#vincentbridges

[magdalene-spirit]

Quotes

* Divination is one of man's oldest spiritual technologies, its origins lost…

* From a framework of mythic events and divination - literally readings of the divine - came language, which evolved over time into written forms based on the original symbolic elements.

* “Language,” Fulcanelli tells us…, “the instrument of the spirit, has a life of its own - even though it is only a reflection of the universal Idea.” This Gnostic meta-linguistic mysticism is the core it seems of illumination itself.

* The language of light emitted and received by the DNA may be the original of all languages, the ultimate language of initiation.

* This Ur-language, Fulcanelli insists, is the common language of initiation and illumination behind cultural expressions as different as the Christian, the Inca, the medieval troubadours and the ancient Greeks. And traces of it can be found in the dialects of Picardy and Provence, and most important of all, in the language of the Gypsies.

* And, to top it off, he told us that traces of it can be found in the language of the Gypsies, a fairly obvious reference to the Tarot, long held to be a Gypsy invention.

* Could it be possible, by looking at the structure of DNA, to reconstruct this dragon's speech, this green language of light's syntax, grammar and vocabulary? And could it be, as Fulcanelli suggests, that fragments of that original language of light can be found in the divinatory systems used by all nautes, shaman and initiates?

* The increment of change between the pairs described the rhythmic structure of that elusive quality the now or the everchanging present.

* How this actually worked was a mystery until recently. Carl Jung's study of the I Ching led to his theory of synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle, but he was unable to see how the flow of archetypes formed meaningful structures in an acausal manner. Synchronicity could be defined as a psychological event, the projection of meaning onto a background of randomness, but Jung left unanswered the question of meaning itself. Does this temporal universe inhabited by biological entities truly have a “meaning?”

* It is no accident, given the light sensitive nature of DNA that eclipse cycles, sunspot cycles and the informational structure of DNA should all be based on the same ratios and proportions.

* From this we can see that the structure of the I Ching and the DNA code contains both local solar system time orchestrated by the permutations of sun, moon, eclipses and sunspot cycles, and the larger cycles of precessional time. Counting by turns and triplets reveals that a macrocosmic framework of precessional numbers supports the microcosm. The movement of the spring equinox backward through the zodiac due to the tilt of the earth's axis is measured at the rate of one degree every 72 years, therefore 12 triplets, 1 and 1/5th turns of the helix equals 1/6 of a degree of precessional motion, or 12 years. Given that there billions of turns and millions of triplets in a single strand of DNA, then the entire history of the universe, from beginning to end, could be coded into our DNA.

Reading the Green Language of Light

by Vincent Bridges

Divination is one of man's oldest spiritual technologies, its origins lost…

From a framework of mythic events and divination - literally readings of the divine - came language, which evolved over time into written forms based on the original symbolic elements.

“Language,” Fulcanelli tells us…, “the instrument of the spirit, has a life of its own - even though it is only a reflection of the universal Idea.” This Gnostic meta-linguistic mysticism is the core it seems of illumination itself.

The language of light emitted and received by the DNA may be the original of all languages, the ultimate language of initiation.

This Ur-language, Fulcanelli insists, is the common language of initiation and illumination behind cultural expressions as different as the Christian, the Inca, the medieval troubadours and the ancient Greeks. And traces of it can be found in the dialects of Picardy and Provence, and most important of all, in the language of the Gypsies.

And, to top it off, he told us that traces of it can be found in the language of the Gypsies, a fairly obvious reference to the Tarot, long held to be a Gypsy invention.

Could it be possible, by looking at the structure of DNA, to reconstruct this dragon's speech, this green language of light's syntax, grammar and vocabulary? And could it be, as Fulcanelli suggests, that fragments of that original language of light can be found in the divinatory systems used by all nautes, shaman and initiates?

The increment of change between the pairs described the rhythmic structure of that elusive quality the now or the everchanging present.

How this actually worked was a mystery until recently. Carl Jung's study of the I Ching led to his theory of synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle, but he was unable to see how the flow of archetypes formed meaningful structures in an acausal manner. Synchronicity could be defined as a psychological event, the projection of meaning onto a background of randomness, but Jung left unanswered the question of meaning itself. Does this temporal universe inhabited by biological entities truly have a “meaning?”

It is no accident, given the light sensitive nature of DNA that eclipse cycles, sunspot cycles and the informational structure of DNA should all be based on the same ratios and proportions.

