Soul Matters, Book 2: Wrath of the Goddess

Phil wasn’t too glib on dredging up any memories from his childhood. He’d rather let those sleeping dogs alone. Therefore, he didn’t do as Manuel instructed, and his resistance settled into a compacted psychic block. By contrast, the images from the archway beckoned to him.

His next sitting on the leather pillow in his study involved a traverse of the trail, to the stairs, to the arch. He stood before the massive stone structure and waited for some intuition on which symbol to touch. Eventually one called to him. He knew it vaguely as a Celtic rune. It looked like an upside-down and reversed F.

Placing his hand on it, he was immediately flooded with images. He also felt like he was in free-fall, dropping through layers and layers of something he could not identify. The images looked as if he was in a movie on rewind. Finally the chaos ended, and he was standing with an older man at the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea.

The sun was low on the horizon, but the air was warm. Breezes lifted the salt smell from the sea and cooled Phil’s face. Gulls circled and yapped at one another in lazy communication about how their day had gone.

Phil quickly surveyed himself and saw he was in a young man’s body and dressed in loose fitting, knee-length pants and a blue tunic. A rope-belt held the clothing together, and soft leather shoes, not unlike moccasines, were on his feet.

The old man next to him was saying, “When God made time, he made plenty of it.”

The old man was draped in a gray woolen robe. It too was bound with a rope. His hair was a thick tangle of white, as was his beard.

He threw a stone to the sea and said, “It’s a good thing, too. I needed a lot of time to find friendship with Christ.”

Then the old man turned away from the sea and headed back to a monastery Phil could see in the distance.

This was no ornate series of buildings, but was, rather, a clump of rock-built huts, a larger common room, and an even larger chapel.

As the old man walked he said, “Come, Virgnous. We must hurry if we hope for any supper. Our brethren have been ravenous of late from securing the crops.”

“Yes, Master,” Virgnous replied, and Phil knew from the young man’s mind the old man’s name was Columcille, the founder of the monastery. He also knew it was the 6th Century AD, and they were on the Isle of Iona.

The scene blurred then, fast-forwarding apparently. When the scene cleared again, Phil-Virgnous was walking to the chapel in the night. A half-moon lit the way to the stone building. He opened the stout wooden door and entered to pray. The flickering lights from a few candles lit the spacious interior so Virgnous could bump his way to an alcove adjacent to the main nave of the chapel. Sliding into a pew, he knelt to pray.

His prayer was for wisdom, but he invoked not only the Christian God, but others as well. One was Morrigan. Phil remembered the name because Manuel spoke it, citing Morrigan as one of the names on his arch. He had no idea who he or she was, but Virgnous apparently trusted this deity nearly as much as God.

The chapel door creaked open and Virgnous started. Slowly he eased himself deeper into the alcove to hide. He wasn’t sure what he was afraid of, but it was always better to be safe than sorry.

The figure walking up the center aisle to the altar was easily discernible as Columcille. He, too, came to pray. Standing before the holy table, he lifted his arms. Moments later a pale rainbow radiance pierced through from above, engulfing the old man. Virgnous looked away. Phil, however, recognized the light as angelic presence.

As Virgnous cowered in fear, Phil used his ears to listen for the musical voice of whichever angel came to visit.

“I am Gabriel,” the voice of the angel condensed out of the blinding light. “I’ve come to bring you hope. For although you will never see your beloved home again, there is a home for such as you in the Kingdom. Very soon, we will bring you home.”

After a lengthy pause, the angel spoke again, “For those who can hear you, your words will aid them on their journey.”

The light dissolved to black. A black made much deeper by contrast, which reminded Phil of his pet peeve with drivers who left their high beams on.

Noticing the distraction, Phil brought his attention back to Virgnous, who remained huddled against the alcove’s farthest wall.

Columcille had turned and was walking out of the chapel. At which point, the scene blurred once more. Fast-forwarding again, the scene stopped at what was probably the next day.

Now Virgnous was walking to the fields to help with the harvest. The sky was overcast, and Virgnous was glad of that because the work would be less difficult than under a blazing sun. Columcille, however, intercepted him on the wide dirt track.

“You must not tell anyone what you saw,” the old man said. “Not until I’m gone.”

“As you wish, Master,” Virgnous replied.

“And I feel I must also say the Lord of the Elements and the Sovereign of Ireland hold for you the answers you seek,” the old man added.

“Thank you, Master.”

The scene blurred again, and Phil was abruptly before the arch. He withdrew his hand from the symbol and climbed the stairs back to the trail, then back to his body in the study.

