.  It drove him nuts.  And he patiently pounded away at me again and again trying to turn his naive good little girl protégé into a Priestess of the Goddess. 

"Let the God Prepare You" he said to me one day when I was agonizing over whatever man of the hour had no interest in me and I was convinced my life would end as a result.  And he stared at me hard and said nothing else but handed me a tissue.   "To live life like a fairy tale is au natural"  he continued a few minutes later.  "something's can only be seen in the moonlight" he reminded me.    I had no idea what he meant.......but I found out in due time.  

I had been abducted into the underworld several years later in my sleep after having hallucinated somewhere in the middle of the night before retiring to bed a glowing cobalt blue light around my left arm.  Somewhere in some inbetween space in some ancient temple, around three AM I stood face to face in front of the most terrifying spectacle I had ever faced.   A large demonic form in black standing completely engulfed in flames with demon faces hissing at me and he never burned.  The temple floor was lined in the same cobalt blue mist I had seen around my arm before going to sleep that night and something was intimated about the fact the grail was kept in this underground place.  When Hades asked me to step into the flame and do as he had done I decided he was nuts and I was outta there kicking and screaming till I woke up in a soaking wet sweat in the dead of night pitch black (it was a new moon, how fitting).... paralyzed in my bed having just met the devil and not even the courage to get up to turn on the light let alone poke my little finger out of the cover for fear something would yank me under the bed (my boogie man always lived under my bed when I was little and in my closet.  I had this thing I couldn't bring myself to hang any  fingers, legs or toes over the edge of the bed for fear I'd be snatched off into the dark under the mattress and the closet doors had to be closed before I could sleep) .

Well apparently all of my well intentioned precautions of snuggling under cover and closing closet doors hadn't worked by the time I got to my twenties the bastard in black snatched me anyway no matter how hard I tried to hide with the pillow over my head, and threatened to throw me as a sacrifice into the flaming fiery alchemical chasm of the volcano below on that fateful night.  The really ugly snarly nasty drooling trolls had kept me locked up behind bars in an underground cavern and some very nice lady in a white shimmery dress in a green field asked me if I ever took the time to smell the flowers..(should have had my first hint there but it took me ten more years after that to figure it out) . and not to worry I'd only die if the lava boiled and that hardly ever happened, so no worries.   (RIGHT!  Thanks for the not so encouraging pep talk, !!!)

My journey from one end of the room to the other in the dark was comical to say the least after waking.  I don't know how many things I knocked over trying to find the light switch in a total panic.  From that night on my life had changed.  And as I was waking I heard the words the Lord of the Underworld had said to me. 

"Its not yet time for you to burn". 

(shivers.....)  That didn't sound good, the foreshadowing was still yet to come at least in part.  Apparently waking up hadn't solved my abduction problem.  The God was about to prepare me.  I would reflect years later on what Ambrose had meant by that from a whole new perspective.

Three years after that the man in back showed up on my doorstep incarnate. The new man of the hour had arrived and fancy that he was a pyro too who happened to be occulty savvy. (its a long story I'm not going to go into) suffice to say, the burning time had come round again, and I had a literal dance with the Devil, who proceeded in the flesh to turn my life totally upside down, rearranged my reality forever amen... and in the train wreck of it all, it took me the next two years after to physically and mentally recover from the blow, and then another eight years to sort it all out and figure out what hit me.  

Apparently I reasoned,   It would seem.... that I was a Priestess of Persephone now and that fire was the element of choice much to my extreme annoyance.  (But did I mention I DON'T LIKE FIRE??)  I always kind of had a Dion Fortune thing and a fantasy of a career as a sea priestess personally.  WATER was the element of my personal choice... I think you got my order wrong, so can I have fries with those flames at the very least? 

