Part 16. From Sinai to Schiehallion
During our last breakfast in Glastonbury we get some travel tips from Toni, the current owner of The Covenstead. He advises us to travel on our way north via Avebury and Oxford. Avebury is known for the megalithic stone circles, which lie on the same leyline as Glastonbury, the male Michael line. As the fog lifts around the hills of Avalon and another beautiful day dawns, we leave the magical town and look back one more time. The Tor glows in the sun and I see the image of a great sword rising from the hill. Excalibur, the sword of truth. Symbol of the new, authentic masculine: The power of the heart.
In ancient tantric scriptures I once read that the strength of men resides in their hearts, and the strength of women in their wombs. When women can open their wombs, they connect with the earth and primal power that resides there. With this power they can move mountains. If men can open their hearts, they are capable of great compassion, and can receive the feminine. The man receives through his heart, the woman through her womb. And vice versa: the giving energy of the man goes through the phallus, and the giving energy of the woman goes through her heart. I don’t know if it’s that black and white, but it makes sense.
As I ponder about the differences between the masculine and the feminine, (Anne is at the wheel and that gives me time to think), I remember that I could see the feminine everywhere in all her variety in Glastonbury, but I hardly saw anything that reminded me of the “sacred masculine.” Women walk confidently, like ancient goddesses, the shops are full of books about the Goddess. But there are no men’s books, many men in the town seem a bit lost, and when I see a painting in the local temple of Gwynn ap Nuth, the deity who lives under the Tor, I notice that he has no cock. The phallus is missing. Where in the ‘ordinary world’ the masculine predominates, in Glastonbury the feminine predominates. Apparently we are not yet ready for an equal connection.
When we get to Avebury and Oxford I start to understand why. The megalithic stone circle is crossed by a highway and when we walk around it I don’t feel anything at all. The magic of Avalon is hard to find here. Without the people who embody the magic, each stone circle becomes nothing more than what the eye sees: a circle of great ancient stones. Nice as a tourist attraction, but without any inner meaning.
We continue our route to Oxford and arrive there towards the end of the day. The city glows in the late afternoon sun, and the beautiful university buildings shine like gold and ocher. This is the mecca of science, the ultimate in knowledge, power and money. This is where thousands of young people are educated who ultimately rule and lead our world. We walk around the town as if we were walking through a Harry Potter filmset and eventually end up in front of a round building, ‘The Radcliffe Camera.’ It has a magical sound and turns out to be the library. “I feel the energy here,” I tell Anne. I have had a kind of nose for energetic places since childhood. I don’t know why and how this is possible, but I can see through the matrix, as it were, and see what is hidden behind it.
I’m a bit taken aback by the images I get when we tune in. It doesn’t make me happy. The cozy student-like atmosphere disappears into the background and I think of the series ‘His Dark Materials’, in which young people are separated from their totem animal by the dark Magisterium. I think about my own time at university, and suddenly realize how I – and all other young people – are being groomed to take our place in society, but that we have to pay a price for this: we have to let go of the connection with our intuition and our souls to join the Matrix of the Mind. I loved studying, acquiring knowledge and still see the great beauty of it, but I am also aware that it only reflects half of our human capacity: the male half of reason, knowledge and science. The other half is completely ignored, concealed or shamed. The hippies of Glastonbury would look ridiculous here. The reign of ‘The Mind’ is all pervasive.
It’s the same dichotomy that is currently ripping open our world: the scientists versus the wappies, the people who put logic and reason above everything else, and those who believe in natural immunity and the wisdom of the body. Those who believe in the vaccinologists’ religion versus those who believe that every disease has a message that we should listen to.
Ultimately, I firmly believe that there is truth in both sides, but the dialogue is currently hard to find. Instead of a healthy debate though to understand each other’s position, people entrench themselves in their own towers of truth. Some healers no longer accept patients who are vaccinated, and the vaccinated denounce the unvaccinated for allegedly endangering the world. What a mess we are in…
Anne and I flee Oxford and find a hotel in a small town north of the student city. Although the hotel is called ‘The Crown’, it seems cheap, run down and rancid. The bar and reception area smells sour from the beer that has been soaked into the carpet. Halloween garlands are everywhere. When we get to the room, the fire alarm goes off. A deafening noise forces us back into the hallway again. Probably our neighbor, whom we can hear clearly through the cardboard walls, has lit a cigarette.
