Queen of Swords

Via wyldlingspirit


Wendy played fair, and she played by the rules that they gave her;
They say she grew up and grew old -- Peter Pan couldn't save her.
They say she went home, and she never looked back,
Got her feet on the ground, got her life on its track.
She's the patron saint priestess of all the lost girls who got found.
And she once had her head in the clouds, but she died on the ground.

Dorothy just wanted something that she could believe in,
A gray dustbowl girl in a life she was better off leavin'.
She made her escape, went from gray into green,
And she could have got clear, and she could have got clean,
But she chose to be good and go back to the gray Kansas sky
Where color's a fable and freedom's a fairy tale lie.

Dorothy, Alice and Wendy and Jane,
Susan and Lucy, we're calling your names,
All the Lost Girls who came out of the rain
And chose to go back on the shelf.
Tinker Bell says, and I find I agree
You have to break rules if you want to break free.
So do as you like -- we're determined to be
Wicked girls saving ourselves.

Alice got lost, and I guess that we really can't blame her;
They say she got tangled and tied in the lies that became her.
They say she went mad, and she never complained,
For there's peace of a kind in a life unconstrained.
She gives Cheshire kisses, she's easy with white rabbit smiles,
And she'll never be free, but she's won herself safe for a while.

Susan and Lucy were queens, and they ruled well and proudly.
They honored their land and their lord, rang the bells long and loudly.
They never once asked to return to their lives
To be children and chattel and mothers and wives,
But the land cast them out in a lesson that only one learned;
And one queen said 'I am not a toy', and she never returned.

Dorothy, Alice and Wendy and Jane,
Susan and Lucy, we're calling your names,
All the Lost Girls who came out of the rain
And chose to go back on the shelf.
Tinker Bell says, and I find I agree
You have to break rules if you want to break free.
So do as you like -- we're determined to be
Wicked girls saving ourselves.

Mandy's a pirate, and Mia weaves silk shrouds for faeries,
And Deborah will pour you red wine pressed from sweet poisoned berries.
Kate poses riddles and Mary plays tricks,
While Kaia builds towers from brambles and sticks,
And the rules that we live by are simple and clear:
Be wicked and lovely and don't live in fear --

Dorothy, Alice and Wendy and Jane,
Susan and Lucy, we're calling your names,
All the Lost Girls who came out of the rain
And chose to go back on the shelf.
Tinker Bell says, and I find I agree
You have to break rules if you want to break free.
So do as you like -- we're determined to be
Wicked girls saving ourselves.

For we will be wicked and we will be fair
And they'll call us such names, and we really won't care,
So go, tell your Wendys, your Susans, your Janes,
There's a place they can go if they're tired of chains,
And our roads may be golden, or broken, or lost,
But we'll walk on them willingly, knowing the cost --
We won't take our place on the shelves.
It's better to fly and it's better to die
Say the wicked girls saving ourselves.


I am definitely going to buy this album!

I'm pondering what looks like it will become a lengthy essay, not just on C&P but on close reading, moralizing, and myth-making.

The oldest version of the story appears in The Golden Ass, and it is nothing like Ashcroft-Nowicki describes it in Your Unseen Power. I'll do a complete breakdown later, probably this weekend, but one of the biggest points of departure is that A-N describes Psyche as "wandering the earth looking for her lost love" and "as she does, she meets and helps [various small creatures] along the way." These small creatures then help her in her trials later.

Nope. The only "helping" she does is to straighten a temple of Ceres -- which earns her the gratitudes of the goddess, but not the help. The various beings who help her later (ants, eagle, river, reeds) do so because she's beautiful and naive and they take pity on her.

She is passive, suicidal, and gives her trust to the wrong people. The only time she takes decisive action is to deliberately orchestrate the deaths of her sisters, who had persuaded her to try to kill her husband.

"Cupid and Psyche" is frequently referred to as an allegory for the purification of the soul through trials until it is ready to stand with the gods. I think they're pushing the story a bit to make this connection. Even at the end, Psyche is not deified because of her own merits but because Cupid is in love with her and he persuades Jove to do him a favor. Personally, I think it reads more like a romantic farce than a spiritual allegory.

I am going to continue studying and reflecting on the story and its variations and see where it takes me, and I still like the idea of the story as a personal meta-story. But it's definitely going to involve some myth-making of my own, not adopting the story as it is.

I have decided to become a Pirate Queen.

Real life pirates are thieves and murderers, but on the archetypal level to be a Pirate Queen means to embrace freedom, to make one's own rules, to declare one's own sovereignty, to be bold, to joyously disregard convention, and to actively search out adventure.

I have not taken leave from my own real life and I'm not going to burn my bridges unless or until I have firmly arrived on new shores. But I am going to start spicing things up, taking risks so I can reach for rewards, and caring far less about what "they" might think.

