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

Sophia in Egypt: Twenty-One

January 23, 2017 amclaughlin2014 Leave a comment

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.

download-of-scarab

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.

eg51-9-17

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

January 17, 2017 amclaughlin2014 Leave a comment

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 21^st 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.

goddess-hathor

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

January 9, 2017 amclaughlin2014 Leave a comment

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.

47-luxor-temple-at-night_thumb

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

January 2, 2017 amclaughlin2014 Leave a comment

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.

yoda_swsb

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

December 27, 2016 amclaughlin2014 1 Comment

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.”

stock-photo-mary-kissing-the-baby-jesus-59597146

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

December 19, 2016 amclaughlin2014 Leave a comment

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.

images

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.

f1000002

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.

(to be continued)

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

Sophia in Egypt: Fifteen

December 13, 2016 amclaughlin2014 Leave a comment

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.

download

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?

tst2

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.

tst5

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 )

Jean Houston, Journey to Egypt, masculine/feminine balance, Sacred Feminine, Temple of Hathor

Sophia in Egypt: Fourteen

December 5, 2016 amclaughlin2014 Leave a comment

denderah-court

We are standing in the court before the Egyptian Temple dedicated to Hathor.

Jean Houston has just acknowledged the men who have had the courage to be part of this journey of mostly women.

“We know that Sekhmet, that great fierce extraordinary goddess, the one who existed before time was, danced wildly here in happiness,” Jean says. “We have among us some very fierce women.”

“What we would like to do for you here in this great temple of connection, of love, in the great temple of Dendera, which is also the temple of the Zodiac… is to dance zodiacly and maniacly around you with the fierce energy that is the rising feminine and to honour these men for being willing to recognise us in our true partnership emergence.

denderazodiac

Zodiac in the Temple of Hathor

“ This is the time, I believe, of the new hieros gamos, the sacred union of the evolved male and the evolved female who can face each other with glory, and no longer with ambiguity.”

So we dance wildly, in a zodiacal form, honouring our male companions on the journey. Wild dogs watching from a nearby hill bark encouragement, approval.

“Thank you for being born at the same time we are. Thank you for coming on this wild journey,” Peg says to the men. “ Thank you all of us for having lived long enough to see this day in this place with that lady of grace, Hathor, and her sister, her other aspect, which is Sekhmet, because she did so love and honour the masculine.”

Jean invites, “Let us intone a great appreciative ahhhh in their honour, and in modern parlance, Wow! Wow! Wow!”

We move into the vast temple, gathering in a small chamber. Above us on the painted ceiling, the Sky Goddess, Mother Nut, awaits us, her outstretched body alive with stars.

images

Ceiling in the temple of Hathor

Peg leads an invocation: “For Hathor, for the restoration of joy in our souls, for the restoration of dancing in our feet, no matter how slowly they may move on these stones, for the restoration of greening in the world, for again and again and again the promise of love between human beings and between all life forms, the engendering love, the love that creates, so between us we create something beautiful on behalf of the world. Underneath this night sky glory, this mother of us all, who swallows the sun, and sends it through her beautiful body and gives birth to it in the day.

“This is the house, this huge temple, the house of the lady, Hathor, whose own name, as we’ve been told, means the House of Horus, so there is an engendering power of male and female here that is filled with inebriation, drunken love, drunken happiness and delight at every level.”

Jean calls us into a reflection on the inner feminine and masculine. “The House of Hathor, the House of Horus. The bridal chamber of the two here under the great begetting goddess Nut.

“Your right hand, your right foot: Horus; your left hand, your left foot: Hathor.”

Honouring the masculine and feminine sides of our bodies, we stamp our feet, gesture with our hands, first right, then left, again and again as the chant continues: Horus… Hathor… Horus… Hathor… Horus… Hathor… Horus… Hathor…

“Bring them closer,” Jean invites. “Crossing your hands across your breast. Horus and Hathor. This is the place of the marriage of the self in time with the eternal beloved. It is also the place of the marriage or the great sacred hieros gamos, of yourself with your soul, and as well as many other dyads between you, within you, of you : male and female, spirit and nature, matter and time. And I ask you the questions: Do you take onto yourself this marriage of self and soul, of male and female, of matter and spirit, of nature and time? Do you?”

And we respond “I do”.

“Will you promise to love, to honour, to support, to sustain, to keep the holy ignition bright and flaming?

“Do you agree to a life committed from this moment forth to the joy of such union?