[vincentbridges]

The Emergence of the Star Goddess at the End of Time

The dawn of a new age, the beginning of a new paradigm is not a sharply delineated event. It is more of an on-going process; something that happens with its own momentum, proceeds according to its own agenda, and creates along the way ever-richer patterns of previously unglimpsed meaning. As the new ordering principle emerges, there are swirls and eddies of psychic energy that all too often in the past turned into an avatistic and aggressive pattern of revolutions, wars, and religious orthodoxies. As Taurus turned into Aries, Moses smashed the golden calf and Akhenaton invented monothesism; as Aries turned to Pisces, Jesus preached the gospel of love and his apostles built a church on the gospel of fear; and now, as Pisces turns to Aquarius, we must face the issue of power, and the fate of our species, and all the species on this planet.

We face the death of History, which in fact is simply the bragging chatter of alpha-male apes huddled around a fire, and the beginning of Myth, which is the collective dream of a new kind of "humanity." Many ancient cultures from around the planet, including some of the most sophisticated, such as the Egyptians, the Mayans, and the Tibetans, have assigned to this time the label, "THE END." The temporal calculations from the Great pyramid end at 2001. The Mayan calendar ends in 2012, after a twenty-five year preparation period that began in 1987, which is, of course, the origin of the Harmonic Convergence. The year 1987 was also the last year of the Kalachakra calendar of ancient Tibet, being the last of the 16 cycles of 60 years since the Kalachakra teaching were released from the mythical kingdom of Shambala in 1027.

Curiously, the legend of Shambala gives us the meaning of the seemingly nonsensical astrological information in the song, "Age of Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In." The Vishu Purana, one of the oldest of the Hindu classics, mentions Kalki, the Hindu Messiah, an avatar of Vishu who will be the last King of Shambala. Kalki is very similar to Kulkan, the Mayan White Messiah, and he is shown leading a great army of enlightened beings against the barbarians. "He will then re-establish righteousness upon the earth; and the minds of those who live at the end of the age of strife shall be awakened, and shall be as pellucid as crystal... As it is said 'When the sun and the moon, and ...Tisha, and the planet Jupiter are in one mansion, the golden age shall return.'"

We are living at the end of the age of strife. The War to End all Wars is winding down in the Serbo-Croatian hills where it began 85 years ago. The rumble of mortar fire in the streets of Sarajevo are the dying echoes of the thunder from the Western front. The barbarian Communist Chinese vandalize and genocide at will in Tibet, the land of the Dharma, as the Precious Guru Padmasambhava foresaw. To awaken, to receive that clarity "pellucid as crystal," we must resolve the problem of power.

In attributing the letters of the Hebrew alphabet to the images of the medieval psycho-technology known as the Tarot, we come upon the deeper archetypal forces at work within this time of transition. The zodiacal sign Aries is attributed to the Tarot Trump The Emperor, a good choice given the Imperial quality of the Aries current, such as the Roman Empire and the Orthodox Church. The sign of Aquarius was attributed to the trump called The Star, the image of a beautiful young woman pouring the Sea of Crystal, the Milky Way, out upon the earth. This image is appropriate, for the most amazing advance of the early Aquarian era is space flight, the urge to reach the stars. The images and the astrological concepts match, but, until 1904, the attribution of the Hebrew letters confused the issue.

The fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, HEH, the pictogram, originally, for a window, was assigned to the Emperor and Aries. TSADDI, the seventeenth letter of the Hebrew Alphabet (and pictogram for a fish hook) was equated with The Star and Aquarius. It seems as absurd to speak of opening a window on Imperial Authority as it does to say the Stars fish for souls, hooking them and pulling them out of their environment. Yet, patriarchal violence is killing our planet and our spirits, dehumanizing our functions until we no longer feel the rhythms of the earth tides. And there is something eerily suggestive of the image of "stars fishing" in the tales of UFO abductions.

These attributions seem even more odd when we consider the passage in the Bahir, or "Book of Brilliance," where the transformation of Gimel into Daleth and then into Heh is described. Gimel is the High Priestess in the Tarot and Daleth is the Empress--why then would they transform into the Emperor?

The Bahir also tells us that Tsaddi is composed of the letters Nun and Yod, or Death and the Hermit in the Tarot. To be hooked by the stars is to endure the death of the ego self might be the simplest way to put it. This certainly describes the old ways of ascetic renunciation, the only path to transcendence in the fallen or "quarantined" condition of humanity. But, in the new age of renewed galactic contact, these concepts have changed.

In 1904, the Star Goddess Nuit announced: "All the old letters of my book are alight, but Tsaddi is not the Star." What then is attributed to the Star? The obvious attribution for Tsaddi is the Emperor, given the prevalence of Caesar, Kaiser and Tsar as Imperial titles, which means that Heh becomes the Star-window, the direct channel for inter-stellar communication. This shift in attributions produces the correct alignment of meanings: The Emperor is the very symbol of alpha-male dominance and power-over-life thanotropic spiritual illness. The very disease that got this planet quarantined in the first place!

