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Chapter 35: Alice Hands Me a Notebook
September 2005, Sarasota
Alice had never said anything to me about our visit to Jane, so one day I asked her what she thought. I expected her to say something about Jane’s competitive, almost combative attitude, but she didn’t. That didn’t surprise me. She had a way of recognizing someone’s essence and then bearing in on it to the exclusion of almost everything else. The fact that someone might have a habit of picking his nose wouldn’t have bothered her in the least—something I can attest to from personal experience. She simply ignored the warts. I think that happened when she met Jane. She immediately recognized her as a rare intuitive.
It must have been what made her suddenly show up at the black Baptist church. I can only imagine those pale gray eyes peering out of a sea of singing black faces.
It was clear she went there to meet Jane, but how she had ever figured out she was in a choir, let alone in that particular black church, was beyond me. Whatever it was that brought her there, it was clear she must have been extremely interested in what I had told her about Jane.
Alice told me the psychic world and physical world were almost one and the same for Jane, that they were barely separated. “That’s the way it used to be,” Alice said to me, “but most of us can’t experience the two worlds that way anymore.
We’ve become too thinky, just like Jane says. I liked Jane’s story about the first man being a woman. I’m surprised you haven’t picked up on it more than you have.”
“Wait a minute! I’m the one who told you about it. Besides, I never really thought of it as a story. I always saw it as a kind of proclamation.”
“That doesn’t disqualify it,” she shot back, and then she suddenly switched gears and said, “Justin, I want you to take a look at one of my journals, something I wrote some time ago, way before we began to talk.”
She handed me a large, black and white marbled notebook, the kind I’d used in grade school. My mind suddenly flashed back to a glimpse I’d had of her living room. We were out driving one evening and she asked me to stop off at her house—for just a second she said—and I remember her quickly opening the front door and reaching in for something and then just as quickly closing it, but I also remember seeing books everywhere, stacked from floor to ceiling, and then, off to the side, a wall that contained hundreds, maybe thousands of black and white marbled notebooks. They seemed almost surreal, like a schoolboy’s dream. And now, suddenly, here was one of them, dated: Journal, December 2000-January 2001.
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When I got back to my car and began thumbing through it, the first thing I noticed was her handwriting. Elegant would be the word, but very precise—no extravagant flourishes. And then I noticed there were no corrections. No erasures.
No cross-outs. No mistakes for the entire hundred pages or so. It made me pay attention. I paid even more attention when I realized how close much of our thinking was. It was almost as if we had been living on opposite sides of a mirror.
Here are some excerpts:
The First Man Was A Woman.
December 8, 2000
The first human was most probably a woman. Even from Darwin’s limited perspective it would make sense, because it best answers the question: which sex would be the most likely to best initially carry on the human gene: male or female?
I’m not talking about the mating process, but the ensuing process of caring for the young. It is what occurs after mating that is crucial. The first human being female would give the human gene a better chance of surviving. The female instinctively protects her young, teaches them. The male doesn’t. He walks away. It’s as simple as that. Sometimes the male even kills the young.
Even in the Bible, which is a very late male-spirit shaping of earlier myths, there are tacit admissions of the first human being a female. Why the Bible still contains those admissions is a bit of a mystery, but it is clear that the Hebrews who wrote the Book of Moses were scrupulous in incorporating the older female-driven myths.
That’s why the early books are like loaves of bread dotted with small raisins of the Female Spirit. A casual glance never reveals the raisins, but it’s a different story when you take a good bite. The raisins are everywhere.
The raisin you’ll taste first is that Eve is much more animated than Adam in Genesis.
That raisin says to me, as it has to many others, that Eve was the first human.
There is a reason Adam says nothing in Genesis whereas Eve can’t stop talking. She is clearly smarter, more curious, more disposed to individual action. This assertiveness and talkativeness may have come over from earlier oral myths about the First Mother and then laid on top of the Hebrew’s later creation myth in which Eve is subservient, a mere rib of Adam.
Thus Eve acquires many of the attributes of the First Mother, who in early preliterate cultures would have been seen as the one in control, the one with plans, the one who would have intuited there was something better. It is ironic (and yet fitting) that this overlay of First Mother attributes would be used to blur the shift from the old, Female Spirit consciousness to our new male spirit consciousness.
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Eve may have given all the wrong reasons in Genesis for wanting to become more Godlike, but her instincts were correct, because those instincts brought about a new consciousness, the one we have today, which is indeed a more Godlike consciousness.
But it is also one that has become unbalanced, too concerned with the life of the self at the expense of the soul.
