From the Desk of Shiloh Richter, Master of Arts
10 Mai 2023, Writing on the Occasion of the major Lunar Eclipse speaking from the hidden depths of watery Scorpio, from subterranean caves, and from beyond death (even an exhumation); and moving into the New Moon of the Body (Taurus) of fixed earth Venus with Jupiter’s momentous arrival
The Sprout 
on La Madeleine’s Tongue
The Search Begins
“There are two distinct sorts of ideas, those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from the heart.” –Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
At the Abbaye Sainte-Marie-Madeleine de Vézelay, the monastery in Burgundy-Franche-Comté in the Yonne department of east-central France, importantly once a Roman villa, and from the earth’s eternal truth always in place, imminent, on the cusp, welling up to speak its truths again, in the 11th century stories of Mary Magdalene’s relics from when she arrived by boat to the Camargue in the south of France began to surface: “About 1050 the monks of Vézelay began to claim to hold the relics of Mary Magdalene.”
This was leading to the personal revelation Dante would write in the Divine Comedy of the arrival of his Beatrice. Author Willa Cather, too, was paying attention to that ancient Roman cultural history throughout France, and finally coming back there for the inspired setting of her last—unspoken—-novel.
The research continues of the legends that:
“A little later a monk of Vézelay declared that he had detected in a crypt at St-Maximin in Provençe, carved on an empty sarcophagus, a representation of the Unction at Bethany, when Jesus’ head was anointed by Mary of Bethany, who was assumed in the Middle Ages to be Mary Magdalene. The monks pronounced this to be Mary Magdalene’s tomb, from which her relics had been translated to their abbey.”
And so the quest for the feminine, but also the problem of the masculine role, begins to show. That anointing with oil in the Hebrew Bible is very much like Odysseus’s arrival home a millennium earlier and his identity not known until Eurycleia rubs his legs and his “woven scars” in oil (his skin woven like poetry—a term from Penelopean Poetics that I wrote about in Coyote Weaves a Song). Jesus’ divine Being is not known to those who argue that the oil is ‘too expensive to use on a beggar.’ Odysseus, the millennium before, is also shunned as worthless. It is still true that there is not recognition of Odysseus’s identity in the poetry in how he transforms the kingdoms. Peace is a cunning warrior. But Odysseus, or Homer, hasn’t broken through again into consciousness, and the song continues. Dante suffered this in exile. Michelangelo carved the grief of it (public crucifixion and death), and also the answer (where there is no death, but transcendence on earth). To overcome that mental cultural limitation, there must be conscious recognition, not more devastation as in the Iliad, the forerunner of the establishment of Rome and thus the prevailing history of Western culture. War is still heralded as god-like. Competition and power “taken” by force, but inner powers of eternity within the artist not seen. He is disguised as a beggar, worthless. The arrival to France in legend was the answer to actually showing what the mythology held, the breaking through the kingdom on earth to eternity. The artists–the actual creators–knew what they were doing.
Photo above: A jawbone I found in the Lincoln National Forest (my home) with a heart in it.
And too, the legends of La Madeleine were momentous and the search for the historical evidence was a true human need, the ultimate desire to show that it was true and that it had actually happened in the flesh, that it was possible. Dante’s art would speak showing how it IS true, the very process whereby it is true. His own transmutation through understanding and compassion through Hell–with sometimes necessary accosting the guilty, the causes of hell—is the mythological and biological answer. All of this was also a powerful artistic and religious (power) move away from the bitter wars of control and ownership of the “holy land” of Jerusalem and its supposed relics, the on-going war and the reason for the crusades from Vézelay begun there by Saint Bernard who also appears in the Divine Comedy. To own and control the story was the great manipulation of turning Rome into the other Holy Land by placing Peter there, and thus a line of popes with the sanctified power, control, and money of the Church. But the truth was held in the art, the eternal truths of the stories, always irrefutable when known. We will take a walking tour of Jerusalem in later writing to show what miracles transmute there from our moment, reverberating back from this momentous rebirth of the eternal voice in the Mediterranean–just like Beatrice’s voice she is given back by Dante in his beloved Florence from beyond death. (The site of Kim and Kanye’s wedding.)
During Dante’s own lifetime, when he was just 14 years old, born in 1265, the legend of Mary Magdalene was resurfacing in southern France. And so his picking up this story with his poetry was coming Dante’s whole life, and having Beatrice come to speak importantly beyond death, beginning about the age John Mayer picked up the guitar and determined that “It always comes around, back to you.”