This decision emerged, surprisingly, during a conversation with my new spiritual director. Inspired by my recent reading of Mama Gena's School of Womanly Arts (one of the factors in my recent healing), I had made a collage of images of pleasure. When I showed this to AA, she made it part of the altar and asked me to talk about it. Very soon, the conversation started to focus in on the images of piracy, and what they meant to me. Soon I found myself affirming that the best, most satisfying times of my life have occurred when I was somehow "outside the lines," and that true pleasure for me included freedom and not feeling constrained by what "they" thought was best/wisest/most prudent/respectable/etc.

From there, it was a short step to affirming and celebrating my inner Pirate Queen, and that's when the energy started surging -- and it hasn't let up since.

( Just a few of my images of pleasure )

Does anyone have any examples of positive portrayals of the mature Cups archetype in popular or classical storytelling? As most of you know, my relationship with Water has been ambivalent, and due to some recent input I'm working more consciously on changing that.

Unfortunately -- with all due respect to my friends here who identify with that archetype -- the examples that leap to mind where Water people are concerned tend to be negative. My sister's Water aspects drive me nuts, as have Michael's. When I think of characters, the person who comes to mind first is Medea: a sorceress so overwhelmed with jealousy and helplessness that murder is the only thing she can come up with to "fix" her situation.

So far, the best positive examples I can come up with are Sally Owens from Practical Magic (Sandra Bullock's character in the movie version) -- who seems to have a strong balance of Earth, and the traditional version of Guinevere. (Although I prefer the Queen of Wands version in Parke Godwin's Beloved Exile.)

Attractive Kings of Cups are even harder for me to come up with, although there are probably plenty of Knights I could name. . .

Ideas?

(P.S.: Don't bother mentioning Morgaine in Mists of Avalon. I can't stand her!)

I may have found the spark and the path to bring me not just fully back to life, but upward to my next level of personal development.

A lot of small things have been quietly shifting and emerging, everything from a book given to me by a colleague at work to my conversation with Dad the other night to my spiritual practices to very old daydreams. Lohain's whisper in my mind during our morning connection ritual today was like a key turning, setting everything into a new pattern.

I'm not going to speak of the details yet, just request prayers for discernment as I test this to be sure it's actually a breakthrough and not just a flash-bang that never comes to anything.

But I feel energized this morning, the kind of engaged/project-energy I haven't felt in a very long time.

I've been keeping the Queen of Cups card from the Robin Wood Tarot on the shelf of my desk for a couple of weeks now.

Those who know me best will understand just how radical that is.

I love the Druidcraft image (the icon for this post) but she's very regal and subdued -- qualities which are very comfortable for me. The RW Queen of Cups has always seemed flamboyant and bold -- which is a big part of the reason why I've never felt comfortable with her.

I know that others probably don't see those qualities the way I do. This is all about my discomfort with Water.
And my issues with my sister.

The deeper I get in my priestess studies, and the more I look at the changes I need to make in my life to be truly satisfied in it, the more I realize tha it's (past) time I claimed my own gutsiness those qualities in the areas she represents.
First I have to get comfortable with them, of course.
I'm working on it. . .

Hopefully this queen will be able to help.

Being reborn hurts.

Being 'between' hurts.

For all my growth, I remain a Queen of Swords.
For those of my type, ambiguity sucks -- and where I am now is full of ambiguity.

There is continuity with the past, yes -- but the old answers, the old methods do not work.

Even my sexuality seems to be impacted -- and being smacked up against that this afternoon was not a happy or comfortable experience.

I retreated into my practices this evening -- retreated to take refuge in them, rather than pick them up like a heavy duty. That, at least, is a positive change.

I sat in my meditation posture (back against pillows against the headboard of my bed, soles of my feet together, hands loose in my lap) and did four-fold breaths, then relaxed into more natural breathing. I started to frame questions about my emerging identity, about my future.

Immediately I got a crystal clear message in my mind: In the past, your identity was based on what you thought, what was within. Going forward, it will be made from what you do.

( Unpacking the Message )

The funny thing is that I can't be sure who sent those words to me. Usually my inner senses are clear enough that I have some sense of who is addressing me: a deity, a spirit, LM, or my own projection of someone from my life: my father, a teacher, etc. This message didn't seem connected to anyone in particular.

I think, based on some other messages I've been getting lately, that it is most likely my higher self. I've been getting quiet but clear messages lately which have been nudging me into better choices about things like alcohol and doing my practices. It's been very clear that although I don't consciously address myself, it's not an external being nudging me. It's me, my knowing-better self. And that feels like a great step forward.

All those stories did shape who I am. The identity I created for myself was real. But despite some very positive elements, it has proved insufficient to deal with being a full adult in this world. It is insufficient to my vocation. It is insufficient to being a good parent (including the need to provide for my child materially).