So how did I come to this conclusion?  Well it was the man in black part, the part about being locked in an underground cave and the nice lady asking me if I liked smelling flowers that sort of clued me in finally.  Ahhhhhhh this sounds kind of familiar.... I recall something about some virginal girl walking through the forest smelling narcissus and falling into a black hole with a big bad demon.  Yeaaaaaaa.... kind of has a little bit of a deja vous ring to it.  I think I was just there..kind of feels like living life like a fairy tale....  And I cursed Ambrose for a week after the realization hit me and then spent many days with my mouth on the ground in total awe of my new realization.

That's the beauty of initiation.  You are given the opportunity to become master over that which you most fear.  And that I believe is the key.  You are truly an initiate when you have been forced completely and entirely out of your comfort zone booted out onto your ass without even a map to navigate your most nightmare territory.  You have to make your own map as you go.  Sink or swim.    

Hades had been my consort. I can truly say I'd met the man of my dreams.  (sigh).  I'm still trying to figure out if thats a good thing or not.  Not exactly what I originally had in mind when I was looking for love I can tell you that. 

I promptly went out and bought some narcissus bulbs to put on my porch and remembered as a little girl I used to love pomegranates.  Loving them was fine from afar, but the problem was I'd actually  eaten one.  

There are some people in the course of their spiritual paths that discover they are "called" to serve a particular deity as I have been.  What does that mean exactly?  I'm sure many people have visions about people dressed in fancy far out costumes and making elaborate pontificating gestures of spiritual wisdom to their flocks.  Nope, that's not what this means.  Or how bout this, running off and joining a cult of Hari Krishna's because your having a mid life crisis.  Nope. 

A personal deity is not something you go out and search for. Well.... maybe you can...but you don't join a club and say.... oh goodie I'm searching for my personal deity now the book on witchcraft said this this and thus and gives a list of herbs and totems, lets go.  Nope.  And it even after the fact took me a while to realize this after having made some mistakes sharing the concept with others.   Not that you can't be mindful and aware of what follows you, and I'm not saying you can't participate a little bit in your search for meaning, but it is something that has to be revealed to you when the time is right and you have the strength to bear it.  I THINK. 

Believe me, I had no conscious intention of wandering thru the forest and being sucked into a big black swirling hole by a big black demon with horns and a team of black horses  to be drug kicking and screaming to my horror into the underworld below... You think anyone CHOOSES that? If I signed that contract before being born I don't know what the hell I  was thinking.   Aphrodite frankly would have probably been my first choice thanks.   Nope.. sorry, it chooses you... plain and simple.  Its the proverbial kick in the ass the Universe finds so amusing.  I wanted water, they gave me fire.  Imagine having such a phobia of fire that you could not light a match until you are 16 years old.  And shaking and with tears running down your face at that.  There I was in a thunderstorm... all by myself in the house at night in the dark when the power went off.  I was on my own.  It was either sit in the dark and be terrified of the lightening, or find a match and light it and be able to see something else besides your own shadows.  I struck the match five times before it lit and wouldn't you damn well know it, the second it lit a sonic boom shook the house the likes of which I have never heard before or since... I threw the match lit.. across the room (fortunately it blew out before dropping to the ground) and screamed at the top of my lungs after jumping two feet.  It took me another ten minutes to compose myself in the dark to light the match a second time and get the candle going.   That is how bad my issues with that element were. 

Those who are called to such experiences and I've heard this from countless other people, (even Janet Farrar makes reference to these experiences) get their lives turned to total chaos when their archetype chooses them.  That is the essence of true initiation and one doesn't even have to be on a spiritual path necessarily.  This is the catch... initiation happens to everyone... some of them just don't know it.  It happens during those major transformational experiences in life where one faces serious loss, serious self questioning, identity crisis, near death experiences and the lot. 