In the new alignment, the Emperor's attributions are Aries (the sign of Imperial structures and patriarchal religions) and Tsaddi, with its element of embracing the spiritual necessity of death of body and of personality. This gives us a clear archetypal view of the disease of patriarchal violence.

The Star then returns to its original meaning of spiritual guidance. The Star-Window is open, and we are receiving the assistance of the galactic rescue squad. We are receiving medical attention! The progression from the Bahir suddenly makes supreme sense: The Priestess becomes the Empress, and then transforms into the Star Goddess. Even the name of God in Hebrew YHVH returns to its original sense. Where once we could read YHVH as Hermit-Emperor-Hierophant-Emperor, all male dominant qualities (suggestive in another sense of the masculine Yod controlling the name, Eve, of the original mother), now the name of God reads, Hermit, Star, Hierophant, Star, or a balance of male and female potencies. The meaning shifts from outer authority of Power-over, which is essentially the ability to destroy, to inner authority, Power-with, the co-creative function of the intuition which is the ability to change and evolve.

The shift was announced in 1904 and occurred 88 years later in the summer of 1992. At dawn on July 26th, a wave of energy swept the planet as the galactic communication window opened. Some people thought of it as a time shift--from a 12/60 rhythm to a 13/20 rhythm--while others saw it in terms of photon clouds and UFO landings. Every man and every woman on this planet has begun to come to terms (in whatever way they can) with their and our stellar nature and origins. History falls away and we can now begin to dream the dream that collective dream of peace and love and hope. We can now begin to braid our monkey minds into a new humanity.

Earth Odyssey '92 saw the beginning of the journey of spaceship Terra, our earth, through the dimensional vistas of galactic citizenship. Our goal is to create a sense of community and then endow that community with the experience of the forces of change so that decisions concerning our planetary future can be made with the free will and consent of all sentient beings. As a species we must allow the old tactics of power-over authority to fade away, as we turn instead to the bright inventive strategies of power-with authority, the forces of co-creation and co-operation.

The choice is ours! The consequences, however, belong to our children, and our children's children. Let us choose well, O Nuit!

©1992 The Fifth Way Mystery School

This article first appeared in THE STAR, a small publication associated with Earth Odyssey '92. In September of that year, people gathered at Hanging Rock State Park in North Carolina to officially open a Star Path, the path of intergalactic shamanism and walk it. Using the Tarot as a place of departure, Earth Odyssy '92 explored the nature of the Galactic energy shift, our connection to the sentient universe and our roles as caretakers of this watery planet, starship Earth.

[vincentbridges]

Message to Russell: Stumbling Across The Invisible College

I was moved by your note to Whitley, but I don't think he will get it. I tried to tell him something similar over dinner in Atlanta in December of '95. He heard me, but he didn't grok it. He was in the process of writing his latest book -- the name of which escapes me at the moment but it came out this winter  and was more interested in interpreting his own internal visions, of which I, or at least my StarGate cap, seemed to be a part, than listening to any grand unified theories. Oh well. (Picture Credit: "Lotus Fire," 1997 DARLENE).

In many ways, Russ, you are one lucky dog. (I mean that in all senses including Gurdjieffian.) At an age when you are still young enough to enjoy it, you have stumbled on The Invisible College. You are supported in an atmosphere of synchronicity so rich as to make one wonder if it wasn't intelligently designed. The boys out in Cosmic Coincidence Control worked overtime on this one.

Consider: You are the fulcrum point of a powerful perturbation in the reality field. For the last few years you have had the opportunity to hang with some of the planet's finest thinkers, including Dan and Jay. Dan, for his all interpersonal flaws, has seen something important and is trying to both communicate the vision and express its novelty and significance. What you have learned from him will ultimately be the foundation of a whole new way of viewing reality. I know this because I came to that same foundation by another more roundabout way.

I was 21, desperately in love with the ghost that seemed to be possessing my best friend's wife, when this old lady who lived in a house built between the cypress trees back in the Santee Swamp gave me a little bottle of dark green, vile smelling stuff and told me what to do with it. I did it, with amazing results.

It was my initiation into the world of the plant allies, in Castenada terms. Much later, I learned that fear is the initiation process. The Lurker at the Threshold is the sorting out process which determines who has the necessary focus to proceed. As you said, fear is absolute annihilation, of the self. In the depths of Hellhole Swamp, (no shit, that's its real name!) I faced the "Primal Terror" and it annihilated every little self I had left. What remained, all that was shareable as Dan would say, was love. But oh my sweet jesus what a Love.

