“You are; I have a headache. But I have to say Mary Magdalene’s last name is a probable link.”
Pietro leaned back and took a long drink of water while counting the number of strikes in the hallway grandfather clock, twelve . . . If Armando, of all people, can put this together, this would indicate human thought really is advancing, which I have observed since the 1970s.
Armando wanted to summarize all Pietro had shared thus far after he refreshed their water.
“I think I can do it if I construct my own timeline by going back to the beginning indicated by our family crest,” Armando began in a determined voice. “If I go back to 17,000 years ago and then come forward, I can make sense of what you say. So, Father, up there on our ceiling we have the snake circle that I always thought was a fat green python eating itself when I was a kid, but actually it is the 26,000-year star cycle. Our symbol, the swan, is taking off in flight 17,000 years ago. Then after 2,000 years, 15,000 years ago, human knowledge began to deteriorate. Two thousand more years passed, and around 13,000 years ago there was a series of terrible disasters that culminated 11,500 years ago, when we were nearly destroyed by something that blasted through the solar system, the Fall of Atlantis. After the Fall, our species went through a terrible survival period for around 5,000–6,000 years, and then cultures developed around the world that built pyramids and standing stones. We’ve had 5,000 years of the evolution of complex cities, and now everything is going faster and faster; we are on the verge of destroying the Earth because we are so damaged.” Armando looked up to see a look of utter shock mixed with exhilaration on his father’s face, as if he was going to cry and laugh at the same time!
“My God, Armando, I never thought you’d put it all together. You really are ready for the story of time. You will be able to convey it to your children. Bravo!”
“You can’t imagine what this evening means to me, father. I have always wanted to have your respect, yet I never thought I would. I was so horribly perverted that I couldn’t hear you.” Armando’s eyes glazed over with milky tears.
Pietro took Armando’s hand, peering through the wet film into his dark brown eyes, depths of passion rarely found in any man’s eyes. “You’ve gotten beyond it; I always hoped you would. I couldn’t share our knowledge with you because knowledge is power; yet, not sharing would cut the ancestral cord. Before I finish with some thoughts about the long past, would you like me to share my feelings about what happened to you? Can you handle that? We haven’t talked about it.”
Pietro’s suggestion pierced Armando’s chest because he was still barely able to talk about it himself. Sharing it with William had been his only relief since he’d stopped seeing Lorenzo. What does my father want to say? “It’s a good idea, I’ll handle it as best I can. I had a talk about it with William a few months ago, and we’ve bonded since then. Slowly, I’m getting over it. Nobody knows what this pain and shame feels like unless it happened to them.” Pietro wondered at this remark but decided to keep his focus on his son.
“Very well, Armando, good. Your grandfather passed me the records when I was seventeen because he knew he was soon going to die young. Knowing so much so soon has not been easy, yet it made me think deeply about all these phases of time. My great delight has been watching the alternative researchers find pieces of the story and put them together for the general public. But as we’ve discussed, those times were horrific. The question is, do those memories affect us now? What if these horrific experiences are stored in our DNA, in our racial memory, and in our past-life memories—traumas set to go off like bombs when Aquarius comes in?
“Atavism—sexual abuse, murder, and cannibalism—are reversions to the survival period. As we awaken, there is a huge increase in atavistic behavior, such as with ISIS, madmen murdering people in the streets, and pedophilia. As the Aquarian energies arrive, dark energy lurking deep in people’s souls from the survival period triggers them, and antipsychotic drugs explode pockets of pain in people who then go mad. This is the critical nature of our wake-up process right now. War, abuse, and ecological destruction are exploding the repressed pain in our minds and bodies, the darkness obscuring our souls. We have to heal our inner darkness to attain the next stage of evolution—humans as peaceful beings—just as you have, Armando. This is why I admire you more than anyone I’ve ever known. You are a model for what we each must do now. I am very proud of you. I think your paintings are helping people handle the Aquarian dark night of the soul as the light permeates our cells. You have real courage, son.”