Archetypes call one from the underworld and super conscious realms during those times of heightened awareness when life stops and becomes like in slow motion because of some trauma, some revelation personal or otherwise or some great awareness of something bigger then yourself.  You feel very small in the midst of it.  Your ego suddenly has very little relevance to anything and life becomes not about what you want but rather its about what you need.  Usually two different things.  Its not a choice, its a life altering event.  The only choice involved is how you respond to it, and what you walk away from it with.   Its just that being able to classify it on spiritual terms I truly think makes it a little easier to integrate and cope with creatively then the person who finds themselves at the cross roads of crisis without a spiritual belief.  Just my personal opinion.

It is also my personal conviction that when you are called by an archetype to serve them especially in the form of a "deity", it is because that archetype is wounded.  Here is what it means to me anyway to serve an archetype when called. 

According to Carl Jung an archetype is a symbol that has the power to evoke an emotional response.  According to Dion Fortune an archetype is a "reservoir of psychic energy".  An archetype is a symbol that belongs to the race mind.  Therefore all god forms are archetypes because they represent the psychological and sociological dynamics of a culture or race, not an individual.  They represent the mass mind and the power behind it. 

These symbols and images have the power to evoke very intense emotional responses because they are charged with centuries of meaning by a specific race or culture.  It can be a negative or a positive response.  A Nazi for example would feel elated at the sight of a swastika.  A Jew however would feel nothing but extreme horror at the sight of the same symbol.  That is an archetype.  The cross is an archetype.  Any number of cultural symbols are powerful triggers for emotional responses because of the history they represent.  They are potent these mythical images and symbols and possess real power  to generate change at the internal levels of our psychological being.   They have incredibly cathartic effects on our emotions, and they have the ability to altar our perceptions of life for good or for evil..

Dr Carl Jung discovered that this happened in his patients quite spontaneously and that the images his clients described were triggered from some internal mechanism, not a mechanism the Dr himself inflicted on the patient.  The experience for most people who live it is totally self generated and the trigger for the archetypal experience usually surfaces from the dream world in many extreme cases at a time of crisis in the life of the individual.  Or at a time of "awakening" to the fact that a crisis point is about to occur.  

Its not about being religiously fanatic, that doesn't work although the experience can bring that on if one is not careful.  There is a certain power of obsession that can grip an individual having the experience that can be incredibly difficult to shake.  I can personally attest to this.  And it is at that danger point one much remember the words of Carl Jung:  "you must catch with hook and net what swims under the surface and in no way fall into the depths yourself, but keep your feet firmly rooted on land".  Its about being internally aware of consciousness and the evolution of consciousness most of all your own. 

An archetype calls to you because it represents something in you that is unresolved and incomplete.  In order for an archetype to evolve, you have to evolve it.  But you can't evolve IT until you tap into the collective and mythical memory it possesses.  You have to understand the history of the time period it represented.  This is very difficult to do with some archetypes because their stories have been rewritten and veiled with centuries of propaganda.  It can take many years to unveil your deity and get to the root of his or her true origins as many of them have amalgamated and mutated thru many cultures over the centuries.  Layers upon layers of new waves of historical meaning have been given to some of them.  It is a long journey of revealing and understanding.  You have to integrate the religious significance of the rites of the ancient peoples who follows that myth into an understandable way so that you have some idea of what powerful forces you are working with.  And when you tap into the race mind of the world you also tap into hundreds of years of bloodshed and warfare, coercion, dogma and collective karma which has made the world what it is today.  Its a heavy load to suddenly be empathic to and the experience of it sends a very traumatizing shock wave thru your nervous system that now you have to deal with.

