The Ascent to the Sky Goddess!
Inanna with her storehouse generated by Kundalini rocket power
Revelation: All is in Eternal Motion, particle meeting wave
The Alchemy of Love: Chapter V opened on 23 January 2008 with my Writing Pauli’s January 23, 1938 dream in live performance.
Consciousness in Time and Space
By
Lisa Paul Streitfeld
In the dream I drew an oscillation process beneath the window – actually two oscillations, one beneath the other. By turning to the right from the curves, I try to see the time on the clock. But the clock is too high, so that doesn’t work. Then the dream continues. The ‘dark unknown woman’ appears. She is crying because she wants to write a book but cannot find a publisher for it. In this book there is apparently a great deal of material on time symbolism – e.g., how a period of time is constituted when certain symbols appear in it. And at the end of one page of the book, there are the following words, read aloud by the ‘voice’: ‘The definite hours have to be paid for with the definite life, the indefinite hours have to be paid for with the indefinite life.’”
On January 23, 1938 Wolfgang Pauli had the above dream. I located it in the appendix of a book, Atom and Archetype: The Pauli-Jung Letters 1932-1958, as I was preparing an art exhibition entitled Icons of the 21st Century.
The double oscillation is the symbol for Aquarius; and the unseen clock represents the unknown timing of the symbol’s emergence in the collective view (the window).
Like Pauli in the dream, we can no longer see time because time is no longer moving in a linear fashion. The voice is alluding to human destiny as the middle kingdom between heaven/earth as well as dream time/ mechanical time.
Like the woman in Pauli’s dream, I have been struggling to determine a “period of time from symbols” in 20 years of compulsive writing from the collective unconscious. The tumultuous journey began with a spontaneous eruption of kundalini that took place at my father’s funeral in 1983, and ended with a career as an art critic. In investigating new forms for the 21st century, I was intent on finding symbols in art which had erupted as visions in my creative writing. This personal quest had a universal aim: to determine what was this collective myth I was destined to live by the circumstances of my birth.
My father, clinical psychologist in the wave of Neo-Reichians, was at the forefront of the Human Potential Movement in the 1960’s. After a decade of experimentation, he exhausted the western approaches to consciousness-raising and gave up his worldly possessions to become a disciple of Swami Muktananda. By the end of the 1970s, he left the Oakland ashram to share his pioneering research into the kundalini. As a founder of the San Francisco Kundalini Clinic, he healed individuals whose psyches were torn asunder by eruptions of this energy, known in Hindu religion as the serpent power. At the time of his death he was involved in Raja yoga, the highest form of this discipline which attempts to bring the body and psyche into spiritual union.
My father was initiating me into the occult when he abruptly died of a heart attack. In comforting me at his funeral, one of his spiritual sisters — so elevated that she seemed to walk on air –– opened up my crown chakra. My life was hell for the following seven years as I bounced between the opposites of love and hate, an imbalance arising from the paradox that the only person who could have helped my condition was dead.
The only constant in my life was instability. As a journalist, I bounced between various cities and the fourth dimension with frequent out of body visions. I appealed to astrologers and psychics only to be told: “You are living out a collective myth.” None of them could tell me what it was. There didn’t seem to be any precedent for a father whose earthly departure ignited his daughter’s occult powers.
Ophiuchus, the 13th constellation, was the image of my father.
We need only look at a star map to see the figure wielding the serpent power, Ophiuchus, as the 13th constellation straddling the Galactic Center; personified in myth as a human figure riding a serpent. Linked to Quetzalcoatl, this figure reflects the human mastery of the serpent power that has been repressed by western religion for several millennia, and only accessed by masters in the east. Surrendering to this power is key to resurrecting the anima mundi that Pauli expected to uncover beneath the collapsing quantum wave.
The raising of the kundalini was key to the mystery traditions that held the divine feminine in high esteem as Sophia, goddess of wisdom. The feminine power is unseen but can be made conscious through behavior. The world became conscious this past summer as the antics of the tabloid queens in our celebrity obsessed culture seemed to compete for attention. The spiritual feminine arose in her dark guise so we acknowledge the potential of this energy pulsating through the body to wake us up and make us whole.
What does that wholeness look like?
In a 30-year correspondence with Carl Jung, Pauli expressed his belief that the hexagram is the form for the icon of the 21st century.