***
In very early tribal cultures, the Creator God was seen as female, or both sexes, but seldom as solely male. The extremely obese female figurines archeologists have found in some preliterate sites are also an expression of that primordial mother: the Great Mother. Some think they are fertility figures, and in some sense they are, but I doubt that fertility was ever directly associated with a woman being clinically obese.
I also doubt that early tribal peoples, or later preliterate agricultural peoples, ever had enough food to get that fat, so the figurines are definitely a metaphor, not an actuality. I believe they are metaphors for a larger than life female —the First Mother. Tribal peoples knew the animal world, and one aspect of it they knew as well as any was the bee world, and most especially the grotesque size of the queen bee, the mother bee. One bee mothering all bees: many out of one—the First Mother.
Let’s say the First Mother lived on long enough not only to mate, but to mate many times, perhaps for as long as three or four generations. Is there any doubt that her human offspring would see her as the giver of all human life?
The later, more elaborate, preliterate celebrations of the Mother Goddess were a natural outgrowth of the initial, powerful story those children must have created about their primordial mother. We might call that initial story the Mother of All Stories, because it contained the seeds of all the stories to come: the stories of birth, love, sex and death and all their endless permutations and combinations.
If we just for a moment imagine ourselves one of her human children sitting at her feet alongside some of her non-human children, we would know, even as children, that we were different, and would attribute that difference to her. She would be seen as having the power to bestow human life, or to not bestow it. The Giver and Taker of Life.
That is the stuff of an overwhelmingly powerful myth. Our Primordial Mother must have also mated with her male human offspring, perhaps even preferred it. So we have Mother as Lover to add to an already heady mix.
Robert Graves has a great deal to say about this in The White Goddess, which is
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what he calls the Mother Goddess. He contends the Goddess dominated preliterate cultures, and that the celebrations of her power as Mother, Lover, Creator and Destroyer of Life can be detected across cultures in the scraps of transcribed poetry that have survived into literate times.
***
God and the Human Race.
January 15, 2001
Let’s take a familiar story: when God comes into time, creation begins. That’s pretty straightforward. Let’s add a twist to it: the universe God creates can’t really exist until there is a story about it. That’s my new story. It’s called Naming Creation. It expresses the central mystery about the special relationship between God and the human race. It’s why God has Adam name all the animals in Genesis: because God can’t do it. God can create a horse, but is incapable of naming the horse, creating a story about it.
Why this is so, we don’t know. The general understanding that has come down to us through our Western religions is that we were created in order to praise God, but it’s just as easy to say God can’t be known, until there are humans to create stories about God.
Another way of saying it is this: God created us in order to be known. But what does that really mean? If we forget for a moment why God wants to be known, which is the central mystery, I would venture that being known means that without us, without our stories about God, God would remain God’s dream. You might say we are bound to each other by God’s need to be known.
This is not to say we are God. That is one of those idiotic New Age maxims. Rather we are somehow a part of God, the part that makes God known. Our creation allows God to be known. It means that our nature, our desire to know, and God’s desire to be known are inseparable.
***
The Nature of Creation
January 27, 2001
Unlike Genesis, which contains the seeds of Western scientific and philosophical thought (in that it sees creation as a specific event in time), the creation myths of the Australian aborigines depict creation as an ongoing event, which I see as a more 170 ALICE HICKEY
correct position, because our desire to know and God’s desire to be known are unending.
The Australian aborigines have always been trying to tell us that creation is continuous, but in order to understand their myths we first have to see that the Australian aborigines are, or were, a very pure remnant of that early migration out of Africa 40,000 years ago, which is about the time the aborigines arrived in Australia.
Thus we could say the aborigine myths contain the essential spiritual concepts of the African Mother Goddess cultures of 40,000 B.C. They are also living myths maintained by the aborigines themselves and not scholars, so outside of changes brought about by internal forces, they provide the clearest window we have into that otherwise very foggy time.
There is no Big Bang for the aborigines, no Genesis, no specific beginning, no onetime affair. The aborigines access and understand that ongoing creation—The Dreaming—
not through thinking, or reasoning, but by entering it in their lucid dreams. In light of this, you can see why the anthropologist’s desire to stay on the outside and take notes is the wrong way to understand the aborigine’s view of Creation.
The only way to really understand it is to actually enter the psychic world. This is the way the aborigine understands The Dreaming: by becoming a part of it. That kind of empathetic knowing has always has been associated with the Female Spirit.
***
Love and the Female Spirit. January 31, 2001The essential question is this: if the Female Spirit driving early preliterate cultures was considered a superior one for becoming more Godlike, why did the female spirit wane and the male spirit wax? It seems to me this is one of those times when earth moved heaven and heaven moved earth, and in this case, earth moving heaven meant we sensed we were not fulfilling our deepest instinct of becoming more Godlike.