The night I had my dream of the underworld I had spent a very uncomfortable evening watching a movie about Native American Indians.  Something snapped in me.  I started to feel very withdrawn and wanted to totally isolate myself from my friends.  I had this desire to leave.  As I left I sat in my truck and started to cry... an overwhelming sense of depression took me over I literally could not explain.  The only thing I recall is that I suddenly felt guilty for being "white".  The weight of generations of slaughter and bloodshed had taken me over and I couldn't get out from under it. I sat for two hours in complete agony in the dark until I was utterly exhausted.   It wasn't my personal "stuff".  Its not like I had a bad day at work.  I watched a movie that was all.  But the pain and the depression was so overbearing it was absolutely miserable  and I couldn't help but be reminded years later of the agony some stigmatic's go thru when they relive the crucifixion of Christ. (I  will include a section devoted to the Stigmata just for this reason in the archives.)    Its a collective race mind pain, not a personal one.  Its a pain you tap into at the archetypal level, not the level of the personal subconscious.   When you become aware of the generations before you of the murder and bloodshed and the downside of history, you are then able maybe to make something of it, and heal a little tiny piece of it in your own personal corner.  That is the devotion required however it manifests to the archetype calling for your assistance.  Its the aid you offer to the healing of the world soul in your day to day life.  Your personality becomes the instrument and modus operandi of that goal and of that deity specifically. 

The crisis experience is different for everyone but it usually revolves around some kind of polarity factor I would imagine.  I can only speak for myself so this may vary among others.  But in my experience you are pulled between the extremes of oppositions.  A paradox of morality.  It could be that this manifested in this way with me since my archetype happens to be a very alchemical one and the union of opposites are fundamental in alchemy.  So now you have to balance these polarities somehow.  There is a Persephone to my Hades, so clearly polarity magic was at work in my case.  Dion Fortunes works of fiction deals beautifully with polarity magic philosophy by the way for anyone interested in the topic. 

Its a two way street when you plug into an archetype.  You are either plugging into the race mind, or you are trying to unplug from the massive overbearing power of the race mind to find your individuality.   You are either remembering something of historical personal significance that effects you emotionally, or you are trying to emancipate yourself from some group soul you have great resistance to or are being overpowered by.   Its kind of like riding a bicycle while trying to outrun a freight train.  Many religious struggles happen to people who have this experience.  Perhaps they for example grew  up Christian all their lives... they had dogma shoved down their throat... now all of a sudden something is different... but how do they handle it?  How do they handle their relationships when they don't believe that way anymore?  How does one handle the approval or lack of approval of ones peers in relation to your new perspective on life?  Your spouse?  Your family?  All you held near and dear may be on the edge of alienation when this crisis point happens.  Your being changed by an internal trigger.  And its one you have very little conscious awareness of at first.  Its also something you cannot stop. 

Mine was a fairly classic struggle between good and evil. Good girl in white dress meets demon in black suit.   I reflect back on those times I was learning and recall I had life characterized into neat little boxes... I knew the difference between good and evil, it was very clear.  But then something happened.   I met the Devil and I had to concede he had some useful things to say no matter how much I wanted to hate him.   That doesn't fit nicely into my little boxes anymore... so what does that make me?  Evil?  I had to fess up.  I admired him.  What could I say? Any dude is a black suit who can stand in a fireplace and not burn has something figured out that I havn't yet.  I struggled with that for a very long time.  I had to entirely rearrange my perception on judgment and on what judgment was and whether or not it was even appropriate in some circumstances.  Is it my job to place judgment on a given situation?  Or would I be serving a higher purpose by showing compassion for the root of the problem instead?  Do I condemn an individual because of a certain experience of life?  Or do I remain neutral because I think everybody creates what they would rather not deal with in the long run?  The list of struggles for me was endless and this many years later they are certainly not over with. 

You have to experience the underworld side of the archetype in its fearful destructive aspect first... then DO SOMETHING WITH THE INFORMATION which requires personal integration and transformation of perception.  You may need counseling to help you through this process if you find yourself in it.   Only then can it can show itself to you in its super conscious benevolent  aspect of the upper world or super consciousness realms. 

