A day of rest

Moses San Pietro in Vincoli by Michaelangelo

It is the first day of the holidays. Yesterday i went back to school and cleared a corner of the school garden as well as transferred the compost bins to a new place where they would not be blown about by the wind. We also cut down the number of compost bins to just the one, instead of three. Then we hid the other two compost bins. So that they would not be filled with compostable material or other things. I also unearthed a set of steel drums, a whole orchestra of violins and several cellos. How come we have had these wonderful child sized instruments hiding in the loft of our woodwork room. What has it been doing there?

A WHOLE set of steel drums. What the?

Today i will be doing lots of gardening at home. And drinking coffee. And trying to get the house and admin stuff in order. It is a holiday in that i am doing things i need to do in a leisurely manner, instead of working at nineteen to the dozen.

I am also starting Moses, by Emile Bock. Bock looks at Moses from the perspective of him being in the tradition of the Egyptian Myths. Moses is the bridge between the clairvoyant/dream consciousness and the start of this clear thinking - this is what the two horns represent. Here horns are the connection to cosmic - they take the consciousness of the cosmos and funnel it into the life force, the living being which possess them. Being the last person to have a face to face encounter with God, in Hebrew mythology, and only having had this after he came down from Sinai, this makes sense right? Having read Exodus and Numbers in some detail now, i realise the importance of the figure of Moses in the Old Testament. Not just as the law-giver and leader. Bock places him in that mystery tradition - where his discovery in the bulrushes was like that of Osiris' coffin by Isis (Moses' mother was an Egyptian princess - a virgin and a relative - also prefiguring the Christ story). Osiris was also abandoned to death. His encounter with the burning bush was an initiation of the Sun mysteries. And that he came chronologically after Akhenaten I was also very important - Akhenatan was almost like a John the Baptist figure which paves the way towards the actual worship of the Sun, rather than a figure representing the Sun.

What i also like about Bock is that he says, look you have to stop thinking about the Hebrews as these people wandering around desert plains living in tents and looking after sheep (despite the fact that there is a lot of sheep in the Bible.) They lived in one of the most advanced cultures of the time. The Babylonians and the Mesopotamians were their contemporaries. The Egyptians were their peers. The Exodus was taking place at the same time as the Golden Age of Greece. They were heavily involved in everything, all of life that was going on then. Just think about THAT, says Bock.

Adam and Noah were still figures of myth - they were metaphors, not real people having real problems and building real boats. When god promises Abraham to make his people as many as the stars he was talking about having 12 constellations, the 12 tribes of Israel. It is really fascinating stuff. It reminds me of when i first read Marija Gimbutas or looked at Goddess spirituality. There is an element of 'you have got to be kidding me' accompanied by, yes, that makes sense. Especially how rooted Hebrew mythology is in the vegetation myths of the Ancient World.

It is fascinating. I am also reading up on Dirt. On the consciousness of Soil. Together with the Sun, the Earth has made us what we are. This polarity, Earth and Sun/Sky has always been part of our cosmology as human beings, no matter what mythic system you belong to. It is fascinating to strip away the layers and layers of the literal which has this fairy tale quality to it and see the connections. It is like studying the mycelium, the cthonic, esoteric, the hidden stories and reading them carefully to calibrate them to a resonance which is then borne up by phenomena. Then to keep testing it you know. Testing the phenomena and then going back to the stories and seeing how they reflect and strengthen each other, or not.

So it is now 9 am. Time to start planning the next two weeks. I am so excited by all this time to do things leisurely. To think and garden and meet friends. Be with the boys. A time of rest.