The Aquarian Paradigm

There is in Europe a body of work that came about in the 1960s that is a harbinger of the new millennium. It is the full body of the mature work of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. The classic series starts with the most famous of his films, The Seventh Seal, and the haunting specter of death leading the dancers in shadow to the dark side of a hill. The story is about soldiers coming back from the Crusades, only to find northern Europe torn by plague. Only one survives, the comic peasant with a clear vision of the Celestial Mother. It is the end of the Christian age, and Bergman begins the film with an appropriate quote from Revelations. The Seventh Seal is Wormwood. Here is the essence of the prophecy from Revelations : And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done. (Rev. 16:17)

There follows a series of three films called the Silence of God trilogy, filled with a spiritual angst that was characteristic of the age, which could be interpreted as coming from anxieties that arise from sexual awareness in youth, the political uncertainties of the time, the destabilizing side affects of creating great art or other causes. They are masterful films, perhaps the greatest dramatic presentations of that time. But Bergman’s last major public presentation, a film adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, is perhaps his most important. It is the only moment in all of his work where the character experiences triumph in the end, and looking at the full body of work it becomes clear that the angst of the middle films were part of the spiritual and psychological struggle to find the character’s achievement in the last, and that those anxieties were allayed by the character’s spiritual victory in the last film. Other work would come, but much o fit seeking box-office cash and finding a generic audience.

Bergman’s rendition of The Magic Flute is a harbinger of the age here and pending. Taking his films out of their historical periods and viewing them as an expression of the artist’s own development and sensibility, his full body of work is a shaman’s journey which traverses ages, starting with The Seventh Seal at the very end of the Christian age and ending with The Magic Flute at the beginning of a new age.

Perhaps none surpasses Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791) in knowledge of the masculine principle and the feminine, yang and yin, first performed at the high end of the Renaissance as the masculine principle and the Renaissance came to dominate the Earth Mother. In Mozart’s story three warriors guard the Lord of the Temple and his counselors, while three sisters accompany the Earth Mother. But now she is the Queen of the Night, the Earth Mother in her third and final phase. She is Kali, the Death Mother. In Bergman’s movie the Queen of the Night is at one point composed with the moon behind her surrounded by zodiac symbols. And Sarastro, the Ruler of the Temple, is shown with his male counsel in caves that resemble those at Lascaux. Sarastro, here in a beautiful presentation at Ithaca College, has commandeered the Earth, the organic realm of the Goddess.

Tamino, the hero of the story, follows on a sacred love quest and in the process moves his allegiance from the Earth Mother to the Lords of the Temple and joins the Lords of the Temple. Three boy spirits in a flying ship accompany the hero and give him three words to guide him in his quest. The words are: steadfast, silence, and obedience.

Mozart’s opera marks history’s turning point. It was the time of revolution throughout the world. It marks the end of the ancient regimes and the monarchies of Europe. And it marks the end to the old Earth Mother cycle of Europe – white phase, rose phase, black phase – which brought them about over the proceeding thousand years. Germany has a special place here and has a special trajectory. The age upon us and that which awakened with Mozart is the Enlightenment. All of Europe entered the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but it was only the German and Austrian regions of Europe that embraced the Power Principle and at the same time incorporated the yin or feminine sensibility - Abbess Hildegard and Meister Eckhart to Goethe and Leibnitz to Schopenhauer and Jung, embraced the yin world, this tradition follows unbroken from the 12^th century until the present. The other rising Protestant nations rose in denial and opposition to it.

Europe faces a new age today and once again sings in one voice. And it sings a German song; its anthem is Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, written within four years of The Magic Flute. The flag of the European Union is a study in zodiac symbolism, a blue background representing sky and air, the masculine field of Aquarius, and 12 gold stars, the full counsel of the zodiac; the council of Sarastro and the Lords of the Temple.

The Death of the Earth Mother

The Irish do not prosper so well; they love to drink and to quarrel . . . from Letters from an American Farmer by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (1781)

My father was a man of few words. “Jews are better to work for than Protestants,” he once said. And French people cannot be trusted, he would say. That was about it. The thing about French people was not a prejudice. Just the opposite. He wasn’t prejudiced against French people. He was prejudiced against everyone else except French people. He liked French people and his relatives would marry French people. Into his old age his only remaining friends were French people. I think he loved French people more than he loved the Irish and that’s what scared him.

The only people who worked in the factories in Fall River, Massachusetts were French people and Irish people, until the Portuguese came in, but then it was too late. So the only people you could trust were French people and Irish people. And you couldn’t really trust the French all the way, although they were Catholic, because they weren’t Irish. His employment maxim about Jews was more complex. At the heart of the matter was the core intuition that lived secretly in the collective heart of certain working-class Irish factory workers in New England in those days that Protestant people couldn’t really run things on their own because they were guided by blind optimism, unfettered by the heart, and if they tried to do things on a large scale without the aid of Jews, things would fall apart. This at a time and place where Yankees had deep roots and the Irish were new arrivals. Thus, there was a complex tribal prejudice toward Jews; they were smarter and not as predictable as Yankees -- and then there was a prejudice against them; they were not Catholics, of course, like we were. But they were a mystical force of nature. It resembled somewhat the prejudice that certain primitive religious groups in the Appalachians have about the Jews secretly controlling the world’s money supply, but it was just the opposite. It wasn’t secret and it wasn’t a conspiracy, it was supposed to be that way. It was nature. So some of the old Irish believed that in the modern world, Jews brought inner balance and were the only ones able to grasp the forces unseen; without them the world would fall apart. A notion that may have been carried across the ocean from Manchester, England when Disraeli was prime minister in Queen Victoria’s era, where a good percentage of the Irish and a half dozen of my living relatives at that time spent an interim decade or so awaiting passage to America. It is not unlike the common widespread mystic belief in fed chairman Alan Greenspan as a benevolent shaman/economist in recent times, without whose singular vision it would all go to pieces. And we working-class Irish were politically allied with Jews and polarized against Yankee Protestants. My father, who entered factory life after high school, once confided that the reason the Egyptians were a great nation thousands of years ago was because of the Jews, even though they were kept slaves, and all the history of the world was like that. It was a startling and complex observation by a man who went to daily mass and communion and said the rosary every evening with the family. And the American metamorphosis that brought this sincerely devout man from the vortex of the cavernous Mission Church in South Boston that he was born into, where the toes of the statue of the crucified Jesus were worn through the paint by humble pilgrims kissing the feet in the pale light; pilgrims who had left behind crutches, wheelchairs, eye glasses and leg braces at the feet of Jesus in surrounding piles to signify the miracles that had taken place, led him at the end of his life to seder feasts in a new eclectic Catholicism, which he didn’t fully understand but had no choice but to accept.