According to Magdalene Publishing author Paula Lawlor: “In 1279, St. Louis’ nephew, Charles II (Prince of Salerno and Count of Provence) acquired knowledge that the relics were buried in the town of St. Maximin in the church with the same name, so he ordered excavations in Saint Maximin to search for them. On December 10, 1279, deep in the earth, he found the marble tomb. When he tried to open it a wonderful smell of perfume filled the air. Inside lay her entire body except her jaw bone. In the dust inside the tomb was a wooden tablet wrapped in wax: ‘Here lies the body of Mary Magdalene’ and a parchment which explained that in 710 her remains had been secretly transferred during the night into the marble tomb of Cedonius and hidden so that the Saracens wouldn’t find them.”
The legends state that Cedonius had traveled with La Madeleine and a small group to France. Cedonius is the person Jesus (in John 9) heals of blindness by putting the clay of the earth on his eyes and telling him to go wash in the waters of Siloam or Shiloah (that Dante, I wrote about before, uses as the keys to the City of Dis in the Inferno to come to see how they hated Beatrice and she as the salvation through his poetry). Those are the verses, I wrote before, of John Mayer’s name, John Clayton, and mine, Shiloh, the name of the waters flowing into Jerusalem. And so Mary has been placed, literally and figuratively, into the crypt of the healed ‘blind’ from both of our names. Those waters of Shiloah are written of in Psalm 46: “There is a river whose streams delight the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. God is within her; she will not be moved. God will help her when morning dawns.”
The further details of the Madeleine legends go that: “Mary Magdalen’s jaw bone had been sent to Rome after a previous excavation of her tomb and before the Saracen invasion of 710 AD, when all important relics in France were hidden. In Rome, Mary Magdalene’s jaw had been venerated for centuries [in St. John Lateran, the Pope’s Archbasilica of the Most Holy Savior at the Lateran and ‘Mother and Healer of all Churches in Rome and in the World’]. With the news of the 1279 discovery, Pope Boniface VIII returned the jaw bone to St. Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume and on April 6, 1295 it was reunited with the skull of Mary Magdalene.”
When I was 21 years old, my jaw was taken off during a surgery and then wired shut for several months.
Photo: My birth chart 10 July 1970, with anaretic 29°49 Ascendant, Descendant, and Moon
When the jaw was reunited with the skull, from which she could metaphorically speak, Dante was 30 years old. I came to know John Mayer when he was 32. Dante was 43 when he began writing the Divine Comedy in exile and Beatrice speaking to him beyond form. John is now 45.
On the very day of the exhumation of Mary Magdalene’s body at St. Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in 1279, Pluto, the planet of death and rebirth, was moving at 17°32-33 Capricorn (the house where Pluto takes down authority structures, according to astrologers), at what would come to conjunct my 16°52 Capricorn mid-heaven as the tomb was opened, the Mid-Heaven or “middle of the sky” being the point for an individual “that represents the most public parts of life” (career, fame, reputation, the masculine). The New Moon Solar Eclipse in Aries (or the birth of spring) on 20 April 2023 aligned exactly to the degree and minute of my Ascendant and Descendant at 29°49 Aries/Libra just before the Lunar Eclipse in the depths of Scorpio. It was exactly quincunx to 29°49 of my Anaretic Moon in Virgo, conjunct John’s Venus at 29°10. (Those minutes of 49 & 10 are the Genesis prophecy with my name and our birthdays.) My Descendant is compounded by conjuncting the “expanding, crowning” Jupiter at the classic critical cardinal 26°29 of Libra, the balancing scales. Today Jupiter is at 28°35 conjuncting my Ascendant as it moves exact into the upcoming New Moon in Taurus–the body, fixed earth, ruler: Venus. The North Node, the collective future path, is also conjuncting. It will be within 2° at the new Moon. Eris, the dwarf planet and Goddess of Discord who began the Trojan War by demonstrating the false values based on surfaces of the feminine, is also conjuncting.
In exact opposition to that Pluto from 1279 (and my mid-heaven) is my Natal Sun 17°34, a separation of that Pluto of only one minute which happened within a day, and my alignment being one expressing the drive to write: Sun (creative drive), Mercury (writing, communication, media) & Mars (will and action) conjunct in Cancer, the house of protection, nurturance, the feminine, and home. John’s & my Mars, or our drive and actions of that drive and writing, are aligned there, conjunct at 24° & 25° Cancer, or “Home Life.” That is where Mars is today, at 24°18. Uranus, the Great Awakener, is currently at 18°59 Taurus conjuncting my Natal Saturn 19°58, those long-term goals in my 1st house of physical identity, where the Sun is right now, 19°41. (Today is Bono’s birthday, or that poetic bard voice of John’s quest for the “Joshua Tree of Vaginas.”) Mars will be conjuncting our Natal Mars at the anaretic on the momentous New Moon in Taurus on 19 May 2023.
