4 10 105 https://filianicstudies.org/cms/files/original/fd1bc62686dc81772598db32c0279f44.pdf 2ad583bbe369daa2692ee2d7bcd2085e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Madrian Literature Circle Description An account of the resource Documents issued by the Madrian Literature Circle between 1973 and 1982. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973-1982 Language A language of the resource English Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data loose leaf, typewritten (3pp.) Text Any textual data included in the document Ecology as a Spiritual Quest In recent years there has been a positive yearning in many hearts to return to a more natural way of living, and to protect – in all her forms – against the ravages of human greed and exploitation. Very much of this has been based on sound economic and ecological reasoning. Yet often one feels that these reasons are only rationalisations of a motive more difficult to express but far more profound. A feeling that beyond considerations of human self-interest, or even compassion for other creatures, there is something in nature that is intrinsically sacred. As a Madrian, I find this a quite natural attitude. Matriarchal religion is closely bound up with nature. It is not a question of nature-worship (as is sometimes suggested by those who wish to see nothing but "primitive" superstition in our matriarchal past), but a recognition that nature is not only a creation of God, but has a special "purity" in that it has fallen less far from the primordial unity with Her than has maidkind. In the Scriptures of the Goddess we read very freuqently that all physical things are the outward expression of Spirit. In their perfect state, they correspond to themis [thamë], the Divine Order or Pattern. For example, in The Way of Simplicity, we read: "All nature is a vast and subtle music, to which the innocent soul is close attuned", but evil can disrupt the music of themis: "The profane assay to sever themselves from this music, fixing new laws of gain and self-advantage against the law of universal love." From the point of view of the earth plane, it is only humanity which can do this. Animals, stars and flowers all move within the natural harmony of themis. Physical nature is not perfect (animals prey on one another, plants may be parasitic, disease and death exist), but at its own level, it is a shadow of the primordial Perfection of God "from whence we came and whence we must return". Only Maid must make an act of will in order to conform to themis: "No tree may blossom out of season, nor any flower greet springtime with austerity, but a maid lacking inward control is broken from the rhythm." That is because only maid has the power of choice between good and evil, between harmony and discord. The present age is wholly profane in having cut itself off as far as possible from the rhythm of nature, building an artificial urban lifestyle which is insensitive to the subtle currents of the seasons and the moon. Ignoring the complex pattern of rights and duties which characterise maid's true relation with nature and substituting for it the evil and ignorant doctrine of "might is right", which allows humanity to plunder the earth without returning anything until it becomes a desert, to torture and brutalise our sisters of the animal realm without mercy and to exploit them as though they were insensate pieces of machinery. All this is tied up with the doctrine that nature is a mere "accident", a chance arrangement of physical matter without meaning or spiritual significance. As soon as one realises that nature is the expression of Spirit, the essential blasphemy of the exploitative attitude becomes apparaent. To truly experience nature is to revere her, and through her to revere She who has created her. Faced with the majesty of untamed nature, whether in the stars or in a forest, the human heart is overwhelmed with a feeling of wholeness and holiness – a feeling that here is something complete and as it should be – an earthly reflection of the awesome Perfectness of the Divine. But it is not only in rare "mystical" moments of nature-experience that the holiness of nature can be with us. Time and again, I have noticed how as a person practices the seasonal rituals handed down from the dawn of time, and meditates upon their inner significances, slowly she becomes at one with the seasonal rhythm. Her work, her thought and her devotion change with every turning of the cycle. Her inner life is not the same in autumn as it is in spring, but follows the pattern of themis [thamë]. This is how we were meant to be. I believe that it is this spiritual transparency of nature which so many modern hearts are yearning for amid the desert of technological/commercial materialism. I believe that ecology and the "natural life" movement are truly a spiritual quest; a pilgrimage back to the true homeland of the human soul. Yet there is a danger. So long as the spiritual significance is not recognised, but is hidden under "sensible" justifications in terms of health, conservation of resources, etc. there is nothing to prevent "common-sense" compromises with materialism which will leave the situation almost as bad as before. It also leaves us open to the charge (so intimidating in this "practical" age) that wherever we cannot find utilitarian justifications for our beliefs, we are mere sentimentalists. No, respect for nature must be based on the hard spiritual facts of life. We must show that it is the materialists, with the crass scientism, their irrational fear of the supernatural, living in their self-made sterilised universe – it is they who are the dreamers. When they jackboot over nature in their frenzied scramble for every last penny, they do not know it is their own souls they are bruising. Only those who can see the spiritual Reality behind nature can be called realists. First published in Action for Psychic Ecology No. 5 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ecology as a Spiritual Quest Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Personal collection of David Kay. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c. 1980 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Text https://filianicstudies.org/cms/files/original/59a818e5dd2ed566af684a0882754cc3.pdf 972b0ff8a24a1810db2fbb07978b489b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Madrian Literature Circle Description An account of the resource Documents issued by the Madrian Literature Circle between 1973 and 1982. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973-1982 Language A language of the resource English Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data loose leaf, typewritten (3pp.) Text Any textual data included in the document The Story of Hera Pellegrina Many years ago, when the fair land of Italia lay under the hand of priests of a false god, who, being more confident of their worldly power were yet more barbarous in their ways than they now are – in that time, be it said, there lived a maid who surpassed all the children of her village in beauty of body and soul. Now the mother of this maid had it in mind that she should become a nun – which is to say a votary, not consecrated by sacred rites to our dear Lady, but bound to the servitude of the false god. This maid had read but little, and the books of that time contained nothing but the falsehoods of the priests; but a guiltless heart is always the surest guide, and in her heart she knew that what her mother wanted was not good. But when she said this, her mother replied: "If you will not become a nun, you must marry the man I choose." "Oh, no," replied the maid, "for I must find my way, and then I shall be loyal and obedient. But first I must seek my true path." At this, her mother flew at her and beat her. But the maid spoke bravely through her tears, and said: "If you treat me so ill, I shall flee to the forests, and dwell among my sisters, the beasts of the wood." And her mother became frightened, and decided to try another method; for she knew of an old woman noted for her wisdom and power of persuasion. "This maid," she thought, "will be able to change the heart of my daughter." And so she sent for her to become the governess and attendant of her daughter, and the woman, being poor, agreed. The daughter and the governess became the firmest friends, and neither one spoke of the nunnery even once. Instead, the governess taught her to love the forest and its creatures, which was for her an easy lesson; she taught her the names and the uses of the herbs, and how to heal the ills of both body and soul, and a hundred other arts that seem sheer miracle to the uninitiated. And all this time, the mother grew more impatient. Now it happened that the maid was in the habit of lying awake at night to listen to the song of the nightingales, and at these times she had often heard her governess in the next room arise and go out on to the great balcony. And one night she decided to follow her. When she arrived, she saw the older woman kneeling beneath the great midsummer moon, speaking words in a low voice that she had not heard before. And she was filled with a great wonder, though she knew not why, and could not move from that spot. Thus, when the governess had finished her prayers, she turned around and saw the maid. She was not angry, but said simply: "So, you are here. I have expected you. I knew that our Lady would bring you when you were ready." "Mean you Maria?" asked the child. "She is called by many names, and that is one of them. But those who call Her by it know Her least!" A thrill passed through the soul of the girl, for she realised that her true path lay before her. With trembling voice, she asked: "And who, then, know Her most?" "I could tell you much," said the older woman, "but these are wicked times, and you would be in constant danger of a cruel death." "For Her sake I shall fear nothing," said the girl. The older woman made the Pentacle upon herself in thanks. "I had hoped you would speak thus," she said. "I have taught you all the arts of a priestess in this land, excepting the most important of them all – the art of loving the Goddess. What I have already taught you, no priest would believe, for though they prate endlessly of their gods and their devils, they have no true belief in anything beyond the material. But now you must work as you have not worked before; for my time on this earth grows short, and there must be one to take my place." In the weeks that followed, the maid learnt truths that had been known since the dawn of time – the Truth of the Goddess. And she became consecrated to Her as Her priestess. But her mother became seized with impatience, and expelled the old woman from the house, and locked her daughter in a tower room with nowhere to sleep save the bare stone floor, and neither food nor drink. "There shall you stay," she cried, "until you are ready to become a nun." But the young priestess said to herself: "Here shall I have silence and time to fast and pray, and when I am ready, my Lady shall release me." And for three days she prayed without ceasing. And on the third night, her mother came to berate her and left, forgetting in her rage to lock the door. And the girl left the house in the hour before dawn. And donning a pilgrim's robe, she travelled about the country, preaching and teaching the religion of the one Goddess. The people adored her and were converted in their hundreds, and they called her la bella pellegrina – the beautiful pilgrim. And many travelled miles that they might fall on their knees and worship her, but she would say: "Not I, but She who is greater; not matter, but spirit; not mortality, but Life eternal." But at last her mother found her and had her arrested, and asked in an evil temper whether she would become a nun, and she replied: "That cannot be, for I belong to the one true Goddess, and I have died to the world and all its false gods, and so too will you, if you have wisdom to know the Truth when you have heard it." But the mother gave her up to the priests to put her to torture and death, as they did to all who would not agree with them or who left their religion. The people were seized with pity and anger and would have stormed the house where she was held, but it was guarded by many soldiers, and she was watched night and day. But they prayed as she had taught them, and she prayed also, and on the morning of the day that she was to be tortured and killed, a great wind arose in the heavens, a wind such as had not been seen before, and it overthrew the house so that not one stone was left standing upon another, and all were thrown into terror and confusion. But Hera Pellegrina walked away with calm dignity, and was taken by her people into the forests; and never again did the profane lay hands on her, but she lived to a great age teaching the Truth of the Goddess and guiding the faithful both in body and soul. But ill luck followed all who tried to rebuild the great house that had been destroyed, and in the end the priests grudgingly gave it over to the people as common land, and on it the affairs of all who loved the Goddess prospered as though a charm were upon them. And this land was ever called La Casa al Vento – The House of the Wind. * First published in The Coming Age No. 1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Story of Hera Pellegrina Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Personal collection of David Kay. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c. 1980 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Text https://filianicstudies.org/cms/files/original/318d8ae9afec22c9d6fef2e27458b5fa.pdf 88f20265c290bd2268d35bb99854a529 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Madrian Literature Circle Description An account of the resource Documents issued by the Madrian Literature Circle between 1973 and 1982. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973-1982 Language A language of the resource English Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data loose leaf, typewritten (8pp.) Text Any textual data included in the document The Hollow Tree Introduction Recent years have seen the development in this country of a "women's spirituality movement", which can be seen as a subsection of the women's liberation movement. In some respects it is a positive development that maids are looking to their spiritual roots, but, as must be expected, this movement, having grown out of the late-patriarchal world and having no access to authentic tradition, perpetuates many of the errors and prejudices of the modern world. So much so, in fact, that many maids within the movement are beginning to question some of its more extreme antitraditional aspects. The present article was written not by a Madrian, but by a maid who has spent many years in the women's spirituality movement. It is addressed primarily to other maids within the movement, but has experienced difficulty in being published within it, wxcept in a drastically abridged version. We are therefore circulating it in the Literature Circle. We would stress, however, that this paper is not an official Madrian document. The Hollow Tree Feminist Spirituality or Sanctified Materialism? A feminist friend recently averred (with some intensity) that there is "no dogma" in the feminist spirituality movement. I would like to use these words to pick up as a thread, to explain why I believe that all is not well with the movement. Feminist religion as a whole does indeed claim to be non-dogmatic, in other words to be free from creeds, belief-systems or assertions of religious truth in general. A closer examination of the facts shows that this simply isn't so. The word 'dogma' means a principle of tenet, and on this ground alone the movement is dogmatic in fiercely holding to certain key tenets (e.g. the right of every woman to define her own spirituality and/or sexuality). Apart from this, the movement's dogma is often simply called something else ("spiritual affirmation" or "collective insight" etc.) as a way of making it sound acceptable. There is a very powerful dogma that the Goddess is the earth-goddess (or that the earth "is" the Goddess). You may say that this isn't a dogma, but just try questioning it, and see how far you get. If you as a woman in this movement don't believe in the earth-goddess, you will meet with strong negative reactions – disapproval, hostility, even abuse – no matter how gently or respectfully you express yourself. A recent pamphlet published by a sect called "The Church of the Goddess" contains this statement: "...the Goddess lives or dies as the earh lives or dies..." as dogmatic (and debatable!) a sentence as one ever did hear! It is simply not logical to insist that dogma is bad, useless or invalid, because this is, in itself, a dogmatic statement – and therefore contradicts itself. Another self-contradictory statement often heard in 'womanspirit' circles is that there is not such thing as absolute truth – in other words, it is absolutely true that no such thing as absolute truth exists! This absurdity is usually taken for granted – and anyone who is daft enough to claim religious certainties is told that one cannot have them – that is, one can know for certain that one cannot know for certain! All these things are interconnected – a mesh to shut out truth or light. Any movement describing itself as spiritual should, one would think, be deeply concerned with Truth – YES, with a capital T! But no – crucial questions, questions of the most fundamental kind, are dealt with byb refusing them as 'patriarchal'. The fact is that dogma – like everything else in the manifest world – amounts to a necessary evil, for we must speak and must communicate. Dogma has its right place as signpost, as key to a lock, as a window, or a road to a destination – but it also has its risks; the violent use of dogma to inflict sufferings on others, while the lazy mouth a form of words to aboid the work of understanding anything. We have gluttons – but do we then ban food? It is not honest, and not the standard to be expected of Amazon women, to refuse to make the effort of discernment and to pretend that we have no dogma. Neither is it honest to refuse to examine basic assumptions. These almost all have their roots in the late-patriarchal-Protestant-tending-to-atheist world-view; the first principles of the 'womanspirit' movement come from relativism, scientism, materialism and atheism – worse still, some of them from very recent patriarchal ideas that were designed in hatred and rejection of all things Female and all things Spiritual! (Not so much woman-spirit as malematter, it seems). It is absurd to reject indiscriminately every aspect of the last three millenia of world religion (including such basic and perennial concepts as worship, prayer, the soul, and so forth) while accepting without question such things as left-wind politics, progress and evolution (to name but a few of the key dogmas of patriarchal atheism) and actually attempting to construct a spirituality upon such ideas. Of course, those who have been fooled by patriarchal false alternatives will only be able to see Fascism, right-wing social injustice and tub-thumping creationism as the alternatives to left-wing politics, progress and