This vision was too bleak. Was that the way you saw the world? No wonder you had thought I stuck out like a sore thumb. Even now in my loathing of my heart’s stopping-place, at its current space-time junction, I was still aware. Despite my suffering, my thinking faculty progressed. With such little Light left in me, the best that I could do was to invoke the power of life to bring about the evolution of the species. It was a meek prayer from my dying hope. I doubted that it could ever be granted.
The months went on and spring was approaching. My anger subsided and I became numb, my inner tides became paralysed and my emotions dead. What should I do next? How could I love again? How could I forget the pain? Would there ever again be someone like you? Did you really get me out of your mind? Why weren’t those moments of bliss we shared eternal? How could I bring it all back? Was there really a Life Force and did it really join us at all?
Matt Norman provided the answer to all of these questions. He was the only person I allowed near me in the months following our separation and my miscarriage. I had met him a year earlier at a TV show; we had ended up sitting on the same sofa in the green room. At the time, I remember thinking how pretty he looked, with his turned up nose and blue Bambi-eyes. He was adorable and scruffy in a rock’n’roll way. His stiff upper lip English accent was in sharp contrast with his street-credibility attire and raucous, cigarette-smoky voice. I didn’t fall in love with him back then simply because I was still madly in love with you. But we had got talking. Matt had been keen to discuss the powers that are latent in humanity, and the possibility of evolving into more fully-fledged beings. With his wit, knowledge and physical attractiveness, I had realised that he was a valid candidate for the work I was soon to unravel at the Transformation Centre. So I had invited him to one of the pilot workshops we would be holding in Lady Honour’s castle. He had agreed to join us the following month.
Matt had started his work with the transformative properties of harmonious sound on the cells of the organism, developing a system of modes and rhythms aimed at raising the frequency in the listener’s body. At the same time, he had produced an album that contained the fruits of his labours. It had gone to number one halfway around the world on the day of its release. The time was right for the wave of evolution channelled by his music. I was becoming enthralled by his charms, I admit it. But I had never thought of him in a romantic light. That was up until almost a month to the day after I lost our baby.
That night he slept in the guest room of my apartment, to make sure I was okay. Of course I still wasn’t. I sobbed for most of the night and must have looked like a zombie, my eyes had sunken so much that they looked like craters. Matt must have heard my noise. He knocked on the door of my bedroom. My weeping didn’t stop when I heard him enter. He sat on the edge of my bed. Like you had many times before, he started caressing my head. The soothing sound of a lullaby came from his lips, hummed almost in a whisper. He continued for a while, till I had no more tears left and surrendered my agony to the arms of sleep.
That night he lay beside me, fully clothed, with his arms wrapped around me. In my slumber I could feel a grounding, peaceful energy surrounding my heart. When I woke up he was fast asleep, still in his jeans and t-shirt, next to me. He looked like a child. I remembered the tragedy of the month before. My hand on my womb still felt the void therein. There was no bridge to connect you and me anymore. Our baby had died. Her spirit was lingering somewhere else, far away from me, far away from the parents we couldn’t be, far away from the lovers we weren’t anymore. Matt sensed me moving and opened his eyes. For half a second he didn’t know where he was.
“Thank you, Matt,” I said.
“Don’t mention it, Cax. How are you feeling now? Are you still in pain?”
I realised that I was hurting. Death had passed through me and I bore the mark of its visit.
“I’m okay. Just very weak and shaken. My whole life is in complete chaos. But these dark clouds will pass. Peace will return. I am not going to give into fear. I am strong...”
My hand moved as if by its own volition to his face.
“... But I need your help...”
I wanted to stop it but it continued imperturbably on its trail.
“... I need your company...”
My index finger came to a halt on his cheek.
“... at least for a little while...”