My Aunt Nora would babysit for Jews and sneak the babies down to the Catholic Church to be baptized, but I inherited the wise guide secret Irish folkloric tradition of my father. In college, I’d look for Jewish names among the professors in the course listings and take their courses. Then, after I left home, most of my friends were Jews. Most still are. My father’s folk prejudices about Jews and French people, passed on as a secret intuition in a rite of passage to his son in order to keep him oriented in the outer world, did no damage. I’ve always felt that I belong to Jews and French and Portuguese people more than to other outsiders, and in fact I do, as my closest cousins and native family are French/Irish.

It has been almost 40 years since I left Fall River but I still feel a strong bonding. Whenever I see that most wonderful of all photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt of the sailor kissing the nurse at Times Square at war’s end, magically composed around the sailor’s huge, strong, magnificent hand, it first crosses my mind that the sailor is from Fall River (which he is). Or when chef Emeril pops up on television I’ll say to my wife: he’s from Fall River.

The one prejudice that lived on tenaciously was toward the Yankee Protestant. They named their kids “Ike” and the Yankee preachers had fierce masculine smiles. Irish children knew that anyone with knowledge of God did not smile. And although people of my generation -- the Jews, the French, the Portuguese and the Irish -- were not particularly religious (it was a generation in which real men did not go to church and if they loved Jesus, they kept it to themselves), we considered ourselves organically rich and alive and in certain cases among the Irish, wild and aboriginal in animal power and poetry. This was not a religious prejudice. Our friends were Protestant; Episcopalian, Unitarian and Baptist and it didn’t seem to apply to them.

It was purely a class and political prejudice. They, the Yankee Protestants, were an inert class of business keepers. They cared about nothing except business. That was the way we saw it, and this deep and tenacious prejudice came to play out in final destiny in the single warrior political combat of John F. Kennedy and Henry Cabot Lodge. We saw no irony later when we did come of age and our first guides in the river between childhood and adulthood were Protestant singers with old rugged cross authenticity, brought up from the Appalachians in Virginia and North Carolina and the Mississippi Delta for the emerging folk scene; Doc Watson, the Weavers, Elizabeth Kitchen.

That was about all my father ever said, but that was enough. I can’t imagine having one of those fathers who talks all of the time like nowadays. Father bonding is less than freedom. I’d always felt man enough coming up as a boy and didn’t particularly want any interference. My friends were the same; go out in the morning, come home at night. So as most of the fathers bonded among themselves generationally during the Second World War, we developed early relationships among ourselves.

Mine was a perfect father and I couldn’t ask for more in a man. He was the last in a massive wave of Irish immigrants to work in a city of quite beautiful stone and glass cotton mills numbering up to 150 in its heyday and employing over a million and a half at the height of the Great Migration. He worked in the last mill to head south in the 1950s and he was the last to leave. He was the electrician. He turned the lights out.

It may be an Irish thing, not to particularly devalue men and the role of men, but to see the universe in women, and in the eyes of one’s mother. Irish or not, I certainly inherited that view. A father should do his work and shut his mouth; work like a man and die like a man. That’s what my father did. It was a nice discovery finding Lao Tsu and the Tao Te Ching, who found poetry in it.

If I had anything to say as a child, it was to my mother. I notice my boys are the same way.

I remember being under the table in the living room with my mother while she was ironing, and the house was warm, and I remember the rhythm and the smell of the iron sliding and the sound it made. She watched the Garry Moore Show when we had our first TV set, because he had as a host a pretty singer named Gisele MacKensey. She was Irish and although my mother thought she was Protestant, it was close enough in the 1950s when the Irish thing was dwindling fast.

It was a perfect paradise between us and little was said, and I experienced it again when my daughter was born. Her hands were just like my mother’s, her eyes quiet like my mother’s and the time we spent holding hands together seemed virtually the same moment as the time my mother and I were together quietly while the others were at school or at work. It was a brief interval of love and grace, a moment perfect in a world that resolves itself into death. It is life’s greatest respite. Twice now I have found it before the outer world and the world of work would call.

School was hard to enter and I had to leave my mother to herself. It meant leaving paradise for a man-made matrix of beating steam pipes, strict nuns and onward and upward to sergeants and corporate managers. Then eventually my daughter would have to leave for a few hours a day for play school, just as I did. She had wanted to go to school, of course, like her brothers. But when the time came she was dreary the day before. Then when the time came, she cried for a moment at the door, composed herself, let go of my hand, and left the celestial bliss behind and went in. That afternoon she came out a kid.

I took longer and even after 50 years have never really adjusted to the outside. But she had the strength, the primal strength, of my mother. Whenever I have had to do something very hard in adult life, I recalled the strength of my mother at difficult moments. It was not that my father was weak, he was not. It was that I as a child already felt I held all a man needed and had nothing more to gain from another man. Indeed, it would weaken a boy to find strength from another man. But what a woman had was beyond the curtain. And when she showed strength it was greater than a man’s. It did not come from orders from the language centers of the brain or from a testosterone chemical directive, but from the heart or someplace secret that a man can’t know.

My mother was fair natured and like many Irish who were raised still with stories of the old country and occasionally even hearing the rosary in Gaelic said with rented death wailers at an Irish wake, she was passive toward the work of the outside world and preferred quiet. But the passive field had a fierce center, a tiger in the rain, that would rise only rarely, when it was challenged. I’d be dead if I didn’t find it in her because I don’t believe I have it in myself and certainly have never seen that force so fierce in another man. But her strength was mine and now it is my daughter’s.

A lot of my mother's family were fey and Elf-like, almost translucent and singularly tall and fine-boned. I think they no longer exists as a race. Many died of lung disease working in factories when they first arrived. I had pneumonia twice and three collapsed lungs by the time I was 30. The general idea was that if you made it past 30 you could count on getting through to 85 or so. Although the conditions that caused brown lung were probably a factor in the older generation, it was their introverted nature that was unsuited to the matrix world of factory life and the mass culture of industrialization. It is certainly too late to lodge a complaint, and anyway, I’m glad to be here under any circumstances. But consider if a society is designed so all of the robust extroverts prosper and all of the delicate introverts fail and eventually die, then the society develops without artists, without vision and without grace. It is a society that is out of balance and one that cannot find balance.

