Monday, December 19, 2005

Barr Ashcraft, Vietnam War Correspondent, 1940-2005

When Barr first walked into my office in North Carolina it was like a vision out of Kipling. Like Peaches and Denny, coming out of the jungle, but bringing a sense of the jungle back with him. He was fully at home in the jungles of Southeast Asia and it was something we had in common. He was nervous, uncomfortable and out-of-place in town and city. He was a huge man with a white beard and he always wore a blue United Nations beret. He was donating his pictures to Wake Forest University as he was a devoted alumnus. Over 10,000 in all, pictures he had taken as a war correspondent in Vietnam and Indonesia. Pictures from Time, Life, Associated Press. I immediately remembered the dancing girls from Bali in National Geographic from 30 years before. We became fast friends.

Whenever he came back to North Carolina he always stayed at our house. He loved our kids and the kids loved him, as children love big, playful men and think of them as bear playmates. I knew this was a new experience to him, as when my daughter was born Barr happened to be in the North Carolina hospital that day giving a talk to the trauma center about death and dying on a massive scale. This occation was of course more auspicious. I asked Barr to come up and see my wife and up he came, blue beret hat in hand. He had a deep, hoarse voice and when we took Catherine, about six hours old, and put her in his hands, she craddled in his palms.

"So that's what a baby looks like," he said.

Every year or so we got together in a Chinese restaurant in Amherst, Massachusetts, near where he lived and invariably we talked about Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. We had both been called to war and Barr went readily. I felt he never calmed down from the excitment. Like the rest of the elite photo corp in Vietnam, he was used to daily danger and I believe he thrived on it. But Barr was the consumate artist, and like every real artist, the child had managed to survive into adulthood intact and came forth with strength and playfullness. The soldiers of the South Vietnamese army were barely children and the playfullness showed in their faces. But it would quickly turn to terror as machine guns riddled the helicopters they were riding to battle. From the photographs, Barr always seemed oblivious to the bullets. It was the smiles, the joy and the terror - the faces of the young soldiers that his camera caught. I'd seen him focus when he was behind the camera, like he was suddenly alone and oblivious to present company and his surroundings. He was, perhaps, from many of his photos I'd seen of the most intense conflict, like those soldiers who are impercious to the dangers of battle. Intent instead and focused on his craft.

Last time we shared a meal we talked of Thailand and Vietnam. The war, the joy, the marketplace, the shamans at night and fortunetellers in the French city squares, the magicians with snakes and cobras which entertained the night crowd, the wary eyes of Buddhist monks in safron robes, the children always playing, always running, always kidding around with the Round Eyes, especially playful with a big bear-like man such as Barr.

One of my smaller children had asked that day what Paradise was. The park in the French Quarters at night and the children, even in wartime. That was Paradise. Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia. That was paradise, Barr considered. I shall miss him.
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Sunday, December 18, 2005

Zen Quilting: Why I Love Indiana

Quilting (a mandala-making art), done classically, as the Amish do it and as it is done by great non-Amish quilters is perhaps the essense of zen in America. Poor quilting shows individual expression, the opposite of zen. Like Samurai swordsmanship, zen quilting is work done in the creative unconscious (D.T. Suzuki’s expression). The conditions of “emptiness” and “nothingness” as zen has come to be understood suggests nihilism to the Westerner and makes extroverts and existentialists feel that they should be doing something (productive). But it is not nihilism. To the Japanese practitioner, emptiness is the gateway to the world of the Great Self, indigenous deities, multiple levels of consciousness, space/time convergences and the Tao, the “Way of the Force." “. . . the Emptiness,” writes Suzuki, “which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir . . . of infinite possibilities.” That perfectly describes the quiet vision of this quilt. To the Westerner, it is only blank, or worse. The Japanese Zen monk Suzuki taught a spate at Columbia and zen became a fashion among the beatnik poets and pranksters in the 1950s. Later, he was blamed for misunderstandings which his work aroused in the West. But if he is to be blamed for anything, says his colleague, scholar Edward Conze, it is an insufficient awareness of the aridity of the desert into which he had transplanted his lovely azalea tree. “For what he unsuspectingly did was to feed an Eastern form of spirituality into a predominantly ex-Protestant environment which, having lost touch with spiritual tradition, gravitated inevitably toward a self-assertive nihilism,” writes Conze in his introduction to Suzuki’s book, On Indian Mahayana Buddhism. This Amish quilt from Indiana is an American original. It is interesting that the Amish disappeared in Germany from whence they came. But they continue to flourish in America. I visit occationally to buy sheep. Worth noting that they flourish in our center: at the line across the states which divides North From South, in Pennsylvania and Ohio particularly, and in Indiana, which now divides East and West. The center of the Four Corners, North, South, East and West; the American Vortex.
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Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Sleep

Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper. - Willa Cather

To discuss Freedom is to Be Free. Likewise, to discuss Torture, is to enter Slavery. America is an Awakening land, an Enlightenment culture and the Land of the Free. One day we will again be a slave culture. But not today. Those who bring up the topic of torture for discussion (they seem to favor life in the LA newspaper) will soon descend to the Hole of Shame and Nothingness from which they have come sputtering forth. Consider that their life force was not, never was, can never be, strong enough to get a purchase in the Land of the Free. Instead, at Christmas feel the Joy of the Season and consider only this until January 6: Will Dr. House end up with Dr. Cuddy? ‘Tis a no brainer: The Marriage of Logos and Eros. The question is not if but when. This season or next? Coming after Christmas: The Three Celestial Ones - from Notes from the Land of the Dead, in progress. Other quiet and introverted adventures from the same work-in-progress: The Aquarian Mandala - East meets West in Chicago and the Lakes Region, The Death of the Earth Mother, on the death of my mother, The Return of the Earth Mother, on the birth of my daughter, Notes on Dreams, including the all important chi factor of who you are and where you dream, and Waiting for Arnold. Madame Blavatsky predicted that California would be conduit to the East and would Awaken a new age in the West. But is Arnold the Aquarian?

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How the Witch Came to New England: Intro. to The Three Sisters, in progress, Notes from The Land of The Dead


“ . . . if you go to the mountains, the Granddaughters [the Sisters] will come visit you.” – dream of auburn and yellow hills in late October, 1994 thereabouts . . . voices of women singing.

There is none so good a description of the wood spirit known throughout Celtic, British and Gaelic lands as the Green Man as that given to Tom Bombadil, Master of the Forest and guide to Hobbits, whose “thick brown hair was crowned with autumn leaves.”

“Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless – before the Dark Lord came from Outside.”

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings restores in part the northern European Original Myths: It was the Green Man evoked by the Son of Herne who would inspire Robin Hood to return to the forest, and it was he who was the primary Earth God to the Knights Templar, but his legacy precedes that. The image of the Green Man appears among sun wheels, the cross within the circle, and traces back into prehistory to the period of the Druids. Green Man faces carved into the oldest cathedrals throughout England, Scotland and France, like this one photographed by Nigel Rushbrook of a church in Kent, invariably show an intense visage covered with vines.

The archetypal spirits or deities of early Europe, not only found their way into the Christian church, but also found their way across the Atlantic Ocean with the early settlers. The carol, Jesus the Apple Tree, penned here in New Hampshire by an early settler combines the ancient archetype of the Green Man with Christ, the Son, and it is still sung today in Episcopal churches on Christmas Eve.

But the Green Man’s legacy is only that of consort to the essential deity of ancient Britain and the Celtic lands, the White Goddess, Albion, whose holy place was sovereign from Ireland to France up until the 12th century. Just in the last few years archaeologists have uncovered the most ancient of British temples at Stanford Drew which even precedes Stonehenge, and contain three archaeological circles. The three rings represent the Triple Goddess, much like the three-in-one masculine god concept adopted by the Christian church.

Sometimes, when someone dreams of six men or six women (or when six graves are presented in a folk tale, as in The Lone Ranger) it represents to the dreamer the Three with their dual faces (Emily Bronte and Charlotte Bronte are Dual Faces of one entity) for a totality of six. The Three Men and the Three Women with their dual faces represent the totality of human consciousness going Outward and Inward; the 12 signs of the zodiac, six female and six male.

The Triple Goddess (by Raphael Stanzio here) represents the three phases of the moon, said to be the three phases of the goddess's historical reign; first is the white phase of the new moon, the maiden goddess, well documented in Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, then the rose phase, full moon, representing the full ripeness of the moon, and finally the dark blue, the waning moon, representing death, the end of the reign of the Goddess Mother. These, incidentally are the colors of the French flag and the tricolor flown during the French Revolution, as the French devotion to the Divine Mother surpassed even that of the Irish and the British. The western European cathedrals of the mediaeval period are filled with archetypes of the Earth Mother or the White Goddess, just as they are filled with visages of the Green Man.

