A wine bottle fell from a wagon
And broke open in a field.
That night one hundred beetles and all their cousins
Gathered
And did some serious binge drinking.
They even found some seed husks nearby
And began to play them like drums and whirl.
This made God very happy.
Then the “night candle” rose into the sky
And one drunk creature, laying down his instrument,
Said to his friend—for no apparent
Reason,
“What should we do about that moon?”
Seems to Hafiz
Most everyone has laid aside the music
Tackling such profoundly useless
Questions.
Hafiz (from The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, The Great Sufi Master, Daniel Ladinsky, translator)
The Flashing Goddesses
Common myths and images can be found running through various cultures and spiritual beliefs around the world. One of the more curious ones involves stories of despair where a goddess brought about laughter, healing and hope... by lifting her skits and baring her vulva. These stories and some cultural carvings showing similar action all relate to fertility.
This action is often called the “Baubo gesture” and that names comes from the story of the goddess by the same name. The myth of Demeter and Persephone is tied to the seasons. Captured by Hades, Persephone has been spirited to the Underworld, and her mother is looking for her everywhere. Having looked everywhere, Demeter despairs, and the world is stricken bare, with cold weather and no crops growing. The goddess Baubo approaches Demeter and attempts to cheer her up. According to the myth, she dances and tells bawdy jokes. Having caught Demeter’s attention finally, Baubo lifts up her skirts and flashes her vulva at the goddess.
This action causes Demeter to laugh. She regains her hope to find her daughter and the world bursts into spring as she sets out on her quest again. Scholars debate the exact meaning of Baubo’s gesture, but most accounts relate baring her body to reminding Demeter of her connection not only to other women but to the regenerative forces in life. By showing herself, she reminds the goddess of her own center and Demeter recovers from her grief.
Baubo is also described in the Egyptian story of Isis and Osiris. While the goddess Isis is mourning the death of her husband, Baubo entertains her the same way that she does in the Demeter myth. Again, the story recounts that Baubo lifts her skirts and shows herself to the goddess, dispelling her grief. Supposedly women in Egypt made this gesture during worship as a way of honoring sacred femininity.
The Japanese have a similar myth in the story of Uzume. The sun goddess Amaterasu has retreated to her cave and won’t come out. Uzume, an ample-figured goddess, gathers all the other gods outside Amaterasu’s door. There she begins to dance with wild abandon, also lifting her skirts. Hearing the laughter and shrieks outside her door, Amaterasu decides to come out to see what all the fuss is about. Quickly the other gods bar the door behind her so that she can’t retreat again, and the sun is returned to the world.
A blessing figure was once found throughout the British Isles that was similar. Sheila-Na-Gig is the name given to these figures which show a female squatting and holding her vulva open with both hands. In the Middle Ages they were prolific, and could even be found carved into the stone archways of churches and cathedrals. Sadly, the Victorian morals of the 19th century has resulted in most of these having since been chiseled off or otherwise defaced. Here the showing of the female vulva was done as a symbol of regenerative energy and fertility. The vulva shape resembles the vesica piscis a shape long associated with the Divine Feminine, and which is often found in modern Christian contexts associated with the Virgin Mary.
But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.
Antonin Artaud
However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order itself often prevents people from distinguishing between order and those who stand for order, and leads them in practice to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself.
Antonin Artaud
At the same time, it is less plausible to conceive God in the thought-graven image of a transcendental monarch modeled on the Pharaohs and Cyruses. But the dissolution of this idol need not leave us with no other alternative than the insipid humanism suggested by the “death of God” and “religionless Christianity” theologians. The God of mystical experience may not be the ethically obstreperous and precisely defined autocrat beloved of religious authoritarians; but as and experience, not concept, as vividly real as indefinable, this God does not violate the intellectual conscience, the aesthetic imagination, or the religious intuition. A Christianity which is not basically mystical must become either a political ideology or a mindless fundamentalism.
—Alan Watts, Behold the Spirit
A negative [apophatic] approach is therefore indispensable, one which sweeps away the idols of the mind, the systems, the intellectual concepts along with the images of sense experience. In the first place, the mystery of Being cannot be confounded with a being, even though it might be at the summit of the hierarchy of beings. The one Being is the cause of being, and so cannot be a being. That philosophical idol, the “Good Lord” of a certain type of Christianity, or the “supreme being” of spiritualism, has brought about simultaneously the “death of God” and the loss of the mystery of Being.
—Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism; (Clement is an Eastern Orthodox theologian).
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it."
(John 1:1-5)