HIEROS GAMOS: January 23, 1997 in New York City
At 12:30 PM on January 23, 1997 a hexagram appeared in the heavens under a spectacular Jupiter/Uranus/Neptune alignment in Aquarius. Astrologers and metaphysicians declared this configuration as the gateway to the Age of Aquarius (gaiamind.com). Predating the Jewish religion, the hexagram, known as the Seal of Solomon, symbolizes the unity of masculine and feminine into the sacred marriage of opposites.
I was alerted to this configuration because it took place during my solar return. Three weeks later, I attended a historic San Francisco conference that brought astrologers and scientists together for the first time. The event was planned for the Jupiter/Uranus conjunction by the organizer, Richard Tarnas (Passion of the Western Mind; Cosmos & Psyche), who declared the Hieros Gamos as the icon of the 21st century.
With the ambition of constellating the archetype in the timing of astrology and the “sacred space” of the art gallery, I launched a series of actions on January 23 in the Lab Gallery of the Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington Avenue in midtown Manhattan to access the power of the emerging archetype in various artistic disciplines. The premiere year, 2005, was a dinner/spoken word performance with the legendary avant-garde critic/artist Richard Kostelanetz as guest of honor. Through spontaneous performance, three outstanding New York poets — Valery Oisteanu, Max Blagg and Edwin Torres — narrated the trajectory of 20th century Spoken Word to create a new language for the Hieros Gamos reflecting the integration of right/left brain.
The following year, I launched an exhibition investigating the iconography of the Hieros Gamos in contemporary art. Icons of the 21st Century consisted of 23 artists works and Laurel Jay Carpenter’s spectacular Red Woman, consisting of the artist in a stunning red velvet gown with a train formed by a 100 red dresses snaking into a spiral inside the gallery.
As postulated by Pauli, the window performance demonstrated the resurrection of Eros as fundamental to the emerging archetype. On January 23, I hosted a dinner with the gallery director Matt Semler in which I drew the clock and oscillation symbols from Pauli’s dream in the window and read the text. The rectangle symbol in the dream was manifested as the dinner table, representing the passage of the dream into the collective consciousness through the geometry of space. The unseen clock was marked in astrological time.
I identified with the “dark unseen woman” in Pauli’s dream who cried because she couldn’t get published. As the next January 23 project, I decided to launch a vehicle for immediate global publication. I invented a new form, the blogel (blog novel) that would enable me to publish as I write. This goal was to be achieved by the public transformation of the kundalini in the body evidenced by an integrated style of writing. The intent was to create a visual language reflecting the passage of the serpent through the chakras that approximated the seven stages of alchemy. For practical purposes, I reduced the stages to the four elements. The performance in the window was to be a public manifestation of Pauli’s dream in which he “drew a double oscillation beneath a window”. The double wave of the Aquarian symbol is reflected in the integration of conscious/unconscious in a holistic style of writing utilizing both sides of the brain.
The alchemical experiment was initiated with a ritual ceremony in the gallery. Under the Moon/Venus conjunction in Aquarius at 12:18 PM, January 20, a priestess established a sacred space to birth the Aquarian Age icon.
The second day of the writing performance was January 23. The entry FLAME: PAGE SIX presented the emerging icon of the Hieros Gamos in the context of the celebrity obsessed media dominated culture as the starting point for the alchemical journey. I spent the night on the bed in the gallery and published the entry at the moment of my solar return shortly after dawn on January 24 when there was a line-up of Aquarian planets (Sun, Mercury, Venus and Neptune) on the horizon. My astrological imprint for the year required delivering the face of the feminine to the collective consciousness.
The performance was to demonstrate how synchronicities regulates consciousness into time and space. I embarked on the first stage of the performance with a narrative arising from Pluto’s recent demotion from planet to asteroid. The intent was to remake the myth of Persephone’s “disappearance” as empowerment rather than victim. This reflected my disappearance into the collective unconscious resulting from my kundalini outbreak triggered at my father’s funeral.
During the year of performances, I plunged into the life/death cycle required by the successive stages of alchemy. While launched into AIR on September 24 I had forgotten all about Persephone when a gentleman from Liberia appeared at the window declaring I had created an African shrine with my 19 unpublished manuscripts arranged in the form of a pentacle. “I see us dancing together,” he said. He wanted to take me to Liberia as his wife. Persephone, whom I personally neglected, had imposed herself into the experiment through the arrival of a suitor from Africa. Liber is the stem of Libra, the planet ruling the opposites that Persephone was forced to live as wife of Pluto and daughter of Ceres.
This synchronicity infused me with the consciousness of my identity that subsequently released me from the control of the Persephone myth and freed me to experience the Aquarian icon of equal partnership. As I write this essay, the myth is entering the collective conscious under a Pluto/Jupiter line up on the Galactic Center (Dec 11, 2007) prior to the birth of the Sun at the Winter Solstice.