He opened his eyes to the reflected glare of the streetlight shining through the picture window beyond his mahogany desk. In his mind were the phrases, ‘Lord of the Elements and the Sovereign of Ireland.’ Columcille, as well as Gabriel, sensed his presence and gave him clues. Or so it seemed.

The other explanation was the whole thing was merely a deepening of his psychotic break.

On this note of conflict, he went to bed. Betty was already snoring softly. She wore a flannel nightgown and straightened it as he climbed into bed. She murmured something about color swatches and settled back into comfortable and unconflicted sleep.

He dreamed of snakes. However, none of the dreams was coherent. He awoke, not well rested, harboring a lingering suspicion a snake may fall on him at any moment.

As it was Saturday, the routine was for he and Betty to go out to breakfast and then go their separate ways. Phil typically played golf with other executives from work. She made forays into the boutiques of the beach towns, accompanied there by her sister and other of her friends.

After his eggs benedict and latte at the restaurant Betty favored were served, Betty said, “Dr. Loreen is in some kind of trouble.”

“I hadn’t heard,” Phil replied as he tucked into breakfast.

“The state licensing board reviewed her credentials and decided she couldn’t practice spiritual counseling.”

“Wow. I didn’t know they could do that. Isn’t spiritual counseling under the jurisdiction of the churches?”

Betty sniffed and gazed down her nose at him. “I don’t know about that, but she suspects you had a hand in her dismissal.”

“I can assure you, I did not.”

“Be that as it may, she reported a demon-assault on her person and her home. She believes it was trying to scare her away from counseling you.”

Phil chuckled in true mirth, but he hoped she would see it as dismissive. “Which demon would that be?”

“It didn’t reveal its name, no matter how she tried to trap it and force that from it.”

“Wow. Is there a way to do that?”

“Apparently. She has battled demons before and been successful. This time she failed and was quite distraught about it.”

Phil nodded in sympathy and said, “She is a high-strung woman, Betty. Maybe she finally cracked.”

“Maybe. But it just seems odd that you were her last patient. That’s a bit too coincidental, and you’ve been behaving oddly these last many months.”

Phil breathed through his rising anxiety and said, “It is just a coincidence. I was working on the mid-life crisis I told you about. It had nothing to do with demons.”

“What about conversations with an alleged angel?”

Busted, Phil worried, but he recovered to say, “She told me it was a projection of my own doubts – a construct I made up so I could work those doubts out. It seemed to have worked, because I’m in a much better place emotionally.”

“Well, your stories don’t match, Phil.”

“Yeah, but I’m not the one under an alleged demon attack.”

“True," Betty said uncertainly. Then with mounting conviction, she said, "And she is high strung, as you say. Maybe she did snap.”

Phil kept himself from heaving out a deep sigh of relief by sipping his coffee.

Once brunch was finished, they parted company for the day. She in her Mercedes; he, in his. But today he eschewed the golf club, with its opportunity to become better known to those with more power, and headed to the library. It took him a while to find it, because he had never been to the library before, but once there he felt a sense of brooding serenity among the silent shelves of wisdom. He located the mythology section and pulled down a book on Celtic lore. For the next several hours, he soaked up the ancient teachings of the first civilization of Europe.

Morrigan, he discovered, was of the Great Mother tradition. As such, she was a complex deity associated with war, fertility, vegetation, and wisdom. She was also known by different names, including Queen Maeve who ritually wed a mortal king – a yearly stand-in for Ailill, a founder-king. In her aspect of the ‘raven of battle,’ Badb Catha, she brought panic to the enemy. One interesting fact was she was also known as a tripart deity, a trinity of aspects: Morrigan, Nemain (panic), and Babd (raven of battle). When referred to as this trinity, she took the name of Morrigna. Along with other natural deities, she was no mere tribal fetish, but rather was linked to the land itself as the ‘Sovereign of Ireland.’ In this aspect, she assumed the title of Goddess -- the way Manuel was using the term. No longer a giver and taker of life, she was now the spark of life within all things. It was reported that Badb was a Celtic war goddess but was also seen as a supernatural woman and demon. In this supernatural aspect, she was known as the goddess of enlightenment, inspiration, life and wisdom.

