My Dear Immortal Goddess, I have a vision of you: You, like Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Isis, and Mary Magdalene, among others, are Sophia's divine incarnate daughter, and you have a mission to fulfill with Gaia before you leave her. Yes, for now you are an immanent sacred body, not yet again a transcendent soul. But you will ttanscend once more when your immanent presence is no longer necessarily on Gaia's earth. . . Our own two souls, I believe, were once, long eons ago, before the fall of souls, united in love as one according to the laws of the Union of Opposites and the bridal chamber of the hieros gamos. By her divine providence, Sophia has brought us together once more. If we are reunited in this earthly life, you and I can regain the Pleroma together and serve Sophia and the Logos forever in the peace and love of felicity. I remain your loving and devoted disciple, mentor, and soulmate. With Love and Hope for Earthly Felicity for All ~llaw Sophia's first instance...

Gnostics say that experience and seeing, and absorbing what you see and experience, is far more important than formal study and education. It has something to do with nature – being close to the earth – and the natural wisdom of intuition that has all but been purged from our senses. It is the musky scent of Sophia and the deep feminine, of damp soil, dark caves and wombs, and of the fertility rites of the old pagan ways when "God was a Woman." – from The Mystery of Being Alive , my essay of January 7, 2009 When I was a teenager a few of my friends and I would occasionally take the latest feminine objects of our desires to a cave system called the Tongue River cave west of Dayton, Wyoming, to seduce them, for there is something sensual – even erotic -- about penetrating deep into the dark, damp, yet pleasantly pungent, atmosphere of a cavern where even the most prissy and proper of our young ladies soon succumbed to the passion of her natural sexuality. We didn't under...

As the years wear on I find myself, more and more frequently, looking back over my long life with conflicting and alternating mixtures of quiet comfort and satisfaction, unsettling regret and remorse, and nostalgic memories of all that has gone before. Though I seldom dwell on the past for long, I often pull incidents, places, people, and things through the cobwebs of my mind for use in my writing. For a writer, drawing from personal experiences is the most valuable reference library there is. From time to time I consider the influences of the roles that others have played in the shaping of my life – the significance of my father, mother, and siblings, for instance. It took me decades to realize that my mother had more influence on the character of my mind and my personality than my father did. My father was a here and now kind of person, and he was a friend and companion more than a father, for we spent years fishing, hunting, and exploring together when I was a kid – all the while i...

Much of basic psychology today instructs us to beat down our negative emotions by " getting out of our minds and into our lives ." It is called acceptance and commitment therapy. Certainly such advice can be valuable to those of us who are living lives full of what psychologists call the "negative self-scripts", or influence emotions, that we generate from feelings of low self-esteem, guilt, self-consciousness, and feelings of inferiority. To overcome these negative self-scripts we are instructed to develop "self core skills" with mindful self-scripts based on affirmation, assertion, focusing, humanizing, and tension-sensing to rationalize and diminish the debilitating negative emotions we all live with. We are to use the polarity of our two basic kinds of emotions -- innate emotions and influence emotions -- to wage a war between our soul and our mind to keep us on the straight and narrow. There is something of "wild gnosis " in this kind of psy...

In this house-of-cards world that seems to be collapsing inward upon us from every conceivable angle, everyday-people seem to lie supinely in apathy watching it all come down around them. We are an indolent, intellectually lazy, bunch who collectively respond to any form of oppression or trouble with an attitude of there ain't nothin' I can do about it . I can't tell you how many times I've heard those who I love and care about the most in all the world say those words. The situation is close to dire enough to bring me storming to the battle-front from my reclusive world. Why are we allowing this to happen? Our very existence as we've known it is being systematically swept right out from beneath our supine bodies as slick as a cloth from a table, leaving us exposed, unprotected and naked, to the nefarious winds of oppressive change. For 30 years and more, some of us have seen this coming and yet, knowing it in our hearts, feeling it intuitively in our guts, we'...

Melancholy, coming in paroxysmal storms of depression and self-pity, casts its dismal gray shadow over me from time to time. I am appalled by this weakness in myself, and ashamed, too, but nevertheless every so often dark clouds of it settle into my psyche, controlling my thoughts, making them as black and foreboding as the dank recesses of a medieval dungeon. When melancholy comes, it tries to destroy me – to drive me into madness over my Zahir. It takes all of my emotional strength to stand before these gale-like fits of melancholy until they pass. They seem to be swooping down on me, like an eagle over a coot, more and more frequently, and so I have decided to write about them in an effort to face them now – head on at a time when my spirits are solid – with the hope that confronting the next one before it arrives will allow me to ward it off with a shield of awareness, understanding, and rejection. It is the longing for her that drives me down, lays my heart bare, allowing the mela...