Armando’s tears flowed and his nose ran; his father’s approval was what he needed the most. “You have just explained to me why this priestly abuse happened to me—atavism! Not having a reason for why he did that to me impaled me; the evil in Father Cesare’s eyes paralyzed me. Claudia believes the Church is a delivery system for the dark forces, the reason she could forgive me. You will never know the things I did to her.” He glanced up at his father but his haunted eyes were too much for Pietro, who looked away.
“Armando, I can’t hear it; I’m sorry. It hurt me more than you will ever know. The lust for power sucked the dark forces into the Church when having too much power dredged up the deeply suppressed urges lurking in the survival memories. I see signs of it all over the place, the bizarre panicked looks in the eyes of world leaders on occasion, like when Tony Blair supported Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Be that as it may, the Aquarian Age is to be egalitarian, so that we can find our way out of this conundrum by sharing power. Power in the hands of the few is atavistic; in the hands of many, ecstatic. What matters to me is you have done it, faced your darkness. You were filled with exquisite light as a child, and then you got slammed down. But you found your way back, and soon you will probably have your own children. If you do, then I will know we are going to survive. Swan Wisdom is very complex and requires astronomical information that requires going into the galaxy, so we must let the details wait for another night.
“Check out some of these ideas with your group of friends and by reading more. Let’s get together when you have absorbed the cataclysmic story. Meanwhile, I want to ask a favor of you. A few Medici descendents who control the Medici chapels are my old friends, and I’d like them to see your painting. May I show it to them?”
“Absolutely, go ahead and ask them to come here because I brought it from Rome to have it with me this summer because it haunts me. Show it to them and let me know what they say. Jen and I want to go to Majorca for the last two weeks of July, so you will have the privacy to show it to them then.”
20
Goddess Rituals
On a hot and humid late-July afternoon, the Tiber reeked of rotting fish, garbage, and gasoline carried by a south wind through the Trastevere. Claudia sniffed the air on the patio and decided to have dinner inside; tonight was to be special.
Lorenzo puttered around in the library thinking about David Appel’s session while thumbing through Claudia’s books. After a while, he went to the window to gaze at the steamy garden still feeling the potent otherworldly vibrations that had permeated his office during his session with David. His session was very genuine because he accessed the personal side of Gaudí, not a swoon with the famous artistic persona.
Mulling over what dimension Gaudí came from when he sat down to dine with Claudia, he barely heard her voice echoing in his mind while sucking a piquant fresh mussel. He took a big bite of delicious linguini, chased it with red wine, then sprinkled Parmesan cheese on another squishy mussel and forked it. Ah, a clitoris in one delicious bite. Pouring red table wine from Umbria for herself, she was studying his thoughtful and distracted face.
“You really have something on your mind tonight. Do you know what day this is? A year ago today was when we realized we were falling in love!”
“I think you are right,” he replied turning his full attention on her. “Yet, for me, it’s as if you’ve always been with me. I can’t imagine a day without your beautiful eyes.”
&nb
sp; “I was not always with you, yet I can’t remember when you weren’t here.” She stared at him thinking he didn’t really know very much about her at all. He didn’t even seem to be much aware that she was having some difficulty adjusting to a new home.
“Well, now we are here together,” he said while enjoying the look of moistness and high color in her face brought out by being in the hot kitchen. “You are making me so happy in my home. I don’t want to make the mistake I made before, that is to miss knowing you deeply. My work does distract me, but that’s no excuse, whether I have a lot on my mind or not. A few days ago, a new client accessed a formidable and moving past life in my office that I keep turning over in my mind. Having experiences like that with unusual clients is my joy; it amazes me to see where they go, but you are my love. Well, I should share more about my work. When a client accesses a powerful persona, I’m reminded of the unseen depths within each one of us, the deep archetypal realms that churn our bowels. Yet, most of us show a guarded mask to the world, especially when we are older. Eventually, we just die, our stories forever untold, really how sad. I heard a lot about you in your twenties from Armando. Nevertheless, I have no accurate sense of the young Claudia. Who were you, Claudia, in your twenties, when you had a long love affair with an intense and disturbed young man? Who was that Claudia? What did she feel?”