On that very day in 1279, Neptune, with its capacity to bring or dispel illusion, to show “what is real and what is not,” was at 14° Scorpio, exactly the degree where the Lunar eclipse happened on 5 May 2023 in the deep of Scorpio’s hidden secrets and wealth, even deficits.
The Pluto Return of that day of the exhumation happened in 2017, exact to the degree 17°54 when John and I met face to face at Isleta, NM after seven years of communicating every day.
2017 is also the summer I registered a copyright for the first book showing what had happened in My Love Affair with Moonbeam: Ten Years of Wonder, Bursting Love and Creativity. It was aligned when I saw him at the LA Forum that New Year’s 2018, and when I published the book along with what I had been working on all along, Coyote Weaves a Song: A Mythological Song from the Beginning of Time Volumes I & II and the tapestry “Until the Right One Comes.”
Oh, I mean, ‘Until Shiloh Comes’ Cosmic Flow Tapestry, in September 2018.
Within a few days of my registering the first copyright on the books, that Pluto of death and rebirth in Capricorn and “taking down top-down authority” and this shift to inner authority, was at work in another way. (I first published the expose of Taylor Swift during the major Saturn Pluto conjunction of January 2020, the 700 anniversary of the Divine Comedy.)
How the Sirens Speak Now, Speak Now
At that same moment, just a few days after I filed the first manuscript copyright, Taylor Swift emptied her social media accounts as my book detailed how minutely she had copied and what had happened in the past ten years. Within a couple of months she released “Reputation” taken from my writing and conversations. Her rudimentary version about herself was just a shadow of a very important distinction of how culture can operate with two different kinds of “repetition.” I had explained in communication with my mother that I wished that she would stop “narrating” my life, and went on to talking about Homer’s more important kind of “repetition.” What Homer in the epics shows is the difference between the eternal voice “repeating”—coming to speak again with no loss of generation because it is always eternal and inspired in the same vein wherever it awakens, its aliveness is always alive—and that of the false “sirens,” calling souls to their deaths, who can only “repeat” things they’ve heard (as opposed to the Muses who, because of speaking the inspired eternal, can see the present and the future), and because it is merely “heard” (how the media oftentimes operates, repeating only what it sees and hears, that voice of social consciousness not yet broken open) it is always trapped in the past (and never the present moment because it is not realized), operating like rumor, and thus, like Helen who tries to get Odysseus killed by mimicking voices of their wives, and to “take over the Poetic narrative” with lies, as Homeric scholars show, she tries to trap Odysseus in the past to own and control his story with her only repeated false stories that his comrades then show are false. The culture that takes rumor and poisoned stories as truth is doomed, quite literally as viewed also online, while the eternal voice “repeating” or happening again in arising in its eternal voice and truths, like true songs, gets Odysseus home. It is then the all-too-absent from our stories return of which we speak that has been impossible in Christianity because they do not know the rest of the story due to the fact that the feminine was cut out because it was not recognized.
Monday night, 8 May 2023, John and Dead & Company played in ITHACA at the beginning of their final tour. The first Cornell University show was the year John was born in 1977.
Ithaca, the first night of the final tour, 2023
All Taylor can do is repeat what she’s seen and heard. Plagiarism to begin with is just repetition of what is seen and heard (and therefore past), but then to track John Mayer and repeat him, trying to make it the future story centered on herself, is a further form of repetition for control, still stuck in the past because it is still just repeating. Helen in the Homeric epics tries to add poison to the wine so that the dinner guests will believe her lies about Odysseus. Homer knew what could be done publicly to narratives. He quietly shows how the music, the eternal Poetry, takes back its truths, always true in the Present Moment. And so what Taylor does, if you are not exactly seeing the manipulation, is if John goes on a John Mayer Solo Tour she immediately announced she’s “solo” (single) while on tour and then repeats things from the past that never were true for her to begin with, like “Dear John” which she copied from on-line. She can never offer anything in the present moment or true. There was power to be taken by forcing herself into the story and poisoning it. Homer shows that’s a common practice, to the detriment of culture. It’s deadly when that’s your feminine. It always means death and war. “No one ever wins” but they can’t see that, because that’s what is happening. She’s stuck on reselling a false, harmful past where it made her the star of the show. And she’s still voraciously hungry for that.