Paulo Coelho, in his most recent Warrior of the Light issue, listed an Inventory of Normality , which includes 47 items about what society considers to be normal behavior in everyday life these days. As he points out, all of these situations are absurd, but two in particular caught my eye, for they profoundly illustrate how utterly lacking we are in our search for knowledge about 1) who we really are and why – a search that should be the primary goal in life of each and every one of us – and how we are conditioned (actually brainwashed) by the patriarchy to 2) believe that our own personal religion is the unconditional, inalienable, Truth – and that you are dead wrong about yours. The first item that struck me this way was this one: 9] Comparing objects like cars, houses and clothes, and defining life according to these comparisons instead of really trying to find out the true reason for being alive. In my essay Looking for Felicity on this blog, Paulo explains that this same situa...

Someone once said they won't enjoy old age because there's no future in it. More profound words were never uttered if we cannot see beyond our own lifetimes. Could it be that we live just a few decades on the face of this earth, struggling as best we can to make the most of this short time, only to fade away to nothing but whatever legacy we've left behind when we die? Do any of us really believe in our heart of hearts that that's all there is? Could it be that there is no further purpose for our existence – not so much as even some mysterious purpose beyond our human perceptions or understandings? To believe in your heart and mind that this life is all there is seems incomprehensible to me. If you are in touch with your own soul, you intuitively know there is more. In previous essays I've discussed the pleroma, hierosgamos, the union of opposites, the bridal chamber, the esoteric knowledge of the Gnostics, pagan myths and their relationship to modern day religious ...

Hierosgamos may be generally defined as an overt spiritual or sacred act of physical sexual intercourse between a deity and a man or woman for the purpose of gaining divinity for the human partner. Symbolically, the celebration of the Eucharist is the same thing. In ancient Sumeria, for instance, a hierodule participating in the act with a god became a deity of the goddess Inanna in the same manner as the taking of bread and wine represents the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist communion today. The roots of this ancient act run deep even today in some religious and neopagan cults, but the fact that it is also ritualized in many Christian faiths, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, seems to indicate that the myth of copulation between gods or goddesses and human beings is based in physical reality. Read no further into the Holy Bible than the 6th chapter of Genesis and you will find that sons of god marry daughters of men: "And it came to pass, when men began to...

For more than a year now I have been in love with and obsessed by a woman nearly twenty years my junior. She is my Zahir (as I have described in a previous post). Our relationship is one full of deep currents of eclectic waters converging from many tributaries, pushing both of us this way, that way, and pulling us down in whirlpools – sometimes together, sometimes separately. My love for her is boundless; her love for me is heartfelt platonic compassion. She is married to a fine man. In a sensual sense my love is unrequited. In nearly every possible way we are polar opposites, as far apart as two people can get in terms of human and spiritual interests, education, social standing, expectations, obligations, and family. She has an active robust life; I am a recluse. Yet, in our souls, we both know we are somehow one – kindred spirits – who belong together. For that reason we are mystically drawn together. We may never have a life together here on earth, but even if we don't we will ...

There was a time when the term sacred prostitute was not at all an oxymoron. As is so common in the altered meanings and definitions of language and the duplicity of our great patriarchal society, the spiritual has been separated from the sexual by men, for men cannot deal with the concept that the woman is equal, if not superior, to the man in every way that was ever meant to be – except perhaps for the hunter/gatherer/defender role. Back then, immanent sexuality and transcendent divinity were inseparable, for mankind understood intuitively the roles between the sexes; the business of life was pure and simple, mostly unfettered by the devious archons that dominate our lifestyles today. Just as night follows day, as peace follows war, life follows death, north opposes south, and love follows hate, our existence is linked together by a polar, yet magnetically attractive, consciousness that has been all but beaten out of us by the patriarchal way. It is called the union of opposites . I...

When I began to look deeply into Gnosticism – particularly Sophian Gnosticism – I found that underlying all the intellectual, spiritual and religious works and studies, the ecclesiastical rituals and ceremonies, the Eucharist, or all the aspects of the Bridal Chamber, there is a profound simplicity to the entire concept of its existence. Tau Rosamonde Miller of the Church of Gnosis explains it this way: "Gnosticism is better understood through art, music, and poetry and not through intellectual pursuit . . . . It is better understood in terms of Buddhism than of Christianity. I find that one of the simplest, truest ways of describing the experience of Gnosis is found in the lines of the Tao Te Ching, 'The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.' Just substitute "Gnosis" instead of "Tao". In this instance the terms can be interchangeable." But the simplicity of Gnosticism might best be understood by the term Wild Gnosis . The concept of Wild G...

My uncle, Albert Pendergraft, committed suicide in 1944, apparently from a longtime overdose of alcohol and depression. He blew his head off with an S&W .38 Special revolver. Born just three years before his death, I have no recall of the event, but Albert, no doubt unintentionally, left a life-long gift for me – or for anyone else who cared to partake of it for what it was. So far as I know I am the only one who did, though my older brother may have. The gift was what I believe was his suicide note – a poem of love for the land he roamed that depicted a key part of the philosophy of his lonesome life. For several years late in his life he was a ditch rider. For sure, he was a recluse: he had great love for Gaia, but little love for his fellow man or their gods. Albert was born on a remote ranch in Johnson County, Wyoming, in 1894, just four years after Wyoming became a part of the United States. The son of a Texas Trail cowboy, he spoke so seldom that he became known as Silent Al ...