All posts by amclaughlin2014

Member of Community of Grey Sisters of Pembroke; Masters Degree in Religious Communication, Loyola University, Chicago; Author: Called to Egypt on the Back of the Wind (2013) Planted in the Sky (2006) both published by Borealis Press, Ottawa Canada www.borealispress.com Retreat facilitator: The Wooing of the Soul (2013) The Sophia Salons, beginning in February 2016, offer journeys to one's own inner wisdom for small groups of women. For information: amclaughlin@sympatico.ca
Jean Houston, St. Catharine's Monastery

Sophia in Egypt Twenty-Four

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Suddenly the mirage that was Sharm el Sheikh has disappeared and our bus makes its dusty way towards the Sinai Desert, passing the rough rock- built Bedouin homes, clustered together in small villages as though for protection against the harsh reality of sand, stone, sun and mountain. I become aware of a shift in mood, of tension on our guide’s face, of whispered conversations, of long unexplained delays as we move deeper into the Sinai. Only later will we come to know that border skirmishes with Israel, involving the Bedouins, have very nearly scuttled our journey.

We arrive safely and without incident at the base of the long hill that climbs upwards towards the Greek Orthodox Monastery of Saint Catharine of Alexandria. Here the bus rests as we climb, gazing up at what looks like a fortified medieval town, protected by walls of sand-coloured stone that soar upwards to a height of perhaps eighty feet. St. Catharine’s is one of the oldest Christian Monasteries on the planet.

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Saint Catharine’s Monastery

 

 

Tradition says it was on this height of land that God called out to Moses from a burning bush. Inside the walls, we go first to the place where, just above our heads, a rose bush, a hardy, long-lived strain native to the Sinai, spills out in blossoming welcome. The Monastery has a continual supply of fresh water from the Well of Moses which taps an underground spring. It is traditionally held to be the well where Moses met his future wife, Zipporah.

Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, was so impressed by the sacredness of this place that in the year 330 she had a small chapel built on the site, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. In 530, Emperor Justinian had a much larger basilica constructed, the Church of the Transfiguration. From that time, the monastery took on the character of a walled city. The Prophet Mohammed also visited the monastery, giving the place his personal pledge of protection.

Our delayed journey has brought us here outside visiting hours. Of the monastic community in residence, we see only a sandaled foot, a wind-whipped robe, as the men pass by. Like children outside a candy store, we peer through the darkened windows of the locked chapel door, trying to catch a glimpse of the magnificent icons on the walls. Jean is determined that we shall not miss this wonder, arranges a visit on the following morning. I am feeling heavy, tired, not open to this experience. Knowing there’ll be a second chance tomorrow feels like a reprieve.

Full darkness has risen like a cloak over earth and sky by the time we reach our accommodations. We emerge from the bus onto flat rock-strewn sand that spreads itself in homage at the feet of towering mountains of ancient, weather-sculpted stone. One of those hovering shadows is the place where Moses received the commandments of Yahweh. Tomorrow at dawn we’ll be there….

Tonight however, we make our way along paths that intersect a series of small stone dwellings, looking for the numbers we’ve been given that identify our lodgings for the night. Once settled, with time for a quick shower, a change of clothing, we gather in one of the larger buildings, a conference centre. Jean tells the story of Moses who led the Israelites out of Egypt, escaping the pursuing armies of Pharaoh.

Which Pharaoh?

For the first time, the question is an important one for me. What I have learned of Egypt gives a different weight to the Biblical story. Jean responds that most scholars believe it was Ramses the Second, the thirteenth-century BCE pharaoh who ruled Egypt for more than sixty-five years, whose statues and temples dominate the Egyptian landscape.

The theological questions are interesting. The Egyptians had honoured many gods, had, as we had learned earlier, gods or neters for almost every human activity, every need. They lived in an atmosphere where the spirit of the gods filled their lives. In the fourteenth century BCE, the Egyptian Pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, declared that God is One, the sun god, Aten. He changed his name to Akhenaten, and moved the capital of Egypt from Thebes to the newly-built city of Akhetaten (Tell -el- Amarna) to honour the Sun god. But his beliefs were widely opposed, and after his death his monuments were destroyed, his name removed from statues and reliefs.

Moses and the Israelites worshipped One God whom they knew as Yahweh.
Patriarchal Religion began here on Mount Sinai, a name that means “Moon”, suggesting the mountain may once have been a site of goddess worship.

From the conference building, we make our way across the rocky ground up a low hill to the building where supper is waiting. The large undecorated room echoes with voices of other groups who are here, including some Canadians on their way to Israel. The place has the look and feel of a hunting lodge. We take plates and fill them with from a table of basic foods, eggs, beans, bread. We find places on wooden benches at long tables. Conversation turns to plans to climb Mount Sinai. As the sunrise from the 7,500 foot summit is spectacular, and the climb will take two and a half hours on foot, less for those who are ready to pay for a camel for the journey, wake-up calls are arranged for one-thirty a.m.

Sunrise on Mount Sinai. A camel ride. Surely this is one of the highlights of the journey. Yet, when Jean asks whether I want to go, I feel uncertain, respond crossly, “I haven’t decided”. I am aching with fatigue, but there is something deeper, something harder to acknowledge. Egypt has shifted my spirituality away from patriarchs, from commandments carved on stone, from arduous climbs so beloved by the ascetics of my faith. Memories, sensations return of the more feminine spiritual experiences I have had on this journey: the magnificent coral, the rainbow coloured fish I saw under the Red Sea, the moment in a tomb, in the Valley of the Kings, when I felt a sweep of tenderness beside a wall painting of an ibex….I cannot summon desire to make this pilgrimage.