Swimming in the depths of the astral eco-sphere, I learned the lesson of entropy. Things decay and die only in closed systems. The Law of Conservation of matter/energy works in an open system, and an open system is never complete. It is always in the process of becoming, and therefore a mystery. Closed systems are thanotropic, that is tending toward death, while open systems are erotropic, or tending toward life or eros. The cosmos is the grandest open system which one can ever hope to contemplate. The Egyptians personified this erotropic openness as Nuit, the star goddess; later the Greeks would see her as the Kore Kosmica, or the Virgin of the World; the Tarot shows her as a woman dancing with a veil superimposed on the galaxy in Atu 21, The World.

Fear, in all its forms, is the expression of the oppressive restrictions of entropy. Just as love is the expression of erotropic centropy, or negentropy. Once you have glimpsed the Beloved Cosmos, you can not help falling in love with every single manifestation of that Beloved. In this state of mind, you even love your fears, love the darkness of entropy, because without a sense of the possibility of loss you might take the presence of the Beloved for granted.

Dan's gnosis was that the expression of love, the touch of the beloved, defines, in mathematical and geometrical terms, the nature of the unifying principle of the cosmos. That is, if you express love or compassion you attain a degree of resonant coherence with the centropic intelligence of the Cosmos. This is one of the big secrets guarded by all secret societies and communities of initiates. Even Tantric Buddhism, the clearest system describing this awareness, requires a thorough grounding in the Sutras, the intellectual structure of the system, before beginning Tantric practices. The reason is that it is very hard, without lots of training, to see love in its open system sense. To the Buddhist, jealousy is one of the five aggregates from which evil arises. Personal, sexual love is all too prone to jealousy.

My own understanding of this foundational principle came in the depths of that dark night out in the swamp. After terror and strangeness had reduced me to a quivering lump of psychic protoplasm, I found that only the pure love of another's well being was capable of reforming the widely disbursed fragments of my being. I was not in love with my friend's wife, but I was in love with the spirit of a young girl who died in 1849 and deserved her rest and reincarnation. This motive, this intent, allowed me to re-form, to re-member, who I was and then complete my mission. The Gris-Gris Lady had asked us: "Which one love her most?" She knew what was going to happen when she gave me that bottle; she knew love was the key. Back in that tiny shack in the middle of Hellhole Swamp, South Carolina, I encountered a true initiate. Someone who knew.

I've met many initiates since, some you would recognize and alot I almost didn't. Masters appear at all levels of life. The Sufis sweep the temples in Egypt and the wisest man I ever knew was a sign painter. I remain open to the possibility that every bum on the street just might be Elijah in disguise.

Which brings us back to the Invisible College and those fascinating perturbations in the reality field. Let's just suppose, for the sake of argument, that the entropic intelligence wants to destroy and die as much as the centropic intelligence wants to live and create. But here's the rub: without some mediating agency, they merely cancel each other out. Every creation followed by every destruction equals a zero sum gain. No structures more advanced than a hydrogen atom can exist under these conditions.

Now, since we have many, about a hundred, elemental substances beyond hydrogen, then centropy, love, must be winning out over entropy, fear/death. Some third force appears to be preserving the creative promise of continuity. The ancient Hindus, those wise old nomads turned philosopher kings, saw the problem as the balance between Bramha, the creator, and Shiva, the destroyer. They resolved it in the mythological form of Vishnu, the preserver.

In Nepal, Vishnu is called the thousand armed benefactor and is considered by the Nepalese Buddhists as an aspect of the Bodhisatva of Compassion. The Hindus return the favor and see the Buddha as an incarnation of Vishnu. Krishna is also counted as one of Vishnu's incarnations. In these terms, "Vishnu" is a description of that compassionate intelligence labeled enlightenment. This allows us to think of that third force, balancing love and death, as cosmically resonant self-awareness.

Now, let's suppose that all three of these forces are capable of engaging "agents," that is entities who actively promote the tendency of each force. There could be thanotropic "beings" who work for increased isolation and entropy, as well as erotropics who are frantically creative. And, for want of a better word, ecotropics concerned with building structures of resonant continuity.

This triad of forces, and their agents, are present at all levels of reality. If fear becomes the basis of our belief system, as in Christianity, paranoid politics, fascism, etc., then we have aligned ourselves with the thanotropics; however if love is the basis of our beliefs, we are aligned with the erotropics. Ecotropics develop out of a belief in the need for balance and the continuity of love. Perhaps it is easier to think of them as materialist, spiritualist and transcendentalist.

