MY WRITING TO JOHN MAYER 2010–THE PRESENT AND HOW IT BECAME AS LA DIVINA COMMEDIA WITH A TOUR OF HELL
by SHILOH RICHTER
27 January 2023
Here’s what we lost when we lost sight of our own Beingness in the documented (and boasted) crimes in the ancient Levant: The ability of our Beings to surround and nurture our experience of Being in these phenomenal Minds & Bodies in kind, gentle, loving, careful, protective, and healing ways. We forgot how to Mother, first of all to ourselves. We were actually conditioned to attack ourselves mentally as we had been attacked historically, to join their ranks through conditioning. Then we were set out into a hostile world, powerless. We were taught to abuse the land, hurt each other, and grab for resources like mad on this temporal realm or sell ourselves or others doing so. This, we were told, would give us value (instead of our own Beingness which was never mentioned again except by the Poets and philosophers), and which we were taught to believe had no value–no place here (no Here and Now). (It turns out that actually defines Hell.) Instead of the Powers of Being in the Present Moment, power came to mean “over others” which most often meant some kind of violence: against oneself, against one’s neighbor, against the Cosmos. Sound like Hell? It is, as Dante shows. And the landslide occurs right there in the Inferno: right at the feminine revealing what actually happened in the un-poetic writing of Genesis that was meant to inflict harm and pain, and how it created hell on Earth.
Photo: NYTimes, Medusa Statue, Manhattan, 13 October 2020
In Inferno Canto 9 Dante has “The One Who is Sent” use the “holy words” to signal his reference to John 9:7 just outside the watchtower with Medusa and the Furies who want to rip themselves and Dante apart and turn him to stone. He shows who the messenger is to open the gates to the City of Dis, the city, having exiled and denied the Poets, where words–very un-poetically–are intended to inflict pain, most certainly not heal it. The words of this messenger are meant to heal that pain, which would actually mean ending their hell: the divine city instead of the hellish, burning one.
John 9:7: “Then He told him, ‘Go, wash in the Pool of Siloam’ (which means “Sent”). So the man went and washed, and came back seeing.”
It is that very same verse from Canto 9 in which Dante also offers his next signal past the fury of those trapped in flame-lit tombs and hurling insults in Canto 11, as the key to the rest of Hell. The word and flowing waters of “Siloam” is a translation of the word “Shiloh” which is referenced in Genesis 49:10:
“The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.”
There are several other signals that Dante is referencing this in Genesis just as there had been signals that he was referencing Jesus healing the blind with the clay in John and the opening of the city of Jerusalem. “The One Who is Sent” is carrying a sceptre, like the Genesis verse. Dante refers to the “beginning pages” of Aristotle’s Physics, “if you read your Physics carefully, not many pages from the start,” as comparable to the beginning pages of what was written in Genesis, “if you recall how Genesis begins,” and to where they stand where huge boulders– supposedly the rock on which the Church is built–are broken: “Along the upper rim of a high bank formed by a ring of massive broken boulders, we came above a crowd more cruelly pent.” Why the boulders are broken here is signaled by those beginning pages of Genesis and in several other ways. The beginning pages of Genesis contain the basis for the broken boulders at the feminine: Genesis 3:16:
“Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee”
thus creating a cursed place of pain and sorrow at the Mother (and the snake, alive energy of the earth and Garden, then turned into a split-mind like Medusa’s.)
Geniusly, Dante also signals this when Virgil makes note at the landslide down into the rest of Hell from this in Canto 12:
“Just like the toppled mass of rock that struck—because of earthquake or eroded props—the Adige on its flank, this side of Trent, where from the mountain top from which it thrust down to the plain, the rock is shattered so that it permits a path for those above: such was the passage down to that ravine,”
and then noting just a moment later:
“Now I would have you know: the other time that I descended into lower Hell, this mass of boulders had not yet collapsed; but if I reason rightly, it was just before the coming of the One who took from Dis the highest circle’s splendid spoils that, on all sides, the steep and filthy valley had trembled so, I thought the universe felt love (by which, as some believe, the world has often been converted into chaos); and at that moment, here as well as elsewhere, these ancient boulders toppled, in this way.”