evolution respectively. I would have hoped that the essential creative vision of woman-kind could see past these crude masculine stupidities! When we come to the Goddess Herself, who I hope is the centre of all our meaning and endeavour, we often find Her described (blasphemously, in my opinion) as a "concept", and one which is justified only insofar as it serves a sexual or political end. Now, either the Goddess is real, Reality itself, the Essence of all, the Self of selves, or She is nothing at all; a vaporization from the collective feminist brain, a projection of our psychology or of some political ideal; less in fact than the least of us, because a mere subjective fancy. Any refusal or reluctance to affirm the Goddess as the Absolute must reduce Her to a nonentity. If one does affirm the Goddess as the Absolute, one's 'sisters' in feminist religion are ready with dismissive quips about "Jehovah-in-drag", "God-in-skirts", or even "The Great Feminist in the Sky". And what, precisely, is meant by "spirituality"? As expressed in most of the movement's literature, it appears to be compounded of psychological theorising (mostly in the style of Jung and so forth) and the flotsam-and-jetsam of patriarchal occultism (a dab of yoga here, a soupcon [sic] of Qabalah there, and rather a strong flavoring of Gardner's "witchcraft", or what he imagined to be the "old religion"). Underpinning the whole and in a sense knitting together a superficial 'diversity', we find the supposition that religion, the basic instinctual drives, the workings of the subconscious and sensations of pleasure are all somehow the same thing. This idea, confused though it may be, is passively accepted as received wisdom, and thereafter adhered to as a dogma. And hand-in-hand with it, we find the related idea that life, matter, this world PRECISELY AS THEY ARE constitute the only reality worth having. The consequences of this are devastating; a religion which leads one to strive towards nothing, and a moral complacency which is a refusal to recognise any difference between spiritual laziness and spiritual effort – it is all the same. We are all 'spiritual' already, without actually doing anything! And since everything already "is" the Goddess, one owes Her nothing; certainly not worship! This hedonistic gospel has nothing to recommend it except that it combines the most comfortable and easy advantages of both religion and atheism. Many of the women in the movement have been demonstrating – with the best of intentions in the world – at Greenham Common Air Base, protesting against the nuclear weapons which threaten the sacred and Goddess-given earth. Many of the same women see no conflict between their expressed Greenham desires to protect life, and the fact that they themselves poison their children in their own living-rooms by cigarette-smoking, as well as the fact that they believe in the destruction of life at its most vulnerable, in the womb. This moral contradiction is nothing more than may be expected from a philosophy of "this world only" and "freedom for all, but no responsibility", and so on and so forth. The so-called Goddess-religion of feminists offers absolutely nothing that may be distinguished from such amoral ways: there is in fact no "Goddess" to answer to; this is atheism and materialism, pure and simple – or, rather, corrupt and complicated! Thus most of the womanspirit movement's literature is intensely sex-centred, pleasure-centred, even cynical of any moderation or restraint – it deals almost exclusively with material considerations as ends in themselves, as "already spiritual"; it offers virtually nothing of any wider perspective. Moral questions are ignored altogether, or dismissed as 'patriarchal' (a very useful dustbin, and saves one a lot of hard work and thought!). As as [sic] for MEANING and PURPOSE, these are never mentioned, except in connection with "cosmic cycles" and other hazy terms, thrown about with much ease and little knowledge. It is little wonder that so much weight is given to those images from the past, from art and mythology, which portray a grotesque, demonic or tastelessly sexual female personage, taken to be a "dark side" of the Goddess, and interpreted as meaning that evil is "contained in" the Goddess Herself, or that promiscuity is a laudable and spiritual activity, or that evil and good are both the same thing. It is not that the women who treasure such diabolical images have no power of discernment, but that these images naturally express the demonic element in feminist spirituality; misguided women reach for them as surely as one reaches for a wooden spoon to stir soup. The constant efforts to prove that what is wrong is really right, make it necessary to refer to such evidence over and over again. The Goddess becomes the mother of lust, the mother of drugs, the mother of self-indulgence, the mother of fearful minds; the worshippers of this 'Goddess' ardently desire divine sanction for what is wrong; not receiving such an assurance from previous deities, they create a 'Goddess' who is part-evil, and then call that evil 'good'. It is true that the growth of female spiritual activity is in itself a happy and hopeful thing, and that some women do (as individuals) have high ideals and real commitment, and are not afraid to think and to be scrupulous. But as for the movement as a movement, it is like a diseased tree – full of promise and springtime on the outside, but hollow within. It leans far too heavily on the modern, masculist world-view; it constantly fights shy of hard graft, and the profound spiritual questions, in particular the questions of Truth and Reality in their deepest and widest sense. It rejects all criticism, both internal and external, which indicates that women in the movement see it as an all-perfect and blameless thing, looking after itself without any attention or scrupulousness on their part. Worst of all, there is a sad lack of real reverence or humility in the face of the Sacred; in consequence the movement is impoverished in any truly spiritual sense. ADDENDUM A shorter version of this article was published in the American magazine Womanspirit. This version contained a few points not contained in the longer version which we reproduce here: Another thing that disturbs me is an apparent unwillingness to see that much of the movement's philosophy comes from patriarchal roots. Many women, though rejecting most of the last three millenia of world religion (including the concepts of worship, the spirit, and so forth) accept without question left-wing political concepts, 'progress' and evolution. How can we safely construct our spirituality from such key concepts of patriarchal atheism? I also question the possibility of common ground between matriarchy and anarchy. Women who look to deconstructed society ('matrianarchy') are adopting the Marxist notion of egalitarian primitives, without seeing that such societies, whether prehistoric or modern, matriarchal or patriarchal, are intensely disciplined and hierarchical. "Living in harmony with nature" and "natural cycles" does not mean "without structure" (which, by definition, would actually be "chaos"). After writing this article more than a year ago, I lost many friends, but during the same year some women who had disagreed violently came back and said, "You know, I have been thinking about this, and I agree with some of what you say." I wrote the article because I care passionately about the Goddess and women's spiritual concerns. I hope that even if you read it with anger, you will by-and-by find something in it that might be of value to you. This last point is particularly interesting in view of the fact that the author herself originally held many of the opinions criticised in her article and even wrote a booklet in which they were set out. This book was sent to Lux Madriana for comment, and her reaction to our criticisms (many of which were substantially the same as those set out in the present article) was one of complete rejection. We were therefore both surprised and pleased to receive the article a year or so later. We believe that wherever someone is prepared to give time and thought to the matter, traditional truth will inevitably prevail over modern fashion, simply because the one is true and the other false, and the soul, in her profoundest depths, cannot fail to recognise that. Why not try it yourself? Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Hollow Tree Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Personal collection of David Kay. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c. 1980 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Text https://filianicstudies.org/cms/files/original/f7f91ecd6ec4a812703a4f815b207658.pdf 572cf8c7e53ce8c633406ea4961a0637 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Madrian Literature Circle Description An account of the resource Documents issued by the Madrian Literature Circle between 1973 and 1982. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973-1982 Language A language of the resource English Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data loose leaf, typewritten (7pp.) Text Any textual data included in the document The Living Tradition Imagine a community of people that has hardly changed its way of life in over twenty thousand years. There are several such communities existing in various parts of England. They are called Madrians, a term deriving from their word "madria", meaning mother – because their whole way of life, both social and religious, is based upon the supremacy of the female. Modern archaeology shows that all over the world this matriarchal form of religious and social order was the norm up until three or four thousand years ago, when the more aggressive masculine systems started to take over. This only serves to confirm the age-old conviction of the Madrians that they are the "original people". The Celts and Druids have come and gone. The Roman and Teutonic religions have come and gone. The Christians have come, and nowadays their cult seems to be on the way out. But the Madrians show no signs of diminishing. In fact, for the first time in many centuries, they are starting to do missionary work among the "urbies" or non-Madrians. To enter a traditional Madrian household is like stepping into another world. There are several different types of household, but let us take a fairly typical one. It will be situated in one large house, or in a number of smaller houses; probably it will be based on a farm. It will be more like an extended clan than a modern fmaily unit; it will contain several married couples and will cover four or five generations. Every wife and mother is the head of her own unit; the absolute mistress of her husband and children, but she in turn is in obedience to her own superiors: her mother, the priestess and the elders, or "wise women", of the clan. This is a wise arrangement, for it means that the absolute authority of a young wife is tempered by the mellow experience of older, deeply spiritual women. There will be no modern gadgets in the household – not even an electric light. Clothes will be traditional; no grown woman will go out without a veil over her head. This veil is a symbol of her authority, and of her status as a "guardian of the Mysteries". Just as the Goddess Herself is never seen fully unveiled, so every maid (the Madrians always call women "maids", they never use the term "woman") is on some level – either as a householder, as practitioner of a sacred craft, as a mother, or simply as a fully initiated maiden – Her representative, and like Her, should not go fully unveiled except among her closest associates. It would be easy to say that every aspect of the Madrian way of life has a religious reason; but that would be a little misleading. The very concept of religion is absent from the Madrian view of the world. The term "religion" was invented by patriarchal societies to designate a particular type of activity conceived as being separate from "everyday life". To a Madrian, neither "religion" nor "everyday life" has any meaning. Every activity of life is a ritual action performed to the glory of the Goddess in the way laid down by Her from the dawn of time. This is what the Madrians call themis [thamë]. The word has been translated as "order" or "custom" or "law"; "authority", "balance", or even "faith". But perhaps the best and simplest translation is "harmony". Themis is the natural harmony and rhythm which the Goddess has established on earth. In nature it is sometimes called ecology; and provided it is not interfered with, it works very wonderfully, producing a perfect "balance of nature", among all the life-forms and forces, both physical and subtle, which make up the "household" (oikos is Greek for household, and gives us the word "ecology") of our planet. But when that ecology, the law of the household, is broken, then we no longer have themis or harmony. We have anathemis [athamë]. Then things start to go wrong; there is chaos and destruction. That is because the order laid down by the Goddess has been broken. The same thing happens in human life. There themis [thamë] is the matriarchal order of the human household. Economy in the true old-fashioned sense of the word (economy also comes from oikos). The mother rules her family, the elders rule the mothers, and so it goes on, right up to the Princess (who is also the chief priestess). And the priestess obeys God. She follows the law set down from the beginning. A whole society run directly by God Herself. That is what the Madrians means by themis. But when themis is broken in human life, the results are just as disastrous as when it is broken in nature. We have violence and wars, we have soaring crime and insanity rates, we have a lack of understanding between the generations. As one matriarch said to me: Once society breaks themis and turns away from the Goddess, it can't last long; it starts to crumble". "But patriarchal societies have lasted for thousands of years," I commented. "A thousand years is not so long," she replied. "The Madrian civilisation lasted for hundreds of thousands. The patriarchal order started crumbling from the day it was created. But it did not turn away from the Goddess completely. That is what has held it together. They used to worship Her as Mary, but then the Protestants stopped all that. The Tibetans used to worship Her as Tara, but then the Communists stopped all that. They have let go of their last lifeline. That is why they are drowning. It is like a maid who inherits an estate from her mother, but does no work. At first she sells off the estate bit by bit, and she thinks she is alright. She eats and drinks and enjoys herself. Then one day the money runs out and everything collapses. It is like that with patriarchy. They have been living off the spiritual inheritance of the Madrian ages. Now it is running out, and everything is collapsing." "What will happen when it does collapse?" "There will be great suffering, but then things will return to normal. There will be a new matriarchal civilisation. Back to themis [thamë]; that is the only way." There is a new vitality in the traditional Madrian communities today, becuase they feel that their time is coming: the time predicted for hundreds of years when the patriarchal order will come to its end and the Old Order will resume its rightful place. All this technology and other nonsense will be swept aside and the old ways will return. It is written that "The serpent will bite his own tail", and the meaning of that saying is becoming clearer every day. Patriarchy will be destroyed by patriarchy. Technology will be destroyed by technology. The signs are all there. The Madrian opposition to technology has nothing to do with a sentimental conservatism or attachment to the past. Rather, it is based upon firm philosophical and spiritual principles. Madrians believe that every craft was taught by the Goddess (or rather, by one of Her Geniae [Janyati], or secondary divinities) to human beings in the Golden Age. Each craft is not simply a means of producing physical goods such as shoes or vegetables. It is also a spiritual path. Every craft has its Ranyas. A Ranya is the equivalent of a guru in the east. But in Madrianism a Ranya may teach weaving or carpentry as well as meditation. But she teaches weaving or carpentry as a means to spiritual realisation. Every tool of the craft, every technique, every traditional form for the finished article, has a deep symbolic meaning. The working of the craft under the close spiritual and technical guidance of the Ranya produces what might be called "occupational meditation". That is the true meaning of the crafts. Just as the whole point and purpose of human incarnation is to transcend the material realm, so every legitimate human activity has its inner transcendental essence. If our work is done for nothing more than to produce food and physical comforts, we are living on the same level as animals; and, according to Madrian teaching, we will then be reborn as animals. It is only when craft has descended to the animal level – when everyone has forgotten the true meaning of craft, and thinks that its sole purpose is to produce material goods – that a modern style technology can arise. Such a technology is very efficient at producing material goods, but only at the expense of destroying the whole structure of the sacred craft which has been laid down by the Goddess. Therefore technology is anathemis [athamë]. It breaks the divine order and harmony. That is why no Madrian will work in technological industries or use the products of such industries. Missionaries who go out of the communities have to make some compromise on this latter point, of course. But in the stricter communities, if a person has touched an industrial product of any sort, she has to be carefully purified with rose-water before anyone is able to touch her! This is not as strange as it sounds; for things made out of themis [thamë] have a deifnite aura of disharmony about them. This cannot be detected by those who habitually handle such objects, as sensitivity to them is naturally dulled, but in the sensitive atmosphere of a themis community, such an influence can have a subtle but very real disruptive effect. Such disruptions are all the more to be avoided because they affect not only the human members of a traditional commnunity, but also the shia [shiani]– the nature spirits or "fairies" which work in tune with the life of a themis [thamë] community. The co-operation of this realm of subtle nature is particularly important in the area of agriculture; for these elementary nature spirits are attached to the fruits and flowers of the field and play a vital role in assisting their growth and development. Like all natural things which have not been tampered with by ignorant interference, the shia are in a condition of themis. They do not see themselves as a cut-off unit living only for the sake of living. They understand that they occupy a place within the cosmic hierarchy which ranges from the highest Geniae [Janyati] to the humblest creature in manifestation. Their life is very different from the human, but in their own way, they are fulfilling their purpose, and mounting steadily through the ritual activity of their