It could be said that the 12th century European cathedrals represent a phase of Earth Mother culture that brings the goddess to high culture status, and the rose glass of Note Dame – Our Mother – called the “greatest Mandela in the world” by Aldous Huxley – represents the rose period of Earth Mother culture, the high noon mark; the rose glass, with its three feminine portals beneath (the Triple Goddess), representing the full moon. If so, surely, the centuries later to follow after the Black Death and the trials of the 14th century so eloquently described by Barbara Tuchman in her book, The Distant Mirror, would represent the dark blue, the passing moon and the Death of the Mother. The death of nature.

Visages of the Green Man, usually carvings of a staring man’s face covered with vines can be found in Tibetan art, in Hindu lore and in other places in the East. Likewise, the Triple Goddess is timeless as well. This most fabulous of paintings at the top, from the University of Michigan’s Art collection, The Descent of the River Ganges, perfectly presents the Triple Goddess of British antiquity with her spirit elements, the curing and creative falling waters and the moon. Yet it was painted anonymously only in 1943 in India.

The demise of the Earth Mother in Europe also has correlation in the East. Just as Europe was failing in the 14th Century, the world entered the Age of Kali, the age of the Death Mother, the Destroyer, according to Hindu lore. We are still there.

As an archetype, the constellation of the Triple Goddess appears throughout western history and is prominent today in the pop culture. It is just the opposite of the Three Celestial males (this blog, January next, 2006). The Three Celestial Ones, as they are called in Taoism, invariable appear to urge a man to bring something from the Unconscious world to the conscious world, as the Three Visitors sent Abraham into the world of the ancient Hebrew to activate a new phase of tribal Semitic awakening, to bring a new public stage in the development of Judaism.

The Three Women always do the opposite. They always send the agent to the Inner Life. They appear in dreams or in folk lore, and they may appear as well in a person’s life. This Dali portrait, Portrait of Mrs. Isabel Styer-Tas, 1945, shows the dual nature of the yin archetype - to the left is the earth mound of the Earth Goddess, on the right, her everyday life manifestation, Mrs. Styler-Tas. Notice the pendant Mrs. Styler-Tas wears, of the same earth materials of the Earth Mother. The Earth Goddess contains a bit of Mrs. Styler-Tas as well, and she is composed of tradition Taoist elements of yielding earth and flowing water, like the Mona Lisa and most of the earliest portraits of the Madonna. Mrs. Styler-Tas looks left and Inward to her as Whistler's Mother looks felt of frame to crated nature in frame. As a young man, C. G. Jung, for example, traveled into the occult in séances held with his mother and two aunties. Ireland’s last distinguished mystic poet, William Butler Yeats, was accompanied on his deathbed by his three “widows,” Lady Dorothy Wellesley, Edith Shackleton Heald and Mrs. W.B. Yeats. Salvador Dali found the nature of the Three Sisters in many of his works, and in this one has them between worlds; the everyday and the Unconscious, appropriately holding the string between the two (and between the ancient world and the contemporary world).

Shakespeare’s Three Weird Sisters sit by a crystal ball, and look inward, as do the Three Crones. The Three Graces, muses to the Greeks, always send the poet inward. They are always holding a sphere of one sort or another, representing a circle, the symbol of the feminine, the Psyche, the wholeness of time in the Inner Life. The three Rhine Maidens, are a good example, they point to chunks of gold – psychic truths - which light up the Rhine river bottom, representative of the Unconscious Mind. (Beware, Siegfried – the Extraverted Warrior - cannot go there, but Loki, the Introverted Trickster, can).

In the Druid and pagan period, the circular object is a drum, as the drum is said to represent the heart beat – the mother’s heartbeat; the sound heard exclusively in the mother's womb before birth. Just as the African’s drum does today and the consistent base beat of disco did in the 1970s and 80s. (Reflecting on disco, when it was first the rage, one reveler said, “It’s just like my mother’s heart beat.”)

The crystal ball is consistently at hand with the Three Crones, and occasionally it is an eye – one eye shared by three blind sisters. In wisdom, the three inward-looking sisters are invariably ancient, as females as well as males only acquire wisdom when they lose ego, which passes with age when the sex hormones, which drives and fuels the ego, deplete.