She’s utterly incapable of insight, but wants the ‘power’ over others (“top-down authority”). Deeper than her knowing, Homer shows the huge pivot of culture on this point of narcissism. Strangely, it is quite like when, for ownership and control, the scribes of the Hebrew Bible sought to eliminate Mary, not realizing where it leads culture. Taylor was simply a high schooler plagiarizing Faith Hill and already moving to tear apart men from her high school, and did all of this to make herself important, then continuing to target any guy in her range. It got her into the room with the bigger fish and then she used everyone in her path to go for the biggest fish. Kanye wasn’t allowed to speak, even though he was clearly speaking the necessary truth. The narrative course was shifted, just like Homer said it would be–which is the eternal telling the present and the future.
Taylor’s content and personas are all completely made up from other people’s lives and intellectual property. Then she “writes” lyrics like “Everything that’s mine is a landmine” wanting, like manipulator Truman Capote, to at least have the spotlight even if its dark, and the lyric coming from a post I made many years ago about “land mines for the heart” with a picture of Princess Diana walking through the minefields, and about the Trinity Bomb Site near my home and alluding to it and the situation. She’s desperate for the narrative to be hers, about her. If I made this about her, which she voraciously longs for, there is endless information of her stalking, like that she first began contacting Matty Healy because he was referenced on a John Mayer fan page on Tumblr from her heavily tracking John on-line–the very reason he went off-line and quit sharing his life with the public. The race car driver bullshit is from John’s earlier references and merchandise from a former tour, and used by her to reference, through constantly repeating him, to her ‘staying in the race’ with him, trying desperately to force a headline with him to try to make it somehow true. She’s done this for years, for example, by appearing in Austin, Texas for Formula 1 as the “only show she did that year” in 2016, in the city where I first saw John in 2010 (and telling the press she had a boyfriend). Matty Healy is now merely picked up for his career role playing a guitar and his reference to the 1970s when John was born in order for Taylor to keep publicly code-referencing John, she trying emptily to ‘code’ everything in replication trying to make herself central, important, and to surround that with the mentally-ill lengths she will go for it as if ambitiously admirable, with the appetite of narcissism for human relationships as competition instead of actual human connection. Even her fixation with “13” is from John having “77” tattooed on his chest. I have witnessed this since 2010. To keep forcefully showing her encroachment, she sought public contact with everyone and everything referenced. I watched it happen from Vance Joy to me referencing the Go-Gos, U2, or Molly Ringwald. It is as if to say, “See, I watch and own everything you do,” and trying to force that to be a story and a “relationship” she first dubiously pushed, then lied about in order to have it public. There are no boyfriends, no males to bash, just a forceful, boundary-crossing obsession, continued by keeping the “codes” (a pattern she first took from John when I started writing to him) about John in the headlines. There would be so much to go into about the repeated patterns of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but Dante wrote of this too at the gates of hell, the pent-up psyches unable to unleash themselves, an appetite that the more the bitch from hell eats the hungrier she is:
“And then a she—wolf showed herself; she seemed
to carry every craving in her leanness;
she had already brought despair to many.
her nature is so squalid, so malicious
that she can never sate her greedy will;
when she has fed, she’s hungrier than ever [ . . . ]
[ ,. . . ] And he will hunt that beast through every city
until he thrusts her back again to Hell,
for which she was first sent above by envy.” Dante, Inferno, Canto 1
Milli Vanilli and the Saturn Neptune Alignment of December 1989
Harry Styles UK Rolling Stone November 2022
As Taylor targets my date of birth for the repeat of Speak Now as she usually targets John’s birthday in October, repeating our lives as her own instead of living within her own being, let’s code from the very cosmos. A Saturn Neptune conjunction is an archetypal alignment that can bring the spiritual, but also illusion, delusion, deception and “cognitive distortions,” with Neptune, according to author Richard Tarnas, to the viewing of reality and structure with Saturn. Tarnas writes of the 1988-89 Saturn Neptune alignment in his Cosmos and Psyche discussing it demonstrating the effects of the illusion on the state of mind, particularly what could be seen in the manipulation of the mind in the range of both drugged effects (Homer’s Helen in her storytelling) and intended deception, in particular, “a dark reality hidden behind a carefully manipulated image.” He writes:
“The Saturn-Neptune theme of poisoning, pollution, toxic chemical effects, and subtle poisoning of the public mind or political environment can take a remarkable variety of forms, as in the dioxin poisoning of the Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko, and the less literal but equally toxic, as in cynical and deliberately deceptive Machiavellian political advertising like that of the ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’ on behalf of the Bush presidential campaign, both themes clearly in evidence precisely in coincidence with the first month of the Saturn-Neptune opposition in 2004. (Machiavelli himself was born with Saturn and Neptune in close opposition.) The original ‘Willie Horton’ advertisement that provided a model for this kind of political deception was produced in coincidence with the last Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 1988, on behalf of the presidential campaign of the elder Bush. In both 1988 and 2004 (Saturn-Neptune conjunction and opposition, respectively), the widely disseminated deceptive advertisements with their dark, fear-inducing images played a critical role in the defeat of the opposing presidential candidate” (474).
