A fellow student gave me these two figurines this morning after a particularly strenuous yoga class. The deity on the left is the Baby Krishna stealing butter, which my friend felt suited me because, "you have a bit of the puer eternis* in you." Krishna, incidentally, wears a peacock feather in his hair. The other deity, on the right, I'd never heard of. She is the goddess Durga, with a lion and a man at her feet.You might recall that I have a particularly strong relationship to the image in the tarot card, Strength.
So here she is again, the lady taming the big cat. In this case, she rides it.Synchronicities aside, I am reminded of how much I love knowing the traces of confluence in world cultures. All these things eastern that worked their way into the makeup of the West, it's a lush history. Except for the Bible, of course, spontaneously generated as it surely was. Nope, no influence there but for the hand of God. Right.
I might add that for the last few days I've been asking for a sign that I'm on the right track. Before receiving the gift this morning, I had been walking my dog on the neighbor's hill. I had a rather dark thought - something about feeling like giving up on some major things if I didn't see any movement in the next several months. I woun't tell you how dark a thought it was, but the moment it completed, I was startled by a large red-tailed hawk taking flight some fifteen feet away. The snap of those immense wings cleaving the air was quite loud, and the visual intense. Immediately I felt it as a warning to snap out of my bad attitude. That's right, go ahead and shake your fist at the universe; holler at the Gods. Real bright of me.
I also recalled that hawks are the symbol for "messenger." Which, incidentally, is synonomous with my name. Anyway, I think I got the message, or at least that hawk let me know another was on the way. So now I'm reading up on Durga, the beautiful Lion taming Goddess and killer of demons, and her nightstand companion, fat Butter Boy Krishna.
(*eternal youth. sometimes known as a Peter Pan Complex.)
5 comments:
Asterisk hidden,
I google 'puer eternis'--
Lo! It's John Stamos!
one less syllable in the middle line, and you'd have had a Haiku!
No influence on the Bible, of course you are being sarcastic... I really love to read theosophists and their esoteric knowledge from the orient. It is a convincing perspective and sort of ties mans history to the same roots... epistemologically.
Potash - of course I've read much Joseph Campbell, but if you please, give me some short syllabus of your theosophists. I'd love to dig in.
Who said I was kidding about the Bible?
Oh, just foolin'. Really, I think it's so much richer a piece when read as metaphor and set in its historical/cultural context. There's a kind of magic in that. I wish folks didn't think that divesting it of it's "fact" somehow rendered it impotent. Quite the opposite - the psyche responds to things from the dream realm. Myth resonates. Metaphor speaks with poetic logic and truth, in ways we can't quite wrap out analytical brains around. Still, to me the paradigms are nearly worn out and a new one needs to be born.
I enjoyed your blog.
I would say Joe Campbell is a western philosopher interested in ancient knowledge from a scholarly point of view.
The theosophists on the other seek that knowledge and use it to order their thinking and living.
The person credited with coining the term and bringing the knowledge to the west was madame blavatsky. (blavatsky.net would be a nice place to begin. The ful ltext of her seminal work in theosophy is at theosociety.org. It is called 'The Secret Doctrine' just incase you have to do a google search.
The esoteric knowledge as they call it links the Judaeo Christian religious tradition to its mystical Oriental roots. It makes for fascinating reading for an open mind anyway.
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