Naturally, both men and women felt this, but because of the nature of the Female Spirit, it is also only natural to conclude it was felt more strongly by women.
There are, of course, other theories why this cultural change took place, among them advances in agriculture, herding and metal smelting. While I see these as contributing to the change, I also see them more as a result than a cause of the change. The change to Male Spirit-driven cultures happened because of a change in
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the nature of the spiritual energy driving those cultures.
Spiritual forces aren’t handled well by science. They don’t fit easily into scientific thinking. Nevertheless, they can’t be ignored. We have to face the fact that spiritual concerns were by far the dominant driving force in all prehistoric cultures—and not growing more cabbages per acre. To get the complete picture, we should factor in those bread and butter concerns, but we have to keep our eye on the dominant interest of preliterate humans, which was becoming more Godlike.
That concern, that interest, is very mysterious. A more contemporary way of describing it would be something like mothers wanting a better life for themselves and their children, but that’s not quite right either, because it is beyond all that. It may manifest itself in saving up to get themselves a bigger house and Johnny and Sally a college education, but at its deepest level, it is aimed at helping themselves and their children to become men and women who are more Godlike. And what is driving that concern is a special, form of love. It is at the very core of the Female Spirit. I call it Primal Love.
Maybe the best way to approach what I mean by Primal Love is to ask: what does it mean to love someone in a normal man/woman sense? It means I want to be who I am, but I also want to become that other person. Plato says our souls were split at some stage of our preexistence and that when we love it is because we have found our other half, and when we do, we experience love as becoming whole.
A mother’s love drives a mother to advance and protect her children. I see that love as being deeper than romantic love or paternal love or altruistic love or any of the other loves we’ve put in specimen jars over the millennia. You could say it’s a mother’s love that moves a mother to run in front of a speeding car and kill herself in order to save her child.
There is something else, however, at work in the case I’ve just stated, something even deeper than a mother’s love. Schopenhauer clarifies this for us by having a stranger run in front of the car to save the child, so the mother’s love is absent.
Schopenhauer says what makes the stranger act is an instantaneous, transcendent recognition that we are one.
I would go one step further, however, and say that the stranger is also driven by a transcendent recognition that we are worth saving—that humans have a unique place in creation, that we aren’t mere atomic flotsam, biological accidents, happenstance animals.
That sense of our special place in creation is driven by our instinctive love of the divinity within us. That is what Primal Love is. It is all but hidden from us in our everyday life. It cannot be consciously beckoned or directed. When it rises to 172 ALICE HICKEY
protect or honor that divinity, it can be both powerful and unpredictable in the way it displays itself.
***
The Female Spirit, like the Male Spirit, also contains the seeds of its eventual waning. In the case of the Female Spirit, the Primal Love that is a part of its energy—and our energy—also makes self-sacrifice possible, maybe even inevitable.
When I sometimes indicate that preliterate women sacrificed themselves by allowing themselves to become subservient in the new Male Spirit-driven cultures, I don’t mean to imply that their sacrifice was a conscious one.
It never rose to that level. Women undoubtedly sensed they were moving in the right direction, as indeed they were, because both sexes did become more Godlike.
Like Eve, however, the women never foresaw the unintended consequences of a Male Spirit-driven culture. Those consequences are what we are living with today.
The more dominant the Female Spirit becomes, the more Primal Love wants to make us, and everything we touch, more Godlike, although it doesn’t matter how we consciously conceive of God, or even if we believe in God. It is always there on an unconscious level, driving the human race forward in all its manifold complexity and it is absolutely out of our control. All we can do is experience it.
What makes this deep, instinctive Primal Love so complex is that it not only drove St. Francis to become who he was, it also drove Hitler to become who he was. Both experienced it as becoming more Godlike. This occurred because Primal Love doesn’t distinguish between the God of Abraham and the God of Jesus or the God of Mohammed.
I think it is better when attempting to grasp the nature of Primal Love to think of God in a more primal way. If we conceive of God as the totality of light and dark, we are closer to what I call Primal Love.
We may think we are ruled by reason, but our desire to become more Godlike is an unfathomable, deeply rooted, amoral instinct of immense power. If we are able to follow that instinct with an intense purity, we may even be able to tap into some part of the utterly unknowable, and, depending on who we are, come back either bathed in light—or bathed in darkness, or both.
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Chapter 36: Alice Finally Gets Around to ISLAUGGH
September 2005, Sarasota
Alice had very specific thoughts about the Female Spirit and its effect on the nature of consciousness. “Most people will tell you the Male Spirit is the reason we are living in a more humane, reasoned, civilized world,” she said to me one day. “But that is only half the story. The other half is that the Male Spirit has also created a consciousness that has become totally obsessed with self, with the hard edge. We have become unbalanced. This is what many people and most women know today, that the world no longer echoes their deep internal world and they know that their internal world is correct; they know that instinct, intuition, feeling, are valid ways of knowing and have to be included if we are to live a truly human life.