Perhaps the most eloquent circle of the Three Sisters is the spinning wheel. (Virgin with Spinning Wheel here, 1420)

The TV series Hercules at the turn of the millennium had a nice episode where our hero’s life was hanging by a thread, which was being spun on an old spinning wheel by three females; a young girl, a mother and an old wise woman (the usual phrase crone is a canard in a power-based culture which despises wisdom). This is a classic exposition is the wheel of life and emanates from the Triple Goddess. On Olympus the most powerful of the minor gods and goddesses were Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, the Goddesses of Destiny; Clotho spun the thread, Lachesis measured the length of thread, and Atropos cut it at death.

So too, the rose glasses on the early cathedral windows are the spinning wheels of the Three Sisters.

The Triple Goddess made it across the Atlantic Ocean as did the Green Man, but she seemed none to happy. My town, Haverhill, New Hampshire, is typical of old New England towns. Founded in 1763, there was a stone well, a yin symbol in the center of the Town Common and the main houses were composed around it. It has since been replaced by a flag pole and an American flag, a yang symbol. The stone well, hand carved out of massive granite stones, has been moved to the side a few houses down and no longer has any bearings on the proportions of the Town Common and its yin symmetry, and instead countervails the harmonies, leaving the beautiful Federalist houses surrounding the Common out-of-synch with their organic yin center and neurotic and out-of-balance with a superimposed yang center. I find this to be the same in all the towns up here which have Town Commons. A Common, by its nature is yin, not yang.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had the artist’s gift for finding the archetype, presented the Triple Goddess as a witch mother in one of the earliest and most perceptive of New England stories, The Hollow of the Three Hills, during, “… those strange old times, when fantastic dreams and madmen’s reveries were realized among the actual circumstances of life.” That would be the 1690s thereabouts; the witch hunts.

His story is about a young woman who had a vision of an old witch or a crone, “ancient and meanly dressed, of ill-favored aspect, as so withered, shrunken and decrepit, that even the space since she began to decay must have exceeded the ordinary term of human existence.”

She appears where, “Three little hills stood near each other, and down in the midst of them sunk a hollow basin, almost mathematically circular, two or three hundred feet in breadth, and of such depth that a stately cedar might but just be visible above the sides.”

As three pyramids clearly represent three males, this is a perfect rendition of the archetype of the Triple Goddess; three earth mounds and a perfect circle drawing inward, like a crystal ball.

It should be noted that it is the Dark Mother in this story that made it across the ocean to New England (no doubt it was her witchy handwork which motivated the clergy and the juries at the famous Salem trials). Nathanial Hawthorne says it is a life force from the spirit world which has always been here. But perhaps the Puritans brought it. Those high-minded early New England settlers were big on concepts and religious fanaticism, but unable to farm enough food to keep themselves from starving to death. It is still here. We feel it here in the mountains, a shadow chi, a negative chi.

They tried to ban Christmas, the Puritans. Maybe it is that witch spirit which today prevents Boston area politicians from being able to properly route traffic, coordinate transportation or generally help you find your way around the region.

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Tuesday, December 13, 2005

The Three Sisters, pt 2 ( . . . in progress, Notes from the Land of the Dead)

. . . I had to look hard to see her face . . . the closest realist face, under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom of my memory. - Willa Catha, My Ántonia

The Christmas wreath, a natural circle, represents the Mother on her day, the Winter Solstice. Another expression of the Triple Goddess occurs during the Civil War period and much of it is set at the warm glow of the hearth at the Christmas season. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is a virtual biography of the Three Women archetype. The novel is set at a time when millions of impoverished immigrants were pouring into Boston slums to work in sweat shops and cotton mills, and the city was cursed with cholera and child labor. But the sisters are high minded, living for love and full relationships in family and extended family and finding charity and creativity in work. The mother is the backbone of the family, developing moral goodness and inner beauty in the girls through natural law and innate qualities of character.

Natural Religion we used to call it in New England. It is a most auspicious portent for the Yankee and its moral sensibility evolved out of the Transcendentalist Movement, as the author was the daughter of Bronson Alcott, who, with Emerson and Thoreau, was one of the three High Elves of the Concord group. Louisa’s home, where the two greatest of New England poets were frequent visitors, might have been be considered the center of the Transcendentalist wheel.