She was a complex deity that possessed many aspects. The complexity was of an order Phil hadn’t run into before. Her complexity included: She was the daughter of either Cailitin or Ernmas, one of the Tuatha de Danaan, themselves legendary founders of the Celtic race. Badb was one of a trinity of names including Ana, or Anu, and Macha who were known as the Fate Trinity and revered as the three Valkyrie aspects of the triple deity Morrigna. In that aspect she was known as the goddesses Morrigan, Macha, and Nemain. The sisters of Badb were thus Macha and Morrigan all of whom were war goddesses.

Phil pushed the padded chair back from the table he was sitting and wondered about the connection between this Sovereign of Ireland and the Lord of the Elements. Both would seem to somehow control or represent the Nature realm. And if the transcendent was embedded in the archaic, what did both mean to him?

Leaving the question unanswered, he forged on to find the Lord of the Elements was the Green Man, who became, or merged with, the Christian God after 400 AD. Celtic Christianity retained much from its pagan roots, including a reverence for the land; a sense that man was already redeemed; the Kingdom of God was now; and an egalitarian treatment of women -- many of whom held the liturgical status of a bishop. Had it not been for the Viking raids through the 12th Century, Celtic Christianity would have rivaled Rome for dominance in, at least, Great Britain.

Of particular note, the Celtic Church was not subjected to the Dark Ages. On the contrary, the Celts preserved the knowledge of the West. Until the 11th Century, those who sought higher learning had no place to go but the Isles or Moslem Spain.

As such, it seemed to Phil theirs was a more complete form of Christianity -- complete in an evolutionary sense. They built on the Mother Earth tradition rather than denying and repressing it.

He wondered, then, if Morrigan still existed. Was she somehow preserved on the archetypal level of existence Manuel referred to? He indicated there was such a level, and it housed the Typhon. Surely there had to be some ‘good’ archetypes in storage.

Remembering from his earlier encounter with Manuel the instruction to read Carl Jung’s work on archetypes, and there were Sandy’s recent quotes from Jung. Phil bustled off to find a book on Jung’s work. He fell to that study with enthusiasm.

When the announcement came the library was closing, Phil reluctantly left his studies to head for home. He stepped out of the solid uninspired architecture of the library in a mood sensitive to his natural surrounding. He stood on the sidewalk and breathed the warm air and looked at the purple-hued sky. Then his eyes noticed the trees lining the sidewalk; each of them caged by concrete. He touched one, felt its life-force and mood, smiled to himself and headed for his car.

Shortly after dinner, Betty gave him a fashion show. Her new purchases -- blouses, pants, shoes and some jewelry -- didn’t seem to Phil to be much different than stuff she already owned. He admired each item as she displayed it, found the right words of appreciation, and Betty contentedly told him she needed to meet with two women from the church’s auxiliary to firm up Sunday’s after-church meeting in the church hall.

She left for her meeting, thankfully without mentioning their brunch conversation, and he went to his study to meditate and meet with Manuel.

The angel’s patio was brimming with white and pink flowers this time, and Manuel was actually smiling. His aura was rippling with waves of pastel colors.

“It’s Francis of Assisi’s feast-day,” the angel said. “Want to go to a party?”

“What would I do there?”

“Talk to Francis,” Manuel said. “He is, after all, the patron saint of ecology. He might have some ideas on how you can keep from destroying your planet.”

“I’ll pass,” Phil said and headed to the bench. “I did get some information from one of those symbols on my arch.”

“Which one?” Manuel asked as he played with the flowers.

“It looked like an upside-down and backwards F,” Phil replied.

“Ansuz,” Manuel told him. “In its reversed position.”

“Does it mean anything?”

“Runes aren’t just letters in an alphabet,” Manuel explained. “They have significance in divination.”

“Like fortune-telling?”

“Like defining the archetype influencing your life right now,” Manuel clarified. “It’s pretty hard to tell the future for one individual, because dealing with your probable future is a bit complicated.”

Phil allowed the obscure explanation to pass without further comment, but he did want to know, “What does Ansuz-reversed mean?”

“It means: You’re not dealing with the messages from your past very well,” Manuel answered and countered with his own question, “Did you figure out how and for what reason you repressed Nature this life-time?”

“No. I’d rather not look at my childhood. It wasn’t great. But I don’t want to blame my parents either. They did the best they could.”

Manuel’s string-accented laughter sounded throughout the patio, and he walked from his flowers to the bench.

“Boy, you really are the stoic, aren’t you?” He sat and continued, “All I told you to do was break the ‘repress Nature’ contract you have with yourself, because it constitutes a grandfathered intention. I didn’t say you needed to beat up your parents in the process.”

Phil wasn’t sure how to answer, because he didn’t want to open the door to his past. He tried to change the subject, “I also checked up on Morrigan. She’s a Mother Earth type of deity.”

