Pagaian Cosmology Forum

One of the key phrases of this Seasonal Moment is: The fruit is in the seed, the seed is in the fruit. And I cut an apple across its diameter to illustrate that, in the preparation of students or a group: the seed can be seen in the core of the apple in a five-pointed star shape. It represents Kore the Daughter in the Heart of the Mother. This is a religious relationship – expressed in the icon of Demeter handing Persephone the wheat, (see p.170 PaGaian Cosmology or Chapter 6 on-line). It is the sacred knowledge of existence passed on. It is a religious relationship - connecting relationship. It has been storied of Old as Mother-Daughter (and indeed science of our times reveals this truth in the nature of the ovum). Thus all initiates may be “Daughter": it is not a statement about genitalia or actual biological details, but rather a statement of relationship - an openness and capacity to receive the transmission of sacred knowledge from the Mother. For this reason I will consider changing the wording of Demeter's invocation slightly this year - so that all are addressed as "Daughter" ... see the next post in this topic below.

We are all Matter – made of the same stuff – Mater, Mother. We are all Mother, made of Her. So may we all be "Daughter". It is not a negating of the particular Son identity as well.

One of the other main stories of this season is that of "Mabon" - a traditional name for this Autumn Equinox ritual.
As I say in Appendix F (or p.302 paper version of PaGaian Cosmology):
Mabon is the name of the Son of Modron – the Matrona or Mother of earliest times. His name is not a name, but is a title “Mab ap Modron"  meaning “Son of the Great Mother". In later tales and songs the divine Mabon is transformed in the role model for the Western knight. Mabon is taken from His Mother when only three nights old as the story goes in the Mabignogion. “He is the primal child …"  (Matthews 1994:83) He represents an innocence* (see Note). In the still strong mysteries of Mabon and Modron the Mother, he is lost and imprisoned, but his primal innocence is held to turn away harm. Though he is lost he has the power of protecting Life. It has similarities to the multivalence of the Demeter-Persphone story.

This “innocence": it is a “Don Quixote"  thing – “innocence “ being a connection to the Mother, to Source, direct connection to Cosmos – not in an arrogant way, but in a childlike receptive way. "Loss of innocence" is much more than the sexual thing it has been reduced to in many cultures globally. It is loss of Vision, alienation from Mother, seeing the deeper truth of things. Don Quixote has often been judged as not really seeing things as they are ... in truth foolish, and wearing "rose-coloured" glasses: but perhaps he was "innocent" and actually seeing something deeper.

The loss of the Beloved One ( our personal Beloved Ones and the collective Beloved Ones) is tended by the knowledge/sense - "gnowing" - that the Thread of Life continues ... the power of the Seed to return Beauty to the world: the She will return if you like - Beauty will return. That is the Promise of the Seed. (Persephone). She is a Redeemer figure in that sense.

"washing our sins away" is a corruption of this original redemption - a corruption of the Continuity of the Thread of Life, of the Power of the Seed to restore Beauty. The Continuity is expressed in the Care that we may feel. This care is a sacred thing. It comes forth in the Sacred Balance of joy and grief. Brian Swimme - inspiring cosmologist - describes the Care  of the curvature of space-time ... it is a delicate precious Balance.

The Continuity, the restoration of Beauty, the regeneration of the Seed, is expressed in the red threads that we put on in the ritual of Autumn Equinox (now in the Mabon script of the 2008 paper edition of PaGaian Cosmology, and also noted in the Commentary - MABON notes.) It is a Vision that can sustain us.  Reference is made to the red threads on p.304 of the paper version, and in Appendix F on-line.

I am understanding the significance of the red threads better this year. And when we tie them on each other I will say:
Let us tie red threads on each other: we participate in the Vision of the Seed, of the Wheat - of the continuity of Life. We are initiates into the Mysteries.
It is the continuity of Life that continues beneath the visible, beneath what we see … it is this Vision that we come to, that we grow in, that grows within us. I think it is the Sacred Balance of Grief and Joy – that we may feel, and it may be described as a Power of the Universe … what Brian Swimme names the Care of the Curvature. It is a Power of Interrelatedness – this Sacred Balance of Grief and Joy that we celebrate particularly at this Seasonal Moment. And that is all part of the significance of the red thread.

I have begun to leave a space/place in the ritual circle for the Lost Beloved One at Mabon - a cushion that has a luxurious piece of purple satin fabric and a thick long length of red ribbon placed on it. This fabric and ribbon was originally used for the ceremony for Lyn's funeral 2006, but is now for all our lost Beloved Ones - a reminder of their absence/presence.

We have a new triangular wooden floor table for the Mabon ritual altar this year. I have covered it with the usual purple triangle cloth. It is a special invocation of Demeter, who is the Mother of the Great Triangle of Life - Creator, Preserver, Destroyer. The first part of Her name - "De" - is the word for the triangle shaped Greek letter delta. The second part "meter" means mother.
* ref: Carolyn McVickar Edwards, The Storyteller's Goddess

The decorating begins for ritual:



The aesthetics in the ritual space - and around the Home - are important. The colours and objects that speak the Poetry of the Moment teach the bodymind as they are placed and as they fill the eyeballs. I dance in the ritual space, and take it all in. I learn from it.

MABON REFLECTIONS:
“You have waxed into the fullness of life and waned into darkness"  (Persephone)

“sometimes the darkness calls you away"  (Wendy Rule)

The darkness.  The unknown or undesirable or just hidden.  What is it?  Why do we turn from it?  Or do we?

“beyond the bounds of space and time, where light and dark, birth and death, joy and sorrow meet as One."   (Glenys’ ritual script.)

Watching the opera of Inana’s descent into the Underworld the other day, I began by asking “but why is she going?"    It was only clear that she heard the call and was going – but what really was calling, why was she going?

I resolved the issue in my mind by deciding that it didn’t matter Why.  Or rather, the call, the Underworld, was all that we hide from ourselves.  All the pain: the unresolved issues of the past, the frightening possibilities of our future, the final knowing that we too shall die.  This, was the Underworld – our own individual Underworld.  And we need to regularly go down into it and acknowledge it as part of ourselves – part of the very nature of our being.

In our society of instant gratification and superficial measures of a “good life"  we, all too easily forget these deeper aspects of life and ourselves.

I wonder too, about the Underworld of the Society in general – all the abuses and neglect, hatred and violence that the societal “we"  try to gloss over and hide from.  With advertisements expounding the virtues of all sorts of treatments and ways to live a longer and healthier life, it is almost too easy to forget that we too, will die. 

In my work in aged care I have seen families expecting much from doctors and medicine, keeping their elderly alive long past when nature alone would have let them go.  And I wonder, how our society would be if it opened itself more readily to that dark underworld that accepted death more easily.

It has only been in very recent times, and only in our affluent societies that we have been able to view death as an anomaly – something that only happens in tragic circumstances, when modern medicine has failed or some tragic accident has occurred.  I am sure at no other time in the history of human kind has any society had the luxury to be able to come to this view.   

But the even the idea that death can be avoided surely contributes to the exploitation of our planet, and our weak.