Perhaps it is meant to be like that: perhaps the industrial movement since the 1830s is a bridge to a new world, the Titan in the icon of the ascending zodiac constellation of Aquarius pouring the water into the new world; people flowing from all corners of the world abandoning caste, religion, race and national purpose to come to the United States. And when they are all here, the bridge will collapse. Nature wastes nothing. And here, in the “land of the red-faced people,” as a Tibetan prophecy of twelve hundred years ago calls it, it will begin again.

Maybe the Black Death already killed off all the introverts and left only the extroverts. Europe a hundred years before was certainly a different place – the land of Mary when she was still primarily the Earth Mother – than it was after – the land of the muscular Jesus in Michelangelo’s Sistene Chapel ceiling fresco, up from the earth and flying alone into the sky.

Maybe it is supposed to be like that.

Those with subtle mind experience the death of others. Van Cliburn froze on stage in New York the moment his mother died in Texas. I have experienced the death of others, though not my mother’s. The pain of her death was only relieved years later when my daughter was born, and the odd thing was that I didn’t ever particularly like my mother.

The very first dream I had as a child was that there was a tiger in my room. I was frightened to death and woke up screaming. My mother came in to soothe things down and bring it back to the quiet night. It was incidental that I named a novel 30 years later Tiger in the Rain, but in hindsight it seemed related to the first dream. I'd written the novel in New York City. On the night I finished it I had a dream about flying to a mountain top and meeting a Chinese women flying in white robes from the East. We consumated our marriage in a Greek-looking temple on top of the mountain. The next day I back went to work and met my wife.

When I was a child we had a yellow cat which my mother hated. I vaguely recall the smell of plaster in our new post-war house with my mother looking like Queen Elizabeth in an apron, standing in the center of the room, frozen solid in terror, while Sally, the little yellow kitten, brushed against her ankle with the back of her neck.

The incident with my mother might have triggered the first tiger dream in which the ascending life force appeared quietly in a passive field – a tiger in the rain would scare the wits out of the small child. I was afraid of life before I left the family and went to Thailand to military service. Then I wasn’t afraid anymore.

My family is not afraid of cats. In fact, we love cats and have a framed picture of a particular cat on an ancient bureau, more sacred to us than any of the ancestors.

Now, last year, I dreamed the same dream again. There was a tiger pouncing in my room, but I was not afraid. It was a vision dream; a dream, as Indians say, that has a particularly tangible quality or reality that is denser than an ordinary dream or ordinary waking reality. It is the essence of consciousness and makes waking reality seem pale by comparison. When I got up and went to wake up my little daughter in the morning, she said, “Do you see the tiger?” pointing up and all around the ceiling, laughing. “It’s there,” she laughed, “it’s there,” although I’d not told her about the dream. Two years later she had her first dream and it was about tigers.

I dreamed of the tiger three times in my life: as my first dream, 25 years later when I wrote Tiger in the Rain, and last year at Halloween. This coincides with the three phases of life: youth, active middle age and old age. Each time I had the experience a cat appeared at my door and I took her into my house.

Some of my ancestors are Anglican Irish and some Roman Catholic. All came from Ireland. The Anglicans were on my mother’s side. They found their way into the working class after Victoria went to the throne and the potato famine drove them out. Industrialization gave them a generation or so in Manchester, England, before they managed to find their way in a large homogeneous group to a mill town along the Saconnet River in Massachusetts. After thousands of years in one place, one town, they lived from 1840 to 1914 in three countries, and when they settled, they faced participation in two wars and the Great Depression. But perhaps work was worse: virtually half of them died while working in cotton mills. My mother quit school at 16, after her father and older brother died in her house on the same day of different causes, to support her mother and the remaining children. That was between the wars at the beginning of the Great Depression.

On the day my mother died twelve years ago, I built a solid wooden gate with concrete footings, but standing alone and without a fence attached to it, in the middle of my sheep pasture in North Carolina, hoping she would return.

The dead find no comfort here and return to Europe. I dream of my Aunt Nora, the sister of my mother, long dead, whenever someone in my family is about to die or to be born, even a beloved animal. But we will be staying here now. When my daughter was about to be born Nora appeared in a dream and said, "Oh, we're all coming over here now." Presumably she meant the souls of the ancestors who had returned to Ireland.

Now they would be coming back.

I understood that until the event approaching, until the birth of the girl, they had found no purpose in remaining here.

The Return of the Earth Mother

Landing on this great continent is like going to sea; they must have a compass, some friendly directing needle, or else they will uselessly err and wander for a long time, even with a fair wind. - From Letters from an American Farmer by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (1781)

My wife is from the South and she brought us back there eventually after a stop here and a stop there. Later, in the upper Midwest we lived in a very big and a very old farm house that was loaded with bats. Here in New Hampshire our house goes back to 1790. Here we have bear.

There was a female spirit in the old Michigan house and I think that is why there were so many bats. The Dead are attracted to old houses in the country, especially if they lived there when they were alive. Death by snow plow is a common danger here in the cold parts, and the women who lived in our Michigan house was killed by a snow plow just before we moved in. In her late 70s. She was a child psychiatrist in Ann Arbor, a women from Iowa with two sisters. All three were doctors. Perhaps it was her, or Walker, who built the house in 1852, who remained behind after departure.

Generally, bats like houses built before the Civil War because they have character. And bats, the night side of birds, are attracted to the dead, because they scare people and keep them away, keeping it peaceful and quiet. You have to be careful in dealing with the spirit world and I wouldn’t advise it. Death doesn’t bother the spirits. They don’t believe in death. There is no death. It’s just moving furniture around. And with the Dead, its hard to get a grip on who they like and who they don’t and why, but we’ve always had good relations.

We have always had a terrific array of unsolicited animals living in and around our houses, more than most people, it seems. And when we arrived in Michigan one of those huge fire balls from heaven almost landed in our back yard. It was a great round ball of blue sparks that looked from earth about like a big 18-wheeler moving slowly across the moon about ten miles above the earth. I was driving at twilight in one direction down 6 Mile and it was going in the opposite direction. It was on NPR and everything.

In the South, it was snakes. Mice living in the walls at first until our cats got rid of them, then snakes. In New York City it was hawks, and my wife and I felt we knew them all personally. 20 years later I read with interest that a one-eyed hawk had given birth on a TV antenna, up by where Yoko Ono lives. Very good karma. About when Catherine was born too. We thought we might have known the hawk’s ancestors. There is a strange absence of hawks here in the northern mountains of New Hampshire.

There was also a snake in New York, the first night I arrived at my wife’s dorm room before she was my wife, being none to relaxed in fact, being conspicuously older than the students. There was a python in her room. It belonged to a friend who was away for the weekend, she said. He asked her to take care of it while he was away. Then when we left for the South, snakes were everywhere.