appointed work to spiritual union with the Goddess; and they look back to the time when human beings did the same. In their quasi-human forms, their ordering is strictly matriarchal, and they have never deserted their own traditional ways. They can only look with amazement and incomprehension upon modern human civilisation. The anathemis [athamë] methods of modern industrialised "agriculture" are so repellent to the shia [shiani] that they have all but desserted the main farming areas of the "developed" world. It is for this reason that the crops in these areas are becoming more and more sickly and subject to an ever-increasing number of diseases, so that they must be treated with growing multitudes of sprays and chemicals simply to keep them alive. On a Madrian farm, working in harmony with the shia, and with natural rhythms and methods (such as the careful observation of the pases of the moon and their agricultural applications), crops have been frequently obtained which border on the phenomenal. But such a working relationship with the spirits of nature depends upon the maintenance of themis [thamë] within the community, not only in the avoidance of technological appliances, right devotion and relations between maids and men, but also in all the customs and manners of life. Life in a Madrian community is rather like a dance. A great deal of what is said and done is directed by ancient custom. There is a feeling of peace, restraint, purity, respect and gentleness in a Madrian communtiy, which contrasts sharply with the noise, bustle and rough "practicality" of the modern world. A Madrian is easily embarrassed by a wrong gesture or a word out of place. A maid in such circumstances may cover her face with her veil. Madrians are quicker to tears and to full-blooded innocent laughter than the wary and worldly-wise "urbies". In many ways, they are much closer to the shia, whom they often refer to as their "little sisters". Madrians seem on the whole happier than "urbies"; they have fewer emotional problems, and nervous breakdowns are virtually unknown among them. They have a place in the world, and a sense of meaning which so many modern people are lacking. Madrian children are rarely rebellious, except in small ways. They feel a part of the community. They want to wear the clothes their elders wear, they are happy to be obedient (perhaps because they see that adults are also obedient) most of the time, but even when they aren't obedient, they have no doubt that they ought to be. That is because the chain of authority passes down from Heaven, in accordance with the law of the Goddess. Nobody needs to ask "why is this so?" or "who gives you the right to boss me?" Everybody knows why, and Who. Madrians work hard and enjoy their work, but they are also fond of their traditional stories and songs which are told at night around the fireside, and of the good, strong, home-brewed ale that goes with them. Four times in each lunar month, the Rite of Sacrifice is held in every Madrian home. This consists of a ritual offering of a small honey-cake, and of a libation of wine or ale. It occurs within the context of a very ancient and powerful ritual which, however, does not require a priestess for its performance, but can be offered by the head of any house. Many young wives regularly officiate at their family Cult Domestic (the name given to the regular celebration of the Rite of Sacrifice in a home). But there are still more potent Rites, which may only be celebrated by a priestess, such as initiations and the Rite of Communion. This latter, which is taken in bread and wine, goes back long before Christianity. For example, Cicero, more than half a century before the birth of Christ, explained how the communicants at Eleusis believed the bread of the Communion to be transubstantiated into the body of Demeter. Communion is taken at the Major Festivals, eight times a year, that is, at the solstices, equinoxes, the cross-quarter days between them, and on one other occasion, the Festival of Artemis (or Diana), on the twenty-third of the month of Samhain (not to be confused with the festival of Samhain itself, which falls on the first of the month and is one of the cross-quarter days). All these Festivals take place within the context of the traditional thirteen-month calendar. These great Rites are celebrated by a priestess, and where possible, in a Temple. Temples were usually constructed in special rooms set aside in large manor houses, for in some rural areas, the landed gentry as well as the country folk were Madrian. Priestesses were always few and far between. One priestess to a village was usual. At the present time it is often less than that. Each priestess has a temple hierarchy under her, consisting of an Ancilla (personal ritual handmaid), Lady of the Temple, and a number of Temple maidens of different ranks. There has never been any male priesthood; but men are certainly initiated. All girls are initiated at fourteen (the number of the full moon), and all boys at sixteen (4 x 4; four, the number of matter, being the cardinal masculine number). As has been indicated, the life of the Madrian communities has until recent times been strictly closed to all outsiders. Recently, though, a certain amount of missionary activity has been taking place largely centering on Lux Madriana, and the Pallas Academy has opened to teach Madrian philosophy and metaphysics, mostly by correspondence. These activities were not approved by all Madrians, and in fact a large majority of the traditional communities oppose any form of publicity. Nevertheless, the outward movement of the "catholic" minority, as they are called, is having a very definite effect. In an age of chaos and confusion, a growing number of people in England are ready to turn back to their spiritual roots and to seek in the pre-Christian tradition of their country in order to try to find the meaning and purpose of life, the certainty and the peace of mind, which modern ideologies, whether secular or "religious", cannot provide. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Living Tradition Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Personal collection of David Kay. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c. 1980 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Text https://filianicstudies.org/cms/files/original/7351c2a687067252e43bd641dccc094e.pdf ebfc7688ef8148a2e5da208ad5a5ab60 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Madrian Literature Circle Description An account of the resource Documents issued by the Madrian Literature Circle between 1973 and 1982. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973-1982 Language A language of the resource English Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data loose leaf, handwritten (2pp.) Text Any textual data included in the document Making the Pentacle The Pentacle, sometimes called the Pentagram of Isis, is a powerful protective symbol; it is a variant of the five-pointed star of the Goddess and incorporates the number five which is central to our Lady's devotion (the Madrian Rosary, the archetype of the Rosaries now used by all the world religions, has one decade for each point of the pentacle, or for each petal of the Rose – hence its name). To form the pentacle over oneself, one should first touch the forehead, then, visualising a line of silver etheric light, bring the hand diagonally to touch the left hip, then draw another line to touch the right shoulder, and then the left shoulder, the right hip, and finally the forehead. Having practised it once to twice, one usually finds that the gesture comes surprisingly naturally, naturally. One of the most important symbolisms of the pentagram is that of the elements or seasons. The uppermost point represents Spirit or Moura, and the other elements are arranged around the remaining points in a clockwise direction in the order of the seasons. The forming of the Pentagram symbolises the Cosmic Drama – we touch first Spirit, which represents the purity of the first Creation; then Earth – the fall of humanity into matter; then Water (the Easter [sic] symbol) – the sacrifice of our Lady in coming to us; then Air – the star of Her coming and the bringing of Her light; she brings us to the consuming Fire of our Mother's love – 'the Rose that is a Flame and the Flame that is a Rose', through the divine Fire, we are purged of imperfection and return to our first purity, touching Spirit again. The pentacle should be made before prayer in order to banish evil influences and to attune oneself to the Goddess, and after prayer in order to 'seal' one' devotion. At other times, the making of the pentacle can form a barrier against harmful spiritual psychological influences, and can be a means of drawing to oneself spiritual energy. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Making the Pentacle Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Personal collection of David Kay. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c. 1980 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Text https://filianicstudies.org/cms/files/original/352aa5bf9706837a9250e0d6b481a2d9.pdf 36bfa04fdce3a5f81c2108239b1185c2 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Madrian Literature Circle Description An account of the resource Documents issued by the Madrian Literature Circle between 1973 and 1982. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973-1982 Language A language of the resource English Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data loose leaf, typewritten (10pp.) Text Any textual data included in the document The Inner Meaning of Music The idea of an art as something merely aesthetic; that is, as something with no purpose beyond that of creating a pleasurable sensation in the observer, is a thoroughly modern invention. It is as foreign to the traditional mode of thought as the related idea of a craft as a mere method of "production", the sole aim of which is to manufacture useful articles as efficiently as possible. In every traditional society from the Incas to the Japanese, from the European Middle Ages to the African tribes, the primary content of both art and craft is intellectual, or doctrinal. The tools, the methods, the traditional styles and patterns of the craft all have a profound symbolic meaning, which "actualised" within the context of the authentic practice of the "mystery", become the constitutents of a contemplative path toward spiritual realisation. The term "mystery" is not used idly. Until recently, every craft was called by its practitioners a mystery, as any student of English literature will be aware; and passing out of the apprentice stage of one's training took place by way of a true Initiation far more solemn and portentous than the rather messy horseplay that still accompanies the occasion in a few of the older crafts today. At one time, this was merely a high-spirited release of nervous tension after the ordeal of the Initiation itself. Having passed this Initiation, one was truly set upon the Path which was the particular craft in question. Such a craft was a worthwhile "living" or life's-work, for its first aim was to fulfil the purpose for which souls are incarnate in human form in the first place – to return to God. Not every soul, of course, is destined to become fully "realised" in one lifetime; nevertheless, the priorities are correct, one is facing in the right direction. At death one should at least be a few steps further forward than one was upon entering the world. It is only when the true meaning of craft has been forgotten that an "industry" in the modern sense of the term can arise. It is craft stripped of everything which relates to the supernatural; a mere mechanical production of goods by the cheapest and quickest means possible, with no regard to the spiritual effect of the work upon the worker. In a society based on an "industry" of this sort, novody, from the chain-belt operator to the managing director, has a worthwhile living. All of them, however many goods and however much money they may be amassing in this life, are from the standpoint not even of eternity, but just of the next couple centuries in the life of their souls, wasting their time. And they know it. There has never been a time in which so many people have been stricken and oppressed by the sheer futility and meaninglessness of life. The advertising and entertainment industries pour out an unending stream of novelties in order to maintain the attention of the jaded masses. No material pleasure can hold its attraction for more than a brief time, so there is a constant demand for more, bigger, better, newer, stranger or even more disgusting novelties to replace the ones that were in vogue the day before. The level of psychiatric disorder is alarminly high, and psychiatrists report that the main underlying problem is "lack of life content" – meaninglessness, apathy, despair. Since the time of William Morris, there have been numerous attempts to return to a more meaningful way of life; to practise traditional arts and crafts, to live the "simple life", to restore satisfaction to everyday activity. All these attempts, however, are doomed to failure for one simple reason. While they reject the symptoms of the modern malaise, they have not rejected the disease itself. Indeed, they have failed to understand what it is. In trying to restore life-satisfaction by bringing back the mere outward form of certain older ways of living, they are like the villagers who tried to keep the spring from passing by fencing the cuckoo to prevent it from flying away. It was not the crafts themselves which made the traditional way of life satisfying. It was the inner meaning which they embodied. It is often supposed by modernists that the Industrial Revolution came about because of new technical knowledge. Actually history makes nonsense of this idea. All the technological innovations of the first stages of the Industrial Revolution could have been made at almost any time in history; but it was only when the real meaning of the crafts had been lost that anybody would have thought of making them. The Industrial Revolution was the product not of new knowledge, but of a new ignorance. It is this ignorance which is the real disease. The loss of the crafts and the traditional way of life are nothing more than a symptom. And it is the disease which must be cured if we are to recover. In practice, this means rediscovering the intellectual or metaphysical content of the crafts and learning to practice them not merely as scaled-down forms of "industry" – mere means to physical ends, albeit somewhat more picturesque and satisfying means – but as authentic contemplative paths. But this is not quite so simple as it may seem, for was are immediately confronted by a double-headed difficulty, which may be summed up in the single word Traditio. We have used the word in its Latin form in order to draw attention to its actual meaning. In modern English usage, "tradition" has come to have a vague meaning, roughly equivalent to "custom" or "convention" or "anything-over-fifty-years-old" (or in some contexts, even over five years old!). In all traditional societies it has a meaning far more precise, and immeasurably more important. It means literally something "passed-down" from the Golden Age – the primordial time when "Heaven touched earth". The techniques of the crafts are not mere human "inventions", but Divinely-instituted rituals. They are passed down through a full-scale initiatory process by ritually qualified teachers in an unbroken chain (tradition) from the beginning. The two aspects of the problem, then, are firstly that no merely human reconstruction of traditional craft-doctrine will be of any value, and secondly that once the chain has been broken, there will no longer be any teachers qualified to carry out the ritual transmission of the Mysteries. However, in the English matriarchal tradition, the craft mysteries are still transmitted. There is an unbroken line of Ranyas or craft-mistresses going back to the earliest period of the manifestation of "human" souls on earth. We may turn, then, to the universal matriarchal tradition in its English form for examples of the practice of craft in the true traditional manner. As a case in point, we may take the craft of music. It may be objected that music is an art rather than a craft; but traditional philosophy draws no distinction between the two. Art, moreover, gives a wider scope for comparison between the traditional and modern perspectives, for modern art cannot help but have some intellectual content, whereas in "industry", all is subjugated to blank utilitarianism. The cardinal difference between traditional and modern art is that the modern world conceives art as having no purpose except to please (or at any rate to arouse some sensation in) the recipient; whereas the traditional doctrine holds that art must be founded upon metaphysical principles and must communicate the primordial Truths of existence in order to be of the smallest value. This is encapsulated in the traditional dictum: "Ars sine scientia nihil", art without science is nothing. But the science in question is, of course, not the merely physical observations which have usurped that name in the modern world, but a knowledge of the underlying metaphysical principles of being. This understood, let us proceed to a brief examination of the art of music. Sound is of two kinds: the heard and the unheard. Heard sound is that manifested upon the physical plane and perceived by our ears. Unheard sound is the primordial expression of creation, the "music of the spheres", the harmonies inherent in the single creative Word spoken by God Herself at the beginning. These harmonies ramify out from the original Note, manifesting the entire range of the Archetypes – the perfect, unfallen order of creation, of which all the lower orders, the physical included, are but reflections. The purpose of the art of music is to organise heard sound into a perfect echo of the unheard. In this, music resembles every other authentic art; for all art has as its aim the depiction not of material "facts" (whether physical, emotional or mental), but of the underlying Realities of which the phenomena of this world are but broken and imperfect shadows. Ar is essentially contemplative. The first task of the artist is to see the Real in contemplative vision. Her second is to depict it in the materials of the shadow-world which we inhabit. Tradition provides her with the means to do this. All the stylised art-forms of traditional societies, from matriarchal Crete to Pharaonic Egypt to Gothic Germany were means for the expression of inner Reality. WHen a traditional artist paints a tree, she is not attempting to mimic the purely physical characteristics of the ash on the village green; she is seeking to capture the essential ash-ness inherent in it; the Divine Idea of ash that has existed in the mind of God before the dawn of time, and will continue to exist in the Real world when this planet and all its trees are ash of another sort. The modern supposition that traditional artists "did not know how to draw true perspective" reflects the same provincial stupidity as the belief that they could not have created an