But those who plan to go are eager. The night will cool down considerably and there is a flurry of borrowing jackets or sweaters. Suzanne needs something warm to wear, and I offer her the long cotton coat I’ve brought. It feels like a blessing. Part of me at least will go with her. My last tinges of regret dissolve.
Jean herself will not go. From within my own fatigue I can see how tired she is. But she will stay awake, keeping vigil for those who are making the climb.
“Take care of one another,” Jean says.

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Sunrise from Mount Sinai

Desire and Longing, Diving into the Red Sea, Jean Houston, Journey to Egypt

Sophia in Egypt: twenty-three

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We return from Sekhmet’s Shrine in Karnak for a last evening on the Moon Goddess. Before dinner, several of us go to the upper deck to enjoy the cooler air, the stunning Monet colours of the evening sky. The events, the palette of emotion I have experienced since this morning, swirl within me. I have a longing so intense it must be visible to pour it all out in words. I wonder if I might speak with Jean, if she would understand if I said it all to her. But I see her deep in conversation with another woman in our group.

I choose a deck chair with a view of the western sky, lean back, invite the evening’s beauty to be my companion. From a mosque on the eastern shore behind me, I hear the call of the muezzin, followed by the deep resonant chanting of evening prayer. I lie still, my eyes filled with the colours of the sunset as the earth rolls eastwards, away from Ra.

With the suddenness of magic, Egyptian magic, I am no longer alone. Imaginary or imaginal, the presence I have summoned by my longing is with me, sitting at the end of the deck chair, waiting, ready to listen. At such moments, there is no point in trying to understand what is happening. Forster’s wisdom applies: “Do we find happiness so often that we can afford to throw it off the box when it happens to sit there?”

Simply, fully, gladly, I unfold the whole story in an inner dialogue. I sit with my eyes closed, still seeing the rose swirl of the evening sky, still hearing the melodious chanting from the mosque. During these sacred moments I speak all that is in my heart, feeling heard, being understood, being known. Warmly, gently, the time passes in a half-awake state. As easily at it began, it ends with an invitation to return at any time to this presence.

 

In full darkness, we depart the Moon Goddess, board a bus for the airport. Hours of waiting follow: frustration, flight delays. It is nearly two o’clock in the morning by the time we find our rooms in a hotel that might have flown straight out from a tale of the Arabian Nights. We have arrived at Sharm el Sheikh on the Red Sea.

red-sea-map

Sharm El Sheikh, called “The Peace City” in honour of the many peace conferences that have taken place there, is located on the tip of the Sinai Peninsula. It is a cosmopolitan Red Sea resort city, with red mountains, thirty-five miles of white sandy beaches, blue sea and coral gardens. Diving is the primary activity, for divers at all levels of skill, including none whatever.

It is only with the light of morning that we see the wonders of the place. It’s like waking up in paradise. Flowers flow from every stone archway, spilling in pale blues, in warm pinks above our heads, and at our feet everywhere we walk. As we make our way to breakfast, clusters of palm trees wave in the morning air, and beyond it all the glistening sun-kissed sea awaits.

We have a whole day here, a day out of time, without schedule or gatherings. A day to recover energy after journeys both mythical and actual. After breakfast, I am drawn to the sea’s edge, where I find Valarie. Under the shade of the palm trees, we talk, not about Egypt, not about goddesses and temples and pyramids, but about our lives, our families. Valarie’s mother is becoming frail; my own mother has recently died. We find storylines that intersect. It is comforting.

I return to my room, change into swimwear, meet Denise just returning from an underwater adventure, willing to loan me her mask and flippers.

I have never dived. Descending from the small pier, I have difficulty breathing underwater through the mask. But at my first glimpse of the magic that awaits me I am determined to stay. The coral is magnificent, treacherous. We’ve been warned not to get close to the razor sharp edges of this underwater flower garden. I gaze at clusters of white, red, pink coral, watch fish swim past in impossible shades of blue and green and red. I can hardly grasp that so much beauty exists only metres below the surface.

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Afterwards, I shower to wash away the stickiness of salt, change into fresh clothing, and hurry to the amphitheatre where I settle onto the stone bench near others of our group. As waiters move among us offering red wine, Tchaikovsky’s music fills the night air. We watch a DVD of a 1989 performance by the Bolshoi Ballet of “The Sleeping Beauty” on a gigantic screen. A fairy tale. A love story that ends happily. The perfect antidote to an overdose of Egyptian mythology, and the not-so- subtle warnings of a goddess about my allurement to tragic romance. I take it all in, in a state of bliss.

Valarie, Denise and others of our group find an outdoor cafe and enjoy char-broiled calamari.

I fall asleep that night, restored by beauty and joy.

(excerpt from Called to Egypt on the Back of the Wind Anne Kathleen McLaughlin,
Borealis Press, Ottawa, Canada, 2013 http://borealispress.com)

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Sophia in Egypt: Twenty-Two

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Mohammed has arranged a private time for our group in the shrine of Sekhmet. As our group regathers, makes its slow way through the intense heat towards the shrine, there is an air of quiet, expectation, reverence. We come to a small stone building with two tiny rooms. Jean invites those who feel a particular connection to Sekhmet to join Peg and herself in the ritual.

Sekhmet is a mystery to me, one I have never sought to understand. My drawing has been towards the light, the loving feminine presence I have encountered whether as Mary, as Isis, as Hathor. Sekhmet, the fierce dark side of that sacred energy, has no allure for me. I wait outside with the others who, like me, move restlessly, aware that something sacred is happening within. I hear Jean’s voice and Peg’s in snatches of prayer, words of ritual.

Then something rises in me, some fierce desire to be part of this. I place my hands, palms down on a stone table, an ancient altar that stands just outside the open door. I say silently to myself,” I am here as high witness.”

A stillness rises among those of us who wait outside, as if the group has become one in that same desire. We are united in a space of utter soundlessness.