It is interesting that Kanye spoke out about the younger Bush in 2005 after this Saturn Neptune opposition in 2004. Kanye has an exact Sun Saturn Neptune opposition in Gemini (media) and truth, justice, and past beliefs of Sagittarius, and right in the middle of each house at 14°.
During the Saturn Neptune conjunction in 1988-89, the pop act Milli Vanilli was signed in 1988, and in 1989 their album Girl You Know Its True was released in the U.S. in March. By July: “The first public sign that the group was lip-syncing came on 21 July 1989, during a live performance on MTV at the Lake Compounce theme park in Bristol, Connecticut.” It was in December 1989 that one of the actual singers spoke out: ‘Unlike the international release of All of Nothing, the inserts for the American version of the album explicitly attributed the vocals to Morvan and Pilatus. This prompted singer Charles Shaw to reveal in December 1989 that he was one of the three actual vocalists on the album and that Pilatus and Morvan were impostors.” Entertainment Weekly reported a year later in November 1990 that: “In December 1989, Shaw disclosed to New York Newsday writer John Leland that he was one of the three singers of Milli Vanilli’s debut album and the Milli Vanilli frontmen Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan were impostors.” EW also mentioned in the same article that, “the white rapper with the No. 1 song in America, Vanilla Ice, had invented a rough-and-tumble street childhood he had never lived” (11.30.90). Although this was revealed in December 1989, in “January 1990, Girl You Know Its True was certified 6x Platinum by the RIAA after spending seven weeks atop the Billboard top 200. It spent 41 weeks in the top 10 of the Billboard Top 200 and 78 weeks on the charts overall,” and less than two months after the actual voice came forward, on 21 February 1990 Milli Vanilli was still given the Grammy Award for Best New Artist. At that moment when Shaw spoke in December 1989, Mercury and Uranus were conjuncting that Saturn Neptune in this illusion, making it an over-the-edge and shocking media reveal.
Taylor Swift’s Natal Uranus 4° Mercury 8° Neptune 11° Saturn 13° are approaching my Mid-Heaven, and are in the line of the path of Pluto’s upheaval having been moving through Capricorn since 2008, when she first started copying and tracking John.
The Eternal Song at the River
The Pluto exhumation of La Madeleine’s remains near 1050 from Saint Maximin and the recognition of Mary comes poetically also from ‘the Dominican Bernard Gui, [who] claimed in his chronicle, written early in the following century, that a sweet spicy fragrance emanated from the sarcophagus’ contents, and that a green shoot was found to be growing from the Magdalen’s tongue.” This is said to have happened in the year 710, with 7 and 10 being the numbers Dante uses in Beatrice’s procession from the Old and New Testament in which she arrives with the rainbows and the Gryphon to speak to Dante. It is my birthdate, 7.10. Dante writes:
“When I was situated on the edge, so that the river alone separated me from them, I stopped to see better, and I saw the flames advance, leaving the air behind them tinted, and they had the appearance of trailing banners, so that the air above remained coloured in seven bands, of the hues in which the sun creates his bow, and Diana, the Moon, her halo.
These banners streamed to the rear, way beyond my sight, and, as far as I could judge, the outermost ones were ten paces apart.” Purgatorio, Canto 29:61-81, The Seven Banners
He sees this view before the appearance of Beatrice at the river. 710 was also the address of the Grateful Dead at their beginning in Haight Ashbury, at 710 Ashbury. As I wrote above about Jesus telling Cedonius, from whose crypt Mary was exhumed, to go wash his eyes in the waters of Siloam in John, and that river being described in Psalm 46 as the inspired stronghold of Jerusalem, in the love song before it, Psalm 45, the poet writes, “My heart is inditing [or overflowing with] a good matter: I speak of things which I have made touching the king: my tongue is the pen of a ready writer.”
