The Guardian - Epilogue

(continued from The Guardian, part 2)

One night I dreamed again:

…I flow with the waters of the Spring of Isis. The waters cascade from a great height, and disperse to water the entire earth. The Guardian meets me in mid-fall, crying with a great voice, “If you feed the earth, don’t forget the source!”

The source of the Spring of Isis? That is far too easy. But in my meditations, I brought to remembrance another story from another age…a story from the Pelasgians, as if the Kabeiri were teaching Kasmillos again at the Great Temple of Samothrace.

“…From a watery chaos, a Woman arises. Though She finds no place upon which to plant Her feet, She begins to dance. As She dances, the waters divide and She dances upon the waters. Eurynome, the Woman, calls to the North Wind and rolls Him between Her fingers to form Ophion, the wise serpent. Eurynome dances ever more sensuously as Ophion coils around Her like a swirling veil. Ophion is entranced by Eurynome and desires to couple with Her. At last, Eurynome assumes the form of a fluttering Dove and lays an egg. Ophion entwines 7 times around the cosmic egg and it bursts asunder. From the egg springs the heavens, the stars, sun, moon, and earth…”1

Eurynome of the Pelasgians had a Sumerian equivalent, an “Exalted Dove” they knew as "Yahu," from which the Abrahamists later derived the name YHVH. Ophion likewise had a later equivalent as Iao in certain Gnostic traditions. It’s a tantalizing story, reminiscent of Genesis as well as the Big Bang, and arouses yet more suspicion that the ancients knew far more than we think.2

So Eurynome (Greek= gathering corruption, or according to some, distributing) or Yahu continues Her dance today in our most arcane archetypes in the Universe card of the Tarot, the Isis of Nature Who dances on the waters with a veil swirling about Her like Ophion, as the Kerubic animals of the Merkabah surround Her, and about Whose dance opens the ecliptic as a vessica.

In physics also, it has been suggested by some that a mere 10 pounds of matter after being superheated, if rapidly chilled, will collapse upon itself and explode into a new universe in other dimensions and begin a new paradigm of time. For as the Pelasgian women may clothe themselves with serpents to cool themselves against the summer blast, so Ophion as the North Wind provided the chilling principle and more: as Ophion entwined 7 times, so the paradigm of a weekly cycle becomes reflected in the common mythos of humankind.3

Ever since that primordial time before time, women have returned again to the dance, gathering the corrosive flotsam of chaos, to rise above what provides no sure footing. And the waters of chaos mingle with the waters of our tears. It’s the most creative thing a woman can do with a heart that weeps, and makes the human…human.

Could this have been the message of the Guardian? It’s easy to think of that from which ideas originate. It’s quite another to think of what one must do as a human being to reflect that order established by nature in the beginning. If one cannot weep, one cannot dance, just like a rainbow can never form unless the clouds dance with the sun. And if one would weep, one must be acquainted with both joy and sorrow, elation and suffering, even as a woman finds those parts of her within the rhythm of her menses.

Most of us who have had menses can remember our first. In mine nothing seemed to come together. All the energy went out of me and all I could do was lay down and cry. One friend was alarmed to see me in such miserable condition. Another came to me as I clutched my ankh for comfort and said, “Welcome to womanhood!” She told me that I would have to learn, as all women do, how to “fly through the storm.”

She was right. In learning that, I developed some of that inner strength that women have, that men naturally don’t. It’s a strength that forms a steadfastness of faith… a steadfastness from which a man draws to himself from his beloved.

And yet, it’s easy to disconnect the idea from the idea of the primordial woman because on the surface they seem like disparate ideas. But when one dances even one doesn’t immediately feel like she can dance, she, like Eurynome-Yahu, relives a principle established in the beginning…to divide the waters of tears from the waters of chaos, and even though there is no place upon which to plant one’s feet, one must dance upon those waters…and dance with sensuous passion.

And in calling to a spirit of cooling from one’s heat, one evokes as it were a dream while she dances. And in her meditations, she finds an inner quietness again, as the dance goes on as if it were a forever out of time. For in dreaming, we create the world.

Perhaps this is what the Guardian meant when he told me not to forget the source, that source of the watering of the face of he earth with the tears of Isis, the source where "only the innocent share Her tears."4
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Footnotes:

1. Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths, Combined Edition. Penguin Books, London, NY, Victoria, Toronto, Aukland, 1992, p. 27.

2. Ibid, p. 28.

3. This idea was broadcast around 1985 but I have yet to find a written souce for it today. Anyone who knows how this idea developed, please contact this writer.

4. See The Guardian, Part 2 on Loving Innocence.