Whereas some have taken this to mean that the landslide down into further Hell took place at the “Harrowing of Christ” when Jesus retrieved Christianity’s own kind from Limbo and left the Poets, and the scribes thinking they could write it themselves without the Poets, no problem, just plagiarize a little and change it for their own means of money, power, control, and a bit of histrionic narcissism and build a Church on it in only “creating” “God” to be just like them as in White Male Only and wanting to rule the Earth without even caring to retrieve or understand the Poets from whom they borrowed. And never mind whom Jesus loved, they only needed him for their own Hector, Aeneas, Odysseus without Andromache, Dido, or Penelope. The story will work without them, right? But the boulder, the Earth, the feminine structure of Earth broke right there, in the founding of the Church on the writing of the mythology without her, beginning with Genesis.
At that Moment just before, Virgil thought he had felt love. But having been left behind in Limbo, now he is showing how Hell got created and opened up. Love wouldn’t do that. And so Dante must see all the circles of Hell so that he will know–and demonstrate–what love is in his own Poetic journey. When you have the Church built on Peter instead of Mary, Christ only goes so far as Limbo, the Poets are exiled and forgotten, and, well, Hell on Earth is “created” from that kind of writing. So, just beyond the Hate Gate and those using language to cause harm, the Medusa and the burning tombs, is the rest of Hell that goes even further in pain and violence than words and hate, and to show how the state of things gets worse from there: what are the worse crimes coming from this breaking of the structure of the feminine and thus the overview of the structure of Hell that Virgil pauses at the beginning of Canto 11 to show because from there on the stench is so bad they have to stop to adjust to it before going on.
So at that broken place, just beyond Medusa, is the curse, the “Biblical covenant” that caused this trauma and pain and opened because of the break of the structure of the feminine for it to go further down. But the messenger is not just showing these “holy words,” she’s letting Dante and Virgil through, where their own epic Poetry provably goes, where Christianity did not go on that Easter weekend for their text (where Jesus actually would have gone if he were the one writing it). What is so surprising about the Inferno is the careful care and love shown between Dante and Virgil, and Dante’s compassion for most of those in Hell, but that’s another story.
This messenger, “The One Who is Sent” is also breaking open the Scripture back to the Poetry so that Dante can show all the way into and out of Hell and he himself and the reader know how it was created and how it became Hell on Earth.
Broken open at the broken boulders also means a view into the keys themselves, and it isn’t just providing a key to know Hell, but also how to heal it.
Poetic Holy Words
When you get eternal Poets like these you can expect a little of eternity and the Cosmos to come through, or a lot. I wrote in the last article about how John 9:7 has John Clayton Mayer’s whole name and the year he began in 1997 referenced by Dante right before the city gates, where all the hate is hurled, but where Jesus heals the blind. I wrote in the ’Until Shiloh Comes’ Cosmic Flow Tapestry about how my name is in John 9:7 and also how all three of my names and my birthdate, John’s birthdate, my birthplace, and a bit more, like how it ties in with the meaning of Beatrice, are in Genesis 49:10. My middle name, Lynn, “a Welsh name meaning lake” is like the clay washed with the pool of water in John 9:7. My last name Richter means “judge” or lawgiver in German, as in the verse in Genesis which is Jacob’s prophecy.
It is also pretty wondrous that the way Dante figures out how in the City of Dis they can’t see the Present Moment (and what is right in front of them) is on the words how the other poet who is still alive “did disdain” Dante’s poetry of Beatrice. (He was also showing the difference of Poetry and the writing in the Hebrew Bible.) They “did disdain” (“the feeling that someone or something is unworthy of one’s consideration or respect; contempt”) who Dante writes of and who he is on his way to see when he makes it through–Beatrice. The messenger, “The One Who is Sent,” on the other hand, unlike those in the City of Dis, won’t put up with this bullshit, to put it lightly. She doesn’t take the hate, and in fact has disdain for all that are hurling words of hate, which they don’t dare do to her and scatter. Dante writes:
“I knew well [she] was Heaven’s messenger, and I turned toward my master; and he made a sign that I be still and bow before [her]. How full of high disdain [she] seemed to me! [She] came up to the gate, and with a wand, [she] opened it, for there was no resistance. ‘O you cast out of Heaven, hated crowd,’ were [her] first words upon that horrid threshold, ‘why do you harbor this presumptuousness? Why are you so reluctant to endure that Will whose aim can never be cut short, and which so often added to your hurts? What good is it to thrust against the fates? Your Cerberus, if you remember well, for that, had both his throat and chin stripped clean.’ At that [she] turned and took the filthy road, and did not speak to us, but had the look of one who is obsessed by other cares than those that press and gnaw at those before [her]; and we moved forward, on into the city, in safety, having heard [her] holy words.”