When I go to the toilet just before going to sleep, my back suddenly hurts. Shit, where did that suddenly come from? I stumble over to the bed and lie cramped on the bed coil, which feels more like a waterbed than a regular mattress.
I turn my attention to my lower back and dive into a dark and arduous process. Suddenly I’m back in the stone circle in Avebury. I see a mage holding the great sword of the king above his head, thousands of years ago, and then burying it in the center of the stone circle. He casts incantations and tells the bystanders that the sword is needed in another time in the future. A time when people have lost the connection with magic and with the soul.
Then I see ‘Radcliffe Camera’, Oxford’s circular library. It is located between the Church of the Virgin Mary and the Magdalene College, surrounded by a square of majestic scientific palaces. Anne said she saw a spiral staircase going down into the ground beneath the circular building. In my mind I walk down the stairs, and end up in the dungeons of the subconscious. I feel again the price I paid myself for the work I do: ever since I left university – a year before graduation – and took a different path, I was socially excluded, cancelled. Everything I wrote was subtly ignored or silenced. The goddess?? hahaha. Men’s work? haaaaahaaaha. I wasn’t taken serious anymore. A long, lonely road awaited me, leading ever deeper into the depths of my own soul, and thus of the world’s soul.
At the bottom of the well under the ‘Radcliffe Camera’ I find a symbol deeply hidden. An image that clashes with the clean world of science. In fact; an image that has been reviled and banned because it reminds us of who we really are. In the darkness I see the image of a life-size golden phallus. The erection of the masculine. I think of a painting I once made of the phallus, because I experienced such a difficulty in consciously seeing my own masculinity. It seemed as if I could perceive my entire body except my phallus. It seemed as if there was a curse on it, preventing the most intimate, the most powerful, and at the same time most vulnerable from entering my consciousness. We live our lives, have relationships, sex, a job, a family, children, but the phallus should not be seen. It has become a symbol of pornography and obscenity, of sexual violence and male lust. Nothing sacred. To join ‘The Matrix of the Mind’ we must renounce, deny, or pretend that our genitals do not exist, or at least should be hidden. We have become apes with clothes on.
I am reminded of a theater performance of a friend that I saw about 25 years ago in the university theater in Amsterdam. He had based the show on the male archetypes, and from a hatch in the ground a Wildman emerged with a huge erection. However, the Wildman was flogged by a circus director who followed him with a whip. I remember it as a very strong archetypal image, and the poor Wildman disappeared underground again. I could feel it in my own body: the primal masculine was not to be seen or experienced. It had to stay in the domain of the collective shame. It is punished by the director, the mind that wants to keep everything under control.
In Indian temples statues of the phallus are seen as sacred objects. They depict the power of the god Shiva, who can both create and destroy. In our time we have forgotten the sacred masculine, and we have lost ourselves in substitutes of the sacred masculine: rockets to Mars (who can go the furthest?), higher skyscrapers (who has the highest?), faster cars (who can go the fastest?), larger multinationals (Who is the richest?). It is the masculinity that does not know it’s own soul and remains searching for its power in the outside appearance.
Suddenly I have a funny idea for The Climate Conference, where scientists and politicians will be together for 12 days to find solutions for the crisis. I imagine what it would be like if they all stripped naked to face the naked truth: that we are human beings, part of the divine nature. That we don’t have to save the earth, but ourselves. That we have to save ourselves from our pride, from our arrogance, from our distorted, separated self-image. That we may remember again that we ourselves are creators, that the yoni of the woman is the life-creating principle, and that the phallus of the man is the sacred symbol of fertility, joy and lust for life. Maybe I should have brought my painting to hang it on the wall in Glasgow…
The night is long and dark and I am happy when I wake up in the morning. Anne holds my hand and we know that we are on a sacred path, walking towards the North.
- to be continued –
