“The first age/experience is Black—the essential darkness of knowledge, wherein we are all within the womb of The Goddess. This age is typified by initiatory rights within caves, temples and underground cells– the experience of the ‘sun shining at midnight’ is sought. The state of darkness is not evil, rather it is the darkness of innate knowing, the divine darkness of apophatic spirituality.”
—Caitlín Matthews
Sophia Goddess of Wisdom:
the divine feminine from black goddess to world-soul
Of the many founding myths of nation states there was one, in the history of Western literature, that hung around and influenced subsequent eras: Merlin as archetype to mystery, magic and source figure for the rule of heroism.
Out of this archetypal weaving to create a patriarchal state, where the familiar story of Arthur and his sword-in-the-stone is known to many still, j/j hastain extracts a timeless Priestess for all human culture. Spelled with the double entendre forward slash / — here then enters Priest/ess.
Ariosto in his Orlando Furioso fashioned an epic to center around Merlin as source-code for the founding of his renaissance time; so hastain here picks up on Merlin’s underworld “librarian” Melissa, re-modernizing the heroic tale.
Melissa, or melissae, honeyed and supple incarnation in connectivity to a literal bee-hive, buzzes through these pages as a study peopled with re-invigorated feminine/masculine divinity, a circle of colors all hued to Sophia, wisdom’s goddess still held within unheard depths of Christos and puck alike.
Priest/ess is hastain’s epic of transitional consciousness—an over-arching poetics that spans a variety of means to forward trans formation.
Obvious themes within any social frame are brought to a shape-shifted ecstatic healing—from cast-out normative body register to flaccid spiritualism.
Populated with the usual archetypes of epic human consciousness—male/female, mother/father, light/dark—the Priest/ess books convey us to a hidden history of transparent magics. A collection of notes, songs, poems and diaristic entries sourced from near and far mythologies, move narration into a transcendental and uncategorizable masterwork surprising on all levels.
“In a mythic time when typical Patriarchal threads were making their way through Arthurian interpretations—the sword being planted by God/dess impetus—into the stone—created in psyche a reality in which she was soul progenitor of the phallus.
No more arguing about who had the "biggest one”—she progressed the conversation from sole (who has one and why) to soul (phallic aptitude proven by tactile feeling). Gradients in intimacy alongside light.
Proved her interest by locking cock into the more masculine or northern aspects of Earth (stone). Locking phallic potential into stone long enough she promoted in “man”—the stilled place (portal) where valors of unusual or apocalyptic Christ light could maneuver true divine masculinity close upon the topmost layers of The Below...there was no more arguing.
Cock could be saved from the direction Patriarchy had taken it. But her ideas of how that salvation happened were unique.
Merlin’s secret secretary melissa (The Melissae a conglomerate face of The Black Goddess with bee cream in her pronoun)—opens to the overall walkabout at hand—and participates by endowing access to The Below—wherein it might be possible for the journeyer to find hidden lights of mystical and mythic cock able to be perceived— under the stone in which the sword sits atop all.
Black of God/dess Below—meets gold of unforeseen valor—results in consciousness of green (Merlin alive and well). And that says nothing of the numinous notes of blue that are a critical intimacy in the long arc of the work. There is so much. Then there is more. Then there is more to come."