The Love Song into the Divine
Early beliefs and folktales of La Madeleine that were passed down were collected by the Italian writer and Dominican Friar Jacobus de Voragine in his The Golden Legend in the troubadourian 13th century from stories there in Provençe, the same time and the same place, cosmically and serendipitously, and from the same place of the heart as the birth of song again–just as Homer–and this the momentous birth of new romantic love. It was the beginning of courtly love, that of breaking free from what was not of the heart, that of the individual’s knowing and desire, away from what was socially demanded, the “thou shalt,” to aspire instead to that of the human spirit, to follow adventure and love, to follow the heart. It is to purposefully disobey what the social structure demands, even that of religion with its punishments and the threats of a living, burning hell. It is to give oneself wholly to a different path, that of the heart that knows, no matter what. The late World mythologist Joseph Campbell, a friend of the Grateful Dead, wrote that “the love idea of the troubadours was completely different [ . . . ] it is not love in the dark, you might say.” He describes of the Provençal troubadour Girhault de Borneilh: “Love, he declared, is born of the eyes and of the heart. The eyes are the scouts of the heart. [ . . . ] This is discriminative, this is elite, this is personal choice, and having found their image, the eyes recommend the image to the heart–not to just any heart but to the noble heart, the gentle heart, the heart capable of love; this is not a case of sheer lust.” He goes on to describe how this development through song with the German minnesingers went even further–into its own religion and the divine. “It wasn’t simply a secular thing but contained the compulsion of the goddess Venus [ . . . ] and so here you’re on the brink of the religion of love” (Romance of the grail: the Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth 26-28).
And so the legends of La Madeleine are not simply just agreeable with the expected or the dangers or threats. It steps into the earthly divine because it is true and because it must. It must follow the heart into what is to be known, even beyond form, even to heal one’s own psyche. Dante is also defying the threat of hell to show what it actually is: what people have made of life on earth. He moves through hell to go beyond to the revelation of his heart. It is far beyond what is expected. This is the Holy Grail. And he accomplishes it through a real human female and beyond death.
It is still vibrantly and viscerally alive in the Mediterranean and here in the South of France, felt in the body and from the very ground, the earth’s expression of its aliveness, what Willa Cather felt of the ground in Marseilles and in Avignon that electrified her—and what had not been shown of the human feminine—and it ignited the path to writing it, from a place of the very real for her, from the very grounded. This realization is to be seen alive in the people and in its art, very alive of place and earth, on the cusp of expression, that she would reverberate in her heroines.
It is still attested to in yearly pilgrimages of carrying Bob Dylan’s Saint Sarah to the sea on his birthday in May, the keeping of the relic art alive in hopes of still inspiring the spirit to stay alive and to love, to be open to what IS, to be open to the adventure and the sometimes dear price to be paid for what is of the heart, what goes beyond all set, acculturated boundaries, above all else. Perhaps it is a secret longing of why we go to concerts, or why we take selfies, a movement to transcend, to find the art, the natural expression that breaks it through to the realization of Being. What the pilgrimages enact to make the love and life alive again, truest art accomplishes naturally and breaks life and culture, even the psyche open again. It springs up like the rivers rushing to embrace the sea coming in again, forever the kiss of consciousness to its freedom. It always finds the way to deliver its truths and the embrace, no matter what, again to life itself. The flow to the form of land. The stories pulse on until their truths are known, century after century, song after song, moving to awakening. Look at the goddess Katy Perry, able to come bless the very gentle coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla, following their hearts.
From Pluto’s Deep Cosmic Psyche Moving to its Expression
Of what is happening in this moment (Trump indicted, George Santos arrested, Elizabeth Holmes altering her persona again to stay out of her punishment), astrologer Pam Gregory recently described the nature of Scorpio that is evident in May 2023’s lunar eclipse: “Par-excellence it is the sign of secrets. Scorpio is the sign of long-repressed, long-hidden secrets, deeply buried secrets. It has to do with the underhand, the underground, even the criminal sometimes [ . . . ] it is very much linked to any kind of issues around trust and betrayal, around issues of toxicity [ . . . ] big money, big investments; also very connected with its rulership being from Pluto: debts, defaults, deficits . . .” It is now what is to be seen in the daylight in powerful shifts.