Musical girl groups usually come in threes; The Andrew Sisters, The Lennon Sisters, The Supremes, The Dixie Chicks, The Mandrell Sisters. But the archetype of the Three Women more or less disappeared from the culture during the rise of federalism after the Civil War. It was as if she was frozen out of time during America’s climb to power and the ascent of corporatism to national dominance after the Civil War.

Like James McNeill Whistler’s painting of his mother immobilized in the chair, Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 (1871), her gaze resolutely fixed on the past. In the early Western tradition Mary is usually on the left, facing right, like classical portraiture, which carries the eye from the left front of the picture to the right rear and in the positive (linear) direction of future time, like the direction of the math arrow for positive numbers (and the “Darwin” fish on cars). In the Mona Lisa, painted when Leonardo returned to Florence in the year 1500, the artist turns the tide, facing the woman instead to the left of frame and removing her from her baby. Hans Holbein’s Portrait of Dorothea Kannengiesser presents an even more doleful example of the woman without her charge and looking left of frame in 1516. 350 years later, the woman is very old and facing dead left, the direction of the Inner Life as Whistler’s mother ( like the direction of the math arrow for minus and the “Jesus” fish). – suggesting past time and the looking into the Unconscious, now very far away and in a crate “nature” is in a tiny frame in the upper corner This change accompanies the rise of the Renaissance and the ascent of the Power Principle. All organic artists naturally understand this. Composition of paintings like described is the same as the composition of dreams and the composition of classic movies, such as Akira Kirosawa’s Dreams, Throne of Blood and The Seven Samurai, all of which yield to this kind of explication.

At the turn of the century and up into the 1950s, respected Western authors and literary figures consistently presented an image of women as desiccated or gone mad. A critical position accuses these artists of creating dark images of women by a misogynist power driven culture. I think there is truth to that. But the archetypal point of view has it that the artist lives in a different realm of creativity. As it is in Zen, the true artist doesn’t create anything. S/he merely sees what is there. This amounts to the same thing. Power despises love and builds its own edifice. The artist is much like the Paul Klee’s image of the man in the front of the boat, spear in hand, following down a murky river, peering into the unknown. This picture speaks masterfully of any and all journeys into the unconsicous, whether artist, musician or dreamer. Klee shows no intention but seeks to presents what is there - and see tht the Unconscious (the water) is light in the artist's vision, the everyday dark..

What these artists saw growing into the 20th century was the paralyzing Death Mother, Kali the Destroyer, in her finest hour. Abstract Expressionist William de Kooning offers Kali in his “Woman” series of the post-war 1940s and early 1950s. The Death Mother, rising from the unconscious “deep” was ready for her close-up in 1956 in the Japanese classic Gojira, directed by Inoshiro Honda, distributed in the West as Godzilla, King of the Monsters (in the 1998 remake, the “king” had babies. Godzilla is the dark side of the Lady in the Lake archetype, the original vision of Earth Mother in Britannia.)

Early in the century, Thomas Mann saw the European yin and yang as the burgher and the insane female (the exact reversal of the Madonna and Child), and Allen Ginsburg presented the mad woman in his poem Howl in the 1950s. Norman Mailer addressed modern times in the 1950s with a column in The Village Voice, contrasted the avant garde man as a psychoanalyst, and the woman as a prostitute. And his novel An American Dream presented the protagonist’s love interest as a whore as well.

A vivid image of woman relieved of all healthy and positive psychic content is found in Earnest Hemingway’s short story, After the Storm. Hemingway, perfect master of loss and chronicler of the crippling inabilities of men who live without women, has his protagonist rowing a skiff after a storm to ward off a hangover. He finds an ocean liner has sunk unnoticed during the storm. Swimming underwater into the “unconscious” of the ocean and peering into the ship’s port hole, he sees his anima, or his female nature; his Psyche beneath the sea. It is a dead woman staring out at him, her hair floating lightly in the blue lagoon on the other side of the glass.

These shattered and debased feminine images echo widely today in pop culture - Snoop Dog, Tupak Shapur and Dr. Dre. Marilyn Manson and Alice Cooper project a Kali anima. The slimy creature who uses Lt. Ripley’s ovaries to produce her own nest in the Alien series is the Great Mother of all Kali figures, finding her place in space. This is an Aquarian turning point. The beast is born of Ripley but Ripley kills the beast and saves the Earth. With Ripley, the Earth Mother begins her return to earth and generally speaking, the culture will return with her. But as she says, she is herself a stranger to Earth - her true nature. She is a “new” person, born in space and part alien.