Becoming a priest or Priestess to an archetype is like being a surgeon.. you are working on the deepest levels of your own psyche and as a result you have an effect on the collective unconscious of the race mind as well.  You have to remove the psychological cancers, and stitch up the wounds and disinfect the mistakes.   This is where genetic and evolutionary changes occur when you hit the taproot of the world mind.    Its similar to the hundredth monkey theory.  When you contact an archetype, your not only contacting yourself, your healing, deranging, encouraging, reacting, evoking or manipulating a portion of history...especially ancestral history, and evolving ( or devolving)  it to a more enlightened consciousness as you work out your own personal issues in relation to it.  You are also having a direct effect on your own cellular physiology as a result of the collective unconscious work on yourself.  You entire central nervous system is being affected. Because that's "how deep the rabbit hole goes".    Of course it isn't comfortable.  How could it be?  If its easy your missing something. 

Nine times out of ten your archetype if it has called to you in the natural way will have some connection to your genetic memory.  If you come from a certain genealogy with a certain tribal influence, chances are regardless of your preference to religious belief, the archetype of that tribal or other genetic influence will at some point invade your waking life no matter how hard you try to suppress it.  Because your blood and genetic make up is where the potency of any magic philosophy lies.  R.J. Stewart in his book, Underworld Initiation has some fabulous things to say about this concept.

My favorite example to use when explaining this concept to other students is this:  If I were to do a Hebrew invocation it would be like trying to start a fire in the rain. I'm not Jewish.   No matter how much I want to know cabbala, the fact is I'm not Jewish... I'm Celtic.  If I were to do an invocation in Welsh Gaelic, and go visit a few megalithic sites, my hair would probably start standing on end and I'd start getting results.... THAT is what is in my blood genetically. 

I've sat in on many lectures and workshops which have berated people for studying certain things.  Native Americans for example will tell any white person they don't have any business learning Indian magic.  Some occult teachers will tell you flat out,  if your not Jewish don't even bother with the cabbala its not for you. You CAN'T do it.  You'll NEVER understand it.  (I can't tell you how much that annoys me).   But what they don't do is explain to you why.  What I was left with after hearing these things was a sense of alienation and feeling like I simply wasn't good enough to learn any of these things and I was being shunned based on some racial or clickishly superior attitude.  But that wasn't the point. Some very well known well meaning public occult figureheads have left me feeling this way when their workshops were over and looking back on it now I don't think that was their intention.  It wasn't until I read R.J. Stewarts book mentioned above very recently this last year that I really understood what the point was because he was the only one that so far in my experience has really explained it in a way that was not alienating. 

When someone tells you that you CAN'T do something just on principle it tends to close the doors to reason and a person does not usually willingly allow themselves to absorb any further information on the matter.  Resentment is the immediate response.  But if someone tells you, that there is a natural law to magic which is unique to each person, and that its easier to flow with the river instead of against it, it starts to make more sense.  Its a case of it not being an issue about the message  but rather the delivery.  Its not that you CAN'T learn it.  Its just that your likely to get better results using something closer to home genetically.  It is this concept that allowed Hitler and the Germans to tap into some powerful magical forces, because those folks UNDERSTOOD the principle of genetic recall with respect to the Germanic heritage of the ancient tribal gods and powers.  Plain and simple.  And look at the forces it wielded.  The history books are still dizzy trying to figure out WWII.      

So students on the spiritual paths are encouraged to pay attention to what they already know and not so much what other guru's try and cram down their throat.  That's not to say I can't study and learn cabbala because I will and I do , but I won't have as good a results with it as I would something that's already in my blood MOST LIKELY.    No one can tell you what you are or what to believe.  Only you have those answers imprinted already in your DNA to do with and altar or evolve however you choose to.  And I think that there are some circumstances where there might be something to be said for past life recall as well as genetic recall.  There is an occasional person who may have an affinity for something totally alien to their genetic makeup because its a retrieved memory from another time and place of what they were then.  It probably doesn't happen nearly as often since our amnesia barriers are built up so strongly with regards to past life or alternate life recall the majority of the time.  