industrial revolution; while modern "realistic" art, which aims merely to reflect material "facts" (physical ones in paint, "psychological" ones in novels, etc.) is an aberration of exactly the same order as modern industry itself. The final loss of traditional art took place in the so-called Renaissance. beginning with the most "concrete" arts of painting and sculpture, a spectacular efflorescence of "realism" replaced the stylistic art-forms of the Middle Ages. These forms cannot but attract our admiration, firstly because material nature is a reflection of the Real, and an art which faithfully reproduces it, although but a "copy of a copy", contains something of its divine quality; secondly because they were the product of a starburst of creative energy released by the sudden relaxation of traditional restraints. It is like a will-disciplined academy suddenly taken over by a principal who believes in a relaxation of all discipline. At first her scheme will work well. nobody will run riot, because the discipline of previous years will have become second nature. For a brief period one will have the best of both worlds – all the advantages of discipline with none of its drawbacks. But as the customs of the past fade and a new generation which has never known the old regime arises, order begins to break down and chaos superenes. In the same way, the age of Raphael and Michaelangelp gave place to the increasingly effete manifestations of the Baroque and Rococo, the sentimentality of Romanticism, and then Surrealism, Dada, Cubism. I hear that some gallery has recently paid for an exhibition of "kinetic art" consisting of a man vomiting into a bucket. Music, due to its more "abstract" character was protected for a certain time from this degenerative process; but this was no more than a temporary reprieve. While it is true that Renaissance music adhered far more closely to authentic traditional patterns than its sister arts, we have today reached a point where all music being composed (with a few insignificant exceptions) can be divided into the slick, meretrecious "popular" variety, and something called "serious music", which is so wholly devoid of either meaning or beauty that short pieces of it have to be sandwiched into programmes of Beethoven and Bruckner in order to induce any concert-goer to listen to it. It may be noted in passing that the two great arguments invariably produced by advocates of the "new music" cancel one another out. The first is "Oh, but all new music is disliked at first; look at Tannhäuser." The second is "We really should be getting used to Berg (or Webern, etc.) by now – after all, it is hardly new, it's been going on for fifty years." Precisely. Beethoven's ninth may have been hissed at the first performance; but it was accepted within a couple of years. Berg et al have not received the wholehearted acceptance of the public in half a century, and there is no reason to suppose that they ever will. But the bankruptcy of modern music, like the bankruptcy of all the arts, has its roots many years earlier, in the loss of its guiding metaphysical principles and the consequent gradual descent into chaos and futility. In other word, it may be accounted for by its failure to echo the unheard Music. In the traditional music of the West, a single note of unchanging pitch is sounded throughout. The melody departs from it and returns to it at the end and at frequent intervals throughout the composition. It is an expression or manifestation of the potentialities inherent in this primordial and continuous note; the "tonic", as it is called. This actual sounding of the tonic throughout the piece is still practised in the music of, say, the bagpipes, and to a lesser degree in the music of such droned stringed instruments as the scheitholt, the langeleik and the Appalachian dulcimer. Where the tonic is not actually sounded, the melody is nonetheless developed in such a way that it is still effectively present and governing the music. The drone, sounding before, during and after the development of the melody corresponds to the Mother, the timeless and unchanging Absolute, while the melody itself represents all the flux and diversity of nature, emerging from Her as its divine Source and returning to Her at the close of its cycle of existence. This process also reflects the emergence of the Daughter from the Mother, the "play" of the events of Her life, and Her final heuresis or reunion. And as it reflects the Daughter, Who is the perfect Soul, so, on a lesser plane, it reflects the separation (or fall) of every soul from union with Godhead, her journey through the vicissitudes of successive incarnations and her final reunion, realisation or salvation. The tonic itself emerges from and returns into silence, even as God the Mother, who is pure Being, emerges from and returns into Absolute Deity, the Dark Mother, who is beyond being and unbeing. In counterpoint which retains an essentially modal character, and in harmony where the ground remains unbroken, the pattern, although more complex, is essentially the same. Here there are several manifestations out of the principial Note instead of one; and their intricate interrelations form the character of the music. Each part affects and is affectes by the others; we find ourselves in a world of opposites and dualities, night and day, pleasure and pain, yin and yang. A world of multiplicity and of seeming "accidents"; and yet every even is directed by the inherent logic of the composition – the destiny, or moira [werdë], which determines all earthly events; and beneath is all, either heard or unheard, continues the principial Note which underlies all the "play" of the manifest universe. The Unity which all the movement of multiplicity is, either consciously or unconsciously, seeking. Now once this principle has been lst, we are quickly confronted with forms of music which modulate, changing from one key or tonality to another. The unheard tonic is actually altered during the course of the composition. At first there were only brief forays out of the key, with a final return being regarded as imperative. Later, modulation became a dominant feature of music, and the "well-tempered" scale, in which all keys are interchangeable because they differ only in pitch, was invented in order to facilitate this. At a later stage, we have the logical development (or reductio ad absurdum) of this in atonal music which deliberately rejects all tonality as a matter of principle, or rather of counter-principle, thus producing that music so alien to the divine (and therefore to the human) Norm as to be wholly unattractive to the normal listener. Now it may be noted that once the ground is broken, it ceases to be an unchanging drone and becomes simply another melody. In other words, the immutability of the Absolute is denied, and all is reduced to relativity, flux and transience. This, it will be seen, corresponds perfectly not only to the pseudo-doctrine of "materialism" (which denies all things beyond the flux of the physical), but also to nearly all the tendencies of specifically modern and anti-traditional thought: the "evolutionism" which seeks to reduce all existence to "a process of becoming"; the "dynamism" which regards action as being superior to contemplation; the "anti-dogmatism" which wishes to see all statements about ultimate Reality reduced to the level of "opinion" and "experiment"; the entire ideology of "progress" which permeates every aspect of modern life and thought. It is certainly no coincidence that although the composers of the last few centuries have had no conception of the nature, or even the existence, of the principles which they have been violating, modern music has produced, in musical language, a perfect paraphrase of the errors which dominate and determine modern society. The tonic which generates a given composition may be any one of the seven notes of the natural scale, and because the intervals between the tones of the scale are not identical, a different pattern is formed by the scale depending upon which note begins it; thus there are seven different scales, or "modes" as they are called, each with its own peculiar character. It is well known that all the authentic folk music of this country is modal. Each of the modes has its own particular effect upon the mental state of its hearer; this fact is admitted by the soberest of modern musicologists, although they are able to offer not "rational" explanation for it. Ancient writers, who still had some access to the older matriarchal traditions are able to go into much more detail. Plato encourages certain modes as beneficial to the moral fibre of his ideal republic, while others he would exclude as being corrupting or effeminate. Pythagoras used music in both physical and psychological healing, using mnusic in certain modes to help to counteract conditions of an opposite character. None of these writers, however, has left a systematic exposition of the characters of the modes and their underlying doctrines. Fortunately, this has been preserved in the matriarchal tradition itself. Each mode, in fact, is governed by one of the seven great Geniae [Janyati]; manifestations of God Herself governing the categories of being; they are related to the seven planets of the ancient system. In some traditions they have been called "goddesses", but in modern English this term carries misleading implications. "Angels" might be a better rendering, but it is still inadequate; the more so since an "angel" in Madrian usage is strictly the servant of a Genia [Janya]. The correspondences of the modes are as follows: Classical name; Folk name; Tonic; Genia [Janya]; Planet; Character Ionian; Do; C; Theia [Raya]; Sun; Generosity, Energy, Heroism Dorian; Re; D; Phoebe [Candrë]; Moon; Purity, Peace, Childlikeness Phrygian; Me; E; Nike [Vikhë]; Mars; Discord, Courage, Combat Lydian; Fa; F; Metis [Mati]; Mercury; Wisdom, Trickery, Unworldliness Mixolydian; So; G; Themis [Thamë]; Jupiter; Harmony, Joy, Humour Aeolian; La; A; Tethys [Sushuri]; Venus; Love, Peace, Gentleness Locrian; Te; B; Rhea [Rhavë]; Saturn; Death, Darkness, Mystery The characters given here are obviously rather brief. It will be noted also that the "planetary" Geniae [Janyati] govern the modes in the same order that they govern the days of the week. Some books on music state that the Locrian mode was rarely used, others that it was never used. Especially in the Christian eccleasiastical usage of the Middle Ages, it was usual to speak of the six modes rather than the seven, although it is obvious that seven scales must naturally exist. The fact is that the Locrian mode was never used for everyday music-making, its dark and mysterious power being far too dangerous for ordinary use (particularly in ages when the substance of the world, both psychic and material, was far more sensitive to subtle influences than it is today). But a number of traditional melodies in the Locrian moder were (and are) used in certain highly specific ritual contexts, which cannot be disclosed here. The use of the mode was not preserved in Christianity. Returning to tour previous explanation of music as a paradigm of cosmic manifestation, we may now see that music in each of the modes will represent one particular aspect of that manifestation, which will be further modified by the precise nature of the music itself, just as the archetypal Ash-ness is modified into the individual reee on the village green. In traditional ritual dance-drama, each scene will be set in a particular mode, which established the spiritual "domain" in which the action takes place. The "central" mode is the Ionian. In the table above, the modes themselves are ranked in Ionian order, as is customary. In modern non-modal music, the major key is identical with the Ionian mode. It is the familiar do-re-me scale in which most ordinary tunes are set. The centrality of this mode is natural, since the Sun in its highest aspect represents the Mother Herself, Who governs all the Geniae [Janyati], even as the physical sun forms the central organising principle for all the planets. The name Theia [Raya] can be taken to simply mean "God", and it is possible for Ionian music to be taken as being in no particular mode; that is, as an expression of Divine manifestation pure and simple, under no special Genia [Janya]-aspect. Nevertheless, the Lady Theia is a very distinct personality in her own right who must take her place alongside her six sisters if the full richness and diversity of the Divine Self-expression is to be perceived. On one level, the fall of modal music echoes the puritan rejection of the cult of the saints and angels (which contained the remnants of the old matriarchal worship; particularly in the cult of the Virgin) in favour of a one-dimensional father-god, who quickly dwindled into the insipid "supreme being" of the eighteenth century. The last vestige of this bloodless creature is still worshipped in the modern atheist cult under the name of Progress/Evolution. He created the world. He gives it what little it has of meaning and direction. He even occasionally displays a little of the old autocrat in the oft-repeated incantation "You can't stand in the way of Progress", ritually chanted in defence of every modern atrocity. The true, traditional modal music, like every authentic art, is, on the contrary, a reflection of cosmic manifestation in all its exuberant abundance. It is the Song of God which has become the world. And yet, like every authentic Mystery, it does not stop there, but leads those who have ears to hear beyond the song and beyond the world, into the arms of God, into Her very Heart, "from whence all comes, whereto all must return." Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Inner Meaning of Music Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Personal collection of David Kay. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c. 1980 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Text https://filianicstudies.org/cms/files/original/2c0cbb1198203e7763210b674d77a0fb.pdf 4524d5e22a43862311e1ad8e5dc34c6b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Madrian Literature Circle Description An account of the resource Documents issued by the Madrian Literature Circle between 1973 and 1982. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973-1982 Language A language of the resource English Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data loose leaf, typewritten (11pp.) Text Any textual data included in the document Matriarchy and the Nature of Ritual In choosing to discuss the subject of ritual, I feel as one who should attempt to pull a long blue thread from an intricate and many-coloured tapestry. For the subject of ritual is closely interwoven with every other subject of religion, and the subject of religion is interwoven with the whole of life. Even to say this is to say something of importance on the subject; for there has been an increasing tendency over the last four hundred years to regard ritual as something external to the real matter of religion – something which has been tacked on and which can, without difficulty, be altered or removed. The reason for this is not difficult to understand, and in understanding it, we will provide ourselves with a key to the whole phenomenon of masculist religion. It can be expressed in the following words: "If we are to have a religion, it must be a sensible system of rational propositions which do not interfere with the rationality of the world. If there is a God, She must remain neatly in Her heaven – there must be no point at which She makes real contact with the real world." But ritual is precisely such a point. It is an intersection between time and Eternity; between space and the Infinite. A meeting-place of cosmos and Creatrix. As malekind became more and more pleased with the sight of his own reflection in the shallow pool of his rationalism, he became less and less able to understand this absolute contact with the absolutely Other. There is a passage in The First Sex which is often quoted by Madrians and frequently greeted with surprise: "When man first resolved to exalt the peculiarities of his own sex, muscularity and spiritual immaturity, he adopted the policy that reality meant tangibility and that what could not be seen or touched did not exist... by crushing every manifestation of supersensory or extrasensory truth and worshipping only sensate matter, man made himself a mere biological organism and denied himself the divine ray that once upon a time woman had revealed to him." "But surely," it is said, "surely all the great masculist religions are a living contradiction of this". But to say this is to misunderstand the origin of masculist religion and society. It did not appear one morning, all complete and shining in the dew. It was the result of a long slow decline from the highest point of Madrian-matriarchal civilisation. Certainly patriarchy came into being through sudden and violent revolutions, but these could take place only when the Matriarchates had become sufficiently decadent to allow them to. Neither did the decline finish with the patriarchal revolution. It goes on to this day. Religion is the fundamental experience of humanity. If we could completely lose it, we would cease to be truly human. The whole drift of patriarchy is away from religion; but it has never been lost. The essential spiritual deposit inherited from matriarchal Madrianism has become more and more diluted as the patriarchal religions have 'progressed'; but it is only to the extent that they retain something of that deposit that they can continue to be called religions at all. The development of patriarchal religion and culture is not constant. Life the forces of nature, it ebbs and flows. It goes round in circles – or rather, it goes round in a spiral, for every time we arrive back at the same point, we are one a lower level. This decline takes two forms which are outwardly different, but inwardly are identical: the masculinization of religion, and the drift towards materialism and eventual atheism. In the beginning the one Goddess stood alone. She is One and She is Three. This is the fundamental fact of all religion. Her life, Her death, Her resurrection: these are the fundamental Mysteries of all religion. Here, in stark simplicity, in utter purity is the one Truth which lies behind all later religious formulations. The earliest deviations from this Truth may seem harmless enough; they involved usually the introduction of a son or consort of the Goddess, always in a very modest and unassuming capacity. Now the danger, and the destructive quality of these deviations was not their religious impurity. There is no innate tendency in the human soul to worship a male god; it is a highly artifical and unnatural form of worship which only comes about when all avenues to the Mother have been blocked off by force or by social conditioning. Even then, it is only a blind and desperate way of striving towards Her. Therefore, there was no danger of the spontaneous growth of an idolatrous cult of the son or consort. Except in the most arid spiritual climate, the son is not a religious motif. And it is precisely in this that the real danger lay. It is only into a religion that is becoming ossified