In the Sixties the sleeping woman awakened. There is today a small industry making worthy and worthwhile claims for her resurrection, but the forty million of my age will recall Her first primal cry as if she was the same woman in Hemingway’s port hole who was not dead but had only been underwater holding her breath in the Havana lagoon for the past 50 years and now in the summer of 1967 she came roaring to the surface in the San Francisco ballrooms, the Avalon and the Fillmore, where she was given this breathless and coarse reintroduction to the world: “ . . . four gentlemen and one great, great broad . . .” It was Janis Joplin, egging on her men (“C’mon, boys!”), Big Brother and the Holding Company. (Like Princess Amidala, Janis, “queen of the hippies,” came with a double; Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane fame.)

And shortly thereafter, the Three Little Women left behind in Concord at the Civil War would reassemble on the far shore of the continent as elder counselors to a girl who had lost her sisters. They are the three aunties who play mah jong in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. (As in Little Women, there is a fourth woman who dies, linking the three living aunties to the land of the dead.) The girl herself is miraculously reunited with her two sisters by the elders’ intervention and by a magical talisman; a single feather from a magical animal, a duck that stretched its neck to become a swan, brought from China to America years before by her mother. (The swan is evoked again as an agent of transition in Jung Chang’s astonishing tale of three women, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, published in 1991.)

The circle of love and family broken in a hundred years of civil strife, global war and the threat of nuclear annihilation is restored by a single swan feather. And the three sisters live again in Taipei in Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman (1994). Later, Lee will free the feet of women bound in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

It is interesting that in Willa Cather's masterpiece, My Ántonia, a "three sisters" American story like no other by an American writer like no other, the two "sisters" Tiny and Lena both find their way to San Fransisco as well, while Ántonia remains to farm on the Prairie. Written in 1918, the book is a vision of America as it wakens in the West, but the critical view of the rising Progressives (in the East) would send Cather into remission for almost a 100-year sleep. Possibly the best American novelist, she is barely taught in University, which is still under the shadow of attitutes of pre-war America and - out of sync with the rest of America - still looks to Europe and to Europeans for initiative and imagination. It is interesting that at the end of the novel Ántonia would abandon the English language for that which her family brougth from Prague.

Today The Three Women are everywhere. In archetypal characterizations, all celestial or other-worldly forms including aliens, primordial beings, Titans, superheroes, demi-gods and goddesses, are psychological entities -- archetypes -- in different forms. That includes angels, as in the three Charlie’s Angels.

Xena, the warrior princess with her circular chakrum, was a run-away pop-star at the end of the millennium and one episode actually featured her in triplicate. The episode in which Xena was supposedly reformed from beating people up came when she was banished to China and found her muse, a serene, graceful, older woman, but a mother, not a crone, who taught her the secrets of the Inner Life. The source of this new wisdom, the book quoted throughout the episode was clearly the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tsu’s classic on yielding power which provided backbone to most post-Vedic Asian religions.

The final episode of Xena: Warrior Princess is an extravaganza Hong Kong-style karate opera with flying samurai, spirit women and monsters from the underworld. Xena is crucified (for at least the second time) and beheaded but in death she lives in the “Dark World” united with her spirit guide where she continues her battles.

There was also a new TV show in the late 1990s called Charmed, in which three young women in San Francisco evoked the magical power of the feminine – good witches, if you will. Their symbol was a three-part Celtic pagan design, which traditionally represents the Triple Goddess. Another followed called Three Sisters.

And the goddess was in the air, as young Jakob Dylan’s Three Marlenas (“. . . see no, speak no, hear no evil about us,”) became a popular hit. Unique among these new groups was Ulali, formed in 1987, a First Nations women a cappella trio that sings in the many styles and languages of their ancestors in the western hemisphere (with language which resembles Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil, a characterization of the Green Man: “We are older than America can ever be and do not know the borders,” they sing. “Our brothers and sisters run from North to South and into and under the waters for miles and years back.”)