I started to caress him with the tip of my finger, afraid of rejection, afraid that my touch would disturb him, or hurt him, or hurt me. What if my gesture were to irrevocably impact the boundaries between us? I wanted to remove it but my hand was moving of its own accord. There was nothing I could do, especially when Matt held it with both of his hands to keep it on his face. He closed his eyes and I let his love slip into my petrified heart, bringing a bright ray of Light to the darkness that had descended upon it. I was a mess, I looked like a mess and I felt like one too. Yet Matt kissed me softly, as if to taste my pain, dipping his toes in the water of my devastated soul. He was in love with me. He had been from the second we met. His smile pulled me towards him as he caressed my hair, just like he had done the night before when I was in despair. We stayed in sweet abandonment for a while, watching serenity return to my days without you. I may have been heart-broken but someone still loved me. My heart was coming apart at the seams but Matt would help me keep it together.
* * * *
Matt Norman was the first of the substitutes we sent to Cassandra, to replace the place where Oscar had stood in the Plan. Matt’s presence was a development we had not envisaged but one that we had to quickly invent. The Plan was engrained in her heart, and in order to be projected to the outside world, her heart needed to be whole, to be healed. To nurture the Plan, while Cassandra was still hurting, she needed an injection of love from the outside, to support her in the aftermath of the first of Oscar’s many betrayals. Because of their Sacred Marriage, there was an inversion of roles; Oscar had become the happy one with the magical powers and a strong, albeit ego-driven self-centred mind. Cassandra was now the self-doubting, hurt-generating half of the couple. With his love, Mat could remind her of her past and the person she had been and had lost. He could point her back Home if she paid enough attention. In a similar way, Charlotte reminded Oscar of his future, and where he was heading if he paid heed to what she stood for.
On the outside, it looked like Oscar was winning over Cassandra. Neither realised what was going on. But their inversion of roles was causing a tear in the seams of the Plan. Unity had been rejected in favour of separation. Oscar was now the leading character in the events that symbolised greater dynamics in action at the level of potentiality. While his frequency was broadcasting a stronger signal than Cassandra’s, his bipolar mind ran the risk of giving rise to the manifestation of a schizophrenic vision. We feared that he would become easy prey to the lures of the Dark Side, which had kept a close eye on him since his first encounter with Cassandra, pretty much as we had. The world was troubled and out of balance, and on the edge of some despicable catastrophe.
Charlotte was happy. She moved in with Oscar within a week of their first sexual encounter. She had found an opening in his heart that Cassandra had previously attended to with great devotion. Charlotte entered through his wound and convinced him that his anger, suffering and self-loathing were his true nature, and what ultimately made him special and different from the rest of the world. She fed his ego with a new diet of flattery and self-indulgence. Oscar wasn’t too sure about this new woman who had catapulted herself into his life. His mind was oscillating between seeing her as a blessing and a hindrance. But she was good in bed and sucked his cock in the most delicious way, he thought. She looked like Cassandra, if somewhat artificially. She lacked the natural grace Cassandra had. But at least Charlotte lacked that zealous obsession of his ex for trying to improve everyone who crossed her path. He had come to loathe that. Oscar was tired of trying to be his best. He couldn’t do it well enough and keep the momentum up. He hated to admit that he resente
d Cassandra’s extra-human powers. He wanted to prove to her that she wasn’t so strong after all. That’s why he had ended up hitting her where it would hurt her the most: in the sacred temple of their relationship.
Chapter 11
THE WEDGE BETWEEN US
______________
Dublin, spring 1999, part 1
I was the ghost of my former self. My powers had deserted me, as had the majority of my followers. Most of the Transformation Centres had closed down. Times were not ripe for the world to change yet. I was starting to get my head around it. I was just a guinea pig whose short-lived transmutation had been a dress-rehearsal for what humanity had in store in decades to come. I had failed because I had loved too deeply. But I was also a survivor. Matt’s presence in my life had aided my partial recovery. He was a gentle lover and a supportive partner. All the healing I had benefited from was of his making. He helped me avoid madness. My life was now occupied by music: I had become his muse.
You loved Charlotte now, it seemed. She and I had already crossed paths two years previously, at the last open event Lady Honour staged before her death. Many people were gathered in the April sun, wearing colourful long robes and intricate headdresses. I was in a white dress and gold chocker, and had a henna tattoo on my arm: a snake that circled around it like a bracelet. My hair was braided and a golden ribbon graced my forehead. The audience was made up of followers of the Goddess Ways. The celebration was advertised at the grass-roots level and only those in the know could find out about it. It was a rendezvous to re-enact the Isis Mysteries symbolised by Easter.
