Tag: Demeter

Red and Not Red

The moon sheds herself into the water

The moon sheds herself into the sea

The moon sheds herself under the mountain

And all will be red, be red, be red.

Our Lady of the Dark Country – Sylvia V. Linsteadt

Ochre Base Coat and Virgo Constellation

A Dream from last Spring had me doing some research because part of the dream was precognitive, and I wanted to know the deeper messages coming through.

I am at my office, where I work as a grants manager. My desk is pushed against the wall, and my things on the desk are placed haphazardly about, and I cannot find my laptop. I start to panic, because that is where all my work is found. I yell at the painter, “Where is my laptop?” Instead of answering my question, he points to the wall and asks me to have a look. He says this is the base paint, Red Ochre. I look and see the wall is painted an Earthy Red color. He holds up a paper, and says this is what it will look like when finished. On the paper is the starry night sky with the constellation for Virgo on it. I begin to realize that is what my home office looks like, I have goddess paintings on the wall, one of Cybele with Lions on either side, and one of the Sleeping Goddess of Malta.

My Feelings upon waking from the dream – frustrated with all the rearranging, and angry I couldn’t find my laptop, there is also a feeling of having an office as a place to call home. The same week I had this dream was when the chaos of DOGE cuts were made known which made everything uncertain in the grant world, and who would have a job at all. My dream seemed to show me there was something deeper going on here, something ancient, perhaps an initiation.

Reality Check – Definitely change is happening, with federal funding cuts, and the office being remodeled. I don’t actually have an office in the building where our company is located on the 10th floor of a high rise building. Office remodeling began a few weeks after the dream, which I had no prior knowledge of previously, although I visited the office recently and everything was pushed up against the walls and in disarray (just like my dream). I work from home and rarely come to the office.

I did a deep dive into Red Ochre, and it tracks back to over 500,000 years, when our ancestors used it in connection with rights of passage, ceremonial body painting, or sacred art on cave walls. It was interesting to find how the word ochre in several lands means, “red and not red” (2).

This deep Earth red ochre seems to be direct communications with the primordial Earth Goddess as the base coat for ancient memory. Neolithic burials may have used red ochre pigments symbolically, either to represent a return to the earth or possibly as a form of ritual rebirth, in which the colour may symbolize blood of the Great Goddess (3).

“In early cultures, the colour’s resemblance to blood linked it to fertility, life and growth, a symbolism that has persisted throughout the ages. Evidence also suggests early cultures were attaching magical, symbolic properties to the potent pigment – it was scattered over the graves of the dead as a form of respectful ritual, seeping into the ground and even staining their bones, signaling a return to the earth or rebirth in the afterlife.” (1)

The other part if the dream is a mystery on becoming, in the Constellation Virgo where the Goddess of the Harvest is seen. Demeter as Earth Mother and Persephone as Maiden whose journey into the underworld makes her a Queen, her return brings the turn of the Seasons. A turn of the wheel to enter the dark time of the year.

She carries a shaft of the golden wheat, a symbol of the Harvest and a rights of passage into the Greater Elysian mysteries with Demeter and Persephone. This year, Virgo season started with the new moon on August 22nd the first of two new moons in Virgo, and also beginning Eclipse Season with a Lunar Eclipse and Blood Moon in Pisces September 7th. A partial Solar Eclipse on September 21st is followed by the Fall Equinox September 22nd to end Virgo Season. These are days of secret initiation.

Elysian Mysteries

It is during September that the Greater Mysteries take place over the week of the Fall Equinox from Sept. 21-27. This year, a week that also includes a Solar Eclipse in Virgo. The Greater Mysteries are held in secret, by pain of death of those who break a sacred vow. Eclipses are a time when the shadows reveal what has been hidden. Perhaps this Solar Eclipse will find Women stepping out of the shadows and reclaiming their agency and their voice, like the Women survivors who came forth to demand justice and release the names of the high powered predators whose identities have been hidden.

The constellation Virgo is Kore the Maiden Persephone, who holds a shaft of grain. The grain itself is a sacred offering of the harvest mysteries. The Greater Mysteries prepares us to take a journey into the unknown with ancient wisdom held in secret, cultivated and kept safe for generations. It prepares us to have a good death, where we will not suffer an afterlife existence, but cross over to the Elysian gardens of peace and tranquility.

References

1) Red Ochre the Color of Survival https://blog.fabrics-store.com/2020/04/28/red-ochre-the-colour-of-survival/

2 ) What the Ancient Pigment Ochre Tells Us About the Human Mind. – https://www.discovermagazine.com/prehistoric-use-of-ochre-can-tell-us-about-the-evolution-of-humans-1775

3) Giulia Battiti Sorlini, “The Megalithic Temples of Malta”, Por Anthony Bonanno, Archaeology and fertility cult in the ancient Mediterranean: papers presented at the First International Conference on Archaeology of the Ancient Mediterranean, University of Malta, 2–5 September 1985, p.145.