After a while, the members of our group who have been inside come outdoors and the rest of us are invited into the tiny sanctuary of Sekhmet. The room is so small that some of us must wait in the antechamber for our turn to enter the shrine.

When I enter the room, I look ahead to where she is seated, a woman of black granitee with a lion head, a face that is somehow both fierce and tender. She is naked but for a pectoral intricately carved, resting on her breast bone. A solar disk encircles her head, but the millennia or a more dedicated cruelty have gouged it so it looks wounded, like the stone heart I picked up earlier. Across her knees is a stone slab that may have been a book. Both her arms and one hand have been smashed. The remaining hand rests on the book. The walls behind are covered in hieroglyphs and paintings, so darkened with age that they are nearly silent.

 

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Another Statue of Sekhmet

Whatever I expected, Sekhmet is more. I am not afraid of her. I watch as the people ahead of me approach her, as they reach a hesitant hand to touch her. I notice Jean standing beside the statue, watching each person closely, aware that anything might happen.
When at last I am face to face with Sekhmet, I lift my right hand, touch her cheek.
I know what I must ask. Only a few hours ago, I was offered a gift, a luminous globe of rose and white light, a gift that can fill my heart with a love that will both answer my own longing and pour itself out for others. The tears of grief and loss that followed the offering showed me that I am still caught in my old emptiness. Now I need to accept the gift. I must activate it now. Here. In the presence of the dark goddess, I have to say yes or face a lifetime of falling back into my old Sethian ways. I ask for strength to be my godded self.

All of this happens in an instant, in the time between the lifting of my hand and its tentative touch on the lion face. And in that instant, Sekhmet speaks to me clearly, fiercely: Give up the allure of tragic romance and all its amenities. Your sorrow will not draw love. It will not. You are holding onto old grief. Let it go.

Afterwards, walking away from the Shrine of Sekhmet, I fall into step with Jean and Michael, a young doctor who is part of our group. Jean is holding something in her hand, opens her palm to reveal a small nail. “Bob had a broken bone set with this when he was a child. I found it among his ashes.”
I knew that Jean had brought her husband’s ashes here to Karnak, to the Shrine of Sekhmet to whom he had been devoted, of whom he had written extensively.

Myths collide: Isis, Osiris, Jesus.
“You have invited all of us into your own mythic story,” I say, thinking of the ritual we’ve just had.

“Were you startled by Sekhmet?” Jean asks.

“She is very fierce, “I say, “but I see all aspects as one now, part of the Sacred Feminine.” Only as I speak the words do I realize I now know this in my bones.
“But she is startling.”

As we’ve been making our way along the open pathways back towards the main temple of Karnak, Aten, the Sun god, has been baking us. Michael and I have been drinking from our water bottles. Peg catches up to us, offering Jean a container of water. Absorbed by our conversation about myths and goddesses, I hadn’t even noticed that Jean didn’t have any water with her. I have a great deal to learn about the practice of loving.

(excerpt from Called to Egypt on the Back of the Wind  Anne Kathleen McLaughlin,
Borealis Press, Ottawa, Canada, 2013  http://borealispress.com)

Isis and Osiris, Jean Houston, Journey to Egypt, Sacred Feminine

Sophia in Egypt: Twenty-One

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Following our reflections on Seth and Horus, we move into the final ritual, the recrowning of Isis, the ritual I experienced alone in my community’s prayer room two months earlier. Now I enter into it, companioned by the group with whom I have shared a mythic journey.

Yet, in the final moments, standing before the presence of the Sacred Feminine, I feel alone, wrapped in mystery. At the moment of the gifting in September I had asked for something to be taken away, the great emptiness that had made me a beggar of love.

Today, I open myself to receive something from this presence. There is a moment of utter stillness. Then I see an inner image, a ball of swirling fire, a glass globe of rose and white light, and it is within me, in my own deep centre. I am being filled with love.

There is no time to reflect on this wonder, to take it in with gratitude.

The morning session is over. Lunch awaits us in the dining room, and afterwards we are to visit the great Temple of Karnak.

An hour later, we are gathered in the lobby, ready to leave the ship to board the bus. I am suddenly overtaken by a grief so intense that, to my shame, tears are pouring down my cheeks. I quickly turn away, but not quite soon enough to escape Jean’s glance. I pretend interest in one of the paintings on the wall.

As if that encounter with love in the ritual only an hour before had never happened, I am empty.

This grief is human, a keen awareness of an ending, prefatory to further endings, knowing this magic cannot return, knowing I shall never again be here in the presence of the teacher from whom I have received the reweaving of my life. The remembered words of Tolkien’s Gimli, leaving Galadriel of the Golden Woods, rise within me: I would not have come had I known the danger of light and joy. Now I have taken my worst wound in this parting.

The intense heat of the mid-day sun devours us like some fiery Sobek as we enter the massive courtyard before the Temple of Karnak. An oddly-shaped stone just ahead of my sandaled foot catches my eye. I pick it up, turn it over in my palm, see a lumpy heart shape with an open wound across the top.

We move quickly inside the towering walls, eager to find some protective shade. Our guide Samai gathers us beneath a huge leafy tree to speak about this temple. He tells us it is constructed so that the sun appears to travel through the day along the line of its one hundred and thirty-four columns, moving from Karnak to Luxor and across the Nile to Deir-el-Bahari. As I listen to Samai, the inner grief weighs down my heart. I become aware of Jean’s presence, a little distance behind where I am standing.

Awhile later, wandering alone in the temple precincts, I notice the grief has dissolved, that it left me there, under the leafy tree. With a lightened heart, once again open to receive beauty, I pause beside a small lake encircled by a low stone wall. It is the place where priests were purified in ancient times in preparation for ritual. The water is so clear that a tall palm tree gazes down at itself, perfectly reflected. A huge stone scarab, seven times my size, sits atop a circular plinth three metres above me. It was here at the Karnak Temple that the scarab was declared a symbol of eternal life.

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Scarab at Karnak: symbol of Eternal Life

Soaring above the temple walls like a great tower of Rapunzel, stands the only remaining obelisk of Hatshepsut, the woman pharaoh whose successors tried to obliterate all memory of her.

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Behind Karnak’s main temple complex and through five gateways stands a small Sekhmet shrine that still holds the original statue of the beautiful, fierce, serene, lion-headed goddess. Those who seek her at her Karnak shrine invariably have powerful experiences orchestrated by a statue created as a vessel for the divine presence of Sekhmet. Skilled craftsmanship and sacred rites opened the statue to the goddess’ spiritual attributes. Three thousand years later, the power of Sekhmet captured in basalt endures.

Nikki Scully, musician, energy healer and leader of shamanic pilgrimages to Egypt, speaks of Sekhmet’s call to our time: When we embrace this power, something happens to us at a cellular level. It’s as though the energy enters into our field and then into our very cells. A person who is receiving this feels as though every molecule and cell is suddenly coming out of an ancient atrophy and malaise, and awakening, becoming alert.
I believe this awakening is a part of the conscious evolutionary process we’re engaged in, bringing forth the aspects of the power of the Divine Feminine that are required in order to achieve the balance we’re seeking at this time.

(Next: Encounter with Sekhmet)

(excerpt from Called to Egypt on the Back of the Wind Anne Kathleen McLaughlin, Borealis Press, Ottawa, Canada, 2013  http://borealispress.com)

Isis and Osiris, Jean Houston, Journey to Egypt, Maiden/Mother/Crone Threefold Aspect of the Sacred Feminine, Sacred Feminine

Sophia in Egypt: Twenty

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Note to the reader: If you wonder how Sophia, the Wisdom presence of the Holy in the Hebrew Scriptures, relates to the ancient Egyptian story of Isis and Osiris, or how she is part of this 21st century  journey to Egypt, this segment may begin to offer enlightenment. Isis, Hathor, Ma’at and Sehkmet are aspects of the Sophia, the Sacred Feminine presence who is making herself known in our time.

 

After last night’s visit to the Luxor Temple, I fell asleep with columns of hieroglyphs on yellow sandstone moving across my eyelids. Then a clear image of Hathor appeared, goddess of love and joy. I awaken to this new day thinking of the light of Ra, the gift of love that shines equally on all.

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Hathor: Goddess of Love and Joy

After breakfast, some of us gather on the upper deck of the Moon Goddess where Marjorie and Paul, a married couple in our group, lead us in Chi-Gong movements. Afterwards, I sit cooling my feet in the pool, looking over at the Valley of the Kings on the West Bank.

In the peace of the moment, remembered words of Jesus rise up within me:

John was a lamp, alight and shining,and for a time you were content to rest in his light.

There is a hint of something here. This light, in which I am just learning to rest, is only for a time. But I don’t follow the thought where it might lead. I cling instead to this present moment, wanting it to last, not looking beyond this day, our final one on the Moon Goddess.

At ten o’clock in the Captain’s Lounge, we re-enter the story, find ourselves in the midst of the eighty-year battle waged by Horus against Seth, the principle of entrapment and limitation. Jean Houston invites us to see how we need to activate the inner muscular Horus within us to stand up to recalcitrance, both within and outside of us, and do battle. People who are entrapped by, limited to the status quo, are living out of their reptilian brains. If we remain working with them, we can only become assistant dinosaurs. To advance the world, the individuated wilful Horus must emerge.

Within ourselves the opposites, the Seth principle of limitation and the Horus principle of abundance, are often at war. We enact a ritual battle between the Seth and the Horus within us, partnering with another to give voice to each aspect of the self. Denise, the woman from Ireland, offers to play Seth to my Horus. I tell her of wanting to travel the earth, working with women to help them find their deep spirit.

“Do you think you can be like Jean Houston?” she mocks. Our role play, as fierce on my side as on hers, leads us into a deep sharing about the need we have both felt for inner guidance, the longing of a woman who feels herself unmothered.

In their epic battle, Seth and Horus shape-shift, become hippos and bears and lions, enduring terrible wounds. Such battles arise, in our time, Jean believes, in cultures that lack guiding principles. Yeats describes it in “The Second Coming”:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

the ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity….

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

That rough beast is Seth, Jean suggests.

As in the Iliad, the gods take sides in this great battle. Ma’at, the principle of truth, withdraws, goes underground and lives with Osiris. She chooses to leave the battle to go into the higher order of the unconscious. We, too, when we cannot make sense of things, retreat into the unconscious, taking Ma’at with us.

After the battle, when Isis realizes that she cannot kill Seth, Horus seizes her crown, tearing it from head. Later, he repents and recrowns his mother, giving her the cow-headed crown of the goddess Hathor.

Seth tries to seduce Horus. Jean comments that even after we think we’ve won the battle, we keep meeting our same old issues, again and again, but at increasingly complex levels. We are seduced by our own Seth, given these struggles to strengthen us. Each time we find ourselves in these same old patterns, we might think of them as trenches in the brain, something we need to over-ride. Dealing with these as fractals of the eternal return, old ditches we must cross, helps us to get on with the new story.

The ancient story concludes with Isis tricking the ferryman into taking her to the council of the gods on Elephantine Island. Disguising herself as a beautiful woman, Isis persuades Seth to acknowledge his crime and make restitution. The gods order him to create a barge that will carry the high spirit of Osiris into the depth world.

Rather than what traps us in time, our Seth principle of appropriate limitation becomes the vehicle to carry us into eternity.