“Waterfall” by Tatanya Stepanova: Hieros Gamos performance, 23 January 2008
The final segment of the experiment was to take place on January 23, 2008. The centerpiece of the exhibition was an astrological mandola integrating the planetary line-up on January 23, 1997 and January 23, 2008 as the conception and birth of the Hieros Gamos. Day three, January 23, was commemorated with the final stage of birth through a collaborative performance in which the Full Moon in Leo makes a direct opposition to the Neptune/Mercury conjunction in Aquarius.
Tatyana Stepanova and Michael Manning, opposite sexes from opposite ends of the world, had the personal/mystical narratives of their painting alternatively projected on the wall while I spontaneously wrote in collaboration with the music of Lutz Rath. Meanwhile, Stepanova painted the eclipse of the Sun and Moon, while I engaged a visual/textual language for the Hieros Gamos. My body movements were intended to integrate mechanical and organic (definite/indefinite, as in Pauli’s dream) time as a response to the visual and sound impressions in their bodies. In other words, I took my automatic writing from the context of both journal and blogel, directly into the art gallery in rhythm to the music.
Pauli’s January 23, 1938 dream took place five days after the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris. Saturn, the timer, was at Zero degrees Aries, the exact degree of my rising sign. Seventy years after this message from the collective unconscious regarding the timing of the Age of Aquarius, the symbols are manifested in the window of a midtown Manhattan art gallery. The clock, the Aquarian glyph and the publication of time symbolism in writing instantaneously over the Internet represent the dawn of a new era in which mythical content of the collective unconscious is instantaneously made conscious through the World Wide Web.
This inquiry into consciousness in time and space moved me from the role of critic to performer. A dream of a departure from a science museum indicated the end of the experiment.
With that “window” of initiation, I was launched on a path of writing about artists who incorporate consciousness in time and space into their aesthetic. Ned Kahn is a MacArthur Fellow mapping energy patterns with interactive sculptures in public spaces. Choreographer Alan Good uses repetition and time symbolism to infuse the consciousness of memory into the body.
This bold new direction that art takes in the 21st century returns us to our ancient roots in shamanism. The creative act in time is an interpretation between worlds. My real time creative manifestation of Pauli’s dream established a middle path between definite and indefinite time as the sacred marriage between heaven and earth. By forging the third way between the opposites, the artist once again guides the culture as was done in ancient times when the priests determined the timing of sacred ceremonies by their knowledge of the stars. This was true too in the Italian Renaissance when Marselio Ficino inspired artists with his hermetic infusion of astrology into everyday life.
To bring the knowledge of 2012 into the body through everyday rituals establishes a process of an evolutionary consciousness in our lives. Daily acts of consciousness in time and space is how we can embrace the icon of the Hieros Gamos in our psyches. And here we have a tradeoff for our lives of consumption – to fill ourselves with the spirit of holism. It may seem like a minor accomplishment in the face of such grave challenges, yet multiply one raised consciousness by the potential millions hooked into the Internet and you have a collective leap into a New Paradigm of an interconnected universe.
Street art from Bucharest summing up the local reaction to the Bucharest Biennale.
With Osiris in Egypt
June 7 was a crucial date on my calendar The date of The Transit of Venus.
When I saw that the Open Center was having a pre-condrence tour to Cairo for the 2012 Esoteric Quest to Egypt, I immediately signed up.
That very day, I plunge\\d into the Isis and Osiris myth as a path of personal death and rebirth that is the subject of a new memoir, begun at the post-conference tour in Cyprus.
A lot of synchronicities turned up along the way, indicating I was living out my own life/death/rebirth journey of Isis/Osirus in preparation of a new life in academia.
Renee and Kevin of The New World’s Fair in solidarity with the Egyptian Revolution
The facade of the Temple at Sequora
Venus at her monthly conjunction to the Crescent Moon
the star flower of Egypt
Seqquora; Temple passage from one world to another
Cairo, Egypt
Dissolving into the Pyramid interior
Pyramids at Seqquora
Passage to the Afterlife!
the kundalini serpent in the hiergphyhs
And I was lucky too. The conference was originally planned for 2011 but didn’t take place because of the revolution and I was unable to attend last year because of my mother’s illness. Even so, turnout was much less expected due to fears of a new uprising.
