A new story excursion begins
It’s Winter Solstice on 21 December here in the northern hemisphere. Among many other magical meanings around this time of opposites in balance, it’s also the entry-point into a new story in Root + Rise: A Membership Space for Mythic Inner Alchemy – and its first birthday!
I can’t believe it. What a first year it’s been.
We’ve worked with the ancient Egyptian myth of Isis, Osiris and Horus; the Lakota tale of White Buffalo Woman; the ancient Greek myth of Psyche and Eros; and the Hindu myth-poem of Goddess Durga and the Buffalo Demon.
And all that’s just the tip of the iceberg ;)
As has been the case with almost all the new seasons and stories, my Capricorn rising brain has a clear idea of exactly which story we’re going to journey with. I’m comfortably satisfied with my choice and about to start planning + preparing, and...in comes the Mystery and makes it patently clear that no, no, no – it’s not going to be that. It’s going to be this one.
And this time has been no exception.
On Winter Solstice, we’ll begin a new adventure with one of the Grail legends, the tale of the Fisher King.
If you’re familiar with the story, you’ll know that it’s a powerful portal of exploration and transformation, and has so many different approaches to it in order to get to know it and work with it.
In Root + Rise, we’ll be diving in from several vantage points:
>> The Fisher King is part of a larger set of stories within the Grail landscape, centering around the adventures of Percival/Parsifal, one of the Knights of the Round Table. Percival embodies the archetypal Fool - who in the alchemical symbolism of the Tarot begins a new cycle. In Zen Buddhism, this regenerative quality is known as Beginner’s Mind.
Through the story, we’ll be looking at what this means, how to cultivate it with courage, why it’s important, and how it’s a part of our soul’s native essence, one that we’ve been colonized into mistrusting and repressing- because it’s a powerful force for Self regeneration.
>> The Celtic pagan roots of the myth will be front and center of our working with it, including the rich symbolism of the Grail itself – before it was subsumed by the authoritarian patriarchy of the Church, where the central potent feminine element was all but reduced to a faint echo of myopic purity. And from this place, we’ll bring in the wisdom of the Gnostic Christians - the original and heavily persecuted followers of Jesus and his beloved, Mary Magdalene - who understood and embodied the mysteries of the Grail.
>> Through the figure of the Fisher King, we’ll explore the wounded masculine, how to begin healing it, and how its distorted projections have created a collective psychic wasteland, as well as a deep dishonoring of Nature – the feminine – within + without.
Within the female + non gender binary psyches, we’ll look at how this plays out in the wounded masculine within – Jung’s animus – resulting in psychic oppression, exploitation + imbalance that plays out in the individual and collective body.
So…I guess saying yes to the Mystery was a wise decision! (When is it not?!)
Explore more about Root + Rise here.