“Do you agree to bring the joy and the power, the enormous fertility and fecundity, as we see from Mother Nut, into this world and time?….and to bring this joy and creativity into the simple things in your life as well as the middling things, as well as the great ones?

“Do you agree to be a fertile vessel of the emergence of the world that is coming now?

“Do you agree to be a spiritual channel for all that is now fertile, fecundating,
a joyful thing, a winged gift? Do you agree to be the bearer of this winged gift now?

“Then celebrate, celebrate, celebrate this union now.”

There is an explosion of sound. A joyous energy courses though the chamber, soars up past Mother Nut, moves through the great temple, delighting the lady of the house. Hathor. Herself.

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

Isis and Osiris, Jean Houston, Journey to Egypt, masculine/feminine balance, Temple of Hathor

Sophia in Egypt: Thirteen

November 28, 2016 amclaughlin2014 Leave a comment

Ra is rising on another day in Egypt. Already we are on the bus, on our way to Abydos on the West Bank of the Nile. This, one of the holiest sites of ancient Egypt, the centre of Osiris worship, is the place where the myth tells us the head of Osiris is buried.

Abydos became for ancient Egypt a pilgrimage destination, a desirable place to be
buried and the home of a theatre festival where for more than two thousand years the passion play of the life and death of Osiris was enacted by priests.

We walk from the bus across a barren rock-strewn landscape, moving towards the temple of Osiris, the place of his resurrection. It is a ruin. We are looking down upon a stone structure, its rough- hewn blocks formed into pillars and arches precariously balanced, some scattered on the ground around what remains of the temple. Water has pooled near what would have been the entrance. A makeshift wooden bridge leads downwards, but we do not attempt to go nearer. It is hard to summon up a sense of wonder amid this tumble of grey stones. A deconstruction site.

abydos-ruins

Abydos Temple Ruins

Yet when Peg Rubin leads us in a reading of the Hymn to Osiris, her voice summons the ancient magic….
When you look up, know I am there –
sun and moon pouring my love around you.

Though apart, I am part of you.
I am the sojourner destined to walk a thousand years
until I arrive at myself.

Now Peg invites us to reflect upon what within us calls out for resurrection. Standing here amidst the ruins I sense my need of a resurrection of joy, the joy of knowing I am free to love. I invite a resurrection of wonder and gratitude that I am here in this ancient land where miracles still occur.

I sense a call to be a bearer of joy.

I hear Peg say that Love make hearts lighter. I remember that for the ancient Egyptians the weighing of the heart at death was the test of goodness. My heart is moving towards a lightness that might even have got me through that test.

Near the ruin is a newer temple dedicated to Osiris, built by the Pharaoh Seti 1, completed by his son, Ramses 11. Inside there are sanctuaries dedicated to Osiris, to Isis, to Horus. Wall carvings, still bearing rich colours, blood reds, soft sky blues, ochre, tell the same story we’ve been listening to on the Moon Goddess.

In one scene, Isis receives the pillar that holds the body of Osiris. A tall man is tipping it towards her as her arms reach out to receive it. The whole scene is surrounded by carefully carved and painted hieroglyphs. I am a child in a magic cavern with fairy tales painted on all its walls. A child who can read only pictures.

From Abydos, we travel on to the Temple of Hathor in Dendara. We walk along a dusty road, enter a wide sunlit forecourt leading up to a majestic temple built on the ruins of a far older one by the Romans just before the time of Christ.
At once I sense a different energy in this open space. A lightness comes into my heart. My attention is drawn to a beautiful stone face, resting on the ground, amid a tumble of stones. I recall the face that had so entranced me in the Cairo Museum. This carving holds the same settled peace and wisdom, a direct gaze, almost on the edge of smiling. I realize I am gazing back at an image of Hathor who is known as the goddess of love and joy.

dendara1

Temple of Hathor at Dendera

As I walk closer, I see that the temple is enormous, looming above us perhaps eighty feet into the clear sky. Its great pillars each bear a likeness of Hathor, the
same face I’ve just seen in the tumbled stone.

Our group gathers on the wide stone pathway at the entrance to the temple.
Jean invites the men in our group to come into the centre. “This is a very very very feminine temple, and it is a temple in which Herself is very much present.”

“We are living into a time moving from a patriarchy all over the world, not to a matriarchy, but to true and deep partnership between men and women. And that’s very hard, after thousands of years of it having been otherwise.”

“These men have been willing and courageous enough to travel in a cauldron of women. And these are the men who are emerging.”