The story became a transformational ritual in Egypt, a ritual of the soul. In it, the four principles of movement, fertility (Isis), inspiration (Osiris), limitation (Seth), and growth (Horus) are engaged in the big turn-around and fall becomes resurrection. What is destroyed is transmuted into a deepened quality, rising like the djed pillar in us as compassion, as empathy.

The transformational journey of the soul is the basis of the Mystery Rituals. In a Hellenized version, the Mysteries of Isis and Osiris were celebrated throughout the Graeco-Roman world. Many themes of the Isis/Osiris/Seth/ Horus story reappear in Christianity: the woman, impregnated by a father in the spiritual world; the threat that the newborn child will be destroyed; the tree as vehicle of death. Isis is the virgin/mother /crone who was worshipped in Greece and Rome for centuries. Some ancient black madonnas are actually Isis with Horus in her lap. Many qualities of Isis are subsumed into Mary.

Jesus was like Osiris, living out the Egyptian mystery of the dying/rising God, taking on the full ancient archetypal myth of the Mystery Religions while existing in space and time. No wonder, Jean concludes, he became Jesus Christ Superstar!

After the story, we take time to reflect more deeply on its meaning for our lives.

What vulnerable quality within us can be transformed from a negative Sethian glitch to a deeper potential, as the barge of Seth became transformative for Osiris?

I sit in silence with this question, wondering how my longing for a particular love can be transformed into a love that overflows from within me to others. It is for me the fractal of the eternal return, the question that continues to arise in my life, always from a deeper place, ever more complex.

( excerpt from Called to Egypt on the Back fo the Wind Anne Kathleen McLaughlin Borealis Press, Ottawa, 2013 http://borealispress.com )

 

Jean Houston, Journey to Egypt

Sophia in Egypt: Nineteen

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The Temple of Luxor

After dinner that evening, when full darkness has risen to cloak Luxor  where the Moon Goddess is docked once more, we gather in the ship’s lobby. The dockside doors are open, and we pass through them into the lobby of a second, then a third ship, this one securely nudged beside the dock. From there we climb a set of steep stone stairs to the street. In a line, awaiting us, are horse-drawn carriages, their wooden wheels and body painted black and red, their seats made of leather, still carry the faded elegance of a nineteenth century “surrey with the fringe on top”. Their drivers turn towards us in welcome.

We are on our way to the Temple of Luxor but we take a circuitous route through the back streets of the ancient city which Homer in The Iliad called “Thebes of the hundred gates.” We pass parents walking with small children whose faces illumine the night. There are clusters of men, talking, laughing, gathered outside shops and houses. Only rarely do I see women and these stay very near to the front doorway of a house.

The driver introduces himself to us as Mufasa, asks our names. “Are you married?” he asks me. His face lights up when I say I am not, and I realize he is making a proposal. He is alone, he says, married only to his horse Rambo, and would like to change this.
The divine comedy eludes me until later. On a day when I have been struggling with the mysterious depths of spiritual love, an ordinary man is asking me to marry him, and for no better reason than his hope that I would be a better companion than his horse!
The Temple of Luxor really existed for the festival of Opet. This was an eleven-day event during which mass quantities of bread, cakes and beer were distributed. After processions of sacred images, followed by members of the royal family, the king and priests retired to private chambers in the temple where the king and his divine essence were merged, transforming him into a divine being. As part of the festival, the god (in human form) celebrated the sacred marriage with the human queen. The whole event was a ceremony of reconciliation – the king’s humanity with his divinity- for the purpose of renewing vitality for both human and divine beings. Although Amenhotep 111 built the temple, six colossal statues of Ramses 11 flanked the entrance. Of these, only two seated figures survive.

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Tonight, the Luxor Temple glows golden in the darkness, lit from below so that the light spills upwards. The effect is magical. Its great monumental gateway is carved with bas reliefs that show scenes from the military campaigns led by Ramses 11 against the Hittites. In front of this wall, next to the two remaining seated carvings of Ramses 11, stands an obelisk, twenty-five metres high. Its twin was carried off to France in 1833 where it now stands in the Place de la Concorde in Paris.

Jean leads us into the sanctuary-heart of the temple, a place of initiation, where we chant: I AM, WE ARE, THIS IS ME. These three simple sayings hold deep levels of meaning, of interconnectedness. Our ordinary “this is me” lives are enfolded in the “We are” of myth and symbol and archetype that we are learning about in Egypt. “We are” expresses our existence in durative time, the place where we encounter sacred time and space. Beyond and yet within these two realms is the “I Am”, the Holy, Being itself, Love itself.
At Jean’s invitation, we turn to one another saying, “I see the I AM in you. I see the WE ARE in you, and in you I see THIS IS ME.”

After our ritual of recognition, we are free to wander through the open courtyards, to look at the bas reliefs, the walls inscribed with hieroglyphs. An avenue that begins at the front of the temple is lined with small sphinxes that once led all the way to the Temple of Karnak. It has been partially restored, and we walk its length, marvelling.

Along another walkway, rows of rounded columns tower over us like redwood trees in a forest of stone. I am suddenly jolted back from these ancient carvings, from the WE ARE of myth to the THIS IS ME, aware I am standing between two turbaned, long-robed guards. They are gesturing to me, pointing at my camera, then towards a row of lighted pillars. For a startled moment, I feel really afraid, then my experience of other guards in other tombs clicks in, and I understand. I am being invited to pose for a photo with one guard as the other wields the camera. For Baksheesh. Of course.

Later, I will see a photo of a very handsome tall bearded guard and a happily smiling woman standing beside one of Luxor’s storied columns. This is me… we are… held safe in the love of I am.

