*This*

Yesterday evening I went to a Half Price Books in a neighborhood I usually don't visit. There I found a book called The Passion of Isis and Osiris: A Gateway to Transcendent Love, by Jean Houston. Given the startling way Isis broke into my meditation yesterday, and the issues I've been working with around sexuality and passion -- as well as the larger scope of my priestess work, it seemed less than a coincidence.

I started reading this morning, and while I'm still in the Introduction I'm feeling great satisfaction. Houston calls her work with myth and archetypes "sacred psychology" -- and it's very much in line with the way I interpret and process. I want to know more about it, beyond the scope of this book.

And there was this:

In its Jungian usage, "shadow" refers to the repressed and disavowed aspects of self. When these same shadow qualities are recognized and reconciled, there is often a movement toward greater maturity and depth of personality. Since time immemorial, myth and mythic knowing have served to balance shadow and light in individuals and in cultures, which has helped to prevent the exaltation of certain archetypal themes that, if played out unchecked and unorchestrated, could destroy the world.

Yes.

The bit about possibly destroying the world is a much larger scope than I think about, but certainly that is the ultimate consequence of destructive imbalances in individuals and cultures. This is my work, and on some level it always has been: the interpreting and healing and maturing of the soul through engagement with myth and archetype. This is the work which for me plays out in my relationships with Ereshkigal and Inanna and the energies they represent and help me to channel and balance. This is the process, the dance, that is implied by the name of this journal.

Ethical Education

One of the challenges of not belonging to an institutionalized spiritual tradition is that it has left me, as a parent, without a set of texts about ethics and morals which I can share with my daughter. I am quite aware that the examples of the adults around her have a powerful impact, but there's a lot to be said for having something explicit that can be used as a reference and a point of discussion. I haven't had that, and the older Wolfing gets, the more uncomfortable I've been about it. She's smart, she's tender-hearted, and she seems to have a good sense of justice, but I've been wanting to have some specific conversations with her about ethics, rather than leaving things generalized and intuitive.

What I have really wanted is to be able to teach her what my ethics are, but I kept running up against the frustration of not having a systematic statement.

( My Background and Ethical Liferaft, for those who don't already know the story )

It was two or three days ago that I realized that I do have a statement of ethics: my life raft is still valid. It's still my point of reference, my conclusions about the qualities -- Wisdom, Integrity, Courage, Tenderness, Humor -- which I believe are essential to being "good."

On Friday I drove Wolfling to her dad's house for the weekend, and I told her that this had been on my mind, and we were going to start talking it about when she comes home. I told her that we'd talk about my ethics and what they are -- and that she was welcome to debate and challenge them, if she wanted. I also encouraged her to spend some time thinking about what she would consider her own ethical framework. "If you were given a little kid and told to teach it right and wrong, what would you tell them?" I told her she didn't have to do this, but that it might make the conversation more interesting for her if she did some reflection first.

We'll see how it goes. . .

I'm realizing as I write this that there is definitely development that can be done. There's no reference to stewardship, for example. Concepts like Service and Justice can be extrapolated from Compassion, Integrity, and Courage -- but there may be something to be said for making them explicit.

It could be fun to engage Wolfling in the process, and see where we end up together.

Me-me-me Meme

Via lupabitch

If you had to liken me to one or two characters from any comic, movie, TV show, book and so on - who would it be, and why?

Venturing Into Egyptian Myth: Time and Personal Gnosis

One of the concepts that fascinated me the most during my graduate studies in comparative religion was that adherents of different religions inhabited different conceptual worlds or cosmos. How time is perceived and experienced subjectively is one of the key elements of those differing cosmologies. The classic example is that Christian time is linear, moving from creation through the birth, death and resurrection of Christ, and ending in an Apocalypse. A human being gets one birth and death as Creation progresses toward the Second Coming. Time as I've usually seen it in Pagan belief tends to be perceived as cyclical, with creation/birth-maturation-death-rebirth conceived of as ongoing cycle, even for humanity.

One of the holes in my religious knowledge is Egyptian myth and spirituality. I have enough of a familiarity to not be completely lost when a reference is made, but no expertise to speak of. The Passion of Isis and Osiris is already helping with that, and one of the fascinating insights of the early part of the book is the ancient Egyptian concept of time.

As Sir Alan Gardiner noted in his Egyptian Grammar, the ancient Egyptians had only two verb tenses. These revealed the singleness of an event or its repetition -- they recognized only the "present" or the "eternal present." Although the "present" could have happened today or yesterday, the significant distinction in the two verb tenses was revealed in a difference in whether perceived events occurred in man's time or in the gods' time.

The dual notion of time permeated all of Egyptian life. The mud brick and thatch houses of the people were temporary affairs, never meant to last, for the Nile floods came annually and washed everything away. But the houses of the gods, the temples, were built of stone. They were to last for eternity, the lifetime of a neter.

This is fascinating to me just in itself -- but beyond that, it strikes a chord with what I experienced of Isis yesterday.

( Putting the rest of this behind a cut, because I'm not quite as sure about it as when I started the post. I'd be very interested in the impressions of my friends who know far more about these gods and their calendars than I do. )