Joseph Campbell points out something else astounding about the creation of paradise and hell in the psyche, and thus culture (and then what is created on earth from this), in his Creative Mythology. Like the necessary cosmic clarification of an eclipse with its endings and major permanent shifts, its disclosures that move us to freedom and awakening, and coming from the cosmic and psyche depths, even showing what has been abnormally hidden in the unconscious psyche (as Persephone trapped in hell and the ascension by psychopomp/artist Mercury). His revelation is this: a culturally unnaturally twisted mythology (as when Hades of the underworld and Neptune’s trident were turned into a fiery burning threat of a demon as a power manipulation of religion to control the gates through fear and threat), paradoxically, like the songs, also naturally (again) gives rise to the vision of the extraordinary and moves it back to the light, to the spring of the planet and humankind (like Audrey Hepburn’s My Fair Lady). Simply stated, because of the popular conception of hell and coming to understand it by looking at the actual internal roots of things (as Dante shows in moving through hell)—healing and awakening the psyche—however it is told, it naturally gives rise to the realization of “Mary” or—how she originally came from mythology and the epics: the human goddess arises again, very much on earth and alive and well, the BEingness beyond life and death that opens beyond all fear or harm to a protection and nurturance of the eternal and back into form, even the river of poetry.
Without that realization, mythology would be of little understanding until it finds its self-correction again: There is always a sense of lack if one does not have Demeter of the grain, the abundance on earth, one’s feet on the earth, alive and real, and no sublime love, art, and talents of Venus if she gets locked only in a cathedral, to be corrected again through Psyche and Eros, transcendence and awakening through Mercury, again, always through the artist: the divine shocking awakener Uranus, like Michelangelo. And so when there is a twisted version of Hell, (or the pent-up energies of being trapped in the underworld or deep human psyche, however it happens), the art, the cosmic, the natural, break through the awakening and speaks.
Campbell wrote:
“As Oswald Spengler has properly noticed [ . . . ] the world of purity, light and utter beauty of soul of the Virgin Mother Mary—whose coronation in the heavens was one of the earliest motives of Gothic art, and who is simultaneously both a light-figure, in white, blue, and gold, surrounded by heavenly hosts, and an earthly mother bending over her newborn babe, standing at the foot of his Cross, and holding the corpse of her tortured, murdered son in resignation on her knees—would have been unimaginable without the counter-idea, inseparable from it, of Hell, ‘an idea,’ Spengler writes, ‘that constitutes one of the maxima of the Gothic, one of its unfathomable creations —one that the present day forgets and deliberately forgets. While she sits there enthroned, smiling in her beauty and tenderness, there lies in the background another world that throughout nature and throughout mankind weaves and breeds ill, pierces, destroys, and seduces—the realm, namely, of the Devil . . .”
It quite naturally brings the realization and the poet is inspired all over again. One state of the psyche naturally and cosmically, through release to natural freedom and expression, gives rise to the other, Hell to the human goddess, whatever culture moves to own, control, or suppress. Art rebreaks it open to its natural freedom. This is also because the feminine does more than just repeat the masculine of patriarchal culture on the same terms. “God” doesn’t just translate to “Goddess.” She’s a different kind of cosmic entity. She crosses the boundaries into the eternal, very naturally. Her body is living proof, not just a receptacle as they would have had us believe to our own deaths and detriment. She is the mother of buddhas on earth. And the real and the eternal is always experienced in the Here and the Now.
Thus Dante is breaking all boundaries (even from exile) through the quest for, or “The Search for Everything,” Love and defying what culture has demanded that be, they having unnaturally again set boundaries to what the heart knows for certain, what others cannot see. The Medieval mind thus shows us this: Pen up life on earth into hell and “Mary”–or the very human goddess–will become apparent outside those bounds of what has been established as concrete reality. In other words, when the twisted minds want money, control, and ownership from what is wrong and pent-up in their own psyches, and they grab for bodies and souls and others’ very real lives and art, try to subsume it and thereby create a hell on earth for everyone, the eternal voice comes breaking back through—the human goddess through art and artist. And through the Cosmic, like eclipses, like the deep secrets in Scorpio.
The Subterranean Arises
The Madeleine had arrived here to the place of the birth of love, to the place of the troubadours, the inheritors of the bards, and here the birth of romance in poetry and song. She arrived here to the feminine subterranean wombs of the cosmos (like the depths that Pluto goes), the caves, “Where the Bears Are,” (and referenced in the stars) exactly where the prehistoric Venus art would speak again these millennia later, but of which no one at the time of her arrival remembered that this was also inside the mountains . . . making the writing of the Ardèche now all the more exciting.