At the moment, as time collapses, history unravels and novelty approaches infinity, each of us is forced to make a series of choices. Out of these choices, our reality either converges or disburses. Choosing fear models, and we will all be faced with our fears, produces isolation, helplessness and emotional inertia. This is quite obvious, even without "intervention." The crisis comes when we discover that choosing love is not enough. Blind optimism butting heads with equally blind pessimism produces no resolution to the problem. We can't love our way out of this one, because love -- basic erotropism -- holds only the promise of creating new life, not the salvation of the old.

Once again, the fear-mongers and the bliss ninnies cancel each other out. Some third force is needed to preserve the promise of creative continuity. This force must transcend the categories of fear and love, birth and death, and so on. In its transcendent quality, this force attains a kind of emotional escape velocity, allowing us to become, consciously, participants in the nature of that promise. In the Buddhist tradition of the Greater Vehicle, this is called the vow of Bodhisatva-hood. A Bodhisatva is one who renounces the final enlightenment until all sentient beings can attain it together. This vow forces one to become a promise-keeper, one who maintains that spark of unlimited awareness spinning in between heart beats.

The community of such beings through out time creates something called the Buddha-field. Every act of grace, charity, love, kindness, intelligence and compassion enriches this field domain. This energy can then be drawn upon to heal the rift between thanatos and eros; salvation occurs at the moment when love and death are seen not as adversaries, but components in a pattern that is not only larger than we imagine, but vaster than we can imagine.

And so we return, after another lap on the moebius strip, to the Invisible College, the Greys and those irritating flashback-like perturbations of the reality field. Let's take them one at a time and see how they connect. What I call the Invisible College are the unseen bodhisatvas, those people working for a greater synthesis but not announcing their spiritual stature. You, Brother Russ, are in the process of becoming the leverage point, the fulcrum, by which the College is moved into action. As you apply your innocence and intensity to resolving these primal issues, you evoke responses. One of those responses is the Greys.

The Greys don't induce fear, they are not thanotropic. The fear comes as part of the initiation process itself. If we fear the Greys, or worship the Shining Ones, we fail the test. Both of these forms are self-programming holograms generated by our DNA in order to present us with just these sorts of evolutionary choices. It is the lessons themselves, and our reactions to it, that are important, not the mechanism by which they are presented. Your flashbacks are moments of higher order, ecotropic, consciousness attempting to reframe the nature of "Russ" according to your new radical intuition into the nature of reality.

As such, they should be welcomed. The problems arise because, unfortunately, you are undergoing this experience solo. Our culture is fragmented that everybody else feels isolated as well. The Invisible College has remained invisible because of this isolation. Your questioning has the power to pull all these different components, Dan and Whitley and Terrence and Paul Devereux, into a common point of reference. From this maybe, just maybe, we might be able to derive an ecotropic consensus before it's too late. That's my hope anyway.

Well, I hope this rambling missive has been helpful, or at least entertaining. Keep up the good work and stay in touch. The best is yet to come.

Light in Extension, Dr. Strange

(written to Russell on May 31, 1997)

1997 The Fifth Way Mystery School

[vincentbridges]

The Politics of Paganism

by Vincent Bridges

Far away, in the shadow of the towering White Himalayas, there lies an ancient kingdom where, until recently, paganism and politics still existed in the primal balance achieved at the end of the Paleolithic golden age. In the hidden valley of Nepal, land of the three kingdoms, a living goddess controlled the relationship between governed and governor. Between the people and the king lay the land and it's ancient personification as the goddess, whose power was loaned to the king as the right of sovereignty. And, as such, might be taken away if misused.

As modern pagans, we are all too often apolitical. We might vote for Gore because of his environmental stance, or even join Green Peace, but rarely do we see our religious beliefs as having deep political implications. But they do, and the loss of those political ramifications led to the stake and to our modern wasteland of pathological displacement.

The story of Nepal is therefore instructive, for we have few models outside of antiquity or legend. Let us begin then with the source -- the mythic landscape.

Once upon a time, according to the ancient chronicles, the valley was a vast lake called the Nag Hrad, or "Tank of Serpents." The nagas were dragon-serpents who guarded a treasure deep in the lake. A Buddha from a past age tossed a lotus seed into its placid waters, and from this grew an amazing thousand-petalled lotus that shone with the blue light of transcendental wisdom.

Aeons went by. And then one day, the Bodhisattva Manjusri arrived, having heard tales of the lotus and its light. He stopped at the edge of the lake, and being thwarted by the nagas, found that he could not approach the lotus. However, after consulting with Vajra Yogini, a manifestation of Dolma/Tara the mother goddess, he decided on a radical plan. He would drain the lake, bind the nagas and thereby share the lotus light with everyone.