Today, Berkeley, California restaurateur Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, who pioneered the idea of a seasonal approach to dining on food produced by local farmers of food grown, harvested and brought to market by people who practice sustainable, organic agriculture, embodies the spirit of the Earth Mother restored to her natural, healthy condition. I find it interesting that prominently displayed under the dome in the Capital in Washington, D.C. is a statue of the Three Sisters archetype, featuring suffrage pioneers Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, while in the heart of China at Tiananmen Square, there is a statue of the three men, the Three Celestial Ones (see this blog on the Three Celestial Ones, in January, 2006).

In astrological terms, earth and water are signs of the feminine, while air and fire are male signs. Invariably, the Mother was associated with the Earth when devotion was strong. You can see this in the oldest church paintings: Mary is an almost yogic figure, pictured in a cave or a stable and surrounded by low hills and quiet paths of water. This is one of the latest, in 15th century Italy by Sassetta, but still carries the Taoist, quiet, Earth Mother theme.

This changes at the beginning of the Renaissance and instead, Jesus is presented as central, and he is often in the sky, the masculine field. Increasingly, as Renaissance culture progresses, the action of church frescos and painting leaves the Earth and takes place in the Sky. Mary is presented later in the Renaissance frescoes in the sky, but there she is a secondary figure. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is among the very last pictures to present a Madonna-like portrait in a context of earth and flowing water, and that is the last of the Earth Mother in European art during the Christian period.

What is noteworthy about the famous Leonardo picture, in actuality the portrait of a local governor’s wife, is that the picture resembles the long tradition of the Madonna and child motif of Mary and the baby Jesus, but the boy child is missing from the picture. The Madonna/boy child traditionally expressed a Christian tai chi motif, bringing in the yin and yang elements into the early Christian world as they had played through history from the ancient days of the Earth Mother (White Goddess and her Star Child, born annually on the Winter Solstice) to the Renaissance.

When the White Goddess governed the heart of the European, the yin dominated the energy and the yang was left in boyhood or infancy, submissive to the yin. This is virtually the psychological history of the European until the end of the Medieval period. In the Mona Lisa Leonardo presents the Madonna left alone without her charge as the Power Principle ascended into the Renaissance, the yin force of the Earth Mother removed from the ascending yang. An alchemist and a devotee of the Earth Mother who worked on commission from an aggressive imperial Pope beginning Europe’s march across the world, starting with the nearby Islamic regions, Leonardo adds a malevolent aspect in a similar portrait classically modeled on Virgin and Child, but with a weasel in the place of the child (Lady with an Ermine).

Michelangelo’s journals show that he fully embrased the warrior’s challenge presented to him by the imperial Pope. On the Sistene Chapel he would present Jesus in strong and naked masculinity, with Mary scorned and virtually cast aside with the Christ almost in disgust. He is alone now and without the yin force, rising into the sky, yang without yin, expressing the separation that would be characteristic of the next 500 years - the separation of son from mother and the separation of Christian from the Earth. From this moment on out, the European would be marked by detachment, disassociation, psychological division and schizophrenia.

Michelangelo's sculpture called The Bruges Madonna (1504) represents an extraordinary turning point in Western history. It shows the babe grown to boy releasing from his mother’s grasp and wrestling his way to the ground. In his journals, Michelangelo clearly states that the boy child is ready to accept his duty and take his place in the world. In the confluence of commissioned images that came from Michelangelo and Leonardo at this time there is no ambiguity of public purpose. This was the moment in history when Columbus had just set sail for the Spice Islands and Michelangelo and Leonardo’s own benefactor, Julius II, the “warrior pope” was setting out to recover papal lands.

In Catholic Churches throughout the world today, Mary is pictured high in the sky as a giant standing on the world, a globe about the size of a basketball. Beneath her feet is a snake, generally a black snake. It is pictured as a dead snake. This is the female energy of the Earth Mother left behind when the church and European civilization embraced the rational and the masculine outlook and moved toward the Power Principle.

But the snake is not dead. It cannot die, because if the snake dies, the world dies. Janis Joplin was first evidence that the snake beneath the feet of the Blessed Mother was still alive. It is worth noting and it is significant, that the Janis uprising took place in San Francisco, the same home of Amy Tan’s Three Aunties.

The Earth Mother lives wherever there are low hills, quiet water and quiet hearts, but on the West Coast, she has brought a new awakening that will have historic consequences for the American continent and for the world. Perhaps as in the Xena series and in Amy Tan’s novels this spirit force will come from the East. Madame Blavatsky made this claim that it would over 100 years ago.

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