(from the novel, Called to Egypt on the Back fo the Wind by Anne Kathleen McLaughlin,

Borealis Press, Ottawa, Canada, 2013  http://borealispress.com )

Isis and Osiris, Jean Houston

Sophia in Egypt: Eighteen

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Sailing to Luxor

In silence, we are given the grace of loving deeply, wholly and well.     (Jean Houston)

During the night following our visit to the Valley of the Kings, my sleep is shadowed by old fears. I am visited by the ghosts of my lifelong struggles with loving, with letting go, my fear that love will measure me, find me wanting, or in the Egyptian way, weigh me, find my heart too heavy, abandon me.

In one of the dark hours, I feel invited into prayer. An image of Russian nested dolls comes to me. I open the first, who looks like Jean, and find inside a second, an image of the Sacred Feminine, the Holy One. In the clarity that comes between sleep and full wakefulness, I hear an invitation, “Simply enjoy being close to this person. Enjoy the gift of this time.”

Hours later, I waken fully to clarity and joy, the power of these old demons vanquished by morning’s light.

We are to spend this day on the ship, a morning of teaching in the Captain’s Lounge, an afternoon free to rest, to enjoy the scenery as the Moon Goddess takes us back up the Nile, then down again to Luxor.

Today, Jean speaks to us of magic in its many forms. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the tale that unfolds in Disney’s Fantasia with Mickey Mouse multiplying brooms to carry buckets of water, is based on the true story of a Greek who studied magic with an Egyptian master.

Magic, Jean tells us, happens for many who travel to Egypt, returning home to find healing and wholeness have come to friends, to difficult situations, while they were away. Things happen in Egypt because it is believed that everything here is invested with life – even stones! As we come to understand the holographic universe, we know everything is a containment of the whole.

While Jean speaks of magic, there is some glitch occurring in the sound system in the lounge. Suddenly coloured lights above her chair begin to blink off and on.
“The ancients learned how to expect the unexpected,” Jean says.
I realize that we are learning the same thing here.

A quiet joy is blinking off and on within me as I sit here, fully aware of being on a ship on the Nile, listening to a teacher whose words have illumined my life for several years now.
Kairos time, Jean is saying now, is a Greek expression that refers to the moment when, in weaving, two sets of weft thread are open so the warp thread, carried by the shuttle cock, can pass through. Kairos time is sacred and urgent. It allows clock time to be suspended and you have the option to change the story.

Now we are back in the story of Isis and Osiris. Their child, Horus, has been born, hidden by Isis in the papyrus swamps. Ruthless Seth at last succeeds in finding the child and releases a scorpion to sting him to death. In her agonized grief, Isis stops time to allow Horus to be healed.

Kairos time offers radical choice. If we don’t take the opportunity, we are like Parsifal who failed to ask the question in the Grail Castle and must wander for years in misery before the second chance is offered.

Like Parsifal, like Jesus, Horus is the widow’s son. His father Osiris is in the Underworld and from there begins to teach his son though dreams. Osiris trains Horus in wisdom and prepares him to defeat Seth in battle.

The Egyptians understood dreams better than any ancient peoples. What we dream comes in more directly than what is obscured by daily life, so that in our dream we can be “tricked out of” our ordinary mindsets.

Inevitably, the time comes when we are called beyond our linear lives. We need training in the depths. We, like Horus, are available to be trained by the partner in the archetypal realm when we are ready to take on our task in the great world.

Today when the sacred stewardship of the planet is so urgent, when an enormous rise of Seth energy is seen in the destruction of the planet, in the economic collapse that destroys the dreams of so many people, we need the training that comes from the ones who, like Isis, sidle in through our doors. From them, we learn how to use the gifts we have been given, for we are born into this time for our task.

For the Ancient Egyptians, training was far more than intellectual development. They were aware that there were other parts of the self, which they called other “bodies”. They described five bodies, with other persona, other ways of being. Egyptian priests learned how to access these other persona, developing a level of consciousness that allowed them to distinguish each of the five while remaining aware of wholeness.

To accomplish our great work, we too need to contact and be gifted with qualities of the five bodies: the Aufu – the physical body; the Ka –the double or what we hold in our mind as our body image; the Haidit – the shadow body entered in dream and trance states; the Khu – the magical body, which in ancient times was thought of as magical-spiritual; and the Sahu – the most subtle, etheric spiritual body.

In a process, beginning with the physical body or Aufu, Jean leads us into awareness of the five bodies within. When we come to the visualization of our magical-spiritual self or Khu body, I am surprised to see an inner image of an old and beloved teacher. For several years the figure of Yoda from Star Wars would appear in my prayer and offer guidance.

 

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YODA

Now he is here, but will not engage in the conversations I want to have about my struggles with loving. He is wholly silent. I sense, I know, he is calling me into a newness, sending a shaft of light that releases my love to flow easily through my life and my work. Love set free.The experience is brief. Powerful.

Isis and Osiris, Jean Houston, Journey to Egypt, Mary Mother of Jesus

Sophia in Egypt: Seventeen

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We are gathered in the Captain’s lounge on the Moon Goddess, re-entering the story of Isis and Osiris. Isis, who has flown over the reanimated phallus of her Beloved, is now, through Tantric magic, pregnant with Horus. Jean invites us to consider that Isis, during her long labours to develop the civilization of Egypt beside her husband Osiris, has remained childless, her womb fallow until the ripeness of time arrives.

“What in you is fallow, and needs to be called forth into actuality?” Jean asks us. “Each of us comes in already seeded with our creative potential, which we may bring into time. If we do not bring it into actuality, we are left with unspecified yearnings. We deny the validity of what we are.”

Isis hides the chest that contains her husband’s body in a secret cave, but Seth, still full of hatred, ever watchful, finds the chest. He butchers the body of Osiris, scatters its fourteen pieces across Egypt.

Psychologically, we are like the body of Osiris when we lack focus and passion in our lives, allowing ourselves to become scattered, called away in too many directions, with too many distractions. The scattered pieces of the self are the aspects that do not live. We need to gather up these bits and fuse them into one integrated body/mind form, create an energy frequency, a potentiated life.