Charlotte had come out of the blue, uninvited. She seemed eager to become one of the adepts. We met in the Castle’s courtyard. In her introductory conversation, she quoted a number of authors she had read in the field of esotericism and self-development. She came across as pleasant if somewhat insignificant. Yet there was something thieving in her aura. She kept asking about you. Was she an energy vampire, one who feeds on other people’s feelings? The other participants didn’t notice. They thought she was young and as such she was enthusiastic and naive. Her curiosity for secret knowledge had not yet developed into something more fully-fledged. By the time the meeting was coming to an end, I became sure that Charlotte was one of your groupies. Before we had become an item, you were used to the favours and pleasures they bestowed on you. You reformed when you fell in love with me, up until that time in Oslo and everything that followed.
In Pinkleton Castle I feared that the man I had met and loved was reverting to his old Casanova ways. Was this girl one of your latest conquests? And why was she trying to befriend me? But worrying was not for highly evolved beings. So I shook the thought from my mind and went on to guide a meditation. I didn’t see Charlotte again until an unfortunate day in early 1999.
* * * *
Charlotte’s connection to Robert Harker was no news to us. Since duality still reigned on Earth and the Plan wasn’t fully in place, the Dark Side was bound to have come up with a remedy for Cassandra’s influence on the evolution of humanity. When the two women met in Pinkelton Castle, the only person who figured out what was really happening was Lady Honour. She understood it was a message from the Goddess, the enactment of events to come. Charlotte stood for the old ways and Cassandra for the new world. As prophesised by many traditions, and like all other messiahs before her, Cassandra was going to be betrayed by the one she loved the most. But she was a female messiah, an Italian she-Buddha: the story would take a more tragic-romantic turn. She was invincible so she couldn’t be attacked directly. Her lover, however, was her weak and vulnerable spot.
The Goddess was working her symbols through our girl according to the Isis myth. As an open channel to divine energy, Cassandra was ever ready to pick up signals from the Earth. That happened easily in Pinkleton Castle, which lies on a very important ley-line, the Mother Line. This geomantic nerve carries the frequency of the Divine Feminine principle of the enlightened woman. It is also known as the Mary Line, Magdalene Line, or ‘Rose’ Line. It runs across Ireland and culminates in the sacred site of Uisneach. As a Star Woman, Cassandra’s energy resonated with the frequency of Divine Femininity. She was often walking along the Rose in the sacred land of Ireland. Many important events of her life took place at important nodes of this line, where it crosses other ley-lines.
The Earth Grid is a system of energy conduits that run across the globe. Ancient cultures are acquainted with this network. Some Native American traditions call it the ‘web of the Spider Woman’. Native Australians follow the grid they inherited from the Dreamtime in their walkabouts. We use it to travel across space and time through the vortexes generated by the ley-lines. The Earth is a sacred Being capable of the most awe-inspiring feelings. She is an egg gestating itself. Just like Cassandra, the Earth was preparing for the birth of her own higher re-invention. She was becoming the Garden of Eden. She was aligning herself with Shambhala.
The Plan was about the rising of the Divine Feminine principle to meet the Divine Masculine principle in Sacred Marriage. Ireland was a map of the Plan for those who knew how to read it. The Emerald Island was also a symbol of the human body. They ley-lines that intersected were like meridians in a body, and their main nodes were like the chakras. Ireland’s heart chakra was at Uisneach. Human bodies had lost the abilities and powers bestowed upon them by Creation, and the Earth had forgotten its True Origin. The Plan was about bringing about collective remembrance, reconnecting all disjointed parts. Although the frequency on the Earth was low, the Plan and the ley-lines could still function as a map for those of us who had mastered matter and had ascended into our fully developed Light-Bodies.