Isis and Osiris, Jean Houston, Journey to Egypt, Thoth, Moon God, Egyptian God Of Truth

Sophia in Egypt: Twelve

November 22, 2016 amclaughlin2014 Leave a comment

It is afternoon when we gather once more in the Captain’s lounge. Jean takes up the story of Isis and Osiris at the point where the casket holding the body of Osiris has become embedded in a tamarisk tree on the shores of the land of Byblos. The King, coming upon this wonder, takes the tamarisk to serve as a pillar in his new palace.

Isis, mourning profoundly, wanders in search of her lost beloved, crying out: they have taken away my Lord and I do not know where to find him.

Osiris is encased in a tree. Jean points out the symbolic richness of this, the tree upon which Jesus was crucified, the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha received enlightenment. In Egypt trees were rare, highly valued, often brought from Lebanon (Byblos) for crafting coffins.

The greening of the tree, the sweetness of Osiris, draw Isis to Byblos. In her mourning rags, dishevelled, her hair roughly shorn, she appears as a beggar at the palace, coming to the side door, seeking work. Isis herself exudes an incredible smell…to some it was atar of roses, to others jasmine, to each it was their favourite smell. The Queen of Byblos and her servants notice the delicious odour of sanctity about Isis. They love her smell. The most primitive and accurate of our senses leads them to trust Isis. They say please come, be with us, and they give this old haggard woman their son, the royal child, to nurse.

“So Isis finds something human to love in the palace to replace Osiris for a while,” Jean says. “Thus both the archetypal and the human loves are served. This is a very feminine mystery. It is not to serve just one or the other, God or human. Rather it is both love of the eternal and of the human at the same time, of both Osiris and the small child.

So much has been made about the biology of love that we have forgotten that there is a huge mystery in love, that one loves the human and the divine in the other at the same time, especially in the feminine mystery. You see it in men: oh you are a goddess to me. They put the woman on a pedestal for about a year, and then…but with women it is sustained, often for too long. There’s something about trying to see the other as both human and godly.”

The story also teaches us that “the high being never enters through the front door with degrees and titles, but through the side or the back door…the high being sidles in.”

Isis becomes the much-loved nurse to the child. Loving this king’s child so much, she decides to give him the gift of immortality. At night when the palace is asleep, she thrusts the infant prince into the fire where through some divine alchemy his mortal parts will be destroyed and he will become divine. Then Isis turns herself into a swallow and flies around the pillar where Osiris is encased, trying to lure him back into life, trying to lure the essence of Osiris into the child who is being made immortal. The child becomes the surrogate for her beloved.

In our relationships, we desire also to lure the spirit of the archetypal beloved into the unprepared body-minds of our beloved in existential space and time. We experience a double loss in our attempts to do this. We damage terribly the flesh and blood beloved and damage also the eternal beloved who seems to remain inaccessible because our attempts have been inappropriate.

But one night Isis is caught out in her attempts to burn the child. The Queen runs in, snatches her child from the fire. Isis then reveals herself in her glory, her fullness, tall and beautiful. She claims the trunk of the tamarisk so that she may remove the coffin that contains the body of Osiris.

Isis takes the body of Osiris back to Egypt. There she animates him, raises his phallus, flies over him as a bird and impregnates herself with the Child Horus.

Jean points to the symbolism of this reverse annunciation, for Mary was impregnated by the spirit in the form of a dove.

This union of Osiris’ body with Isis’ spiritual essence, a union of the essences of their spiritual bodies, teaches us that the spirit of our higher essence can engender a great one, create new possibilities in our lives. Horus is the divine child born of the spiritual and the magic side of the self. For both Jesus and Horus, children of sacred birth, the task will be to raise the consciousness of the entire community.

mary.JPG-22

Following the afternoon’s teaching, I am drawn once more to the Moon Goddess’ tiny jewellery store. I have been looking at a silver bracelet that holds an image of Isis, her wings outstretched, deep carmine red, and blue of night skies. Its price is high, would take all the spending money I have, including what I was saving for Christmas gifts for my family. The Egyptian storekeeper, aware of my dilemma, offers to adjust the price to allow for Christmas gifts. I walk away smiling, my wrist encircled by Isis. l see the throne on her head, her symbolic name. I know that this will carry the memory of her response to my prayer on her Island of Philae, and the gift of truth under the full moon of Thoth.

Much later, after my return home to Canada, examining the bracelet with greater care, I will see clearly that it is a feather, not a throne, on the head of Isis. I will learn that my bracelet shows the winged Isis in her role as Ma’at, goddess of truth.

sophiawakens