“I know,” Manuel yawned. Phil wondered if angels actually did sleep -- or maybe yawning was a way they communicated boredom.

The angel let him know, “It’s boredom. I’m more interested in you breaking the early childhood contract you have with Nature than discussing a redhead who likes horses.”

“But does Morrigan exist at some archetypal level?”

“Of course she does, along with all the other Top Gods and Goddesses who ever existed,” Manuel said. “I mean, we don’t have a parking problem in eternity. As I also told you, the henchmen and women of these Top Gods were angels going under different names. We can’t impersonate Top Gods, though. It’s against the rules. We have to let the people we contact know we are Angels of the Lord.”

The comment made Phil pause, and his mind did a series of quick connections before he said, “So which is it? Do we create them as archetypal entities, or are they one of the masks of God?”

“Both,” Manuel clarified. “It’s more you create a mask of God. If the mask fits an aspect of the Great Mystery, he or she becomes an archetype. If it doesn’t, then one of us takes up the duties of the entity you are asking help from until you outgrow them.”

“Odin, Zeus, Allah, Ahura Mazda, Wakan Tanka, and however many others still exist on the archetypal level. Am I hearing you right?”

“Yep.”

“This gets complicated.”

“Yeah, it does. But wait ’til you get to the hard parts,” Manuel chuckled. “At least with entities of any sort you’ve got something predictable to deal with. When you get to the Void or the Clouds of Mystery, there ain’t nothing but Nothing to deal with.”

“Alright,” Phil decided. “I’ll look into my past and see what’s there.”

“Good,” Manuel replied. “Now I can tell you a bit more about Ansuz. Consider it a reward for dropping your stupidity.”

The angel arranged himself on the bench, his white gown fluttered as he did so, and his aura changed to deeper hues.

“It’s a rune dedicated to Loki. Along with it being a symbol of a ‘message,’ it’s also a coyote kind of signal -- like in ‘trickster’ energy.”

“I don’t follow,” Phil interrupted. “What’s trickster energy?”

“It’s been called the ‘mocking shadow of God’ by some,” Manuel answered. “What I mean is: adversity is also a teacher if you are open to the lesson.”

This made sense to Phil, but a new question came to him, “What’s this rune symbolize in its reversed position?”

“You’re actively not wanting to get the lesson.”

Phil smiled a wry smile at the answer. It was true. He didn’t want to look into his past. However, another question intruded, “What was it doing on the archway?”

Manuel laughed his musical laugh and answered, “You put it there.”

Phil wanted to protest, but knew there was no other answer. He had put it there. Calming himself, he pursued another topic, “I also must have put Morrigan there.”

“Yep. And someday we’ll find out why.”

“You don’t know?”

“Nope.”

Phil sighed and knew he was boxed in. The next thing for him to do was wade through the forbidding feelings of his childhood to secure an uncertain goal.

“On the other hand,” Manuel interrupted his self-pity, “we could go to the archetypal level and ask Morrigan herself. And while we’re there, we could stop in and have a chat with Typhon.”

That seemed a chilling rendezvous with oblivion. Phil declined the offer.

Instead, he made a quick trip to Sandy’s the following day. After Sunday services, where he was on the lookout for Dr. Loreen, whom he didn’t see, he told Betty he had a client meeting that shouldn’t last for more than an hour. He’d meet her for an early supper at the restaurant they frequented on Sundays.

Sandy was roaming around his living room in an obviously hung-over state. With one of the beers Phil brought, Sandy mixed up a red-beer -- a mug with tomato juice and beer, while he waited for an English muffin to pop out of the toaster.

“I should know better than to get into shots of tequila,” Sandy moaned. “Cactus juice is the worst. It makes you do some crazy shit.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I think I escaped it by passing out.”

“Are you too fuzzy-headed to talk?”

“Give me a minute to drink this and eat.”

Phil took a beer and headed out back. The sun was giving off some warmth as it burned away the morning fog. It looked like another sunny day in southern California.

Sandy came out with a second mug full of red beer and sat heavily in the lawn chair next to Phil. “What is it this time?”

“My past.”

Sandy smiled wistfully. “We lived during exciting times, Phil. We still do. Mankind will survive or blow itself up based on what our generation leads us to.”

“What did we do in the Sixties, anyway?”

Sandy laughed and ran a hand through his tousled hair. “Probably threw the baby out with the bath.”

“How so?”