Nepthys, lady of dreams, of psychic knowing, of shadow, joins her sister Isis in the search for her husband’s body. Together they create a boat of papyrus and set out to seek the scattered pieces of Osiris.

This myth, Jean tells us, is a massive story on the psychological, mythical and spiritual levels. The regathering of the self.

Isis uses a mixture of water, incense and grain to mummify each piece of the body of her Beloved that they find.

“Set up a garden of your lost selves,” Jean suggests, “so you can see the greening power as each new aspect of the self sprouts with life and vitality. You will attend to both the garden and the self.”

Isis and Nepthys regather all the missing parts of Osiris but one. His phallus has been devoured by a fish. Isis creates one for him made of gold. Alchemically we, too, supply what is lost in the self.

Seth finds Isis, and imprisons her in his spinning mill. But this gives her time and space to reflect, to gestate the new child. In our own lives, it is important for new ideas to have gestation time, spinning time, to help them reach fullness before we give birth to them.

“Do you attend to emails first thing in the morning?”Jean asks. “This is your most creative time. You might want to look at how you use it.”

In a time of gestation, it might look like not much is happening. New things are spinning out of darkness in the inner world.
“What was Mary thinking while she waited for the birth of Jesus ? or Maya as she waited for the Buddha to be born? The unborn child is affected by the thoughts the mother has during pregnancy.”

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Margaret Mead’s mother and grandmother played music, read Shakespeare, to the mother’s belly before Margaret’s birth.
“When you are in a prenatal state, preparing to give birth to a higher self, feed yourself on poetry, music, literature.”

Our genes are dynamic little explorers on a great journey along the Nile seeking new experiences, new patterns, cross-generating new things.
“You are not stuck,” Jean tells us. “Your choice of using the wandering genes and cross-fertilizing culture makes so much possible!”

Consciously altering and evolving the patterns that limit us is the task. A major growth spurt can happen at any age at all. Self-transcendence is built into the essence of our genes. Dynamic evolution is conscious orchestration of potential. We are in a crystalizing moment. Untapped reservoirs of creativity can be called upon, potentials now desperately needed by individuals and cultures as a whole.

“What capacities, skills, potentials do you need to be better human being? Which of your own latent possibilities do you need to gestate?”

Dinner that night in the ship’s dining room flows with laughter and wine. I look around the table where I am sitting, see the smiling faces of my friends: Suzanne, Rosemary, Ellyn, Kathleen.

After dinner, I am on my way upstairs to my room when I see Jean bent over a computer in the lobby, checking her emails. Without thinking, and utterly without fear, I walk up behind her, kiss her lightly on the top of her head, say “Good night”, and continue on. Perhaps it is the wine that has released my fear of showing love, but I do not think so. Love touched me that morning in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and broke open my own sealed tomb.

(from Called to Egypt on the Back of the Wind by Anne Kathleen McLaughlin Borealis Press, Ottawa, Canada 2013  http://borealispress.com )

Jean Houston, Journey to Egypt, Valley of the Kings

Sophia in Egypt: Sixteen

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The sky above the Valley of the Kings is now a clear paint box blue, but the looming mountains wear skirts of deep darkness, waiting for the sun to climb high enough to undress them.

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the Valley of the Kings Egypt

 

For the rest of the tour of the Valley of the Kings, I feel an inner glow. As we move towards our bus for the journey to Deir El Bahari, a woman from our group whom I do not know well looks at me, touches my face, says, “You look so beautiful and so peaceful. I don’t know what happened in there but it shows.”

Nestled in the arms of the great rock walls not far from the Valley of the Kings, facing towards the east, is the magnificent temple of Deir El-Bahari. Twelve hundred years after Imhotep designed the Step Pyramid, Queen Hatshepsut, drawn more to the arts than to warfare, had the architect Senmut design a funerary monument for her father, Tutmose I, and herself. She chose a valley which had already been consecrated to the goddess Hathor. The design was an entirely new concept, making creative use of the great rocks spreading out like a fan behind the temple. Senmut built a series of great terraces that lead by means of ramps towards the sanctuary. Here in this temple, Hatshepsut restored the great rituals that honour the goddess Hathor.

With the sun now high in the sky, its rays hot on any exposed skin, we look towards an Everest-like flight of stone steps. We mount the stairs, pausing for photos as we ascend, finally reaching the entrance way to the temple.

Inside there are many structures, leading off open courtyards, so that the sky forms the roof and tall palms offer shading. The large temple’s inner walls are meticulously carved with hieroglyphs. A series of bas reliefs tells the story of Queen Hatshepsut’s birth and childhood, another tells of an expedition she led to the mysterious country of Punt, thought to be somewhere in the midst of Africa, for the carvings show giraffes and monkeys. High above on the inner side of a stone archway, I see a beautifully preserved painting in ochres and reds and blues of the winged presence of Isis, her arms outstretched, allowing the fullest wingspan.

We wander under overarching palms, exploring other buildings, some very ancient. A few of us discover the only tomb known to have been built for a priestess. We go inside the tiny building, pose for photos with our hands raised above the altar. Behind the main room, a narrow passageway circles around and back again, its walls covered with bas relief carvings. I stand for a long while before a carving of two kneeling figures, a man and a woman, facing each other, their open palms lifted towards each other as though in blessing. There is energy in this exchange, light and love being passed from one to the other.

Later, when I look at my photo of the carving, I see a narrow glistening chain of golden light passing across the two figures.

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On our journey back to the ship, we stop for lunch at an outdoor restaurant, its roof a vibrant red flowered cloth that receives the breeze like a sail. We cross the river in feluccas, return to the Moon Goddess, to an afternoon free for rest, as the ship sails back upriver, rocking us gently in the Nile’s currents.