Quantum physics in my opinion has fairly well thrown the reincarnation theory out the door since the reincarnation theory is so linear.  Quantum physics is now discovering that there is no such thing as time or space, and everything happens now which would mean all past lives are happening now in an alternate dimension.  That's a tough one to wrap your brain around.  So even some of our oldest spiritual doctrines have to catch up to some modern scientific discoveries I think. 

I was very fortunate to have not been brought up religiously.  So my connection to my DNA and ancestral recall was less impeded then some others might be who grow up in an institutionalized religion that is not based on their genetic heritage.  Some people if they have this experience will have the added trial of breaking the binds that keep them chained to dogma, if their personal path is calling them elsewhere.  That can make for a difficult road being even more difficult.  In fact my problem was just the opposite.  I had no knowledge of my ancestry or roots at all and I came from an immediate family who had no sense of anything spiritual.  I had to struggle just to find the connections in the first place.  And it was literally ONLY my dream experiences that took me by the hand and led the way or I would have never found the information.  The information was LITERALLY stored in my bloodline and ancestral memory even though I had no conscious knowledge of anything regarding my geneology or my families past.  And it literally came raging thru my subconscious insisting I become aware of it.  I had no personal idea at all.  Its not like someone told me several years ago and I just forgot.  I had never been taught and no one in my family ever cared to even know let alone keep records for the most part.  And amazingly when I closed my eyes, the Goddess and her consort  revealed what one would assume had been completely forgotten from ancient times. 

If you have a basic understanding at the personal level of this phenomena of awakening to an archetype, you won't be asking the proverbial question for ten years like I did.   WHY ME GODDESS? What the hell was THAT all about?    Why did you pick me to kick in the teeth?  I had this experience some ten to twelve years ago.  I've only heard people actually talking about the phenomena for the last two years in occult circles.  I've been driving myself nuts over trying to figure out what had kicked me in the teeth all this time.    Now I know.  Or at least I'm starting to figure it out... there is still more questions unanswered. 

So now that I had a beginning of a grasp on the matter I was set to task on another question that made very little sense then.    What on earth did the grail have to do with a Greek myth?  Why were two culturally different symbols involved in my experience.  I didn't understand what Greek paganism had to do with Christian mysticism. And I didn't understand what the underworld had to do with the cup of Christ.  I found in my researches they had everything to do with each other and the rest of the articles in the archives are dedicated to the meaning of the connections.  R.J. Stewart validated even that in his book to my complete amazement. 

Having never been interested in Christian mysticism till that turning point, I suddenly found my own self on an age old quest for the grail while I was shopping for narcissus flowers at the nursery.  This was a personal thing now.  This is another good example of the power an archetype has.  I couldn't have cared less about the mythology of the Holy Grail  before that dream.  All I knew is that it was some cup that had something to do with Jesus and that was enough to turn me off right then and there.  But once the symbol "woke up" in my subconscious mind... I was obsessed with every aspect of it.  I had an emotional investment and craving in knowing more about it.  It happened that quickly.  Literally overnight.  

The articles that follow are a result of the information I've acquired over the years since that fateful night in the underworld while chasing the tail of this puzzle.  And hopefully some questions as the one above and other questions will be answered.

Practicing magic and living magic are two different things.  And it depends on your definition of magic as well in order to have an appreciation for the context that magic manifests in your life. 

Crowley defines magic as the " art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will"

MacGregor Mathers  defined magic as "the art of causing change to occur in Nature"

I'm rather partial to Dion Fortune's definition myself.  She says of it, it is the "art of causing change to occur in consciousness".

So whenever you are in personal doubt, go back and visit those times you sat with your personal Merlin whoever it was and reflect on the state of your own consciousness... or maybe it was an influence that wasn't human...a favorite place, a favorite tree, your dog or the stuffed animal you still keep on your bed.  We each have a place we couldn't have gotten through life's tragedies without.  Your personal archetypal symbol has helped to lead the way to wherever it is you need to be even if you don't even know yet what that symbol is. That's magic.  The only real magic there is. 

Light In Extension

Persephone RC