“What was the net result of all we did?” was Sandy’s rhetorical response, which he promptly answered. “Beginning with the Seventies, we got to apologize to women for being men. We’re still doing it.”

Phil was sure some of Sandy’s mounting negativity was powered by the hangover, but he did have a point -- one he expanded upon.

“We definitely shifted consciousness to a higher more sensitive level. But it soured into political correctness. It did so because we have no clue on how to be sensitive men. All we could think to do was apologize endlessly for the patriarchy and what it did to women. We never realized, because of our collective guilt, what the patriarchy did to us.”

Sandy paused to drink more beer, but he was on a roll.

“The whole Twentieth Century produced a massive failure of fatherhood. Men came home from World War One with shellshock, what we now call PTSD. Then there was the dislocation of the Great Depression. Then World War Two, and our fathers came home with battle fatigue, PTSD again. As a result, we had no real role models. We had to figure out what it meant to be a man on our own. Our fathers and grandfathers were checked out. Even so, we knew we didn’t want to continue a tradition of war, but what else was there? Since we couldn’t figure it out, we defaulted to what women wanted us to be. The reaction to that emasculated state was hatred of women, a rape epidemic, domestic violence, and the rise of anti-heroes in movies.”

Again Sandy paused to slurp more beer, but he wasn’t spent yet.

“I’ve been searching my whole life for the answer. I still haven’t found it.”

“Answer to what?”

“What is a sensitive man?”

Phil was painfully aware of what it was not. “Capitulating to women doesn’t work, but standing up to them seems wrong as well.”

“Yeah. Because we have nothing to stand for, Phil. Standing against something is just reaction. What should we stand for? It’s the corollary question. And I don’t know the answer to that one either.”

Phil considered the question but his mind bounced off it. It was the wrong question. While yin and yang were supposed to be complementary opposites, Manuel told him yin always wins. The reason was yin was the creative force, the architect, and yang was the builder, the general contractor. They were equal in the sense that you need both to build anything. However, without the creative element, the idea and plans for what to build and why, nothing would be built; hence, yin always wins.

Progress for progress sake, building stuff for its own sake, the 'growth' economy, was out-of-control yang. One could argue global pollution, climate change, and the culture of greed and polarized politics was a direct result of out-of-control yang. And no amount of sensitivity could fix it.

Phil directed his attention back to Sandy. “Ever hear of the Celtic goddess Morrigan?”

“Yeah,” Sandy relied, still stuck in his funk. Then he breathed deep and relaxed. “I did some research into Celtic Christianity at one point. The Celts included the old deities, gave them a new home even though St. Patrick was said to have thrown them out – the whole getting rid of the snakes story. In reality, he did incorporate existing symbols and mythology to teach the Christian message. The Celtic cross, for example, incorporates the sun.”

“And Morrigan?”

“A triple goddess. One of the Morrigna. So it was a female trinity. The Holy Trinity was father, son, and holy spirit. The female trinity was ancient and came from female biology: maiden, woman, crone, which are marked by the onset and ending of the menstrual cycle. The Holy Trinity tried to replace it after the sky gods came into power.”

“Interesting,” Phil mused. Then he told Sandy, “I’m somehow connected to Morrigan.” He went on to tell Sandy about the arch and the rest of it.

Sandy rescued another beer from its bondage in the box and sat back down. “She is a complex deity, but you see her most often in battle.”

“A warrior goddess?”

“Pretty much.”

“I wonder why I’m connected to her.”

“Well, Phil, you’re not much of a fighter.”

“Huh. Maybe that’s what needs balancing in me.”

“What?”

“Yin and yang balance each other,” Phil replied. “We don’t need sensitivity. We need to find balance.”

Sandy snorted. “Fat chance. Women are just figuring out their power, and they’re making the mistakes necessary to figure out how to use their power in the right way. It will be another generation or two before they accomplish it.”

“And men? Us?”

“We still need to heal from what the patriarchy did to us.”

“Like what?”

“Like we are always right, even when we’re wrong. We’re right, or we blame the victim. We’re right, or it’s someone else’s fault. We are the authors of the blame-game.”

“That’s from the patriarchy?”

“Yeah. In the patriarchy, men get to be in charge, because their decisions and problem-solving is superior to what a woman could come up with. But what if the decision is wrong? Well, it undercuts the rationale that men are superior and ought to be in charge. Therefore, they can never be wrong. Hence, the blame game.”

“Hence, the political polarization.”

“Yeah, that too. There’s definitely enough blame to go around, and in the long history of the world, blame has yet to solve one problem."