Lady Honour understood that Cassandra represented the true Rose Line and Charlotte stood for its exoteric, false counterpart. The fact that the two girls met implied that there was a leakage in the Earth Grid where the Dark Side could filter in. The tear in the Plan was symbolised by Oscar’s rejection of Cassandra and all she stood for. That’s what it looked like from the outside. The deeper meaning was that the Male Principle, necessary to fertilise the Sacred Marriage, had gone astray. Perhaps it had come too soon. Perhaps it lacked the stamina. One thing was sure: high time for evolution had not come yet.
The two women had met on Easter day, the day that derives its name from the great Goddess Eostra, Light-bearer and symbol of female fertility. It is no coincidence that the symbol of Easter is the egg, while the name of the Goddess and the festivity also refer to the female hormone, estrogen. Cassandra and Charlotte’s encounter signalled a time of fertility, of conception. The Divine Feminine doesn’t need to be fertilised, as it is already whole. But the Divine Masculine needs to turn itself into a purified vessel capable of receiving the Feminine Principle. For humanity to become divine again, men would have to learn to accept and embrace the Divine Feminine, the Goddess. The fertilisation that either Cassandra or Charlotte would bring about would be Oscar’s transformation. He could either become an enlightened or a darkened soul. The first instance would result in humanity commencing a process of evolution back to the Source, back to the egg, back to its origin. However, if he refused the Goddess in favour of his lowest instincts, the whole race would be cursed. The two women stood for Oscar’s choice. As usual, he was in two minds and two diametrically opposite situations had manifested.
* * * *
Even with Matt firmly planted into my life and his open-handed love to sustain me, I still suffered the loss of my true love and I continued missing you. I didn’t talk about it. I tried to squeeze the thought of you down to the back of my mind, in a corner where it would go unnoticed and hopefully forgotten. I pushed the wound you left me with to that forgotten corner too. Despite all my efforts to avoid it, I had become a slave to the pain you had left me with. I found some solace wandering around the city where we both lived, walking along the ley-lines under its surface.
The streets of downtown Dublin have names that point to the energy that runs below them: Mary Stree
t, Queen Street and Dame Street are all pulsating centres of Goddess energy; King Street, George’s Street and St Michael’s Close are conduits of the Divine Masculine. The Alchemical Marriage is mapped out on the tarmac. You and I are forever married. Your about-face on the sacredness of our Union couldn’t wipe the Truth away. In its finest hour, our merge as man and woman was wrapped in holiness. We used to bless each other after sexual union, sure in the knowledge that we were treading on sacred ground.
You taught me that Irish mythology revolves around the act of marriage between the Goddess and the tribe, based upon the selection of the rightful king at Tara. Sacred kingdom requires sacred marriage of the Divine Feminine with the Divine Masculine. The symbol heralding such glorious happening is the most famous of Tara’s monuments: the Lia Fáil, or “Stone of Destiny.” For a brief moment, you were the High King I had joined with. Tara of the Kings was everywhere we went together. But the dream had now collapsed and the sacred Hill was deserted. I couldn’t go back on my own. Perhaps the day would come when we could return to the Hill together. Not yet, though. So I kept my eyes on the pavement and tried to ignore Tara’s call.
The Spring Equinox was approaching. I was now thirty-one and reckoned it was time I should stop suffering. Premature sunshine shone on the city that March. I needed the joys of the new spring-time. I wanted to leave the previous year behind me. Time for a fresh start. My relationship with Matt was now consolidated and in the public media. I wasn’t in love with him but in need of him. We had a tacit acknowledgment not to probe too deeply into my feelings. Our rapport was more intellectual than physical. The alchemy of our relationship was slightly out of balance but it proved it had stamina.
Being English, Matt didn’t know Ireland very well. He lived in London’s Primrose Hill among the beautiful crowd of actors, musicians and models. He was more at home in a modern art museum than at a secret site, and more interested in the cultural sophistication of my native country, Italy, than the rugged beauty of my adopted nation. He kept insisting that I should move to London rather than continue living in the place where I ran the risk of running into you. Remarkably, it had been five months since our split and never once during that time did we bump into each other. I was protected from you by the wound you had left me with. Love had brought us together; a hurt was keeping us apart.
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