Seizing the great Sword of Discriminating Wisdom, Manjusri sliced the mountainous rim of the valley in a single stroke, creating a gorge through which the waters of the lake, and its nagas, poured. As the water rushed out, the nagas were caught in a bottomless pit, where, along with their treasure, they remain to this day. The lotus settled to a small mound in the center of the emerging valley, eventually to become the stupa of Swayambunath.

Now, the curious point here is that geology agrees with and supports the myth. Roughly 20,000 years ago, an earthquake did in fact drain the vast lake that was Nepal valley, slicing open the rim as neatly as if it had been done with a sword. The lake formed as much as a million years earlier when the Himalayas lurked upward. Therefore for many thousands of years, there was indeed a large, deep lake of placid blue water surrounded by high, white mountains, just as the traditions say. All we are missing is the giant lotus, radiating light.

The chronicles continue in a similar vein, telling tales of gods in human form and of kings with the power of gods and their interaction. In this magical era, a single king could rule for a thousand years and temples were endowed with images of the gods who sweated, bled and spoke as they communicated their desires. This sense of a magical reality within a mythological landscape remains strong even today.

Buddhism arrived in the valley very early, so early in fact that it became woven into the fabric of its mythological past. During the reign of the semi-legendary Kiratis -- whose founder Yalambar fought and died in the epic struggle depicted in the Mahabharata -- the Buddha and his disciple Ananda visited the valley. They founded a school in Patan, where the Buddha elevated a family of blacksmiths to goldsmith status and gave them his own clan name, Sakya.

A few centuries later, the great Indian Emperor Ashoka, a convert to Buddhism, made a pilgrimage to the Buddha's birthplace at Lumbini, in the terai or plain to the south, and then continued on to Katmandu valley. He built and enlarged stupas at Patan and Swayambunath, and his daughter married the local prince, Devapala. This link to the original Indian traditions ensured that Buddhism would survive in Nepal long after it had died out in India.

At the turn of the 4th century CE, the last Kirati king, Gastee, was overwhelmed by an invasion of Rajaput princes from the areas of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in India. The Licchavi princes spread a veneer of Hinduism over the local Buddhism, creating a unique mixture of practical shamanism and sophisticated philosophy. This Nepalese Buddhism owed as much to Rajaput tantrism as it did to the teachings of Siddhartha.

Later branches of the Licchavis, the Thakuris, were instrumental in bringing Buddhism to Tibet. Princess Bhrikuti brought some of the Buddha's relics with her when she married the king of Tibet, Tsrong-tsong Gompo, and eventually converted him. For her devotion, she was identified with Tara, the Tibetan mother goddess.

After this high point, the Thakuri dynasties settled into a kind of semi-mythological Dark Age. An example is the story of King Gunakamadeva. It seems that the god Indra, whose interest in the valley went back to the primordial blue lotus era, assumed human form to observe the Indrajatra festival in his honor. A group of tantric magicians spotted him and bound him with spells until he granted them a boon. Indra's boon was the wood from a celestial tree, used by the king to construct a large seven-tiered pagoda called the Kasthamandap, or the "House of Wood." From this came Katmandu as time chipped away at the extra syllables.

Early in the 13th century, court intrigues and intermarriage brought a new dynasty to the throne when King Ari-Deva took the name Malla, meaning fighter or wrestler. The early Malla period was a time of peace and stability, even as the dark clouds of invasion and disaster gathered. But in 1311, the Moslem invasion that had devastated India for generations swept through the region, ravaging the whole valley by fire in the words of a contemporary chronicler.

These Moslem incursions had a tremendous effect on India, and a powerful but indirect one on the valley. During this period, the valley became a refuge for all sorts of displaced cultures and religions. As the refugees blended with the peculiarly Hindu Buddhism of the valley, strange and extravagant hybrids developed. One of these was the cult of the living goddess, Taleju.

As we have seen, goddess worship is as old as the valley itself. Princess Bhrikuti, a Buddhist, was worshiped as an incarnation of Tara, and even Manjusri asked permission from the Vajra Yogini before he drained the lake. As early as the 11th century, King Laxmikamadeva instituted the worship of the Kanya Kumari as an aspect of Shiva's consort, Shakti. But the arrival of the foreign Taleju marked the beginning of a new kind of goddess defined relationship with politics and power.

Around 1330, an adventurer named Raja Hari Singh and his private army of South Indian Nayars conquered the three kingdoms and became King of Katmandu. The earlier dynasties had ruled by extension of the god of kingship, Indra's, authority. But the Moslem invasions had destroyed the Brahmin class of the Mallas, and Raja Hari Singh, clearly no incarnation of Indra, needed a source of legitimacy by which to rule.