The stories told of her time here are that she made her way to a cave at St. Baume, La Grotte de la Sainte-Baume, and lived out her isolated spiritual existence high in the cave on the mountain top, alone, only visited by angels. There are other legends of the time that involved romance and caves, and central to them, as world mythologist Joseph Campbell showed, is that the cave held the sacred bed, the first place of the altar, the sacred marriage. (That which cannot be spoken about La Madeleine.) And so here, the only witness to the resurrection of Christ would maintain that spiritual relationship of what was divine on earth, expressing her existence ‘alone’ in at-one-ment until it finds its natural expression, the breakthrough of the artist, even if he/she/they were painting in 36,000 BC.
The feminine in the caves in the South of France match that of the bed chamber of Penelope. Beyond the Venus chamber at Ardèche, coming out through the vaginal tunnel of the Megaloceros Gallery is the bursting life of the rushing horses. Turning deeper into the cave to the right is the Skull Chamber which first opens to a bear skull set on a boulder by a hand so long ago. The hall is called the Skull Chamber, full of bear skulls, and even beyond this is where the child’s and the wolf’s footprints are found together side-by-side, having overcome all fear of what lies beyond the bears (also known in the sky as Ursa Major and Ursa Minor that never dip into the ocean, and thus stay eternal), or into the feminine and eternity. That child and wolf then emerge as completely different kinds of Beings, having witnessed the other side through her.
This chamber, I showed in the tapestries, leads to the joyful realization of the Grateful Dead. There is a commonality with the return of Odysseus, as I describe in Coyote. (And a miraculous path of Billy & the Kids.) It is the return of the shaman, a transformed Being, and the Song.
Eumaeus, Odysseus’s “lowly” faithful swineherd (the pig a symbol of the feminine, even in ancient Canaan), having kept a very low profile, recognizes Odysseus in his beggar and aged disguise and makes possible his taking back his kingdom. In Coyote Volume II I wrote:
“Telemachus [The Weeknd, Thundercat, Travis Scott, Ed Sheeran, Shawn Mendes, Justin Bieber, Alec Benjamin, Joy Oladokun, etc.], knowing now from which he comes, his truer identity of the kind of heroic person Odysseus is and the metis and natural forces that are taking their course, is to return directly to take his place in the society, what belongs to his lineage that he now knows–his lineage’s structure is to re-inform the society’s structure, and is to be informed by Odyssey’s [divine] nature, not the ill-nature of the imposters, those who, as Eumaeus [ . . . ] says ‘we have toiled long and hard for the sake of these white-tusked boars, while others consume the results of our efforts for free (Book XIV). They have assumed a structure and abundance that is not theirs. Not only have the Suitors been taking this for free, but so has Helen, and both lineages are now being set right, their false structures cracked beneath them.”
So many commented early on (or continued to say “This isn’t the Grateful Dead”) not knowing what Bob Weir could have first seen in John Mayer who had been shunned because of the lies. It is the mythological sacred rite, the return. What most have not recognized is what Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann have done by bringing in John (and Oteil, Jeff, and Jay) that matches the sacred rites described by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner’s theories of the passing on and thus breaking back open of ritual in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, which includes breaking back open all that has come before in the lineage–now back through Homer and the shaman artists of the subterranean caves–and by breaking it open, in that process is the making it alive and sacred again, a repetition of the most necessary kind for humanity. The process then shows what the original members are made of. They knew what they were doing despite all the protest of those not yet broken open. If it’s true, the music will take you there.
“What I want to know is, are you kind?”
And this, on this cusp of breaking open into consciousness, is Eumaeus helping Odysseus to Ithaca, giving him his true identity back.
It’s a gorgeous, gorgeous thing.
And so the Grateful Dead Dancing Bears are as that joy beyond “death,” reawakened to the very real, the realization of the skull chamber at Ardèche, up the Rhône River to La Madeleine’s mountain top, a return of the shaman, and the breaking back open of the sacred poetry.
I will endure it, owning a heart within inured to suffering.
For I have suffered much, and laboured much,
in war and on the seas: add this then to the sum.
Homer, The Odyssey, Book V: 192-261
Works Cited
Clayton, Barbara E. A Penelopean Poetics: Reweaving the Feminine in Homer’s Odyssey. 2004, ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA67954485.
De Vesle – Astrotheme, Brice Joly-Philippe Lepoivre. “Astrology, Horoscope, and the Best Forecasts With Astrotheme.” Astrotheme, www.astrotheme.com.
Homer (c.750 BC) – the Odyssey: In Translation. www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Odhome.php#highlightodyssey.