that one can introduce an image totally devoid of real religious content. Further, the introduction of such images accelerates the ossification and creates a downward spiral; for those who have a genuine religious sensitivity and might have reformed the structure find themselves confused and alienated by the harsh and jarring notes which have become a part of the Faith. These tender and delicate souls will be among the first to be driven into a secular aestheticism or a private and uncommunicative mysticism, or any of a hundred other refuges. Increasingly, religion will pass from the hands of the religious into the hands of the religiose. It will become a 'civic religion'. It will represent 'social realities' rather than Absolute Reality. In the Dark Ages which followed upon the fall of the Roman Empire, Christianity very nearly perished altogether; and when the great Christian revival came at the dawn of the mediaeval period, it was spearheaded not by the cross of 'Christ', but by the holy image of the one Goddess, and the name of Mary. Elizabeth Gould Davis writes: "The church seemed doomed to failure, destined to go down to bloody death amidst the bleeding corpses of its victims, when the people discovered Mary. And only when Mary, against the stern decrees of the church, was dug out of the oblivion to which Constantine had consigned her and became identified with the Great Goddess was Christianity finally tolerated by the people." From this point, Christianity divided into a worldly and totalitarian civic religion on the one hand, and on the other, a vast popular devotion to our Lady, under the name of Mary and of certain other saints (such as the Irish St. Brigit or St. Bride, under whose name continued the Celtic cult of the Goddess Brighde). The final turn of the spiral began with the Protestant reformation. Again, a rigorous return to the cult of the Death and Resurrection, and an equally rigorous attempt to abolish the worship of Mary and the saints. But Protestanitsm was more than this: it was an attempt to adapt religion to the urbanism and hyper-rationalism of the modern period. Max Weber argued that Protestantism and the social spirit it engendered was the cause of industrial capitalism; others have suggested that incipient industrial capitalism and the social spirit it engendered was the cause of Protestantism. But nobody can deny that Protestantism goes hand in hand with urbanism, industrialism and materialism. This did not affect only the Protestant churches. At the Council of Trent, soon after the Reformation the Christian-"Catholic" church significantly Protestantised itself, and has continued the process ever since, following always a few steps behind the professing Protestant denominations (the Second Vatican Council has recently come close to completing the process). This is the final turn of the spiral, for the decline begins to approach its nadir. The religious movement cannot continue, but moves steadily toward materialism, atheism and alienation. The patriarchal religions, living on the borrowed spiritual resources of the ancient Matriarchal faith have finally run dry. Humanity flounders without hope or direction, clutching at straws. The old religions can do nothing to help. Either we will return to the ancient springs of the one fundamental Truth, or the Atomic Age will destroy us spiritually and probably physically as well. Either we will have a revival of the one ancient and (literally) catholic faith of the one Goddess, or we will have nothing. Now if this seems to have led us a long way from the subject of ritual, I can only say two things in my defence: firstly, that I feel it was necessary, and secondly, that it has at least led us right back to the subject of ritual. For if there was one thing which characterised the final (or Protestant) phase of patriarchal religion more than any other, it was the extreme dislike and misunderstanding of ritual which was mentioned at the beginning of this article. And the two reasons for this were the rationalism and materialism that have been developing ever since the decline of the great matriarchal civilisations. The rationalist, even if she believes in a religion, must believe that its essence is a series of rational propositions, and not a series of seemingly irrational acts. The person who is on the road to materialism can believe that her body is nourished by a little bread and wine, but she cannot believe that her soul is nourished by a Sacrament, even if she professes to believe that she has a soul. This, of course, is perfectly illogical. If one has decided, for emotional or cultural reasons, to give one's faith to the belief that there can be nothing beyond the material, then one is logically justified in believing that there can be no such thing as a supernatural event. We may quarrel about the first belief, and ask where it came from, but we cannot deny that the second belief came by a process of strict logic from the first. But if, on the other hand, one believes in the supernatural, and indeed in the Divine, then one cannot expect to tame Her – one cannot start making rules to circumscribe the areas in which She may manifest Herself. One cannot keep Her out of the living room. It may embarrass the scientists, or it may embarrass us in front of the scientists, but there it is. If there is a Power above and beyond the 'natural' world, we must accept that She is able to invade the world and to act upon the world. She will give us miracles and She will give us sacraments. Now there is one very typical objection to this which goes as follows: "But is not ritual a rule governing the manifestation of the Divine? Is it not an act by which you conjure up the Goddess?" It is a frequent objection and one which reveals a reasonable mind. But it also reveals a mind which knows nothing of the nature of ritual and has never participated fully in a real Rite of the Goddess. Anyone who has knelt in Her Presence at any Rite will know that ritual is not an act by which we conjure up the Goddess; it is an act by which She conjures up us. Every religion which understands the dual nature of ritual teaches that it is not just a Rite, but a duty. It is not just a means by which we come to the Divine, but a means by which we must come to Her. The recurring events of the month and of the year echo the call of the Mother, and we who are Her children obey it. Equally, every religion which understands the nature of ritual teaches that it is not a thing invented by maidkind for the sake of the Goddess, but a thing instituted by the Goddess for the sake of maidkind. Ritual is not artificial: it grows naturally (or rather supernaturally) wherever there is a genuine worship of the Goddess. Anyone who has truly experienced a ritual knows that it has an independent and indescribable power, far beyond anything which can be explained by the actions and words of the Rite itself. This is not to say that there cannot be artificial rituals. Every government ceremony is an artificial ritual, so, for the most part, are the rites of the masculist civic religions. But an artifical ritual is as much an anomaly as an artificial tree, and about as much use. When one begins to see ritual as a purely human creation which has no spiritual purpose beyond being a "commemoration" or a "communal expression of faith", then the most honourable thing is to do wihat the most extreme Protestants did: abolish it altogether. But the first patriarchs did not see ritual as a human creation which could be altered or modified at will. They altered the ancient Myths, they destroyed the ancient temples, they made idols to replace the image of the Goddess; but they dared not tamper with the rituals. They knew that these were their last contact with the divine. Sometimes, working on the masculist-materialist principle of 'bigger is better', they replaced the simple Sacrifice of a cake or flower with vast and bloody holocausts, but even this was rare and did not last. All the rites which have survived into the present era are taken from the Rites of the Goddess. If the patriarchs wanted a ritual of initiation and rebirth, they must use the sprinkling of water used by the Babylonian matriarhs in the name of Ishtar. If they wanted a sign of blessing, they must adopt the three-fingered blessing of the Phrygian Madrians, and named after the Amazon princess Myrine. If they wanted a rite of communion, they must copy the bread-and-wine Communion which was celebrated at Eleusis in honour of Demeter. Christians like Clement of Alexandria spread obscene slanders about the Eleusinian Mysteries. Christians from Paul onwards loathed even the most mildly independent woman, and would have shuddered at the thought of a conquering Amazon princess. But they dared not change the ritual acts. In the early years of patriarchy, priests wore the robes of a priestess and had false breasts, for they knew that a religious rite could only be celebrated by a woman. To this very day, the priests of ritualist religions wear flowing robes, and in the Roman "Catholic" church, they are not allowed to grow beards. The patriarchs did not do these things because they found them attractive, or because they could not devise for themselves any better "expression of communal faith". They did them because they knew that ritual was real; and they were still close enough to the true heart of religion to realize [sic] that the only genuinely efficacious rituals are the Rites of the Goddess. Inevitably, these rituals became more and more debased as patriarchy progressed; but the completely negative attitude toward them which has developed over the last few centuries is the surest sign that we have reached the last turn of the spiral: that we are rapidly approaching the point at which must either make a radical change of direction or decline into spiritual oblivion. The decline of ritual is a symptom of the general spiritual decline of humanity. But in a sense, it is also a cause of it, for all aspects of life and religion are closely interlinked, and a decline in any one will create decline in the others, which will in turn react back upon the first, creating a vicious cycle. But positive developments can also have the same cyclical effect; and the way in which we can bring about the necessary reversal of spiritual direction is by creating and nurturing this interreacting process of positive development, first in ourselves, and then in an increasing number of others who are becoming ready to turn to the Goddess. It is like kindling a fire. First we light one twig, and then another, trying to make the tiny flickering flames spread and combine and strengthen one another, sheltering them from the winds of the world that could so easily destroy them; often despairing of the possibility that they shall not be extinguished as soon as our breath stops blowing on the dying embers; often fearing lest our own tears should put them out. But slowly the fire grows, the twigs become bigger, and soon we are bringing logs and branches to feed the leaping flames. The little pile of glowing twigs becomes an all-consuming pyre which no force can withstand, lighting and warming the cold, dead world of the expiring patriarchy, and gathering up those who stand closest into the burning ecstasy of the Goddess. Now ritual is one of the first and most important areas – perhaps the most important area – in which we can begin the upward spiral. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that ritual provides a supernatural time-structure for our lives. By regular participation in ritual, we are delivered from the slavery of the lineal time of masculist-materialist culture. This time is endless in two senses; that it has no termination, and that it has no end in the sense of an aim or object of consummation. At its best it is idealised in the vaguely optimistic, but essentially aimless cultural motifs of 'progress' and 'evolution'; in reality it is epitomised by the unending tedium of the conveyor belt. The practice of ritual displaces this time-structure. Not only is the climax of a Rite a literal transcendence of time, but the regular experience of ritual structures the life of the psyche around the recurring events of the lunar and seasonal cycles; which are themselves the symbolic reflections of the Divine Events – the fundamental Mysteries of existence. The regular practice of ritual continually deepens the spiritual apprehension of the Timeless as it is reflected in the progression of time. Masculist-materialist time is a line attempting to extend itself into infinity. Madrian or ritual time is a circle attempting to transform itself into the perfect sphere of Eternity. And just as the masculist time-conception has provided late-masculist culture with the central element of its characteristic view of the world: progressivism or evolutionism; so the Madrian or ritual time-structure, as it grows within us, will give rise to a qualitatively different and characteristically feminist world-outlook. Another importance of ritual, which is closely related to this, is that it has its greatest effect on an unconscious level. This is important because, whether we like it or not, most of us have been so deeply indoctrinated by patriarchal culture that much of the time we are either unconsciously operating on its inbuilt assumptions, or (which is almost as bad) reacting directly against them. The process of ritual experience slowly permeated the deepest levels of our whole bein in a way that no rational formulation could ever achieve, so that even when the conscious mind cannot find its way through the tangled maze of patriarchal sophistry, the deeper levels of thought are able to cut a clear path to the Mother. Behind both these facts lies a third which is greater than either. It is the simple fact that ritual is. It works. It is real. It was instituted by our Mother in the beginning, and when we can be sure of nothing else, we can be sure of this. Some modern sects and cults have wanted to do away with 'stuffy rituals', stressing the importance of a simple, direct personal contact with Deity. In a way, they were right. The rituals to which they referred were, for the most part, artificial rites; and one can never say too much about the glories of a simple direct communion with the Divine. But one of the things that one should not forget to say is that it will not always be there. Everyone, however deep her faith, knows that there come times which we feel a million miles away from the Goddess. We have not ceased to love Her; we do not believe that She has ceased to love us; but somehow we feel a complete lack of contact, we feel as though a great gulf has opened up between ourselves and She. But however dissatisfied we may feel with our prayers, and even when we feel repelled by our personal devotions (as may occasionally happen even to the most spiritual), we can always be sure when we participate in a Rite of the Goddess that She is there, and that at some level of our being, Her grace flows within us. Not everybody experiences Divine rapture at Sacrifice, and nobody does on every occasion: but we can always be certain of the Rite. The mind may be unable to concentrate upon Her for a moment; the heart may lack all faith, but the soul has come before Her altar, and it is enough. She will receive us in the Rite, for She has promised; and we will know that She has received us, for we cannot doubt Her sacred vow. We may fail Her, but She will never fail us. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Matriarchy and the Nature of Ritual Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Personal collection of David Kay. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c. 1980 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Text https://filianicstudies.org/cms/files/original/4a935439f4037d049341c799beb959a1.pdf cb18227482bfa7531f5ca48ec68b9219 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Madrian Literature Circle Description An account of the resource Documents issued by the Madrian Literature Circle between 1973 and 1982. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973-1982 Language A language of the resource English Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data loose leaf, handwritten (24pp.) Text Any textual data included in the document The Normal Life The Problem Profane society is abnormal. A society with no aim or purpose except material acquisition either individual or communla is an historical oddity. It occurs from time to time; usually at the decay of some great world-order. It happened during the last centuries of the Roman Empire and during the last centuries of the Babylonian Empire. It is happening today. Even during patriarchy, it has been usual for the structure of life (and particularly of peasant life, which has been the life of most people throughout history) to be based primarily on spiritual rather than material considerations. The profane myth that human history is the story of a prolonged struggle for control over the environment and the betterment of material conditions, leading from the caves to the modern technocratic utopia, is not only refuted by spiritual knowledge (which tells us that maid began her earthly history as a spiritual creature having perfect control over her environment, which she only lost by her gradual descent into matter); it is also refuted by a simple study of history, which shows that for the average person in the average century life was neither rich nor poor, and she had better things to think about than the betterment of her material conditions. A normal society is normal not only in the quantitative sense – that it is by far the most usual and frequent type of society – but in the far more important qualitative sense; that it is a society striving to manifest the norm or pattern of fallen humanity laid down by the Divine: that pattern by which human life is rendered as perfect as possible within the limits of its fallen condition and the level of its decline into matter, and by which human activity and society acts as the best possible instrument for the liberation and spiritual advancement of each individual. No patriarchal society can be truly normal in this sense (nor even, considerting that the vast majority of human history has been matriarchal, in the quantitative sense), but a thoroughly profane society such as the one prevailing in both eastern and western Europe (the minor differences of ideology between one materialistic system and another are of negligible importance from an overall spiritual point of view) and extending throughout the world by economic and/or military force is abnormal to a quite extraordinary degree. Every physical act has a spiritual meaning. Every word we speak, every action we make, as well as the environment with which we surround ourselves, has a definite effect upon our spiritual nature and on the whole "spiritual atmosphere" in which we exist. The cumulative effect of all our actions, words and gestures, together with those of the people around us, together with such things as decor, music, entertainment, clothes, modes of transport and the countless other "soul-shaping" influences to which we are constantly exposed, is to build into us an almost unbreakable pattern. This is because our dual