In our first old house in West Virginia, when only our first boy was born – a beautiful old brick farmhouse, built by German farm people in 1840 and put together with oak pegs – we were sleeping the first night when we heard a scraping sound. Like a shoe dragging by itself across the attic floor, directly above us. We sat and listened for awhile and looked at each other. Still being city people, we didn’t think that we needed to handle the situation right away and didn’t have a clue what to do. Maybe call the realtor: there are snakes in this house.

Finally, I took a flashlight and went up to the attic and I couldn’t see anything, although I heard the scrapping noise right under my feet. Then I shone the light between my feet and between the boards and I saw it moving like a slow train in the night. Like it was in a different world.

It appeared as long as a train as well. It was maybe seven feet but seemed endless. I shone the light around the room and saw maybe a dozen discarded snake skins hanging off chairs and things discarded in the attic, lightly moving with the air coming up from downstairs.

I didn’t do anything, which was the right thing to do, just went back to bed. The next day I saw them climbing up the brick in the sun, seven, eight feet long, moving slowly. They were black snakes, which are common throughout the South and they are benevolent. They eat mice, rats and other snakes, particularly copperheads, which are deadly. Farmers want to have the black snakes or rat snakes in their barn to keep the rats down. We found that they eat eggs as well but only two or three a day, which we considered salary to the snakes for doing their job eating the rats.

They are a big impressive sight, especially if you have never seen a big black seven-foot snake before. It lives in the part of your mind that has no interpretation, but is like getting past the man-made world of the mind all at once and you are back in the garden. It is like they were here first and are here always and will be here after we with our busy projects and city shoes have passed on.

I first saw one when my wife brought us South from New York for a visit. We were first starting out, and she took us to the top of one of the rolling hills in the west of Virginia, and looking out over the horizon in a state of new bliss, she said, “I can see it now . . .” waving her hand, then she screamed, “Eek!” A black snake was right under our feet crawling away from us. Six feet, maybe seven feet.

Ten years later when she was busy managing three kids and awaiting a fourth on our little farm in Tobaccoville, North Carolina, she once mildly complained that there were 47 animals in and around the house, including sheep, chickens, indoor cats, kids, outdoor cats, dogs, including one that had been kicked by a neighbor’s cow and had to live in the kitchen until it’s broken leg healed, and snakes in the barn and snakes in the cellar. By then she’d lost the eek reaction and if a copperhead had managed to get past the dogs, the cats, the blacksnakes and close up near the babies, she’d lop off its head with a shovel without a thought.

I am one of the people who are drawn to snakes. Women share something with snakes, I think, and that is why I am drawn to them. They share the same soul, I think. And Bela Lugosi offers this in the movie Ed Wood: when giving birth, the woman enters into the unconscious of the world or the Universe and after a few births going back and forth, a woman is familiar with the Unconscious and comfortable in it and at one with it. And Sun Bear has an observation. He says they share soul with the moon as well. Once a month, they complete a lunar cycle and if they all live together, like in a college dorm, their period cycles all synchronize. They share the same channel of consciousness, especially sisters. And especially at birth. They know what snakes know and share it with the moon.

Relatively speaking, a man doesn’t know about these things. It is the way of quiet understanding; the knowledge and experience of the Unconscious as it is understood in Islam and to the Zoroastrian, not the object knowledge in the mind of a white man. And when it is birthing about to happen it pulls the man in, having an affect that can’t be managed by a man’s own experience or knowledge. There is a kind of magnetism to it.

In the country, the ordinary Southern woman folk will take a string and hang it on a key and hold it in front of the pregnant woman’s stomach at about six or seven months, to tell what sex the baby is going to be. If it swings to the right it will be a boy, to the left, a girl. You can also tell what kind of a life force it will have by the velocity of the key spinning. It’s magnetism drawing the woman around the Fibonacci curve that is a black hole, down into the Universe and then out again into the world. The country people say there’s magnetism in the mountains too, which makes the lights on Brown Mountain so frequent and strange and they don’t have an explanation. Everybody in those parts believes in UFOs and don’t care what the city people think about it. They don’t even know about the string thing with a pregnant woman. Anyway, the hant woman at the farm market said the string thing doesn’t work with city people.

I was never able to put my finger on it or to understand why – maybe it is magnetism – but after a few years on the farm, people, not just twins who are famous for it, or sisters who would all be like one woman at the birth period, but everybody – high church, low church, trailer park, black and white – would all get synchronized after a few years of this kind of life among the snakes and chickens and the critters. Even for a displaced Yankee like myself, brought down from New York City. When I’d stand in my front yard thinking, “I’ve got to get that stump out one way or another,” later that day a good ole’ boy would drive up in his truck and ask if I needed any stumps removed. Or if I’d think to myself, “How am I going to get rid of those extra roosters?” an old country man with sons would appear who my wife had sold chickens to the year before and ask if I had any this year. Birth cycle, in and out, ties you all to the mountain like sewing, says the hant woman.

But after a while it got kind of ponderous and heavy, especially after the third boy was born. It was about that period – when the third was five to six months in the womb – that there got to be a burden on my mind. Had I been raised on that particular mountain and on that spot it might have been different. Also, just about then our friend Catherine. I could feel her coming.

Driving to Chapel Hill one day, I heard on a call-in radio show where you call in and ask the astrologer for advice, a man with my birth date, July 15, called and asked the woman on the radio what kind of wife he should get. Pisces, she said, early spring, or just the opposite; Scorpio, early fall. Now these are not opposites like yin and yang, she said, male and female, they are ascending and descending charges of the one force, in this case, the feminine force for the guy who called in about getting a wife. The both together represent the fullness of the force, in a united episode. My wife was Pisces, perfect for a man born under Cancer as I was, and Catherine was a Scorpio, perfect for a friend and companion. She was new in my office, the artist who would design the magazine I worked for. We would be friends and she would become a special friend of our family.

But a lot of things started happening all at once, just before we met Catherine and I found it quite disturbing and destabilizing. It started one night when the third boy was six months in the womb. I had a dream that I was walking through the woods with a group of Indians. Suddenly, we got to a clearing in the woods and in the center there was a round stone circle, like a primitive holy site. I stood around it in a circle with the Indians. Then they all put their weapons down and backed away into the forest. I was left standing by myself. I shouted for the Indians to come back, but they shook their heads no.

When I woke up I didn’t know what to do. I’d always dreamed of Indians acting as guides and felt navigating through life was a breeze, so long as I had my Indian guides. Now I was alone in a stone circle. Next night I dreamed I was alone at sea in a ship and was being tossed about by the stormy sea.