These fears have caused tourism to drop 90 percent since the Revolution. For so long, I regretted not getting to the Pyramids before the masses of tourists, and here my dream came true. Imagine having an entire pyramid to yourself! That is how it was for us at the pre conference tour in Cairo.
In Cairo, I befriended the author Normandi Ellis and read her book Dreams of Osiris, a beautiful book interpreting the Egyptian Book of the Dead as a manner of living in a paradigm of the life/death/rebirth cycle, which I have been seeking in art since I became a professional critic at the turn of the millennia.
This immersion into Ellis’ writing was a revelation for me. I always had passed over Egyptian mythology to get to the historical origin of the sacred marriage, between the Tigris and Euphrates in ancient Sumer. Yet, our discussion revealed that while the ancient texts deciphered from cuneiform provide the pre-patriarchal/post-patriarchal path of death and rebirth of the feminine, they fail to relate the masculine story of death and rebirth.
When Inanna climbs her way out of the Underworld, through the portals of the monthly Moon/Venus conjunctions, she is told that she must send someone in her place. When she returns to her kingdom and confronts her partner, Dumuzi, sitting contently on the throne without her, she immediately sends him down. The story of Dumuzi’s escape has been translated but once he is caught, we miss the trail of his rebirth.
While staying in the grand old Cecil Hotel in Alexandria, I dreamed of being in a bathtub and picking up what I thought was my lover’s penis but was actually a piece of shit. Telling Normandi this dream as I sat beside her on the bus, led me into Osiris, and reading her book began to filter into my dreams and therefore the mythical path I will relate in this blog, and more fully in my memoir.
Here I share her e-mail sent in July.
Isis was Sirius and called Softhis. She pushes Osiris above the horizon and resurrects him as the constellation Orion, which we understand was connected with the ancient Egyptian New Year celebrated during the time of Leo (July 19 or so) when the Nile gushed forth fed by the monsoons then in Ethiopia and the melting ice that feed Lake Victoria to overflowing. And the exact southernmost source of the Nile was only found by German explorer Dr. Burkhart Woodpecker in 1937. It is a small bubbling spring in the hills of Burundi.
Isis has always been connected to Sirius and the Dog Star. Even the Dagon tribes know it was a double star system. The second star they attributed to the jackal god Anubis, whom Isis raised. So this IS her month. This is her birthday!
City of the Hieros Gamos; Pest as viewed from Buda.
I didn’t realize, when I got the last seat on the cheap flight from Cyprus to Budapest that I would be following Dracula’s trail.
My following Dracula’s footsteps through Budapest and to Bucharest coincided with the publication of Media-N-Journal, publishing the papers from the panel I co-chaired with Mina Cheon on “Magic and Media” at the CAA Los Angeles. My return to LA via Palm Springs prompted a full cycle return to my first review, Adam Ant published in Venice Magazine in 1994.
I recounted my personal Dracula experience through my Romanian father and the culture illuminated by the scholar Laurence Rickels’ insights from his illuminating book, The Vampire Lectures. I will excerpt some of my concluding paper here in order to illuminate this journey.
My favored hotel in Budapest, the brand new. Not only did Priceline get me four star hotel room for the amazing price of 75 dollars, they gave me an upgrade to a suite.
Budapest was stunning. I didn’t know that there are 110 springs under the city that made it a retreat for wealthy Europeans. I only know I felt the presence of the Goddess there.
Buda Castle
To honor my 28 year underground journey under the occasion of Venus rising while conjunct the asteroid Juno at 7 degrees Gemini in my natal chart, I walked up the hill to Buda and, quite spontaneously, entered the labyrinth under the castle.
The labyrinth under the Buda Castle
Stumbling upon the Dracula trail
My destination in the underground labyrinth: Dracula’s torture chamber under the Buda castle
Underground Imprisonment
Instruments of confinement
The power of confronting this symbol as an instrument of torture in the occult underground of the Buda castle brought me full circle through my journey to uncover the shadow through my literature and then recognize and interpret it in art — all so I wouldn’t have to make the encounter in a relationship that would imprison me.
The largest spa in Europe
Then, I took the night train to Romania. I never thought I would make it because the conductor kicked me off the train about 2 hours from Budapest, after insisting I pay a 50 euro fine for not filling in the date on my Eurorail. i took a train back to Budapest and got on the last train pulling out of the station — to Bucharest at 11:30 PM. How thrilled I was to see the sign of my destination, the land of my ancestors.
The sign outside the train window that I arrived in the land of my father’s ancestry which I always associated with the occult.
Passing through Transylvania, I marveled on how the people still live self-sufficiently so close to nature.