So what is the big deal about Taylor Swift selling violence against others and their intellectual property? Why can a plagiarism lawsuit not bring justice? Why is it not okay to exploit John Mayer?
As Dante shows in the Inferno, the loss of the Poet is the beginning structure of “creating” hell. It is a heart-breaking spectrum of anger and sorrow down from there–all the way down to Fraud, and worst of all: Fraud accompanied by the act of Betrayal, not to someone you didn’t know (that is only slightly less), but to someone who gave you their trust, as John gave to Taylor when he extended the olive branch to her feelings from 2008, offering her being on “Half of My Heart,” and when she could not have what she wanted in the spotlight with him, she took the opening to misuse and capitalize on his kindness and his own beautiful and hard-won career, and used a story with him that was not true, or hers, as if it were her own. She robbed many people of the Poet, exiled him (he went willingly for the road ahead), and continued taking his intellectual material as her own property over fifteen years–just as was done to Dante and the ancient Poets.
And that is the key to the structure of Hell, even beyond plagiarism and beyond hate which is where the cultural rock slide is:
In Circle 1, Limbo, are the ancient Poets.
Directly following this in Circle 2 are the shades of the likes of Dido, Helen, and Francesca. These are the feminine where the stories go awry. That wasn’t understood about Virgil’s writing of Dido (unnatural love, leaving behind the feminine) or of Homer’s of Helen (the value system of a culture based on surface appearances of the feminine in the Judgment of Paris; she trying to take over Odysseus’s narration as her own to tell a poisoned story and this after she’d already proved she tried to get everyone killed).
And so we have the first steps into Hell right after leaving the Poets (and ancient philosophers), and also as therefore what happens to a culture when this happens, as when Francesca “plagiarizes” Lancelot and takes his story for her own.
By Canto 11 the earth, the boulders, the structure of the feminine is broken, the structure of culture, of religion, of Poetry, just beyond the hate.
And so past Canto 11, when they have had a moment to get used to the stench, the air that can barely be breathed that is below, is the twisted nature of the Minotaur that once was in the feminine mystery rite labyrinth, flowing streams of blood drowning the violent: those who slaughtered, the suicides, those who defied the Cosmos, and so forth, those who wished they had helped more, help support and encourage the Poet more, until the Fraud monster is lured to carry Virgil and Dante further just as a river of tears seeps down from Crete to those who sold the sacred for profit and power.
The Poet isn’t peripheral. They are our guides to navigating the depths of life. Ancient cultures knew that. Things do not go well when the Poets and their eternal insights are not understood, and worse when their words are taken without that understanding. A plagiarist doesn’t know that and doesn’t care or they wouldn’t be plagiarizing. They would instead understand the sense of Beingness, the eternal, the Poetry itself, and how it opens Paradise. That’s why here one loving careful Poet is showing it to the next, and so forth, until it is understood again.
Katy Perry (and her discography) has been providing these keys all along, opening the gates where they get closed, shining the light on the moments when things went wrong, protecting the Poet, and making sure the trip through Hell gets opened and completed in order to transform Hell by showing what it is and how it happened, and how to make it Paradise (Valley). She has replaced a false story of a poison narrative with an eternally true one where Poets love and guide each other in order to make it through.
Photo: Katy Perry and John Mayer at the Grateful Dead Fare Thee Well concert in Chicago, 4 July 2015