The other unusual thing was a series of coincidences that occurred when I first encountered befriended Catherine.

I raised sheep, and was in the market for some. Tunis sheep; pretty, reddish sheep with long ears like goats – these were sheep of African stock that were well suited to the hot, dry climate of North Carolina. But they were hard to find. There were only two breeders in the state. I’d been to one that weekend, but didn’t like his stock, as they’d been crossed with Dorset and had lost their pretty faces. So I needed to find the other breeder.

That Monday morning I went to work and was introduced to Catherine, who would be my new office mate. We got into a conversation and I told her about my weekend trip to look at sheep.

“I have sheep,” she said, to my surprise.

Sure enough. I checked the breeder’s directory and there she was. Listed as the only other breeder of Tunis sheep in the state.

There was a truck thing too. I had a 20-year-old Dodge pick-up with a Custom Cab that I’d paid $800 for ten years before when I bought if from an Elvis worshiper. It was a rare beauty. Jim, my office mate, said that as long as I had that truck I was a special person. If I didn’t have that truck I’d just be a chump, down from New York City and talking louder than the other people. The Custom Cab only underwent small production in that model and I’d never seen one exactly like it in ten years. But Catherine had one exactly like it. Only mine was red and hers was blue.

After I had that dream about the stone circle I started to have great but confusing dreams. I’d always taken my Indian guides for granted and assumed they would always be by my side. Now I was alone.

My sister-in-law who has a gift for knowing what to do in situations like this, suggested I read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and learn to draw. She bought a variety of pencils and drawing papers. I discovered what I’d long forgotten, that I can draw. That is, I could draw as a child, but had given it up and forgotten about it as a teenager.

I was suddenly taken by the desire to draw and set up a studio in the barn. Dreams were unrelenting now and I decided to draw the pictures that appeared in the night. Some students and a few faculty became interested and so did Catherine and I often had visitors in my studio barn.

This continued for two years. The third boy was born and things were going well, not bad that is, without my Indian helpers, but I was managing, just managing, to retain balance by painting my visions in the barn. There were flaming swords and many pictures and sculptures of a strange stick man with branches growing out of his head who I often dreamed of. These dreams were so rich and intense that they made the outside world pale by comparison. When I started to draw in the barn, I noticed the sheep and chickens would all get very quiet and become passive. One night I dreamed that the strange stick man climbed out of the stone circle. Then I discovered that other people had seen these pictures in dreams as well.

At a special exhibit of old Celtic manuscripts at the college, I happened to notice a figure just like the stick man, Chernunnus, he was called. He was considered a fore-father of the Green Man, the text said. I looked further and found drawings of other things I had drawn.

I began to understand that this was an ancestral force coming to the conscious mind. It could be nothing else. But I’d about lost interest in these ancient things as a new image was compelling my drawing and painting. I felt a strong desire, a compulsion, to draw snakes.

Catherine often visited the studio and stayed with the family for supper. When she moved to a city house from the country, she asked if she could leave her chickens with us, and we agreed, so she dropped off a chicken that the children named Magisto, the Flying Chicken, and two others.

This was a very special chicken, it turned out. It was a very small bantam, pure white, more like a dove than a chicken. What was special about her was that she liked to be picked up and pet by the children like a puppy or a kitten. The children loved to play with her and Magisto would rush out to see them when they arrived home from school. Magisto could also fly – only very small chickens can fly, ours could not – and he would fly up and light on the childrens’ shoulders. Catherine’s two other chickens were giants called Dominiques, beautiful black and white spotted birds that followed Magisto everywhere she went, one on one side, one on the other, like guard dogs.

But I wasn’t elated by the birds or anything else. And I knew what had sent my soul down beneath a funk for almost two years now that I could not retrieve it from. My mother had died almost three years earlier, and if a husband flows into the wife’s soul at child birth to some unsettling degree, so too when his mother dies, maybe his soul goes with her.

When my mother died, I died, and I could not get back. And that is what sent my soul to the Celtic netherland of flaming swords and Trees with the Eyes of God. I had no idea how I would get out or how I could survive there. And on top of that my wife was heavy with what would be our fourth child and, the tests told us, our first girl.

Snakes in the night, then snakes under water and snakes rising out of the water. These were the pictures I was compelled to paint in the barn while I ignored the demands of my family. The most vivid dream was of an ancient ship maybe a thousand years old coming into port but at a subway stop filled with water. I touched the old charred hull but found it to be fresh pitch. But then I had the most pleasant dream: I dreamed that I was standing in a river – the river of life and death, I knew – when a brightly colored snake, like a coral snake, flowed down the river. Everyone was afraid of the deadly coral snake and ran away, but I was not afraid. I knew it was not a coral snake but a milk snake, a gentle snake which disguises itself as a coral snake to fool its predators. I lifted it up out of the river, held it high and joyfully played with it.

One day just before the baby was born, I was standing in the corral with the sheep, leaning on the gate, thinking. Why don’t we name the baby Catherine, I thought to myself, like our friend? Just then my wife walked out of the house and came down to talk, not knowing what I’d been thinking.

“Do you know what I’ve been thinking?” she asked.

“What?” I answered.

“Why don’t we name the baby Catherine,” she said?

I was not surprised because things like that were happening all the time now.

“Your mother’s name was Catherine,” she said, “Did you know that?”

No, I answered, she was wrong. My mother’s name was Kathleen. I ought to know my mother’s name.

“No, you’re wrong,” she said, then she relayed an astonishing story.

Before my grandfather came over from Ireland he had been married to a woman named Catherine who had died in child birth. When my grandmother gave birth to my mother she named her Catherine and that was the name put on the birth certificate. Then, coming home from the hospital she recalled her husband’s first wife had been named Catherine and didn’t want to name her daughter after her husband’s first wife. So she scratched the name Catherine off the birth certificate and wrote in Kathleen. All my life my mother had been cheated out of her true name.

“How do you know this?” I asked my wife.

“Your sister learned it at your mother’s funeral,” she said.

Catherine was the name decided on for the baby and the other Catherine, our friend, was delighted.

Then a few weeks before the baby was born Catherine came to my office to tell about a dream she had had, the first and only time we talked about her dreams. She dreamed that Magisto, the white dove chicken, was carrying the soul of my mother to baby Catherine, who was about to be born, and as soon as the baby was born, Magisto would die.

That week baby Catherine was born. Mother-in-law and sister-in-law managed the house and family while I stayed at the hospital with mother and daughter. The only nuisance that occurred was the presence of a snake that had found its way into the house, which my sister-in-law kindly asked to have removed.

