Quick Note to Myself: Great Rite

As I've been sorting through a lot of concepts about what I am and am not, struggling to avoid my either/or tendency to embrace both/and, I suddenly had the image of the Great Rite in Token: the union of blade and cup.

I am a Queen of Swords who is slowly but steadily embracing, reconciling with, and coming to trust my intuitive, Cups, side. I am a passionate woman who is trying to work out what that means in my current situatuation of wife-widowhood. I am trying to explore how best to live out my vocation, to disentangle a mess of "shoulds" from the authentic "I am."

The Great Rite -- in any form -- has always appealed to me on a very deep level, but I've tended to relate to it as a priestess celebrating with a priest or as representing God and Goddess. I can't recall a time when I've used it to celebrate and confirm the complementary union of my own polarized aspects.

This calls for further, practical, exploration. . .

First Jean Houston Exercise

This evening I did the first set of exercises in The Passion of Isis and Osiris. The concept of durative time (eternal time of the gods) seems to be central for Houston, and the exercise focused on connecting with that place/state.

The first part was spending ten minutes writing down a list of places/times/events in which you were happy, and which you would like to think of as existing eternally in the minds of the gods. That was fun. Then there were exercises in mixing them up, shaking the mind loose from linear, chronological time. Finally we were to combine them all into a single celebration happening in durative time. I wrote that out, and was taken by surprise by how powerful it was. I filled 3/4 of a page of stream-of-consciousness description of those events -- plus new ones that came to mind -- happening together. It was amazing.

After that, the directions said to imagine yourself on a barge on the Nile under a brilliant sky, and to picture something you want to bring into being, large or small. As I shaped my vision, I perceived Isis beside me telling me that this is the essence of magic: the ability to shift my consciousness into this place/state, to create something new, to shift and to shape, so it can come down the planes into manifestation.

This is what your imagination has been reaching for all your life, she told me, and showed me a series of images which haven't translated well when I've tried to type them here.

I'll be very interested in exploring where this is going to lead. . .