Choosing Descent

Persephone made a choice,

She chose the dark time of the year.

She chose a separation from all she had known before. She chose to follow her destiny and become Queen of the Underworld.

Persephone visited me in a dream years ago, and she planted a seed within me of a Pomegranate tree. A magical tree took root and grew tall and strong, with fruit bearing branches. She told me, “If you never plant the seed, the tree will never grow.”

In planting that seed within me, she initiated me into her dark mysteries. Persephone has appeared to me in dreams and journeys a few times over the years. In another dream I recall, she took me down into her cave. She showed me a ceremony she allowed me to perform, where I would take groups of women into her cave, and there they can leave their sorrows, confusion, burdens, anguish, terror, trauma, grief, blame and shame behind. She as Queen of shades, would take from us what has passed, so that we may live. Together we came to her cave as a group of troubled women, and we laid our burdens down, and let the dead rest. We returned to our lives without them.

Underworld Cave

As we move towards the blood moon, the darkness opens and the veil thins, the season of the Ancestors is upon us. A migration of dreams awaken. It is a time to become another shade of ourselves, letting our shadows dance in the wind.

What choices will you make, what changes will break?

Persephone chose to become Queen of the dead and broke her Mother’s heart.

What can you carry, and who will you marry?

Kore picked a narcissus flower that sealed her fate with the dark King.

What charms will arise from the depths of your eyes?

Seeing beyond time and space, yet in rhythm with the seasons, she descends and rises again and yet again returns.

Can you see in the dark or must you shapeshift the part?

SHE becomes Queen of the Dark and needs no one to save her. The dark is where seeds get planted. If you never plant the seeds, the tree can never grow.

What paths may open, when your truth is spoken?

Hecate is the way opener of the crossroads and holds torches to guide the way. The Goddess requires truth spoken to enter her realms of healing and wisdom. We cannot hide from ourselves under her owl wings. She has her ear to the ground, and her eyes in all directions and carries the wisdom of the seer. These truths must also be understood and spoken. Hecate holds the keys to mystery at the crossroads of life and death.

Crossroads

Jung and the Mysteries of Wordless Transmission

Niān huá wéi xiào – pick up flower, subtle smile

Vernal Equinox March 20, 2020 

As I lay in bed, immersed in some dream I can’t recall, my cat stirred me from my dream, while shaking his head intensely, ringing the bell on his collar. The sound and shaking effect, shuffled my dreams like a deck of cards. Each card flipping by was a thin reality of other dreams. I landed in a dream in black and white, where an old man wearing speckles held out a colorful bright pink origami lotus flower in his palm, while looking at me directly and smiling. – Dream ending.

A  lot of energy was held in that small bright pink lotus. I paused to feel the heightened crisp energy in the dream space between black and white, past and present, and the colorful seed of awakening I was being offered.

It was held in the hand of Carl Jung. I felt he was offering a symbol from the collective unconsciousness about spiritual unfoldment, synchronicity, dreams, and multidimensional reality. I woke up immediately to record my dream in a dream journaling app on my phone. But instead of writing my dream down immediately, as I would normally, I found myself scrolling through previous dream reports.

I landed on a previous dream I had recorded about Carl Jung and Synchronicity. There’s that dream shuffle again. I was amazed when I found it, because it was as if I was looking for it unconsciously. I could feel the energy of the lotus from my dream, now surrounding me in my physical space, in the form of synchronicity.  I knew I was being sent an important message.

Dream Lecture and Synchronicity News – March 8, 2020

I pull out a newspaper from the trash can, and it has a long article about synchronicity on the front page. The headline is in large bold letters, but very long sentences. I take the paper over to a group of women meeting in a building of a co-working space. I have a book on dreams by Carl Jung in one hand, and a newspaper article on synchronicity in the other. I join their meeting and begin talking about the topic of dreams and synchronicity. I do so by example of finding this newspaper article on synchronicity in the bathroom trash, right before coming to give this lecture on dreams. – Dream ending.

In the potent energy held in the Archetype, Jung reaches across time and space to send me messages in dreams and synchronicity. This is a fascinating study in consciousness. The Pink Lotus itself is an archetype associated with the Buddha and nirvana. In some Buddhist traditions paper lotus flowers are created and burned as ancestral offerings or for those who have crossed over, or as a kind of spiritual currency, offering appreciation for blessings, and invoking good fortune of prosperity and health (Shih-Mou).

Zen Buddhism is rooted in the wordless transmission of the Flower Sermon, where the Buddha holds up a Lotus Flower with a smile, and is received by a smile from Mahakashyapa, who then becomes his entrusted successor (Dumoulin, pg. 9).