Magisto disappeared the following day. We never saw the bird again. Gotten by fox, coyote or hawk most likely. And I discovered the man’s joy of having a daughter and a love that transcends life and death. The boys are wonderful and I love them too, but as I was with my father, they are colleagues. They are my friends and equals. The love between a boy and his mother and a father and his daughter is exit and entrance to the world. The ancient ship that brings out the dead and brings in the living.

Maybe it is an Irish thing. Or maybe it is the dance of all life for all who have a mother.

The End of the World - intro to The Aquarian Mandala

Here we shall raise our children and be as little chickens under mother sheo's [Prairie hen's] wing. - from Black Elk Speaks

There has been a rash of scholarly books in recent years, like Cassandra here in Dr. Who, declaring the End Times (and millenialist spiritualist societies, like the Raelians above from an Economist article). In fact, it has become a small industry. As it is in the pop culture, the thinking man’s Mad Max or Bladerunner usually ascribes the imminent fall as a uniform failure throughout the entire culture, like the fall of the U.S.S.R. all at once, due to some virus that affects the entire body; liberalism, permissiveness or drugs.

The fairly recent of these is The Death of the West by conservative presidential candidate Pat Buchanon, presenting himself here as the working man’s Jacques Barzun. Spengler he ain’t, but his point is essentially the same as the mandarin-class fin de seicle scholars of the 1990s. This might be called a death archetype at work, and it has been apparent since the end of the Second World War. We always think we are going to die. There was a stock cartoon back in the 1950s in magazines like The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post which showed an itinerant non-denominational monk in beard and sandals walking down a street like Madison Ave. filled with business types, carrying a placard that read: The End Is Near. But perhaps it is as it is in dreams; a death dream means a rebirth.

It is a vague collective fear that something is dying. This is a vagueness that comes naturally to people, particularly those over 50, particularly men, so it should be cautioned that this could be a projection that death is being seen by one whose time is up or coming up, and he or she projects it onto the world around him. As comic Jackie Vernon once put it in one of his routines: he had an uncle who was always predicting that the world was coming to an end and for him it did.

But that which weakens one faction of the culture often strengthens another. And for a public prognosticator, it is less than responsible to predict the End of Days and not say why or how or what is dying and what will follow. Where many of the public pronouncements are particularly lacking is in the what; that is, in identifying what groups, classes and specifically what cultures will be affected in the impending doom. WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE! Is the general trend. This is an inherently silly view of old men for whom it hasn’t gone as they’d liked the last 20 years of so. Everybody dies.

This is important because societies, like the human body, are made up of component parts that are interdependent on each other and with component parts that are dependant on universal systems of the body. If the heart dies, all systems collapse. But if the appendix fails, it can usually be safely removed, and it has lost its overall historical function anyway. Then again, if an arm or leg is lost it doesn’t mean the entire body will give up the ghost. The function can be mechanically replicated or it can be done without.

The human body is a good analogy for cultural failure but not a great one. A family is a better one: If a father dies he may be replaced by a daughter, which could bring fundamental change to the family culture, maybe positive change, but not necessarily destruction. And that analogy is limited as well, as the larger human society is infinitely more complex. But that one is better because in a human society, when one component dies it often allows life to flourish in other components. Particularly in a culture as young and healthy as the United States and the Canadian provinces.

Often when a prognosticator sees death it is the death or the loss of function of his own particular class or social group. But death is a necessary ingredient for the long and continued life of the overall culture. When one force grows to strength it sends others into submission. And when the strong force dies, the submissive forces grow strong and flourish.

The classic novel and film Gone With the Wind illustrates. The film is often described as an account of an entire culture swept away by the Civil War. Very definitely a certain way of life was swept away and a certain class of people lost their function. The planter class, particularly those in Virginia, was swept away. These were English Anglicans who settled the Southern colonies and supplied the governing class from the last quarter of the 17^th century to the Civil War. They formed a Southern caste, in a land that was arranged in a strict caste system. (And in which religion did and does identify social class.)

After the Civil War it was largely over for the English planter class. Some moved to New England and some back to England. Their governance function was taken over by conquering Yankees, generally Presbyterians, who also assumed the roles of professionals. Their business function eventually yielded to the white yeoman farmers, largely Baptist, and eventually most, if not all governance would devolve to the Baptist.

In terms of cultural death, the only thing that was really gone with the wind when the Southern independence movement yielded to Yankee federalism was the function of the Southern upper class. Its historical time had already passed before the war and when it finally lost its function it liberated new forces such as those of the poor-white – the so-called Scotch-Irish - and the blacks who were kept impoverished and enslaved under the previous system.

America today is made up of component cultures interacting and feeding off one another, including religions, classes and national groups of social and generational identity. And there are overall cultural themes that pervade the country and the world; pop trends and identity themes.

The overall death predicted by some public prognosticators doesn’t appear to be the death of the whole culture, but a change in the culture as a whole. This may seem like death to components that are yielding, but others feel like they are just coming to life.

The black Pentecostal church, for example, is not dying in this milieu of ennui. Indeed, it glows and bringing health and strength to its churchgoers and to its regions, whether in rural Mississippi or in Detroit.

When we lived in the South, all our neighbors, both white and black, seem to have preserved a slight degree of healthy indifference to the rise and fall of the American condition and its globalist networks, in spite of the region’s overall acceptance of the Yankee management principles. The scholarly death cry comes from elsewhere. Perhaps because the South has found the amazing grace that accompanies utter failure; the seed of salvation that came with devastation in the Civil War. As C. Vann Woodward expressed it, “. . . Southern history, unlike American, includes large components of frustration, failure, and defeat. It includes not only an overwhelming military defeat but long decades of defeat in the provinces of economic, social, and political life. Such a heritage affords the Southern people no basis for delusion that there is nothing whatever that is beyond their power to accomplish.”

Southerners share this with the general run of mankind, Vann Woodward points out, but not with the rest of Americans.

Vann Woodward’s observation is more responsible than the Gone With the Wind prognostication and more mature. Everything dies and everything is born again. When the strong yields, the weak become strong and find their full life. When they reach their full expression, they will yield. There is no exception.

rough draft - The Aquarian Mandala

It is worthwhile to look at symmetries as they occur in history and not ignorIt e them or consider them random. The patterns of early Christianity bear looking into as they press westward from Christian Constantinople to empower Christian Rome and subsequently the secular and Protestant movement of northern Europe. The patterns they formed may be the patterns we will form.