He found it in his Nayar retainer's devotions to their goddess, the mysterious Taleju. Combined with the Kanya Kumari, she became the royal patroness, and in true Nepali fashion, was soon assimilated into the cults of Durga, Dolma and Tara. Although Hari Singh failed to establish a dynasty, the cult of the living goddess caught on. Within 50 years, the Malla rulers almost supplanted by Hari Singh would be competing with each other to build the most extravagant Taleju Mandir or temple on the main square of Katmandu.

What made Taleju so powerful, and virtually unique, was her devotees' insistence on her "living" status. Not content with animated statutes or the casual divine visit, Taleju's followers declared that she was literally present as an incarnate divine being. How this originally worked is unclear, but it soon became institutionalized as a department of the state.

The story goes that Taleju appeared to Hari Singh and his Malla successors in human form. This was so beguiling that one Malla king made an indiscreet overture, which enraged the goddess. She threatened to abandon him, his family and the valley for good, until he pleaded with her for mercy. To prevent this sort of thing from ever happening again, the goddess declared that she would return only in the body of an inviolate young virgin, chosen from the Sakya clan of goldsmiths blessed by the Buddha.

And so it remains to this day. A young girl, aged 4 or 5, is carefully chosen from the Sakya clan. Her body must be flawless and she must have the 32 specified and distinctive signs that identify the goddess. As a final test, the young candidates are subjected to a grisly ritual. The girl who remains calm and selects the correct articles belonging to her predecessor must be the goddess. Her horoscope is done, to see how it matches with the king, and then she is installed in her residence. There she will remain, except on festival days, until she bleeds, either from a wound or the onset of puberty.

Today, her residence is the 18th century bahal or monastery just off Durbar Square in Katmandu. Two large painted lions guard the entrance, and the lintels over the doorway have laughing skulls that suggest the Grateful Dead or voodoo's Ghedes. Inside the small courtyard, as far as the casual visitor is allowed, the carvings are even more intricate. Animals and humans riot in a frenzy of sexual ecstasy that is beyond anything the western mind, with the possible exception of Bosch, can conceive.

For a few hundred rupees, the goddess can be persuaded to appear at a small window overlooking the courtyard. A shy young girl, not more than eight years old and with more eye shadow than Cleopatra, steps up to the window. She looks down and smiles at the small knot of tourists, her expression one of infinite melancholy, and then she is gone.

And yet, this child is a vehicle for a supernatural being who is, theoretically at least, more powerful than is the king.

All of these threads come together during the eight days of Indrajatra, the festival where, a thousand years ago, Indra was caught celebrating and forced to divulge the secret of the celestial tree. On the third day, the Kanya Kumari, or Living Goddess, emerges from her residence painted as a hummingbird and ready to receive the homage of the entire valley. She is carried through the streets in a highly colorful chariot, accompanied by two young boys representing Ganesh and Bhairav, until she arrives at Durbar Square and the Taleju Mandir. There she receives the puja or worship of the people.

The climax of the ritual comes on the final night of the festival as she offers the tika of her protection and endorsement to the king. By this acknowledgement, he is empowered to rule for another year. Omens are carefully watched, and the Kumari's favor is considered necessary for the king to be legitimate.

In the early years this was crucially important. As the Mallas split into small warring factions and competing city states, the authority to chose a ruler became all important. Nothing demonstrates this more than the story of the 18th century adventurer, Prithvi Nayan Shah.

It was the latter days of the Three Kingdoms Era, when the small city-states of the valley engaged in endless disputes and intrigues. For a century or so, a Rajaput kingdom to the south of the valley, Gorkha, had been gaining in power and prominence. Ignored by the quarreling Kings, Prithvi Nayan Shah the Gorkha Warlord managed to enter Katmandu during the final day of Indrajatra, when the Kumari endows the king with the right to rule.

This was a calculated move. The Malla king's soldiers were too drunk to fight, and the conquest was easy. The Shah entered the square at the head of his soldiers, and, the legitimate king having fled, the Kumari offered her protection to him. He accepted the tika and became the king of Nepal, founding the dynasty that survives to this day.

Although the dynasty would have serious problems along the way, the Shah Era began grandly with a surge of expansion, halted by contact with the British. A brief war led to concessions -- the country was closed to all but the British, with a resident at Katmandu, and Britain had the right to recruit from the Gorkha hill tribes for its army. With the threat of foreign intervention averted, the court at Katmandu turned inward and plunged into a round of intrigue and betrayal. This came to a head in 1846, when a noble family, the Ranas, staged a coup.

