about to be posted on Washington Post “On Faith” site:
*Inviting the Light of the Trickster Redeemer
to *Magnetize the Desirable Story – and send it *Spiraling Forth into the Darkening World
Late-breaking ancient Mythic News: The Lunar Eclipse Winter Solstice of 2010
Winter Solstice is a time of inviting the returning light to animate the community’s new desirable guiding story. With all the ancestors behind us, and the next seven generations before us, we once again step into the still point of the travelling now! to lay the old year to rest:
“The longest night – the wheel is turning – what do we give to the night?!” being the traditional (thank you Star Hawk!) Winter Solstice chant. We toss energetic dross into the fiery light of the new story.
“On earth as it is in heaven,” “As above, so below.” All cultures have derived not only their calendar but also their story from earth-sky correspondence.
The 12th day of Christmas – Epiphany – honors the arrival of the three Magi – aka Astrologers, who through sky-earth divination, arrive at the birth of the Trickster Redeemer. The Trickster Redeemer, in myriad cultural forms, is he or she who, like Sheherezade, not only liberates the land from tyranny, but seeks to liberate even the tyrant from his own murdered heart, always encouraging us to suck the ‘G” out of “Kingdom,” leaving – “The kindom of heaven is at hand.”
Empire’s nature is to periodically inhale the liberating story, (Some think of Paul as the early Karl Rove) kidnapping the democratic (“Love thy neighbor as thyself!” some would call “socialist”) spiritual teachings, and holding the story as hostage in servitude to Empire. “O come, o come Emanuel, and ransom captive Israel,” being one of the most beautifully beseeching of incantations.
The manner of invitation for the invisible back-stage power of spirit to be born into the visible on-stage incarnational realm of matter has always been story. Story, language, eloquence, metaphor and music are the incarnational garb whereby power enters the world.
For banishing bonus points, this Solstice coincides with a Lunar eclipses, a precise Full Moon (available only on this precious home planet) where the Sun projects the earth’s shadow onto the Moon. We see shadow. We see what is usually hidden. The traditional form of participation was, “as the Moon is eclipsed, so may (fill in the blank) be eclipsed by (fill in the blank)! Everyone is invited to play. Spiritual etiquette guides that we do not put proper names in the blanks. More – “may human rudeness be eclipsed by reverence”, “may empire be eclipsed by democracy,” “May constraining lies be eclipsed by liberating truth,” “May opacity be eclipsed by transparency,” “May war be eclipsed by Reverent Imaginative Ingenuity!”etc.
For every mundane – may there be a spicy, playful energetic correlary: WiccanLeaks: “May anything up to no good, be revealed, rendered harmless, and an occasion for mirth!”
For mythic understanding of the news, befoibled personalities aside, – we look to late Swedish investigative journalist Stieg Larson’s life – to his novels, (36 million in print) “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” etc. about an investigative journalist who with quintessential outsider-genius computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander ( the new Harry Potter, trickster outsider waif, all evil against them, who against all odds, with team of ingenious allies, reveals tyranny, becomes a liberator.) On to Wikileaks etc. with its curious Swedish connection. Reality to fiction to reality… Demeter and Chiron are two of myriad mythological figures who found actual theatres. Zora Neal Hurston writes of the Great Trickster Redeemer High John the Conqueror: “First off he was a whisper, a will to hope, a wish to find something worthy of laughter and song. Then the whisper put on flesh…”
The implications of this interplay between reality to imagination to reality are wonderfully mind-boggling.
The protoplasm of the world is now particularly & partically responsive to imaginative imprint. We are made in the image of Creator – not that we look lke an old guy with a beard, but we are imagined into being by the Divine, and our imagination is the divine spark within us all that can dream the desirable world into being.
We are invited to participate in a new ancient story of collaborative kinship rising from the ashes of this dying year, and collapsing Empire. (Please note most “news” shows brought to us by Viagra etc. Because Empire just can’t get it up anymore. If your Empire lasts longer than 2,000 years – please consult your pragmatic mystics.)
The essential mythic-political-spiritual-cultural guiding meta-story of now guides us at this time of Dire Beauty to eclipse a culture of dominance: “Eat it own it, put mackeral genes in this tomato, ’cause we are unsupervised Mars, no Venus.” Belching and brawling to planetary looting and pillaging. “Side-effects may include sociopathic dis-egard for kinship leading to planetary extinction.” The New Guiding Story – of Indigenuty – reverent collaboration with the symmetrical genius of nature -from despair to golden- hearted willingness to be part of a Big Story.
The gifts of the Magi are available: Gold – to illumine the re-born innocent dignity of our child hearts, Frankincense for our spirits, and Myrrh to honor the guiding wisdom of the dead. May informed grief, the human dead, the on-going death of all the micro (plankton) and macro beings in the Gulf, the suffocating death of the Oceans by plastic – serve as sufficient incentive for us humans to rejoin the community of creation as participants, proffering collaborative ingenuity to resolve the innumerable rude crises we have imposed on our neighbors.
The oppressor needs the medicine of what he oppresses. The colonizer unconsciously, thus crudely, seeks the anti-dote to soul-less materialism in the colonized. England needed the spirituaity of India. America needs the art-form of beauty and reciprocal blessing from the Middle East, and Afghanistan, birth-place of the mystic poet -Rumi.”Stop! Be still! and listen – because you’re drunk – and we’re at the edge of the roof.” “Let the beauty we love be the beauty we do – There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the earth.” Iran-Persia is the birth-place of Hafez, who says, “The small man builds prisons for everyone he meets, but the wise woman ducks under the Moon and tosses keys to the beautiful and rowdy prisoners.” Regardless of our temporary age, race and gender assignments, let’s all be that woman, under this Full Moon.
And let’s toss a key to the beautiful and rowdy prisoner known as Barack Obama, whose name means “Bless the Good!” And whose Middle name “Hussein,” means “Beloved of God.” President imprisined by Empire, bless his heart. One of this year’s recent ancestors is Chalmers Johnson, great scholar and critic who said, “America, you can either have an Empire or a Democracy.” He urged us to dedicate to the latter. Empire eclipsed into the night!
Nasa provides us with one of the blessings of the modern world – information.
The last time a Lunar Eclipse and Winter Solstice coincided was 1638.
So what was going on in 1638? Even in the micro-Northern Western realm? Politico-Historico Ally, Jamie Yeager chimes in: “getting ready for the English revolution of 1640, in which for the first time in history a people decided that nobles should not dictate the religion of a country, nor should the bureaucrats of the religion itself do so, but that the populace should – our old friends the diggers, the levellers, and the fifth-monarchy men, among others…. The English revolution is the spiritual father of the American, the French and ultimately the Russian revolutions…
This is our gift to ourselves and the world. From this Season’s death-re-birth Solstice-Eclipse cauldron we draw forth the irresistible invitational meta-story to take the lead in the memosphere. We invite the Light of the Trickster Redeemer into all hearts – “tidings of comfort and joy,” that the atmospheric “rough music” may have no purchase in this world, that war is always a failure of imagination, that it’s anti-dote is the story that invites the best in all of us to quicken.
Next Lunar Eclipse Winter Solstice: December 21st 2094 – So let’s get all the good out of this one!
Caroline W. Casey is the Chief Trickster at Coyote Network News. – the Mythological News Service – host of Pacifica Radio’s The Visionary Activist Show,” provider of astrological readings, Trickster Trainings, and astrological*political*lecture*theatre. Dec. 21st 8 p.m. at Busboys and Poets, 5th and K NW in Washington D.C.
www.CoyoteNetworkNews.com