Historian Edwin O. Reischauer points out that Japan’s rise to secular power in modern times matches that of northern Europe, and the two rose out of feudalism at the same period but were distinctly separate and unrelated to each other. Another symmetry: calculus, the tool by which the Enlightenment rose to materialization and the catalyst for the age of science was discovered in roughly the same period by mathematician Takakazu Seki Kowa in the East, as it was by Newton and Leibnitz in the West.

Today, we see a reversal of Kipling’s maxim: East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Now, East and West, like the recently-photographed galaxy known as IC2163, swinging counterclockwise past its celestial partner NGC2207, appear to be about to form into one unified solar system. Now they cannot be kept apart, and regional cultures like those in Calgary and Vancouver where populations are in the area of 50% Chinese and 50% Canadian Caucasian are in the avant garde of North American life. These cities bring together in harmony Asian and Victorian business and cultural ethics and eastern directions of Taoism and Buddhism. So too, Hindu thought finds its way gracefully into Canadian culture in Toronto and the middle Canadian cities, which have recently received a large number of Indian immigrants. One young filmmaker recently made a film about Lord Khrisna returning to earth as a hockey player. (But doesn’t The Great One already carry that spark which dances amongst the suns?)

It almost appears as if history was waiting for this moment to bring these two forces together in unity. An ancient spiritual force from the East and a new-to-history technical force in the West, as the Dalai Lama generally expressed it recently.

These two forces could not have come together at any other time in history. Nor could they have flowed together into a unique new culture at any place other than the North American continent. The “old souls” of the old world inhibit clear action and when change does occur, so often it merely consists of breakage of the old, as the new tradition of nihilism since the 1830s in Russia, simply breaks the past. Into pieces. But alienation also opens the West to a new future, and that unique but trecherous condition that deprives the American of ancestral lineage and psychological fullness of old world Asian, African and European, welcomes and rapidly adapts to new growth.

North America is the Aquarian continent, made up of all the world’s peoples, castes, races and religions, pouring freely in, as the water pours from the vessel of the Titan. And its epic tale, Huckelberry Finn, identifies the vortex, the Mississippi River. The water pours freely over the falls at Niagara to the sacred lakes of the Manitou, the Great Spirit, into Chicago thereabouts and down the Mississippi to where the Amish flourish, on to the sacred primal place of Elvis’ Graceland and out into the Gulf of Mexico.

The westward movement of the last century is matched now by an Eastern movement from Asia to the Pacific Coast in Canada as well as in the United States, creating vortex forces in, around and above the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. This effects all classes and castes that enter and changes their destiny forever. It is worth pointing out the Hindu text which says when you leave your homeland, and start from scratch.

Vancouver, with its Hong Kong cash, is developing as a Paris on the Pacific, but the life force also shows it’s power in the plain people. Jackie Chan, master of the karate opera, is to North America today what Jimmy Cagney was 80 years ago, and if Cagney represented the collective promise and optimism for the millions of immigrants who swarmed to Ellis Island from Europe and Ireland, Chan does the same for the large immigration from the East, who settle primarily as a new American influence to the west and the north of the Mississippi.

This is the Aquarian mandala, which will find creative energy in centuries ahead. This means the development and enrichment of regional cultures on the North American continent, forging one another, helping one another and hating one another; forming new dynamic relationships and creating a new world.

North Americans have more in common with other North Americans than they do with Europeans. This transcends caste and religion, which, in the U.S., have entirely different structures than in Europe and Asia. And it has been like this for a long time and even in the darkest days. W.J. Cash pointed out that the wealthy white woman of the South in the 19^t century had more in common with her black maid than she did with people out of the region. And Thomas Nelson Page, a popular Southern writer writing at the end of the Civil War, pointed out that the Southerner had more in common with his Yankee enemy than with foreigners.

Outside of academia, almost none default to Europeanism in America, particularly in the South and the Midwest. And people who live near the borders of Mexico or Canada share in those cultures in direct relation to the proximity of their borders.

These all three together, Canada, Mexico and the United States, make for the most dynamic singular cultural union in the world today. In terms of global action and passion, they are the center of the world as we enter the new millenium.

We come together in a federalist state. With federalism, everyone is equal, but no one is connected. This is the Hamiltonian model of federalism and it is singularly responsible for how we develop. Hamilton favored a vast, singular state with a central government to aid and abet industry and the business class. Thomas Jefferson envisioned instead a series of autonomous regions, each with their own provincial culture and life force. My prediction is that the Hamilton way is temporary, and once we are all here and found the place we like, we will stay here and grow here to our own Peoples, as Jefferson envisioned a free society. But we are not all here yet and will not be for another 100 years, and in that time, flow in capital, industry and people will come from the East. Then the regions will settle, find themselves, and begin to look inward to find themselves as new people in a new place. Till then, the Hamilton model is appropriate. And in the end, we will be an East/West nation and an East/West continent.

As Revelation closes the gate for one epoch which began its historical march in Constantinople, the Indian visionary opens a gate to the next. Here is Black Elk, in language like that of St. John: “The oldest one spoke again: ‘Your Grandfathers all over the world are having a council, and they have called you here to teach you.’ His voice was very kind, but I shook all over with fear now, for I knew that these were not old men, but the Powers of the World. And the first was the Power of the West; the second, of the North; the third, of the East; the fourth, of the South; the fifth, of the Sky; the sixth, of the Earth. I knew this, and was afraid, until the first Grandfather spoke again: “Behold them yonder where the sun goes down, the thunder beings! You shall see, and have from them my power; and they shall take you to the high and lonely center of the earth that you may see; even to the place where the sun continually shines, they shall take you there to understand.”

And here is Black Elk as the perennial guide – from Cooper to Kevin Cosner -- for the new arrival on this continent who has lost his orientation and is wandering with a sick soul in the desert of the new world: “And the Voice said: Give them now the flowering stick that they may flourish, and the sacred pipe that they may know the power that is peace, and the wing of the white giant that they may have endurance and face all winds with courage.”

The recent novel Cold Mountain with its Indian guide is representative of the journey to the Self as it unfolds here on what still is a new continent and in what is surely a new age. As Bunyan’s Christian pilgrim seeks a life of the highest integrity and moral perseverance in a world torn asunder in the 1600s, so Frazier speaks to us today. There are two Cold Mountains, one in China where Taoist sages and hermits have lived for ages, and one in North Carolina, considered sacred to Indians in those parts. At the beginning of the novel Frazier quotes the eighth century Taoist sages, Han shan: Men ask the way to Cold Mountain. Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail. It is a mandala novel; it begins with the character on the edge broken, and in a brief but perfect life he finds in the center, whole. And he finds wholeness and completion in the house of the Indian. It speaks well of the North American journey, a journey for all which is just beginning.

draft - The Thee Celestial Ones - intro.