Jung writes, “One day the Buddha silently held up a flower before the assembled throng of his disciples. This was the famous “Flower Sermon.” Formally speaking, much the same thing happened in Eleusis when a mown ear of grain was silently shown. Even if our interpretation of this symbol is erroneous, the fact remains that a mown ear was shown in the course of the mysteries and that this kind of “wordless sermon” was the sole form of instruction in Eleusis which we may assume with certainty” (Jung, Kereny, pg. 179).

Now this connection comes with the arrival of my dream on the Vernal Equinox, a time when the Elysian Lesser Mysteries took place, in preparation for the Greater Mysteries in the Fall, as referenced by Jung in the image of harvested grain. As the fates would have it, I did take part in journeying into the Lesser Elysian Mysteries, weeks after having this dream, when I participated in an online class series by Robert Moss on Shamanic Dreaming with the Goddess.

In my journey, it is revealed that as Demeter the Mother, I enter the underworld in search for Kore. I present her with a white flower.

Dreams are a path of direct experience, and wordless transmission, through the potency of archetypal energies. Synchronicity is the transmission of messages from the world behind the world, which may include written words, or words of speech overhead, or a song that comes on the radio, or a dream image showing up in waking life, accompanied by a larger energy of recognition that may feel other worldly. The mysteries of the collective unconscious are a place we frequent in dreams. In my dream, Carl Jung presented this to me as a pink paper lotus and a smile.

Written by Valley Reed©2020

Sources

  1.  Dumoulin, Heinrich (2005). Zen Buddhism: a history. p. 9. 
  2.  Jung, C. G. & Kerényi, C. (2005). Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis. Routledge; 2 edition.  Routledge, p. 179.
  3. Shih-Mou Kou, Shu-Chi Chao, Chi-Hsiung Tseng, “The Construct and the Symbolic Meanings of Paper Lotus in Taiwan” Department of Visual Communication Design National Yunlin University of Science & Technology.

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jssd/60/0/60_67/_pdf/-char/ja

Persephone and Opening the Pomegranate

  In a dream from just the other night, I encountered the Goddess Persephone. She offered me a Pomegranate which she held in her hands and told me.  “If you never open the Pomegranate you can not plant the seed and the tree will never grow.” She then took a single seed from the open Pomegranate and planted it from which a beautiful tree grew tall, full and strong like magic. EOD

This dream is rich with meaning and nourishment as is the Pomegranate. In this time of the year as we edge toward the winter solstice and the turning of the wheel from the harvest of Autumn to the cold dark days of Winter, it is the season when Persephone makes her journey into the darkness of the underworld. She will make her ascent and return during the season of spring when all things come to life and begin to grow once again.

During the season of Winter and the descent into the darkness of the underworld, there are opportunities for growth to come from within.  This call from Persephone to break open the hard shell which surrounds the deep juicy fruits inside is a kind of death of the protective hard shell and an opening of the heart and soul.    The seeds planted will grow to provide more fruits and opportunities for growth, as well as a path to travel in dreams toward the upper realms.

The Return of Persephone by Frederic Leighton

In the Myth of Persephone’s abduction by Hade’s into the underworld her Mother Demeter, Goddess of the  Harvest, is devastated by the loss of her maiden daughter. She searches the earth for her daughter and becomes forlorn by her loss and refuses to bring the sun to grow anything upon the earth. Finally, her father Zeus is persuaded to bring his daughter back from the depths of the underworld where she sits as queen alongside Hades over the souls of the dead.

Zeus sends Hermes to go and bring her back but before he is able to do so Persephone eats the seeds of the pomegranate and is destined by the fates to stay in the underworld.  Hermes manages to negotiate a time settlement where she is able to serve part of her time on earth but must return for a portion of the time to reign as queen of the underworld alongside Hades. It is agreed, and Hermes returns her to her awaiting mother goddess Demeter, bringing the return of spring and the end of winter.

“Eclipsed Moon” photo credit Martin Pugh

The Winter Solstice honors the descent into the longest  night of the year and celebrates the hope of renewal and the return of the Sun as is portrayed in the myth of Persephone.  This year the Winter Solstice will shine under the light of the full moon and also be brought in with a lunar eclipse that will at its apex appear like a giant pomegranate in the sky.  In the spirit of Persephone, I honor this time of year with remembering loved ones who have passed into the realm of  the underworld where Persephone sits as Queen.  I will celebrate the hope of the return of the light, just as Hermes served as guide to Persephone to help her return to bring about the season of planting seeds.  Before the return though, the winter season of breaking open is upon us , an opening to bring about change and transformation and growth.  May your Winter Solstice be juicy and heartfelt!