Deep Mythings

Greetings all,

I know this post is late.  I have had a month's worth of activities packed into one week.  Since the commitment to blog was made to myself, I can on occasion relax my rules about getting a post out exactly on the nose.

After many months of anticipation I had the distinct pleasure of taking a workshop with Justice Bartlett.  I first saw her at a Matrix Energetics Seminar in 2008.  She was dressed as Batgirl.  (It happened to be Halloween weekend).  She became entangled in my first access point into the quantum field of wizardry.  About 2 years ago she was supposed to teach a workshop up in Indianapolis, which I was interested in attending but it fell through.  I toyed with the idea of bringing her to Louisville for over a year, and then finally approached her about it this past fall.  Apparently the timing was just right, so this past weekend she taught a 2 day class at the Louisville Spiritualist Center.

As you can see above we had a good time.  Identity and how we enfold ourselves in the stories we believe about who we are can become rigid.  So we had to make up a new persona, with a story.  My persona was Madame Miseur Locke.  I don't know why but they were bigendered.  While we were on our lunch break though I began to ponder that having both the masculine and feminine represented in this alternate persona was significant.  I have talked before in this blog about my struggles in redefining masculinity in sacred and profane terms.  The women's movement has made great strides in redefining women's roles, but men's roles and identities seem to be stuck in the past.  While discussing a traumatic experience that two other participants had, I was curious as to how it manifested differently for them as one was a man and the other a woman.  The woman had been shamed.

This is not surprising.  We tend to project our shame onto the feminine in this culture.  Well I don't know how I got to the next bit of insight, but I started thinking about the myth of Adam and Eve.  Eve of course was blamed for the fall of humankind banned from the bliss of the garden for listening to the serpent and eating from the tree of knowledge.  I started to play with the story a bit.  The traditional interpretation blames her for staining us with original sin, a shame that can only be washed away by a savior that encourages ritualized cannibalism. I reached a different conclusion.  Eve gave us free will.  She gave us self direction.  Before, we were in our primal animal states only, the act of choosing her own will over an authority's made her and by extension her descendants human.  That's not to say we don't have our animal nature's now, but we also have something else, that human streak of sometimes having a mind of our own.  So instead of the original sinner we have Eve Liberator of Humanity.  She's practically the feminist Prometheus.

So why am I telling you this and promoting heresy (besides it being one of my favorite past times)?  Well it's important to look at the stories that run our lives and our cultures.  Look at them with fresh eyes or maybe with a pair of flower opera glasses like Madame Miseur Locke.  Would I have leapt to this new interpretation without personifying a dual gendered being for an exercise?  It is hard to say for sure, but by unifying two sides of a continuum I got a fresh perspective.

So how about you?  Can you hold the polar sides of the scale simultaneously in your awareness?  How does that change you or your perspective?  What spin does it put on the stories and scripts you've been living by?  Play a bit, stretch your concept of who you are in the moment.  See what insights can arise.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle