Holi into the Ashes
The core task of the shamanist is to dream her world into being. Otherwise, she has to settle for the collective nightmare that is being dreamt by others.
~ Alberto Villoldo
James returned from his day at the beach one afternoon and stepped into my studio. “Hey what’s with you? You look bugged about something.”
It was apparently written all over my face, so I explained. “Today I received an email from my sister, and got to hear the old lines about abandoning the family and our country, how our artistic life is irresponsible and somehow costs them, and all the pain I put our parents through.”
James looked heavenward and sighed. “And you’re letting her uninformed opinions affect you? From someone who has no clue about us or our work!”
“It reminds me of all the grief I used to get from Mom and Dad – how I was wasting my life, not making any money, chasing my dreams... like it’s a crime,” I lamented. “And now I’m wondering: how is it that my sisters are now sitting on the Throne of Judgment my parents used to occupy?”
“Good question. Now who could have put them there?” he queried in mock wonderment.
I stared at James, not wanting to answer. He insisted, his voice now stern. “Who lets them get up on that throne and issue disapproval to you? And then you get all upset!” My eyes wandered down to spy a line of tiny ants marching across the floor. “Becca!” James’ voice snapped me back to attention. “Answer the question!”
“Me!” I cried. “I mean, what’s the one thing in common over all these years of condemnation by the authority figures in my family? Me! It’s me! So you’re right: I’m the problem.”
James sat down on the sofa to be eye-to-eye with me. “Becca, make sense now. If you’re the one letting in this grief, then you’re the one who can change the situation. You’re the solution. So just when are you going to do something about it?”
A voice in my head proclaimed, Now! But I could not say the word. Biting my lip, I gazed at James and suddenly noticed that on the side of his head, his hair was bright red. “James! What happened to your hair?” I asked.
Glaring at me as if to say, Do you think you can get away with changing the subject? and then apparently deciding to let it go, he said, “Oh, I got color thrown on me today by some kids. It’s Holi.” He stood up and headed to the shower. “And by the way, there’s a band tonight at the Shore Bar. Why don’t you get out and dance off this energy? I’ll make an early dinner, and we’ll go for sunset. It is a holiday, ya know.”
It was the Festival of Colors, Holi. Most people described it as a time of renewal, or a commemoration of the triumph of good over evil. According to one legend, the wicked witch Holika had been burned up in a fire, while the pious man who worshipped Vishnu had been saved. Holi began with bonfires, followed by throwing colors the next day, though kids liked to extend the color ambushes for as long as they could get away with it.
Predominantly Krishna was remembered at Holi. According to the story, the blue (i.e., dark-skinned) god had lamented to his mother about the injustice of his being dark while his beloved Radha was fair, so she suggested he take some dyes and color her skin, then. (Oh! Would that caste distinctions in India be so easily solved!) It followed, in accordance with Krishna’s playfulness, that people’s springtime exuberance now had them sprinkling or smearing powdered dyes on others or pelting them with water balloons or squirt guns.
It was into this atmosphere that James and I ventured on Holi Eve. Feeling unsettled still, despite the tranquility of the royal pink sun dissolving into the ocean mists, I decided to walk down the beach. I passed a group of people stoking a bonfire, shouting and laughing. What were they yelling? The Holi bonfire was for burning the demoness Holika, and people shouted, “Holika is dead!,” celebrating the “destruction of evil.” Or it represented the death of Kama Deva, when Shiva’s searing gaze reduced him to ashes. The smoke stung my eyes and I walked on, until I came upon some orange laterite boulders, where I could be alone.
Climbing up on them, I suddenly felt shaky with emotion. Facing the incoming waves, I spoke to the turbulent sea. “Burn the demoness! Burn the witches! Deny the Goddess! Rape the Earth! How much longer can this go on?!? Why all this suffering? I’m sick of it – sick of it! Shakti!” I screamed. “What has happened to you? Rise up your power within these women in India! Within me! Help us to restore the balance!”
Waves crashed onto the rocks, and the wind pushed against my body. Covered in salt spray and the gray-pink dust of dusk, I felt a quivering in my gut. Something had to come out. Seizing the moment, I began to rant.
“I experience fear when confronting authority, and I hereby declare the end of my smallness. Fear! Henchman of the Dominator Culture! Even if a law is unjust, it demands to be obeyed and enforces its authority with fear and force. This manipulation of people is installed in childhood, and serves to short-circuit thoughtful, willing compliance. But that’s what the Dominators want, isn’t it? A knee-jerk reaction that disempowers... coerced obedience through fear... The whole dynamic teaches us not to think. How very effective, for making slaves to the system, how very effective...” Then, in an unguarded moment, I caught a glimpse – the air shimmered right next to me as if it were leaping up and away – and I knew I had something right there in my grasp.
Fury barreled up from my stomach to my throat, and I cried, “Fear! How dare you disturb my peace? Where did you get your authority? Why would I want to feed my power into a system based on threats, fear, and violence? And terror, for Goddess’ sakes! You do not deserve my energy! You are Ego gone mad with power and greed! But I think you’re nothing! I think you’re insecure!” I taunted.
The livid indigo sea seethed under the gathering gloom of a dusky amethyst sky. Then, like an escaped prisoner caught in police searchlights, Fear began jabbering – a torrent of words charging through me: I am insecure ‘cause I’m fooled by appearances. I puff myself up to look big and scary! Like a vampire, I feed off the energy of others... ‘cause I don’t think I’m enough on my own. I make the Dominator System. I can survive only as long as I can trick you into giving away your power. I will convince you that I can hurt you, punish you, make you suffer. But that only works as long as you’re afraid of me! Fear is my weapon. I’m caught up in small Ego’s game and can’t break loose ‘cause so many others have invested their energy into my structure and my survival.
Free me! Let me return to Love! All the fear, and the desperate bids for legitimacy and authority have constructed a nightmare that imprisons the world. Release me!
Stop seeing me as the Authority that has power over you. Stop participating in the nightmare! Wake up! It takes two to play this Dominator Game, and if you refuse to play, it frees us both.
I am the Authority, the Truth-holder within you. Stop making me the Other and let me come home. Let me sit on the throne of your heart.
I am the power that was split off from you in the Fall. Alone out in the world, I become ugly, insecure, and destructive. But within you – my true home – I merge back into the glorious being that we are.
We are the Creators.
In separation, we become senseless Destroyers, completely out of balance. Let us become whole. Follow your anxiety back to excitement at our potential as you realize the immense power that we can wield in the infinite process of Creation in the Eternal Now.
Following these words, a silence began to vibrate in my head. It was the ringing of Truth rolling through my being, and I was the bell. Speechless, I watched as waves, one after the other, dashed themselves into white splatters against the rocks, ejecting a silvery spray that glistened before my eyes, tiny droplets that seemed to glow with their own luminosity. Glowing drops? Turning around, through the leaning coconut palms, I regarded a buttery yellow orb floating above the Goan hills.
“Queen of Heaven!” the words popped out of my mout
h as if I were a courtier bowing before the sudden appearance of my queen. But who do I serve? What does my energy support?
“Queen of Heaven,” I repeated, this time consciously, sending my mind into tagging its many associations. Inanna, Queen of Heaven. Venus as Queen of Heaven, meaning not just the moon but also the planet Venus. The image of the Cretan Snake Goddess materialized in my mind, the proud, bare-breasted woman holding up two snakes. Serpents, kundalini, Shakti. The energy of the Goddess spiraling up to meet the consciousness of her god, Shiva. Tantric union. Goddess and God. Within me.
The light of the Holi full moon grew, casting shadows of palm fronds on the beach. Clasping my hands in prayer position at my heart, I bowed to the wholeness of the Self as my self.
Climbing down from the rocks, I headed back toward the bonfire. I would walk down the beach to meet James, dance barefoot in the sand, and later that night, with the light of the Queen of Heaven showering upon our Indian home, I would write a letter to my sister, repudiating her judgments and thanking her for helping me stand in my power as her sister and as my own woman. As I fell asleep that night listening to cows lowing and crickets chirping and roosters crowing at the glaring moon, I felt Shakti step regally, authoritatively, to take her proper place on the throne of my heart.
Together through Tantra
The months of our peripatetic informal survey in India on the significance of the yoni-linga had turned up a variety of answers, most of them centered on the spiritual power of Shiva. The dissociation of the icon with its sexual origins, and the widespread denial of the feminine aspect of the altarpiece, shed light on our dilemma of how a goddess-worshipping people could treat women so poorly. Kama Deva had been chased out of town, despite the fact that every human being prays to him their most fervent prayer. Everyone wants to love and be loved. Rita Banerji’s thesis that the Hindu psyche was suffering from schizophrenia, and that this split resulted in psychopathic behavior, while offering us an answer, did not necessarily ease our concerns about the abuses we had witnessed.
And so it was that, when we later reached the end of our stay in India, we tended all our experiences and lessons, like pea shoots in our garden of ideas, looking forward to their ripening and eventual harvest for our book. I did not want to fall into desperation about women’s lot in India – or the world, for that matter – and I held onto the hope of the rise of Shakti within myself and others. In truth, the beach ladies and women like Ambika always greeted us with affectionate smiles, and when speaking of their lives, focused on the beauty they found in them.
Fast forward to the day of our night flight out of India. We had been staying a few days back at Shashi’s apartment. It was May in Delhi, and we felt like we were living inside a clothes dryer, it was so hot. In Shashi’s neighborhood, I discovered the Kali Mandir, a temple to Kali, and so on our final day in India, James and I climbed the steps to the temple, to make our offerings there. Meditating in front of the central altar to Kali, I felt my heart pour out gratitude for all the lessons that had come to me through the fierce, black-hole Crone, tough-as-obsidian, no-bullshit, infinitely loving archetype known as Kali. We offered her orange and yellow marigolds.
At the Kali Mandir there was a side shrine to Shiva, the center of which was – what else? – a large yoni-linga. The whole altarpiece was carved of black stone, but the yoni dish part of it was fit with a filigree-decorated silver covering, which kept the liquids poured over the lingam more easily flowing into the shallow basin below. Paying a few rupees to the priest in attendance, we took the milk and water he had on hand so we could bathe the yoni-linga. With typical Hindu acceptance, he did not mind at all when we told him we preferred to do our own ritual, so after his initial prayer, we were on our own.
James leaned over the altar stone and began pouring milk onto the lingam. It ran in rivulets down the smooth stone shaft, reminding me of James’ lingam ejaculating in response to my hand’s loving strokes. (Honestly, how could people have told us this stiff phallic-shaped statue had nothing to do with male sexuality, especially when they dribbled it with milk or coconut crème?)
“I am just so grateful that we’ve made it safely through this amazing country. Thank you for keeping us safe. Thank you, Shiva, for the strength you gave me to climb your mountain. I’m a different man now,” James said softly.
Then taking a brass pot of water, he began to trickle it over the linga, saying, “Please wash away people’s idea of caste. It’s caused so much suffering. Thank you for bringing me the Dom in Varanasi; I was glad to shake his hand. And for the beach women from Karnataka; I will carry Sima’s beautiful smile with me always. Help them, give them strength in raising their children, so that the future is better for the girls.”
His pots empty, James stepped back from the yoni-linga. The priest handed me my brass pots. Before pouring, I grasped the statue, placing one hand on the smooth linga and my other hand on the silver yoni. “May we come into balance,” I prayed. “May the wisdom of Tantra bring this country into another golden age. Shakti united with Shiva, in love, and in peace.” I saw Ambika’s piercing eyes, felt the strength of her spirit; remembered the veiled women who had welcomed us at the Muslim shrine in Delhi; felt the joy still reverberating off the statues of Khajuraho – all crowding into my awareness at once. I drizzled milk onto the stone, watching it flow down the yoni channel. A refrain from one of my poems came to mind, and I said,
“From Lord Shiva’s mountain realm
On top of the world
Cascades down a stream
Laughing, Lady Soul.”
Remembering the Shakti within me and my sisterhood with all who felt this power, I delighted in the play I now found myself in, celebrating the union of the Feminine and the Masculine, and the deeper reality that it symbolized.
A man had been in the corner of the temple room watching us, and when we finished our little ceremony, we struck up a conversation. It was not long before James posed his usual survey question.
“So tell me, what does the Shiva linga mean?”
The man, whose name was Asim, looked to be in his late fifties, with thinning grey hair, silver-rimmed glasses, and was dressed in a grey and white striped kurta (like a long pajama top) and baggy white cotton pants. Against the study of grays and whites, his face glowed with friendliness.
“You see,” he began, pointing to the yoni-linga, “the Shiva linga is Purusha, and the yoni is Prakriti. The linga is a phallus – you see? – and the yoni is a vagina. Man and Woman.”
James and I both dropped our jaws, speechless. All the Indians we had talked with, all these months, and here, on our very last day in India, was a man explaining the yoni-linga to us! I started laughing.
Asim thought I had been embarrassed by his explanation and hurriedly added, “Purusha is Brahman, consciousness – you see? – and Prakriti is the Nature.”
My mind followed along, pulling scraps of information out of its files: Purusha was first man, and all the different castes of people came from different parts of him. Shiva is consciousness. And Prakriti... Mother Nature.
Asim continued. “Prakriti can manifest as Creation, Preservation, or Destruction.”
The triple goddess, I thought to myself.
“I understand about the phallus and the yoni in the Shiva linga,” James said. “But I never heard of the Purusha and Prakriti symbolism.”
“Oh yes!” Asim said. “Many people do not understand this! You see, Purusha, the human being, is standing on the Nature, Prakriti.”
“Standing?” James asked. “You mean, Nature supports the human being?”
“Yes! You say it exactly! But obviously people do not understand that to mistreat the Nature is to destroy our foundation for existence,” Asim explained.
We, of course, agreed with him. He went on. “This Shiva linga is not just an outer image, but has a deeper meaning. To reach this inner wisdom, one must med
itate and pray. It is a balance of forces, and these ideas are basic to our religion. Have you ever heard of Tantra?”
James and I burst out laughing, and James patted Asim on the back as he proceeded to explain who we were and the books we were writing. While we bantered our common ideas, standing there barefoot on the white marble floors of the temple, the priest seated before the yoni-linga cocked his head, listening to us. After half-an-hour, we wrapped up our discussion, thanking him profusely for everything he had told us. Asim took it very humbly, unaware of what a send-off he had just given us.
Stopping at the Shiva linga altar on our way out, in the names of Mars and Venus, we placed the rest of our marigolds on the yoni-linga, quietly crooning the praises of the worlds of wonders that result from the union of Purusha and Prakriti, Shiva and Shakti, Consciousness and Nature.
Sleuthing through Tantra and Mythology
During our life in India, we were hot on the trail of what happened to Shakti, the principle of the Divine Feminine. Through all our years of devotion with Venus and Her Lover, we had been after the story of what happened to the Divine Masculine as well, and how the two of them had gone into pathology and conflict.
Tantra had revealed much, but before we left Goa, it was mythology that would lead us to the origins of the War Between the Sexes, back to the meta-myth. What we discovered came as a shock.
The meta-myth originated in ancient Sumer. I should have known... because I was there.
DARK VENUS
O Divine Mother...
Bring us into the fire of
Your sacred passion for reality,
rejoin the severed mandala of our being.
~ Andrew Harvey
American psychologist Sienna Lea is dedicated to rooting out agendas of control hidden within our psyches. The passion for her mission flares through her dark eyes and discharges through the auburn curls that form an electric halo around her head. In her book, Stealing the Moon, she delves into her past memories of Nefertiti and Akhenaton during the time when the Patriarchy took power in pharaonic Egypt. When James and I met Sienna, we jumped into a lively conversation about archetypal influences in the War Between the Sexes. As our friendship developed, I became interested in her specialty: Shadow work.
Venus and Her Lover Page 38