physical/spiritual nature is so constructed that it cannot act or be acted upon on one plane without a corresponding action on the other. This fact is used by a normal society in order to build up patterns which lead the soul back to its true spiritual home, not only in a relatively limited number of periods set aside for woship or contemplation, but through every action of her everyday life. This, indeed, is the norm or pattern of human life laid down by the Goddess from the beginning. The pattern is built into the very structure of life on our planet. The divine Mysteries are continually expressed through the cycles of the seasons and of the moon. Every human community, however far it may have strayed from strict spiritual truth, has recognized these facts and enshrined them in its religious rites and in the rituals of everyday life. Every human community, that is, with the solitary exception of the specifically profane society. Superficially, it would seem that the great mistake of profane societies is that they are able to see only the outward and physical results of human activities, that they completely ignore their far more important spiritual aspect. In lloking at human existence, they miss the central and salient feature (its spiritual reality) and focus wholly on what is merely accidental, merely the medium through which it is expressed; like the one who, seeing a great painting, should comment only on the quality of the canvas. But it must not be forgotten that every material phenomenon is in essence an spiritual phenomenon, including materialism itself; and while the human architects of the profane society are for the most part quite ignorant of the inner meaning of their own actions, the spiritual forces which stand behind them know only too well what they are doing. This is evidenced by the fact that the results of profane activity are never "spiritually neutral", but rather the whol momentum of profane society is geared to the undermining and destruction of the relationship of humanity with the Divine. Technological society systematically severs human contact with the seasons, taking the vast majority away from the land, mechanising what little agricultural work remains, creating work which has no seasonal variation of any sort. Natural rhythms are supplanted by mechanical rhythms. The cult of speed is inculcated in every area, creating reflexes of haste and superficiality which are directly contrary to the habit of contemplation and deep thought. To the same end a constant barrage of noise, and a constant stream of mass "entertainment" are maintained. Traditional forms in dress and custom, which usually preserve some trace of the profound spiritual principles upon which all dress and custom were once based, are systematically eradicated, even where they pose no threat to "efficiency". Similar examples are to be listed in every area of life. Every act is a ritual act with a ritual effect; and the effect of this profane ritual (or anti-ritual) is to create a great network of discordant vibrations which are wholly destructive of spiritual harmony, both in the individual and in society as a whole. Although profane society is not by any means a new phenomenon, its successive manifestations have increased in intensity throughout recorded history. The decadence of the Babylonian empire was a relatively local occurrence. Roman materialism, using its undoubted advantages on the physical plane, expanded over the whole of Europe, north Africa [sic] and the Middle East. Nevertheless, not only did it leave untouched vast areas of the globe, such as the Far East and the Americas, but since it had no great effect on the actual methods of agriculture, the areas at any distance fromt he main Imperial centres retained in many respects a way of life unbroken by disruptive influences. As the Empire fell victim to its own innate spiritual dissonance, and came to its inevitable conclusion, there was a break-up of the great metropolitan centres and a massive flight to the land, where the more traditional life-style provided the basis for a return to the relative sanity of a "normal" patriarchal society. During recorded history, there has never been such a thoroughgoing attempt to permeate profane structures throughout the world. Every major area has been taken over, the life of the land has been undermined, and even the smallest pockets of resistance are being systematically eradicated. Tribal traditions are destroyed in Africa by contralised bureaucracies under the guidance of east or west European neo-colonialists, the mountain fastnesses of Tibet are invaded by China under the banner of a western materialism. Indeed, wherever any vestige of a normal spiritually-based life-style survives, it is fighting a losing battle against the economic and political forces pitted against it. The patriarchal religious organisations, even where they do represent a genuine spiritual concern, have too little spiritual knowledge even to understand what is taking place, and for the most part lend their support to the very forces which are destroying them in one form or another. By accepting the division between "religious" and "secular" life, the patriarchal religions have compromised the very principle upon which religion is based and undermined their own foundations. It is no coincidence that this contradiction lies at the very foundation of that religion which has been most bound up with and implicated in the development of modern profanity, in the words "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's". Nothing belongs to Caesar, because all life belongs to God. If Caesar is given anything, there is no logical reasons why he should not have everything. Which is exactly what has happened. But when a civilisation is spiritually disrupted the seeds of its material destruction are already sown. That lesson is clear both from spiritual knowledge and from history. Anyone who has given the smallest study to the ecological crisis facing modern civilisation over the coming century will realise how close that destruction is in physical terms, even assuming that the nightmarish arsenals of nuclear and other "advanced" weaponry are not unleashed upon the world. People who have studied the subject are constantly amazed that governments with the facts of almost unavoidable disaster before them simply treat the problem as if it did not exist. What they cannot know, studying the subject from a purely material standpoint, is that this problem is not in itself the disease which is destroying profane civilisation, but merely the physical symptoms of a far greater spiritual disease; and that even if catastrophe could in some way be circumvented, without a complete spiritual re-orientation of society, it would only be a postponement of the inevitable. From a long term spiritual/historical perspective, what is far more disturbing than the fact that profane society is in its final days is the fact that it has spent those days in destroying all the things which might provide human life with continuity after its demise. Unless a very sudden change of direction takes place – of which there are no signs – there will not be any remnant of a normal life-style left in any part of the globe to which the refugees of the collapsing civilisation may flee for shelter and which may become the basis for renewal. It is this which makes the modern phase of profanity more dangerous than any of its predecessors. Yet even this is not a mere "accident" of the material level. Even in this a definite pattern can be traced. Ever since the ending of the matriarchal period (which can almost be termed a "second Fall"), there has been a steady and continual decline or downward spiral. Each profane phase has been more intense and more widespread than its predecessor. Each "recovery" after the inevitable downfall of the profane civilisation has been less complete, incorporating religions even further removed from the archetypal faith, and forms of society ever farther removed from the authentic Norm. We have now reached the extreme point of descent, at which we are confronted with a sort of mirror-image or inverted parody of normal world-order. During the matriarchal period (except in the last decadence) a single faith was held in every part of the world. Throughout the various phases of matriarchal civilisation over countless thousands of years, the one religion was that revealed by the Goddess from the beginning of earthly existence. Although social forms in different times and places varied over this vast period, each one was essentially normal, in that it was based on absolute spiritual principles and always judged every action not by its outward result or "efficiency" but by its spiritual or ritual effect.* After the "second Fall", spiritual Truth was fragmented. Different civilisations took up different aspects of the Truth and allowed others to drop. Everywhere the essential Centre and guiding image of the one Goddess was cast aside. Thus the one complete Religion was replaced by a variety of partial religions. Every patriarchal society abandoned the Norm, but each fell further from it or came closer to it, passed through profane phases and quasi-normal phases according to the vicissitudes of each particular culture. Now, for the first time since the matriarchal period, the world adheres to a single faith, a dogmatic scientistic materialism completely closed to any form of spiritual reality (it matters little whether the adherents of this faith pay lip-service to the masculist religions, or rather to the burnt-out shells of them); and the whole world stands in the same relationship to the social Norm: that of complete rejection and alienation. The long process of decline is rapidly approaching its ultimate point: the total inversino of the normal state of human existence. After this there can be no new "recovery", for the ever-dwindling spiritual residue left over from the matriarchal period will finally have been exhausted. The human race is rapidly approaching spiritual extinction; and extinction on the spiritual plane would, of course, be mirrored immediately on the physical. The instruments of this physical extinction are already in place, awaiting only the touch of a button. Is there any escape from this extinction? In the strict logic of cause and effect, there can be no escape. But we must not forget that the sacrifice of the Daughter permeates the whole of fallen creation, and that through this, the mystery of mercy may always overrule the logic of causality. Through Her death and resurrection, every death contains the potentiality of a resurrection. Even now, She is actively making available the means of a new rebirth. The religion of the matriarchies has once more become a reality on earth. The seeds are being sown from which a new world may arise out of the ashes of the old. But the Goddess cannot save us without our active participation, for that would be to destroy our free will. She is making the way ready for us, but we must take it. This means firstly that we must return to Her spiritually; but it must be a return which involves not only an intellectual decision, but a radical re-orientation of our whole lives. Secondly, we must begin to lay the foundations for a rebirth of the normal lifestyle. This means beginning to construct a way of life based upon ritual and spiritual principles; one in which outward activity is directed not only to outward aims, but is continually "referred back" by its traditional form to the centre of all being. The transfer from abnormal life to normal life is in essence a transfer from living "on the surface" to living "from the centre". The Solution: first principles The ways in which we may begin to recover the normal life will vary with the situation of each person or group of persons. No full attempt to realise the active life can be made outside the context of a community, or at least a relatively large and self-contained household; and between the ideal community and the most unfavourable individual circumstances, every intermediate stage will present its own peculair problems and advantages. Here we will attempt only to give certain fundamental principles. There are two forms of the normal life: the active life and the contemplative life. Of these, the higher, and in the fullest sense the more active, is the contemplative life. In this life the soul is fully active and moves among the highest spheres. The activity is not "intellectual" in the profane sense (i.e. exclusively concerned with the lower faculty of reason), nor is it emotional; it is a raising up of the self to the plane of pure Intellect, or pure apprehension of Absolute Reality, "changeless, beyond the impermanent flux of time" [1 Teachings 12:6], that is to say, "behind" the purely relative events or "shadows" of the material world. This activity of pure Intellect is expressed in the Teachings in the words "then shall mind rise up into soul and soul breathe the breath of Spirit" [1 Teachings 12:23]. It is, however, an extraordinarily strenuous activity as well as requiring a special aptitude (that is to say, a special state of moiraic** [werdic] development), and is, therefore, only the vocation of a relatively small number of people. Our main concern here will be with the active life. Whereas the contemplative life penetrates behind the veil of matter to the Absolute Reality that lies beyond, the active life remains within the flux of material events. However, it is fully aware of the relative nature of these events, and realises that they exist only by virtue of the external Cause and Ground of all being. Therefore no material objective is regarded as an end in itself, but rather, all outward activity is seen as the expression of inner Truth. Contingent existence is continually referred back and re-connected with the first Cause from which it flows and upon which it depends. The contemplative life and the active life are in no way opposed. Rather they are complementary, although not equal. It is said that the contemplative life is the elder sister of the active life, guiding and protecting her, and also teaching her to grow up in her own likeness. For the ultimate aim of the active life (although it is not necessarily to be achieved in the present incarnation) is to transcend outward activity and penetrate the veil of matter; for all truly normal activity leads eventually to the same point. The active life is sometimes called the "slow way", or the "gentle way". Nor should too rigid a distinction be drawn between the two lives, for all outward activity, in so far as it is authentically normal must contain at least a minimal contemplative element. Its very ritual pattern is a constant "reminder" of the eternal Truth which underlies it. Furthermore, certain outward activities, particularly in the sphere of artistic expression, are wholly or partly contemplative disciplines, whose creations in a normal society are judged not by their "originality" or individualistic self-expression, but by the contemplative realisation of the Whole that shines through them, as expressed in the saying: "not I, but She that creates through me". This true art is practised both by contemplatives and by those in active life (usually under the direction of contemplatives). Which raises the converse point, that even the strictest contemplative is, by the very fact of inhabiting a material body, necessarily involved in some degree of outward activity, and that by her very presence, as well as by her spiritual ministry, she makes an important, not to say essential, contribution to the normal active community. There is a third life, which may be called the passive, or passionate life. This life is lived according to no Principle, but is merely bent upon maximizing pleasure and avoiding pain. This life is, strictly speaking, sub-human, since it relinquishes the free will which is the essential characteristic of humanity, making the soul the passive plaything of external influences, biological drives, and physiological reactions. The passive life may be exceedingly "active" in the outward sense at times, but this is not the authentic activity of the soul, but merely a reaction to stimuli. The soul is active only in the sense that a log is active when borne by a rushing torrent. It is this perversion of the active life which constitutes the whole life of abnormal societies. This life is doomed to a continual frustration, since in its constant round of outward activity it is desperately seeking a depth of peace and satisfaction which, by its very nature, is not be found in the flux of outward things, but only in the Reality which underlies it. In the first instance, a considerable part of the development of the normal lifestyle will be negative, since we must begin to cut off the channels by which the passive life is inculcated into us by profane society. The difficulty here is that our natural inclination to take the line of least resistance is always working against us, since the passive life is by definitino the line of least resistance. The false self is naturally inclined towards the passive life. That is why the introduction of western attitudes and lifestyles into relatively normal eastern societies has often broken up the traditional way of life even when it was not enforced upon the people compulsorily, merely by the power of "temptation". We will put ourselves in a very vulnerable position if we underestimate this power, and we will do wel, as far as possible, to remove ourselves from it. One particular example of this lies in the profane mass-media, particularly television. The very nature of the media, quite apart from anything they may actually say, is so constituted as to inculcate a profane world-view. They are designed to concentrate upon change, novelty, "news", in other words, to fix the consciousness exclusively upon "the impermanent flux of time" [1 Teachings 12:6]. The visual nature of television is designed to fix the mind on outward "things", rather than on fundamental principles, ideas or contemplative truths. These faults are quite apart from the specifically profane and materialistic scale of values which underlies every word written or spoken, the more or less dogmatic assumption that only the outward events of the physical world are "real", and that they exist by and for themselves, with neither cause nor purpose beyond them. This is no less true of those who profess a religion, for except when they are speaking on specifically "religious" subjects, they invariably express views indistinguishable from those of the materialist, though perhaps with a few "religious" catch-phrases by way of decoration. They have no specifically spiritual analysis of the world. These may seem merely negative evils, but all evil is essentially the negation of good, just as all cold is the negation of warmth. Evil is not an entity in its own right. The profane media inculcate a whole view of the world designed to entrap the soul within the outward flux and blind her with the veil of matter. There is a temptation to feel that since we realise these things, the media can have no power to persuade us, and therefore can do us no harm, although they may harm others. Ironically, this is based upon a fallacy which has its roots in profane rationalism: the