For the next hundred years, the Ranas ruled through their control of the royal government. The king and his family were held as prisoners and hostages in the royal palace and the day-to-day workings of the government rested in the hands of the Rana Prime Minister. This office, called Maharaja or great king, was made hereditary, establishing a sort of quasi-dynasty. However, only the King received the Kumari's favor.

In the wake of World War II, as changes swept through India, China and Tibet, the moment came for the restoration of the Shah dynasty in Nepal. Opponents of the Ranas had formed the Nepali Congress Party during the war. This new democratic movement saw the King as the embodiment of his people's hopes and aspirations. Finally, in 1950, King Tribhuvan escaped from the palace and sought refuge in the Indian Embassy. From there he flew to Dehli, where he was recognized as the legitimate ruler of Nepal.

India eventually negotiated a settlement. The Ranas fled and the King returned to the valley in triumph. His victory was honored by a special appearance of the Kumari, who bestowed her blessing on the changes. King Tribhuvan died in 1955, and was succeeded by his son Mahendra, who ruled until 1972. His son, Birendra, still rules the valley, as the world's only official Hindu monarch. Every Indrajatra, the King still comes to the Kanya Kumari for permission to rule.

However, King Birendra has several times been exposed to the power of the living goddess. In 1979, the Kumari refused to give the tika of protection to the King, which sparked six months of riots and civil disturbances before the King gave in and instituted the changes, in a nationwide referendum, that the Kumari desired. In 1990, however, a similar power play by the Kumari resulted in a change in the constitution.

As Nepal became more dependent on western aid and financial assistance, the west became more insistent on certain changes. The IMF, USAID and the World Bank considered rule by goddess to be absurd, and so, after a last attempt at exerting her authority, the 1991 constitution changed forever the nature of kingship in the valley. The Kumari's favor or displeasure might sway the people, but the government would no longer rise and fall on account of it.

And so, far away in the shadow of the White Himalayas lies an ancient kingdom where until recently a goddess religion exerted direct influence on the state. While there are many lessons to be drawn from this story, I've shared it here for a couple of reasons.

First of all, it illustrates in a direct way the idea that the land and the king are one, the heart of the Grail mythos. If there is any one political principle that can be said to lie at the root of any concept of paganism as a goddess based, earth-centered spirituality, it is this one. In a sense, it is the only valid form of government, one that enforces the concept of accountability in a personal and direct way.

Think for a moment of how different our current political landscape would look if our government were based on these concepts. This is so mind-boggling that it is hard to visualize. Not only would the Bush-Cheney oil cartel not be in the White House, the world itself would look so different as to be completely alien. Who knows what we really lost with our indigenous cultures in the west?

We certainly lost our connection to the land. Our dominant paradigm is one of exploitation, because the Bible says so, and this has led us to our present psychotic state of rampant self-consumption. What would happen if we consciously began to change that perspective?

My second reason for sharing this story brings us to the core of that last question. As I pieced together the story of Nepal's living goddess, I was struck by how the outer image of the goddess seemed to change as needed, while the inner reality stayed the same from Vajra Yogini to the Kanya Kumari. This made me curious about how the archetype may have manifested in the west.

From the Kanya Kumari, literally Virgin Goddess, to the Virgin Mary is actually a very short hop. In that sense, the Virgin apparitions, from Lourdes to Fatima, Zeitun and Medjegorria, suggest a new current of long displaced feminine power, the Lady of Sovereignty, emerging into our reality, and to a certain degree effecting politics. What this means in the long term is hard to tell, but we may take it as a sign that new/old forces are emerging from the Dark Ages of the current paradigm.

From this and the tale of the living goddess, I draw two succinct lessons.

One: The land and the king are one.

And Two: The goddess is willing to help, if we will just pay attention to her warnings.

Therefore, it falls to us, as followers of a new form of goddess-based, earth-centered spirituality, to give voice to the goddess' pleas and to insist on a form of government that embraces the new/old paradigm of the Lady of Sovereignty. Who will speak for the trees, and all the other living beings without voices, if we who are self proclaimed worshippers of Nature will not?

Vincent Bridges, author, lecturer and general pagan gadfly, is one of the pioneers of psycho-acoustic therapy, a trauma abreaction technique using light and sound entrainment of brain frequencies. His fields of expertise include the Hermetic origins of the Renaissance, ancient cultures and their shamanic practices, the history of language, cultural anthropology, Egyptology, comparative religion, mathematics and sacred geometry, brain physiology, psychology, theoretical physics and psycho-acoustic technology. He is also Director Emeritus of the Fifth Way Mystery School, an international group of spiritual researchers, the co-author of A Monument to the End of Time: Alchemy, Fulcanelli and the Great Cross