This also neatly folds in with the other meditations I've been doing around consciously embracing the more explicitly (to my formulation) masculine power archetypes, in particular the King of Swords and the Emperor. All of my most important work has been inward-focused. It's time to claim the yang energy, the Chokmah energy of the Tree of Life, and start projecting outward.

A lot of what's been moving in my life since my ordination has involved power: as energy, as potency, as authority. It started with B in the encounter at Pantheacon, where we moved into a space where he started addressing me as "Mistress" as he gave me a massage, and I accepted the power with a sense of pleasure and ease that was entirely new, and then enjoyed exercising the power. And I had a very strong sense that both the sensuality and power elements of that encounter were a direct gift from Ereshkigal and Inanna, and the interaction with B was an essential step in integrating the energies I'd received.

One of the challenges I've dealt with my entire adult life has been feeling that I can't claim and exercise authority -- and by that I mean the authority of knowledge or skill as much or more as the authority of holding a position of privilege over others -- if I haven't been given some kind of stamp of approval by an outside institution or established authority. This has made starting my spiritual direction practice problematic, since by definition my path is outside of such structures.

I grew up middle-class, the daughter of a man of significant authority, both personal and institutional. The more I became aware of the way my secret thoughts were falling outside of what was labeled safe and proper and appropriate, the more intent I became on blending in and achieving recognition through the proper channels.

And now. . . to quote Elphaba, Something has changed within me. Something is not the same. I'm feeling my power in a way I never have before -- and a big part of it is because others have been spontaneously deferring to it, even reveling in it. I've been afraid that if I claimed authority and/or exercised power past a certain limit of perceived safety that I would be wrong, that I would cause harm, that I would be rejected for arrogance. So far, none of that has been happening. I've been feeling my energy, my potency, coursing through me, and it's been very, very satisfying for me -- and evidently helpful and/or pleasurable for others.

It's also made me aware of how quickly and easily I could burn out from the intensity of the energy coursing through me, especially when combined with the high of the interpersonal dynamics I'm experiencing -- not to mention that I'm now vulnerable to the temptation to abuse of power, something that hasn't been an issue before.

So yesterday morning as I stood before my marriage altar and shared my morning cup with LM, I asked him for help, for insight, for advice. His response was to flash the image of the Emperor from the Robin Wood tarot into my mind. Things started crystalizing immediately, the first of which was the need for me to be solid and secure and appropriately protective of my own resources, to exercise some of my power and authority in setting my own boundaries for self-care.



The Emperor seems to be a problematic card for many (like the Queen of Swords!). His four-square, conservative energy is often portrayed as oppressive patriarchal structure and/or arrogance. I've seen very few attractive Emperor cards. But when LM (who partakes strongly in this archetype -- as does my father) showed this to me, what I saw was the way his square throne grounded him. He wasn't automatically responsive to every desire or supplication directed to him.

That doesn't mean he's lacking in generosity. My experience of the Emperor includes the positive aspects of 'rule by the father': nurture, providing bounty, shelter, and protection, and abundant love as well as discipline. But he's not a pushover. At his best, his structure provides a framework within which others can flourish in their own way. (At his worst, he punishes or prunes anything which goes outside that structure -- but every archetype has its dark side.)

Historically, Emperors are land-grabbers, but I don't see that in this figure. His solid energy speaks to me of knowing what is appropriately his and holding it as a sacred trust, leaving what is outside his sphere alone. What is inside his sphere is his to rule -- but he is answerable to the gods for the fruits or consequences of that rule. If he abuses his power, not only does he sacrifice the legitimacy of his title, he will have a massive karmic debt to pay.

I'd been trying various grounding techniques to try to work with the energy that's been flooding me -- but it was this image and the combination of intellectual and intuitive responses to it that seem to have helped me the most. I feel more centered than I have in a couple of weeks, more in control of myself. And that's the first task and responsibility of power: to properly rule yourself.

Is there a god/dess of sacred strangers?

Their power has been so vivid in my life in recent weeks. Each time I turn around some stranger -- an acquaintance, actually, someone 'known' but not a regular part of my life -- has been there to companion me.

There is much to be said for old friends: people who know you through and through, the tried and trustworthy, the secret keepers, faithful and reliable.

But in this past month I'm finding it's the strangers who are blessing me, walking with me into new places with no preconceptions of who I am, only a glimmering sense of who I am becoming. They have no stake in my past, nothing to lose if I grow and change and evolve.

I blossom and soar, supported by the undefined possibilities they see in me.



(And I love and cherish my old friends who continue to cherish me as I change.)

Every so often I think wistfully of my QoS identity.

I miss the quick and easy username. I miss the image of the card (see userpic).
I miss the specificity of her.

I was right to release her as a primary identity. I needed to grow beyond that single aspect of my self being so central.

She's still a part of me, but I miss being so close to her.