A wave of alarm coursed through her nervous system, a mild panic. However, when she looked at his empathic face, she knew he sincerely wanted to know her better. Regardless of what he wanted to know, that part of her life was in a box she’d covered with a black cloth and hid in the back of the closet with the mice and spiders. Who was I? Is any of the young Claudia left? If not, where did she go? “Well, ah,” she stammered while forking a mussel that squirted juice on her hand. “Armando and I had an esoteric bond. We performed spiritual practices to influence reality. You are a Jungian analyst, so you probably can imagine what we did and why. In your language, we became archetypes—a man and woman parlaying roles back and forth in a long slow sexual dance. We, ah, well, Armando was the male deity and I was the goddess to neutralize the asceticism and misogyny that rots the Church.”
“Claudia,” he broke in. “I must make sure I understand you. Are you talking about having sacred sex to reach divine levels—hieros gamos?”
“Yes, and I’m thinking about what I really want to say to you about it, since it’s hard to find the right words for something so experiential. You’re not judgmental, and your education in these matters must be profound, since these experiences fascinated Carl Jung. Talking about it with you could be good, yet I do feel cynical and slightly embarrassed after all these years. How could I have believed we affected those desiccated old fools in the Vatican? Once I left Armando, I forgot about what we did. As I think about it now, we conjured forces that coursed intensely through us both as gods and goddesses. It was ecstatic and mind bending, might be one of the reasons Armando is such a great painter. Yet, it became increasingly disturbing to me when lower frequencies came in that were lustful and potentially possessive.
“I’m very strong and kept the darker forces at bay, but poor Armando got dragged down lower and lower; it was horrible watching him degenerate. Our day-to-day personal relationship did not grow or deepen while we experienced every form of sex ever dreamed of by the human race. But, sex became intense and addictive, and I began to feel crazy. I felt like I’d walked into the wrong room, the door locked behind me, and my soul threw the key into the Tiber. Armando was losing himself; possibly he was using the rituals to block his repressed memories? And it wasn’t just us, Lorenzo. We were a group of initiates exploring these realities. There was always a priest or two, usually a Jesuit. I’m sure that seems unbelievable, but for us, nothing was worse than the Church getting more power, since papal infallibility terrified all of us. Once the Church pushed its agenda that far, they terminated their personal responsibility. They were acting like gods.”
“Some clarity,” Lorenzo broke in again. “You’re saying that as the Church became power mad, sexually abusive, greedy, and claimed total access to the divine, your group carried out sex rituals that were designed to break them down?”
“Exactly.”
“Do you now feel you were breaking them down, even though you just said you feel cynical, foolish to think you could make a difference?”
“Maybe we did actually affect them because we were so creative, the fun part. We made great theater with costumes and great masks, that’s what I liked. We role-played: for example, a sexy woman would seduce a pope or a cardinal played by Armando. We played games in the Doria Pamphili Casino, and then we went through the inner door into the tunnel to the cave. It was very stimulating, very hot, and I think maybe the person we were targeting did feel our projections. I have to admit I’ve often wondered whether that’s what took down Ratzinger, since as far as I know the group still carries on.”
“Cave? This took place in a cave? Where?” She could be right about Ratzinger’s abdication, an extremely peculiar event.
“You’ve heard rumors about it I’m sure, rumors about the Black Mass in caves below the Vatican? They’re true! We believed we were awakening the goddess.”