It's okay to be a man. - Journals, Kurt Cobain

There is a Japanese wood cut of a famous 16^th century Zen Buddhist monk, viewing a rooster fight with rapt fascination, and if you have ever seen these animals go at it naturally in the woods or in the barn yard when they hit adolescence and fight to establish dominance, you can see the hypnotic effect. They still raise and fight these birds in the hills of Tennessee where it crosses into the mountains to Virginia and North Carolina, far from the gaze of those who would disapprove. We raised our kids in those parts.

I first saw roosters fight when our day-old chicks arrived at the post office from the mail order house 20 years ago. They arrived peeping in the box, one day old. We ordered a dozen Rhode Island Reds, docile egg layers, but received cocks by accident occasionally and once a game bird. They can be as tame as cats, allowing the children to pick them up and pet them like kittens.

Any rooster will fight if there is more than one and there are females around. Sometimes they will crow in a masculine way to express dominance over the other males, and if the cock’s crow is fierce enough, the other roosters won’t even bother to fight, but will simply submit to dominant rooster.

After that, the submissive ones never crow, unless something happens to the dominant rooster, like he is killed by a hawk. Then the strongest of the submissive roosters will take on the dominant rooster characteristics.

Once my dominant rooster, a Speckled Hamburg, proud and hyper-alert, white with black spots and reddish tints the color of autumn leaves – one of the most exquisitely beautiful animals I’d ever seen - had his crown and almost the entire back of his neck torn off by a coyote that had ravaged through the barn just before dawn. I knew by the extent of his injuries that he couldn’t possibly survive, but he strutted through the yard with his usual cockiness until noon with no sign of weakness, even looking for a fight, then found a quiet place under a piece of sheet rock to wait quietly for his death.

My friend Barr, who once lived as a Zen monk in Japan, died like that.

The submissive roosters even take on the behavior of the females sometimes, and try to sit on the eggs, like a broody hen. But usually they fight, and sometimes to the death. They circle one another slowly, intently staring, eye to eye, each ready to pounce, their cowls extended for the event in a perfect circle sticking straight out around their necks.

Then after a tense silence they pounce simultaneously, feathers flying and wings out, lifting them up off the ground, and flail at each other with their claws. It is usually over in a minute when one male establishes dominance over the other.

The focused, concentrated fight and the intense stillness that precedes it brings Zen to mind, as it was practiced by ancient Japanese Samurai swordsman. Zen monk D.T. Suzuki, writing not about roosters but about the silence of God says, “This sort of silence pervades all things Oriental. Woe unto those who take it for decadence and death, for they will be overwhelmed by an overwhelming outburst of activity out of the eternal silence.” It is the same silence and intensity which precedes a cock fight.

The swordsman class of ancient Japan exclusively chose Zen as its discipline, and the short, violent clash that follows the slow dance of the Samurai explains why: it is the most masculine of behavior in a spiritual discipline that is masculine to the core.

The Samurai tradition of Zen creates in the mind of the swordsman an ability to give up his fear of death and to face every battle thinking he will die. Only when he faces battle, like the rooster, unafraid and unthinking of his own death, will the swordsman find the ability to live with simplicity and clarity.

Samurai culture presents an exaggerated picture of the masculine force and presents in high relief the fear that most inhibits a man after he has left the womb and left his mother, the fear of death.

It is the fear of death that prevents him from finding fullness. And it is this fear that leads him to avoid risk, and to go instead to the middle ground, to middle management and to the middle class. To be, as we said in those parts of the South where we raised our kids, neither man nor master, but mid’lin.

The end of the millennium has brought Middle Man to the high water mark. Here in the Age of Information the binary matrix offers alternatives to the sword and the path to manhood of the Samurai. Archetypally, the prevalent dangerous myth in the computer culture most resembles the maze designed by the shaman Daedelus to hide the whereabouts of the Beast, so to ease the mind of King Minos. The maze creates an “alternative consciousness” for the King. So too middle man’s defector, the computer geek – and computer geek cults are almost exclusively defaulted male or man/boy types like the Lost Boys – projects his consciousness onto the computer screen and slays imaginable beasts, but none to match the bull within himself which is the one that is calling. The bull is the man calling the boy forth and if he is denied or circumvented the boy will not enter manhood.

There is no alternative. In the end, the computer man/boy lost in Daedelus’s maze is left behind when the age passes. To the defaulted man/boy of Computer World, information is not power, it is a distracting dance of light, distracting him from the fear that Lord Krishna instructs him to resist: the fear that prevents him from becoming himself. Better to go mad and die on the river like Mr. Kurtz.

At a college I worked at a few years ago an imaginative doctor at the teaching hospital observed over the years a difference in the reaction of his male and female patients before they went under the knife.

A man, he noticed, even for a trivial operation, often asked the doctor if he was going to die before he went under the anesthesia. The doctor began to take notes and tally these questions and he found that over 50% of the male population who entered surgery with him wanted to know if they were going to die. The number of occasions when the female population under similar circumstances asked that question? Zero.

I can well picture computer man/boy, his life extended behind a screen, being afraid to get out of there to face his death. But can you imagine Anwar Sadat who instinctively raised himself bolt-upright when he saw the gun man coming at him, and unflinchingly stood at attention to take the bullet in the chest? Can you imaging Walter Reuther, facing the federal agents and their armed goons about to fire on the Detroit factory workers, standing high on a wall in plain sight, pulling off his shirt and baring his chest, telling the thugs to fire the first shots here?

In the movie Gladiator, there is throughout the conspicuous use of the salute, “strength and honor” among the Roman soldiers and the gladiators, terms which recall both the Third Reich and the honor code of the officer class of the Confederates in the Civil War. With artistry by the director, Ridley Scott, and the masterful craftsmanship of actor Crowe, these human strains of personality are retrieved as if from a dark cave where no one should go, and retrieved for the general culture as virtues utterly needed by any human society, and particularly by the boy about to become a man in that society. These virtues are needed for the man or boy to pass successfully to the fullness of his adulthood, whether he aspires to be priest, pirate or panderer. Strength and honor, in an exaggerated and explosive masculine episode brought on the destruction of Europe. But without strength and honor there is no manhood, there is no balance, there is no dharma.

And it is not a guy thing, it is a cultural thing - a yang thing. When Hayley Wickenheiser led the Canadian woman’s hockey team to gold victory in the 2002 winter Olympics, head coach Daniele Sauvageau gathered the team around her after the victory for a final word on the virtues that would carry the women and their families through the difficult times in their lives. She said three words: Responsibility, Determination and Courage.

These are the Three Celestial Visitors.