At five o’clock we gather in the Captain’s lounge, ready to re-enter the story of Isis and Osiris. Isis, who has flown over the reanimated phallus of her Beloved, is now, through Tantric magic, pregnant with Horus. Jean invites us to consider that Isis, during her long labours to develop the civilization of Egypt beside her husband Osiris, has remained childless, her womb fallow until the ripeness of time arrives.

“What in you is fallow, and needs to be called forth into actuality?” Jean asks us. “Each of us comes in already seeded with our creative potential, which we may bring into time. If we do not bring it into actuality, we are left with unspecified yearnings. We deny the validity of what we are.”

(to be continued)

Isis and Osiris, Jean Houston, Journey to Egypt, Sacred Feminine, Valley of the Kings

Sophia in Egypt: Fifteen

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In the Valley of the Kings

Now it is late evening. In my room on the Moon Goddess, I write about our visit to Abydos, sacred to Osiris, about Hathor’s temple at Dendera. I write of resurrection and greening, of partnership and the sacred marriage within the self, of joy and rebirth. As I write, tiredness drains the feelings of joy, like wine spilling from an overturned goblet.

I pray that tomorrow will bring some fresh magic when we visit the Valley of the Kings.

Four o’clock. The wake-up call sounds. There is just time to shower and dress, to gather in the ship’s lobby for coffee, before we board the feluccas to cross the Nile. The waning moon is still bright, lighting our way as she descends from her midnight perch. On the far shore, the bus waits to take us to a gorge once hidden among rocky ravines, now accessible by roads.

 

Some thirteen thousand visitors are expected today in the Valley of the Kings, Samai tells us. Yesterday there were seventeen thousand. Though we reach the entrance just before the gates open at six a.m., two other buses are there ahead of us, their passengers already climbing out.

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the Valley of the Kings

 

Beyond the entrance, we walk a dusty roadway under the looming mountains, still in the grip of darkness. Small signs on posts identify tombs that have been found here and excavated over the past century and a half. I had expected something like a street of tombs in tidy rows; instead I see a muddle of up and down, wide spaces between some, others close together. Choices may have been based on where an entrance could be made, a deep passage dug, hiddenness valued over order or relative closeness to another tomb.

A small opening in the side of the stone hill leads into the tomb of Ramses IX. Inside, we walk along a raised floor made of wooden planks, holding guide ropes on either side. I think of the fictional Amelia Peabody, that intrepid nineteenth century explorer of tombs and pyramids, who gloried in the dust and danger and bat droppings … ours is a more sanitized, less dramatic, journey inwards. The walls of the entrance way are inscribed, floor to ceiling, with a plethora of hieroglyphs, a whole book it appears. What story accompanies this pharaoh on his way to eternity?

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interior of  a tomb in the Valley of the Kings

 

The hallway opens into a room dominated by a great sarcophagus made of granite. I wonder how long the pharaoh’s body rested here before being unceremoniously taken away, hurled by the tomb robbers of Gurnah into a jumbled heap with the mummies of many other luminous pharaohs. In 1881 the hidden bodies were found by the Deputy Director of the Cairo Museum, after intense questioning of one of the descendants of millennia of tomb robbers. A week later, two hundred men arrived to carefully pack up the mummies and carry them to the Nile where a ship was waiting to take them to the Cairo Museum. Where, I realize suddenly, we saw them on our second night in Egypt.

 

After the briefest of visits, really just a circular walk in and out again, we move towards another tomb entrance. A marker near the open doorway identifies the tomb as belonging to Tausert, a little-known Pharaoh Queen, a descendant of the great Ramses 11. This tomb is spacious, welcoming, and as we move into the deeper room where the sarcophagus, long emptied of its occupant, rests, I have a sense of beauty, of colour in the wall paintings.
Jean gathers us into a circle around the empty coffin, invites us to send forth from this place a blessing of peace. Standing here in the tomb’s heart, our voices lift in song, chanting the single word Shan-ti.

Suddenly we are in darkness. Our song, a living thing, resonates, moves in waves around the tomb. As we send this blessing into the universe, the darkness feels choreographed, part of the planning for this ritual. I wonder who found the switch, turned off the inner lights.

We move out from the tomb’s centre to a larger open space, where we pause to experience the quiet. I am standing close to the left wall, beside a luminous painting, a woman’s body, blue-winged, with the head of an ibex, like the deer who greeted me in my roadway the night before I left for Egypt. The wingspread reminds me of my Isis bracelet.

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wall painting of ibex with outspread wings in the tomb of Tausert

Suddenly I sense, I know, here in this ancient place, the presence of a great overarching, protective, loving, being. A Sacred One. I know this with my entire self, and the knowing fills me with surprise and joy. I taste the Holy and I am crying.

 

Slowly, returning to awareness of the group, I realize that on the far side of the room, there is a rustling, a whispering. Cinder, one of our Mystery School companions who has in recent years been losing her eyesight, calls out, “I can see clearly”. Jean invites us to sing the Pachelbel Canon. Our voices rise together, in several harmonic parts, as though we’d been rehearsing for weeks. I open my throat and a rich sound pours out. “Al-le-lu-ia”. Something wonderful is happening here. I don’t begin to understand it, nor do I feel, for once, any need to understand.

 

We emerge from the tomb. The large group of Japanese tourists who had been waiting to enter has vanished. Samai is looking rather shaken. He tells us that our singing made the tomb tremble and the Japanese ran off in terror.
Jean appears unsurprised by this. “These tombs were built for resonance. They were meant to be sung in.”

Asked about the sudden darkness, Samia is puzzled. No one had turned off the lights.

(to be continued)

(taken from Called to Egypt on the Back of the Wind, Anne Kathleen McLaughlin, Borealis Press Publishers, Ottawa, Canada 2013     http://borealispress.com )