I made a reservation at the Green Frog Hostel, a short walk from the station. There Chrisitan greeted me and gave me a single room for the same price as a dorm bed.
There was external reflection of my passage to the hieros gamos on every street.
I must have come across about 12 brides posing for pictures with their gallant grooms!
Vlad, the original Dracula
The tour guide gave a graphic description of his preferred method of torture impaling.
An alter to Michael Jackson brought me full circle back to the panel, Rita Alves paper on Michael Jackson and the Horror Show.
In the days before the Winter Solstice 2011, I was fasting in a hut in the Laos jungle, and on the day of the Winter Solstice, a beautiful woman came and led me to a feast celebrating the birth of a child in the village, revealing how in touch Laos is with the annual cosmic cycle of death and rebirth!
The Aquarian Goddess embodied in the women from Laos…
A year later, it is clear that time I spent at the Vanvisa Waterfall, which I renamed Aquaria after my rebirth experience in the village.
I surrendered to the Aquaria at the Waterfall named after her…at the Vanvisa Healing Center outside Lupang Prabong in Laos. Here I am wearing the magnificent national costume of Laos made by Vandara, owner of the Waterfall at Vanvisa.
This year, I had the darkest Winter Solstice of my life, as I have been in Berlin, with diminishing light due to its location so far north on the European continent.
The view from my window in Berlin — Kunsthaus Tacheles. Originating as a department store, it became a Nazi torture center, and after the Wall fell, it transformed into an arts center. It was closed in September 2012, a month before I moved across the street, leaving it as a silent profound relic of the power of creative transformation for the New Berlin.
I have spent the past week on a semi-fast, channeling energy day and night, sending healing vibrations to Newton, a town I used to visit prior to meditation circles celebrating the Moon cycles in Danbury. From what I gathered from press reports, it seems that tragedy was the result of the repressed feminine energy blocking a conscious understanding of the cycles of life death and rebirth. Jose Arguelles never intended 2012 to be an apocalypse, but rather a massive change in orientation, where the polar opposites of masculine and feminine would finally come into balance.
This is due to the emergence of the bipolar Aquarian Age Goddess…who is EMBODIED under the yod configuration ruling the Winter Solstice 2012.
The Yod symbol forms the foundation of the Aquaria jewelry line channeled by Aquaria… The Y is in coral, representing both the Yod and Aries, surrounded by a Mandorla birth form, consisting of silver and bronze, integrating the symbolism of the Venus Transit on June 6, 2012 and the subsequent Moon/Venus conjunctions serving as Gates for the Embodiment. The six transparent strands represent the sacred marriage balance (six) of the Aquarian archetype.
However, the lasting effect of the world’s focus on December 21, 2012 and the focus on the Mayan mythology surrounding the Great Year beginning at the Sun’s alignment with the Galactic Center, a new understanding and appreciation for the cycles of life/death/rebirth. This is the basis of the paradigm shift from mechanistic linear thinking.
The New Beginning is reflected in this astrology chart for the Winter Solstice 2012 in Berlin, where I have been doing my final preparations for a New Beginning reflected in the chart below…
...which culminates with the Aries line-up for the Spring Equinox! It happens at dawn in New York City, where the Sun is ascending on the eastern horizon to join the Mars/Uranus conjunction reinforcing the power of personal initiative to make changes that will impact the world. The mystical power of the Yod configuration, which is like a cosmic tuning fork (shown in the green triangles in the charts), is balanced by the physical embodiment commanded by the Saturn and Pluto mutual reception. This means the change will be deep, at the structural (Saturn) collective body and soul (Pluto) level, and the Moon in Cancer opposing Pluto in its natal house means the feminine energy will take form in the culture!
This is going to be a wild three months!!
The cosmological configuration points to a massive change in the human vibration, providing access to a multidimensional reality, which means the quantum leap is finally happening in the mass consciousness.
The change is taking place on the cellular level, within the human DNA and our task is to make space for Her arrival…
The natural home for Aquaria — the transparent crystalline blue water of the Vanvisa Waterfall…
I am writing nonstop about the effects on The Venus Transit in art. An invitation to a mediation in Brussels resulted in a treasure trove of information. Directly under the influence in Paris, I submitted a post on the paradigm shift in Chelsea to Huffington Post.
The Transit of the Sun is truly revolutionary in Paris, with Uranus rising in Aries.
Information received causes one to reflect on what happened on a personal and collective level during the five horns of the pentacle in the seven year transit of Venus since the last, companion passage across the Sun on )8 June 2004.