“Well . . .” Lorenzo pondered as he ran various speculations about the rituals through his mind. “In ancient Greece and earlier, what you describe was religion—the ecstatic and orgiastic Mysteries of Dionysius—the reverse of how things are now. And, this practice can be detected way back in the mists of time. To hear it goes on now is not surprising, but I do wonder about its efficacy in modern times. That is, long ago when all the people believed in hieros gamos, they fertilized their fields with sexual intercourse and menstrual blood, sometimes even sacrificial blood. They believed this helped the plants grow; however, now, few people believe that. Could doing it really make a difference in a culture that does not support it?”
She broke in heatedly because the wine going to her head made her feel contentious. “You and I just had a great talk about The Lost Gospel that describes Jesus and Mary Magdalene using sacred sex to connect with the divine. We agree that Christianity buried their real story and denied it ever happened. Regardless, The Lost Gospel depicts Jesus coming to Earth to share sacred sex with his chosen bride, a priestess who anointed him. Well, our group may have been on to something. Anyway, that’s what I was doing in my twenties, hah!”
“Based on my Jungian research, for many thousands of years people believed they had to enhance the life-force to support nature. There’s evidence Neolithic people had sex timed with the cycles of Venus to have healthy children. They believed sacred sex was the way humans protect the planet. You really have to wonder about this because Christianity drove out these rituals over two thousand years ago and look at our species now! We are sick and overpopulated, confused about gender, and have lost sight of genetic rejuvenation—what it takes to birth and raise healthy children. Our species may be degenerating because we no longer engage in goddess rituals. Like the migrations of swans to their nests, once the memory traces are lost, they are gone.
“I will surprise you, my love, my Claudia. I think you and Armando and your friends were keeping something alive that we need to remember. Maybe you kept the Naples supervolcano dormant! Now that we’ve had a year of love, it is time for you and me to have sacred sex; that is, intentionally connect to divine levels when we have sex. Why not? Maybe Jesus did come to teach men and women to connect in this way. As we experience the last of Pisces, maybe millions of lovers as they said in the sixties need to ‘make love, not war’ to nurture the planet in a lively and erotic way.”
“To be truthful,” she smiled enigmatically, “I’ve already started consciously traveling out to the stars, higher realms, when we make love. I see blue light, golden light, and organic green light in my pineal gland. About six months ago when we first started having sex, I found myself in a temple standing in a row of beautiful goddesses. We were being led to a sanctuary where a baby was being b
orn when I was climaxing with you. I believe I birthed a child in another dimension. Since then, sex has been sacred and I can travel anywhere in the universe. I don’t need to go down into a damp cave under the Vatican when we can do it right in the temple you made for us. As we complete the Piscean Age, we must weave together a morphogenetic field of sacred sex; we must be nature and welcome new souls when we make love. You are my divine partner, my god in the flesh. When we make love, we spin Earth on its axis as it travels around the sun!”
While she talked, her lovely face and catlike body entranced him. He loved the way exuberance rippled across her face as he took her hand and stroked her long fingers. “It really is that simple, isn’t it? Having had children, I can see that the kind of love we’re talking about tonight doesn’t happen much when couples are having and raising children; it happens when they are lovers. This is what happens when sex is simply love, the force that drives the universe. Ironically, the Church says that only procreative sex is sacred, yet it is the opposite. You’ve given me a feeling for who you were when you were young, an earnest woman dedicated to bringing love back. I see who you were then and now you are my goddess.”
She laughed happily stroking his arm. “You’re only partially right: I have a strong suspicion Sarah and Simon would fully understand what we’re talking about. I just wish he were home more to be with her. Then my old apartment would sing!”
David took Sarah and Teresa to Tuscany immediately after his session with Lorenzo. Sarah needed to get out of the heat and relax, and Teresa wouldn’t stop talking about Auntie Matilda’s great big house and wanting to pick grapes there and eat them. David hoped for another conversation with Pietro. The refugee crisis was pressuring Italy and Europe and the rising chaos worried him. He’d begun to fear the future and needed the mature thoughts of an intelligent European. A few days off in Tuscany and some time with Pietro would be a welcome relief from the world’s escalating turmoil.
Revelations of the Aquarian Age Page 20