fallacy that "intellectual" persuasion (in the profane sense) is the only danger. The answer to this lies in the Teachings: "Thoughts of the mind pass not away, nor vanish into air. For every thought is a builder in the subtle world that lies about you." [1 Teachings 11:1–2] Each time we expose ourselves to particular thoughts or currents of thought, structures are being created or strengthened within the psychic and astral material of our subtle bodies. This last principle is one of the keys to both positive and negative action in the construction of the active life. To put it another way, the material world is really a realm of symbols rather than realities. If those symbols reflect the Reality which underlies material existence, they participate in its quality of realness. If, on the other hand, they become severed from it, they become like the arbitrary scrawls of an infant on a piece of paper, devoid of significance. It is necessary, therefore, to exclude negative influences and to construct positive ones. Grace, rhythm and a certain formality are the keynotes of the active life. The modern use of language and gesture, for example, fosters a casual and "outward" approach to life. Here one must be careful in the use of terms. What is certainly not wanted is a "formality" of the kind cultivated by the governing classes of late patriarchal societies, but rather the easy and natural formality of the central matriarchal period: gestures of respect, such as the reverence, formulae of speech. One recalls the simple and natural use of "Mari be praised" on referring to the homeliest blessings, and the everyday use of invocational forms. The remembrance that all words are a species of magic ("I am ... between the lightest word of greeting and the thought from which it flows": Teachings [1 Teachings 11:35]) is a guarantee of a formality of the correct type, since the instinct for correct speech is latent in every human being. Nevertheless, language as a whole is a very involved subject, since the whole modern dialect, and indeed the late patriarchal languages as a whole are very far degenerated from archetypal language, which, very far from having its origins in animal squeaks and grunts, as profane mythology suggests, was a direct manifestation of Divine Intelligence on the particular fallen plane which we inhabit. There can be no question of the sudden creation of an artificial language. We must work with the languages we have, allowing the Madrian communities to develop first their own dialect, and gradually, over several generations, their own distinctive language. Insofar as this language develops out of an authentically normal way of life, it will be a sacred language, having retained and purified that which is true in contemporary languages, replaced that which has been lost and discarded all that is false. The fostering of developments of this sort is another reason for the isolation of the community, so far as possible, from profane influences. The slowness of this process should not be a source of discouragement; firstly, because it is one of the marks of abnormal society that its thinking never extends beyond the next generation, owing to its immersion in the cults of speed and immediacy, secondly because there is no implication that the very earliest forms of purified speech will not be an immeasurable improvement on current profane language. Very much the reverse; once the real nature of language is understood, and that understanding is put into practice, we have already stepped over the boundary which divides normal speech from profane speech. We are encamped, so to speak, in sacred territory; the task that follows is the building of a permanent citadel. Clothes, decoration, forms of recreation, etc. should never be devoid of higher meaning, for that would be to imply the self-existence of material things. This is not to say that, for example, our stories and poems should all be "religious" in the restricted sense which that term has acquired in profane society. On the contrary, all authentic art whether "folk-art" or "high-art" has a metaphysical dimension; the genuine fairy-tale is always an allegory of the soul's quest (it is the characteristic failure to understand this – or at a deeper level, the unconscious realisation of it – which has induced modern society to banish the fairy-tale to the nursery. It was never written for children alone). So-called "realistic" art, on the other hand, has for its "moral" the self-existence of material events. The distinction between art and craft is also false, based on the one hand on the profane cult of "originality" in art, and on the other, upon the degeneration of craft into mere "production". In a normal community, both art and craft are the expression of primordial principles, with traditions of form and style governing every aspect; which far from limiting the expression of the craftsmaid, provides her with that field of expression within which alone she can convey genuine meaning. Spiritual leadership and direction is particularly important in the process of distinguishing harmonic forms of expression from dissonant ones, and in creating cohesion within the community as a whole. Profane society, while imposing an increasing uniformity of lifestyle and activity upon all its members, together with a continuing "standardisation" of the artefacts and influences which affect their everyday life, encourages a lack of discipline in all matters of abnormal behaviour and a disregard for all forms of courtesy, respect and obedience on the personal level. This is calculated to strengthen the passive life, by making the individual increasingly subject to impersonal stimuli, while simultaneously undermining the willed control of outward actions which is the essential characteristic of the active life. On the esoteric level, it also helps to prevent any workable alternative to profane society from emerging by ensuring that personal discipline is absent and genuine authority (which is always based upon spiritual principles) is confused with the tyrannical (because unfounded) pseudo-authority of profane society. Thus the vast majority of "alternatives" founded on purely secular, or inauthentically "spiritual" bases, have collapsed in a welter of conflicting personalities. While it is unlikely that a Madrian community would make this elementary mistake, it is essential that a sound authority whould run throughout the community, and that no concessions be made to the falsely "libertarian" conditionoing of profane society (the express purpose of which is to destroy the liberty of the soul by making her "passion's slave"); while at the same time, that authoirty should be constantly referred back to its spiritual bases and not exercised outside them, otherwise it will degenerate into mere tyrannt of the profane order. Crafts and work which is in tune with the rhythms of nature are best suited to a normal community; and it is essential that an entirely new rhythm should begin to pervade the community as a whole. A slower rhythm; a rhythm suited to the human being and her natural environment rather than to the machine; a rhythm which will welcome the re-telling of old stories without craving for novelty or novels, which in all things is released from the necessity for ever new stimuli. A new simplicity and a sense of wonder in simple things, which is in a sense a refining of the perception until it begins to see the unity underlying all things. The profane rhythm of the working week must give way to the sacred rhythms of the moon and sun. These rhythms are an expression of the childlikeness enjoined upon us in the Mythos. They are nurtured by the ritualisation of life, and by the setting up of patterns in dance and song and ritual drama. Above all, they will be fostered by the habit of contemplation, and the presence within the community of at least one person pursuing the fully contemplative life will be of inestimable value. Touching only on principles, we have said but little about the actual practices which a community might establish. Some of these will be suggestes in the companion paper to this, to which this paper really forms a preface. Yet the principles enunciated here will prove fruitful if applied contemplatively and prayerfully to a living situation. They may be summarised in three words: live from the Centre, harmonise, control. They are perfectly expressed in the following passage, and in the whole of the Teaching from which it is taken: "It is not possible that a flute should play at once two tunes. Nor may any maid pursue at once true wisdom and the false. Therefore, be you attuned to the music of Eternity, and dance within the rhythm of the Mysteries and the seasons. Let your soul be simple, that she may be a mirror of perfect love." [1 Teachings 3:43–5] *Which, incidentally, was as successful in achieving happiness, peace and – within the limits prescribed by a non-materialist society – prosperity as civilisations wholly devoted to these temporal aims have been unsuccessful. **Moira [werdë] is the stream of moral/spiritual causality which continues from one incarnation to another. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Normal Life Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Personal collection of David Kay. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c. 1980 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Text https://filianicstudies.org/cms/files/original/05c74f5d548be3b99f9a9d9f9db1cbf4.pdf f99a6be661d9cb282e78cc08eb9b4181 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Madrian Literature Circle Description An account of the resource Documents issued by the Madrian Literature Circle between 1973 and 1982. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973-1982 Language A language of the resource English Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data loose leaf, typewritten (2pp.) Text Any textual data included in the document THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX An enigma of modern psychology understood in light of the Madrian faith. Modern psychology has been a mixed blessing. Insofar as it has increased awareness of levels of mind beyond normal waking consciousness, it has done humanity a great service, but insofar as it has tried to explain these in purely material terms, it has attempted to deprive humanity of even such glimpses beyond the 'natural' as nineteenth-century scientism allowed. One truly significant aspect of the psychoanalytic method, however, has been its recognition of the importance of myth. Even Freud, the most materialistic of psychoanalysts, realised that in order to express the emotive and psychic quality of a psychological situation as well as merely describing it intellectually, one must harness the archetypal depth of myth to one's purposes. He did not realise, though, that the psychological level of myth is inextricably connected with far deeper levels of spiritual meaning, and that one cannot use one without unconsciously bringing in the others. It is because of this archetypal depth that the idea of the Oedipus complex has had such a profound effect on modern thought – despite the fact that most of its details are incorrect. Baldly stated, the idea of the Oedipus complex is that nearly every man has within him the repressed and therefore unconscious desire to kill his father and marry his mother. The evidence upon which Freud came to this conclusion was correct; but Freudian theory is founded upon a thoroughly materialistic world view – the belief that human beings have no souls, but are merely 'naked apes.' This gave rise to two prejudices which distorted the interpretation of the evidence: 1. The prejudice that we cannot have had any existence previous to this life – and therefore all feelings held from an early age must originate in childhood experience (or even 'womb-experiences.') 2. The prejudice that we have no higher or spiritual impulses – and therefore all motivation can eventually be reduced to animal instincts – hunger, aggression, sex, etc. The Oedipus story is, in its origins, connected with the early stages of the patriarchal revolution (see footnote). On the surface level, it is a chronicle of an attempt to overthrow Madrian-Matriarchal society and religion, and the tragic consequences which followed. But as the overthrow became complete, the story took the form of a paradigm of the feelings of the deep unconscious of every person – a longing to return to the Goddess, and a bitter resentment against the cruel and arrogant 'father' god of wrath, and the repressive social order set up by his followers. When one realises the tremendous emotional power of past and present Madrian devotion, and the tender and delicate relationship which is built up between the aspiring soul and her Goddess, it is easy to understand the depth and bitterness of the psychological trauma when she feels herself rudely thrust aside by a coarse and violent-tempered 'god' claiming first to own and possess the Goddess, and then denying Her existence altogether. Under the influence of the first of his two prejudices, Freud, who saw every fairy-tale queen and king as types of mother and father, of course interpreted Jocasta and Laius in the same way. Under the influence of his second prejudice, the only motivation he could come up with for the whole things [sic] was his good old standby – sex. And because of his emphasis on sexual (and purely heterosexual) motivation, he could not conclude that women could also have 'Oedipal' feelings. He therefore invented for women the 'Elektra complex,' a pitiful afterthought which has made no real contribution to the understanding of psychology. The Oedipus complex has become a household word because it expressed something which people instinctively felt to contain a great truth – but how many people have even heard of the 'Elektra Complex'? The fact is, however, that the so-called Oedipus complex not only applies to both sexes, but applies more strongly on the whole to women, because they tend to be more spiritually developed. The sexual aspect of Freud's theory, and of the patriarchal version of the Oedipus myth itself are both typical of the spiritual immaturity of masculist culture. The primary act of communion is the union of the female soul with female Deity – not because all Her worshippers are female, but because the soul itself is female. The matriarchal Celts taught that upon death the soul took an 'angel' form, and that all 'angels' were female. The patriarchal Greeks and Romans spoke of their souls as 'she.' Only Christian dogma ended this with its unsophisticated doctrine of bodily resurrection after death. (Incredibly, this doctrine is still officially held by all the major Christian denominations to this day!) The Freudian version of the Oedipus complex has two extremely harmful effects. Morally, its effect is at one with that of puritan patriarchalism – it both crushes and innures; making people feel 'sinful' because of the wicked thoughts which they are unconsciously harbouring, and making them feel that since they have wicked ideas which they can't control, they aren't really morally responsible anyway. The second effect is to help establish repression as a condition of life. One's most basic desire is to kill one parent and marry the other. One cannot possibly do that, therefore one's most basic desire must be repressed. Emotional life is to be founded upon frustration from the beginning. Once we have understood the real nature of the desire, we see also that it can and must be fulfilled. We must overthrow the male 'god' and all the materialisms and puritanisms that follow in his train. We must return to the love of Our [sic] Lady, the one true Deity. * Footnote. See Robert Graves, "The Greek Myths," Penguin, vol. II, pp. 9–15. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Oedipus Complex Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Personal collection of David Kay. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c. 1980 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Text https://filianicstudies.org/cms/files/original/06b88ada3f2855c0f0afa83646035d52.pdf 390dbfdfd14967cb2fc54b9b349f7132 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Madrian Literature Circle Description An account of the resource Documents issued by the Madrian Literature Circle between 1973 and 1982. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973-1982 Language A language of the resource English Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data loose leaf, handwritten (18pp.) Text Any textual data included in the document The Pattern of History and the Quest of the Soul Every religious tradition informs us that the Golden Age or Garden of Eden lies in the past, and that humanity has for long grown ever more distant from absolute spiritual reality. The modern mythology of progress, on the other hand, which has been called 'the religion of the newspaper' preaches a strange inversion of this, holding that we have developed from a superstitious primitiveness, and are rapidly approaching moral and physical perfection on earth through the multiplication of material acquisitions. The earliest civilisations known to archaeology were controlled by women, ruled by priestess-queens, and devoted to the service of the Goddess. Although these civilisations existed for many thousands of years, we possess relics only of their declining centuries when the people were beginning to fall away from their highest religious ideals. Certainly there was a harmony between society and the highest forces of creation of a kind that has rarely been dreamed of since. Nevertheless, certain areas of life were becoming 'secularised': certain elements of materialism were creeping into popular thought and practice, and although these were so far removed from the materialism of our own time that a modern mind might well think of them as forms of the highest spirituality, nonetheless the earliest ideals, which saw the whole of society as one great temple to the Goddess, and all of life as a single and exuberant act of devotion, were declining. And with this decline came a corresponding decline in cultural achievement. Even when the decline had gone so far that nomadic patriarchal tribes from the east had been allowed to make considerable inroads into religious thought, and a second wave of more savage patriarchal invaders had found it possible to overrun large areas, suppressing matriarchy and introducing the cult of the male god of wrath – even at this stage, those states which remained matriarchal maintained a culture whose remains have provoked effusive tribute from even the most soberly academic of historians. Thus, comparing matriarchal Crete with the surrounding male-governed states, the normally unenthusiastic Harold Hauser writes "...what a difference in the whole conception of art! What freedom in artistic life in contrast to the oppressive conventionalism of the rest of the Ancient-Oriental world!" While the art-historian Mrs. Groenwegen Frankfort writes "Here and here alone, the human bid for timelessness was disregarded in the most complete acceptance of the grace of life the world has ever known." Jacquette Hawkes describes the queen-priestess's [sic] palace at Knosses as having "...a residential style, a domestic civility and convenience that seems to anticipate European palaces of the Renaissance and after rather than imitating its contemporaries in Egypt and the Orient." In the language of progressism, it was some three thousand years 'ahead of its time'! Yet perhaps more important than all these things are the qualities which the matriarchate lacked. Miss Hawkes has described how contemporary male rulers surrounded with huge painted scenes of battle and bloodshed. Prisoners bound and writhing, severed hands and severed heads are displayed not only on paintings covering walls and stairs, but also in a great variety of carved objects. This form of decoration – the glorification of violence which has characterised the patriarchate through practically all of its existence – is found not only in contemporary Europe and the Orient, but as far afield as Central America. "And yet in Crete," writes Miss Hawkes, "where hallowed rulers commanded wealth and power and lived in splendid palaces, there was hardly a trace of these manifestations of masculine pride and unthinking cruelty." The difference between these two cultures is best expressed by saying that one was a spiritual culture and the other is a material culture. In one culture, even the architecture expresses the 'grace of life'. In the other culture, even the Supreme Being is represented as an oriental potentate. It is true that at certain times the later religions did recapture certain of the truths of the original religion. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental difference between the two kinds of religion which is expressed in a very profound symbol – the unpronounceable Name of the Goddess. This Name is represented by the three letters I H V (the Trigrammaton). When the earliest priests of the patriarchate set out to masculinise the Godhead, they did a very revealing thing: a thing which, consciously or unconsciously, symbolised the inmost nature of the culture which was to dominate the world for the next five thousand years. They added one letter to the Trigrammaton, thus forming the Tetragrammaton, I H V H. Deity was no longer expressed by the spiritual number three, but by the material number four. The full significance of this can best be understood in the light of the spiritual history of that group of souls which make up humanity. When intelligent creation first turned from the Goddess, the universe was translated from the sphere of ideal forms or Divine thoughts into the realm of matter which includes not only the level of dense material which we call the physical world, but also the etheric and other subtle planes. This separation from the Goddess was not to be permanent, but as by her own choices and actions the child had strayed, so, if she was to retain her essential freedom, by her own choices and actions she must return (it is to make this possible that the holy Maid has come to us). At this time all souls were at a much higher level than now, living on the subtlest planes and still very close to the Goddess. Since then every soul has taken its own direction – some descending to lower planes to incarnate in human form, others coming back into union with the Goddess, and multitudes of others moving through every level of existence from the lowest to the highest. Life on earth, too, has been subject to continual change. At the beginning humanity was still close to the higher realms, sensitive to etheric currents, and to the mental and emotional vibrations of others, able to see 'spiritual' entities and to bring about changes in physical matter by a simple operation of the will. The powers of individuals have never been uniform, and at every time there have been some possessed of the highest faculties; but there is always a general level, and because of the sensitivity of the individual soul to the psychological atmosphere about her, she is rarely able to rise very far above that level. In our own time the level is very low. At the height of the last matriarchal period, however, humanity reached a peak of achievement. Both culture and human faculties were brought to a high point of refinement. It is difficult to describe exactly what took place at that time; but one way of putting it is to say that idea was much closer to actuality than it is now. All our actions begin with an idea and consist of the attempt to bring that idea into actuality. In the Divine Mind, every idea is at once actuality – that is what we mean by Divine creation. We are told that in the beginning 'the daughters of the Goddess' – intelligent creation – possessed a measure of this divine prerogative. As a creature grows further from her Goddess, so her ideas and her actuality grow further apart. We may also say then that humanity had in the period of which we are speaking come very close to the Goddess – for the more a soul is in harmony with Divinity, the more she is in harmony with all things, and the more all things harmonize [sic] with her will. This is the highest meaning of magic. This high level of culture was attained by the dedicated cultivation of the spiritual. The ideal of beauty was applied to every area of life, for only the beautiful was fit for a gift to the Goddess; and all life was to be given to Her. The ideal of perfection governed everything – from the tallest building to the briefest gesture of the hand, each thing must achieve perfection after its own kind. When this is understood, we may see how a decline was possible. Why should those who have a complete magical control over the things about them ever choose to lapse from that state? Why should the choose hardship and effort in place of a life of sublime grace? Because the effort entailed in maintaining themselves at this level was inconceivably great. Because the closer we come to the Goddess, the more She demands complete perfection. We are released from the physical demands of life that we may meet demands of a higher and purer nature whose fulfillment is immeasurably more satisfying than anything we now know, but also immeasurably more difficult. Our Lady demands that we become the perfect and resplendent creatures that we were when She first created us. She leads us patiently, step by step; She does not at any time demand more of us than we are able to perform – but neither does She demand one whit less. Our Lady is pleased beyond measure with our first faltering turning to Her. She is delighted with every loving act and each small sign of progress. But She is only satisfied with perfection. There can be no standing still on this path. Either one is moving forward or one starts to slip back. As soon as one ceases to make moral effort, idea and actuality begin to drift apart and the psychic and magical faculties begin to lose their sharpness. This is not a punishment any more than the faculties themselves were a reward; it is a simple matter of cause and effect. Where idea and actuality separate, the world becomes for all practical purposes more 'solid'; its material is more intractable; and we are increasingly driven to the use of physical intermediaries between ourselves and the matter which we would affect rather than the direct employment of the will. At its most sophisticated the use of such intermediaries becomes an advanced technology. It is ironic that such technologies are claimed to increase human control over the environment, for while in one sense that is certainly the case, in the deepest sense the reverse is true. The exclusive study of the 'objective' physical conditions of the world brings about precisely the psychological conditions which promote the continuing 'solidification' of matter. It also tends to foster an attitude of mind which precludes any serious spirituality and therefore drives people yet further from the Goddess, Who is the fount and source of all creative activity. Must we say, then, that the achievement of the matriarchal age has been completely lost? No, for not only did that period help many souls to refine themselves until they could leave the world and continue their upward journey in the heavenly spheres, but also, every true aspiration to perfection is a precious creation that continues to exist in a realm beyond time and place. This is another and more immediate question which emerges from our brief survey of the pattern of history: for those of us who have remained in the lower planes and in the cycle of reincarnation, is it much harder in this present age for us to come closer to the Goddess? There is a twofold answer to this question. In the first place, it is true that insofar as we have drifted further from out Lady we have a greater distance to return. But it is also true that the farther we stray from the light the fainter it becomes until we can no longer see it at all, and must be lost to flounder in eternal darkness; or even if we should catch a glimpse of it, the tiny increase of brightness which would come from much arduous striving toward it would be of such small comfort to our souls that we could not find the courage to continue. That, in the nature of things is the situation in which we must find ourselves. And yet so great is the love of our Lady for Her children that She could not allow it to remain so. She must come to the assistance of Her children. But how can She, Who is pure unbounded energy and abundance come into a place tinged with restriction and limitation? To put it another way, how can She, Who is pure good, come into a place which contains evil? How, in short, can She come into that place which by its very definition is that-place-where-She-is-not? The nature of that problem is made more difficult for us to understand by the fact that we think mostly in the language of the materialist culture. One the material plane it is easy for a mother to pick up her straying child and carry her back home. She compels the body, but she does not compel the soul. She picks up the body and puts it where it ought to be, but she cannot pick up the mind and put it where it ought to be. She cannot make the child think what she ought to think, feel what she ought to feel, like what she should like and dislike what she should dislike. The mother can teach and encourage the child, but she cannot do these things for her – if she could the child would quite literally cease to have a mind of her own. We could not speak of it being for the child's own good, for the child would simply have ceased to exist as a person. Now on the spiritual plane there is only soul – we have no body that may be carried. Our Lady cannot take us to Her, for is She did so, She would destroy the essential freedom which gives us our existence as intelligent personal beings. We must come to Her of ourselves. It may be asked why She may not come to us, but this too is a question born of material ideas – for coming and going are the only ways of speaking, for there is neither time and space in the spiritual world. The choice that each of us has made from the beginning of our separation was that we should be apart from the glory of Her light and energy. She cannot annul that choice without annulling our personal existence. The distance between ourselves and the Goddess is not real space, but the outward spiritual manifestation of our inward spiritual rejection of Her. It was necessary, then, that She should come to us shorn of the glory of Her light and energy; that She should put Herself on the same spiritual plane as us by making the same choice that we have made – by rejecting Herself. Thus She came to us in the person of Her Daughter. The coming of our Lady is symbolised in the story of Her nativity, and the terrible Act of divine self-rejection in the story of Her passion and death. We cannot ever understand the full meaning of this Act, but some insight may be gained by meditation upon these words from the Easter [sic] Liturgy: She Who is life and life alone, the quintessence of life, Went to death for our sakes; She Who is all and only light Gave Herself to be cast into the profoundest darkness; She, Who is wholly one with the Mother, and is the Mother, Who is the glance of Her eyes and the breath of Her mouth, And the strength and cunning of Her hands; She alone suffered the most terrible severance That we might be reunited. Through this sacrifice has our Lady come to us so that we need not be without Her love even in the lowest depths of fallen creation, and even when we cannot open our eyes to Her light, we have but to stretch out a hand with faith into the darkness and it shall be taken by another hand infinitely strong and infinitely gentle; the hand of One Who has suffered more deeply than we can ever suffer; the hand that shaped the universe. The answer to our question, then, is that we are in any age able to turn to our Lady and to receive Her love, 'so far as we are able to contain it'. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that it is ever harder to turn to Her and to keep Her image before us as we are increasingly surrounded by a leaden atmosphere of dull materialism and receive no encouragement on any side. Materialism has increased throughout the history of the patriarchate. Although it has been a continuing process there were two major religious shifts. The first was when Christianity replaced the Classical religions – the patriarchate could no longer understand a purely spiritual account of divine Actions, and had to imagine that the divine Sacrifice was an actual historical event – also with this went the worship of our Lady under the names of the classical Goddesses. The second was the so-called Reformation – attuning of Christianity to the mechanistic minds of those who initiated the factory system; over-urbanisation and all the other trappings of the last phase of materialism – along with this went the destruction of the worship of our Lady under the name of Mary. It may seem, then, that this flight from the Goddess into materialism might continue forever, and that the souls caught up in its current might be eternally lost. To earthly eyes it may appear so; but in its final stages, the advance of materialism falls subject to a law stated in the Oracle of Changes thousands of years before the dawn of the patriarchal age. This is the law of Climax and Reversion which states that as any temporal movement reaches its point of greatest extension it begins to change into its opposite. We can see how this works in the case of patriarchal religion: the rationalistic spirit of its most extreme form has increased to the point where it has destroyed its own beliefs and ushered in a period of general irreligion – with protestantism [sic], the destructive vibration of Christianity reaches the point at which it shakes itself apart. Yet all the values of civilisation have their source and meaning in religion – divorced from this source, they are but empty husks to be swept aside by the criticism of alienated minds which are brilliant in their destructiveness, but can offer no positive solutions. They speak of 'social conscience', but cannot answer the question of why there should be a society in the first place; they talk of 'human happiness' but cannot say why human beings should exist at all, or what a human being is – how much less can they know in what true happiness might consist. Their 'science' can answer the question 'how' with considerable accuracy (thought even here its limits are severely marked) but it cannot even ask the question 'why'. Life divorced from an understanding of its religious meaning becomes increasingly purposeless and void; that is what is happening to the present society – with irreligion the snake of patriarchal-materialism bites it own tail and begins to devour itself. There is a still deeper reason why we cannot be carried downward forever on the tide of materialism; it is also the profoundest reason why no soul can ever be lost. Because this concerns the highest spiritual truths, it can only be expressed in a symbol. We are told that the highest state of existence consists in beholding the perfect beauty of our Celestial Mother; living in the Divine Image. As we move away from Her, existence becomes less and less like that image until, should we go as far from Her as it is possible to go, at the 'bottom of the universe' we should see a vision so dreadful that to compare it to the most hateful nightmare of high fever were but to make a mockery of it. It is the absolute reverse of our Mother's image. This vision is the most terrible shock that the created soul can sustain; yet although it is an experience of unmitigated horror, its evil is turned to a good purpose, for at the sight of the true face of Evil, every soul is filled with loathing, and must turn to flee back our Lady. This is the final safeguard against 'damnation' for no soul, seeing evil in its absolute form, can fail to hate it. The absurd doctrine that Deity will allow the soul to lose her essential freedom at this point so that she cannot turn, but must suffer eternally is the cruellest of all blasphemies. Though she has the furthest possible distance to travel to her Mother, yet the Daughter, who, through Her sacrifice, has penetrated even to the lowest depths, is waiting to comfort her, and to help her upon her way. This is not to suggest, of course, that human society has collectively plumbed the uttermost depths of Hell, for this can only occur to the individual soul. But a shadow of that awful vision is creeping across the modern mind, and some of the more sensitive souls are already experiencing a revulsion from it. In this revulsion, they are turning again to our celestial Mother. And it is here that we see the true miracle of our Lady's grace. It is part of Her promise that those who love Her shall never lack a way to turn to Her. The most perfect way in which an earthly creature may turn to Her is by participation in Her divine sacraments, but when, due to the laxity of Her servants, these were suppressed by Her enemies, She was called by the names of the pagan Goddesses. When these too were suppressed, She too for us the name of Mary, Maris Stella, Regina Coelis. When this cult was suppressed, still there were the folk-beliefs and popular Marian devotion. And now even that is taken from us, the darkest hour seems upon us – but look again. The light has not vanished, but grows stronger; the sacraments themselves are openly performed once more. The wheel has reached its point of farthest extension and can but return. The waxing has begun. --- Note: The term 'spiritual world' used in this paper should not be confused with the 'spirit world' of the mediums which might more accurately be called the 'psychic world'. It refers to the highest plane of fallen existence which intersects with the lowest plane of perfect existence. The most refined souls have their whole being in this sphere, but all actions of intelligent souls on any plane have spiritual significance and therefore operate also in the spiritual world. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Pattern of History and the Quest of the Soul Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Personal collection of David Kay. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Madrian Literature Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c. 1980 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Text