“I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but every 2,100 years or so, a new Astrological Age occurs. There are many disputes among astrologers as to the exact start of any given age—and they can involve differences of hundreds of years—but it’s generally thought that we’re either in, or about to enter, the Age of Aquarius. Jung believed the transition period between these Ages contained, or signaled, a change in consciousness. He saw the transition period preceding the Age of Pisces, The Fish—which began around 0 A.D.—as signaling the change that was to be brought about by Christ.
“Prior to that, there was the Age of Aries, The Ram, which began around 2000 B.C. The invention of writing and the emergence of our modern consciousness were signaled in the transition period leading to the Age of Aries.
More importantly, it was also somewhere around that time that the Male Spirit began to ascend and the Female Spirit began to decline. And it has been declining ever since, right up to the current time.
“What Jung and others saw in the two previous Ages however, may have been a coincidence. There is no evidence that any of the transitions before Aries had the kind of impact Jung saw in the two he studied. That’s because when we go back further than The Age of Aries, we’re back before writing was invented—
and the Zodiac too, for that matter. There are no records—at least that we’re aware of.
“Yet I believe Jung was essentially correct about these great cycles: they are somehow connected to changes in the collective unconscious and, therefore, changes in the nature of human consciousness. I believe, however, we are somewhat in the dark as to the exact nature of the changes the Age of Aquarius will bring about. No one came even close to predicting the nature of the consciousness that was embedded in the Age of Pisces, and we’re just as baffled trying to predict what the Aquarian Age will bring.
“To my mind, what we need is more unconsciousness. Everything tells me the Female Spirit is ascending and that the Age of Aquarius will embody it. Jung, in a way, agreed with me. He saw Aquarius signaling a time when we will no 174 ALICE HICKEY
longer be able to ignore the existence of Evil, which is another way of saying we will no longer be able to accept Evil as a temporary deformity that can be set right through the instruments of Reason.
“We will have to accept that our existence is much more complex, and more irrational, than the Age of Pisces and especially the last 300 years of the Enlightenment have led us to believe. We will have to accept that Opposites—
Life and Death, Good and Evil, Love and Hate—are not only real but also mysteriously and eternally interlinked. One can’t exist without the other. They feed each other. Jung believed that this new reality, which he called the Union of Opposites, was something our new consciousness would have to accept on an intuitive, or spiritual level, because it is a reality that is beyond reason.
“That means to me that our consciousness has to become more intuitive, more open to the ways of the soul, more directed by the Female Spirit. For me, that is the linkage between the Aquarian Age and the rise of the Female Spirit.
One can’t occur without the other . Only time will tell what that new consciousness will be like, but my sense is it will not be like our current self-driven, rational consciousness, nor will it be anything like the type of consciousness we had in preliterate times, one dominated by the Female Spirit.
Rather it will be a consciousness more balanced between the Male and Female Spirit .
“Your vision of ISLAUGGH , I believe, was a vision of the Female Spirit , but a very particular one: it showed how weak the Female Spirit had become.
ISLAUGGH herself is so weak she has lost the ability to speak. She has become powerless, mute, a victim. All she can do is stand in front of you, hoping you’ll feel what she feels, and what she feels is the loss of soul brought about by the products of 4,000 years of Male Spirit consciousness: the enslavement of women, the rise of armies, empires, philosophy, systematic violence, cities, writing, mathematics, science, capitalism, television, Freddy Krueger, you name it.
“You were blind to what ISLAUGGH was trying to tell you because you thought you were looking at a man. But see her now through a woman’s eyes: she has witnessed terrible things, just as you had surmised, but it wasn’t just war and slaughter. What she has witnessed is the dark side of the Male Spirit: a consciousness that has become consumed and directed by the needs of the self, a consciousness that refuses to recognize the ways of the soul. If ISLAUGGH
seems burdened, it’s because she is burdened.
“But that’s not the complete story. Despite her condition, you still have to see her as a warrior, a very special warrior. That’s what the boar’s snout means.
Did you know that?”
“Know what?”
“That the boar was a Godlike animal to the Celts—the essence of a warrior. Did you ever hunt boar?”
“Alice, I’m a city boy.”
“My two brothers use to hunt them. In fact, the woods around here are still thick with them. You don’t ever want to mess with boars. My brothers were pretty wild
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themselves and not afraid of anything, but they were very leery of boars. They’d work themselves up on liquor and then go out in the backwoods and set up big steel cages baited with fallen oranges. Then they’d leave for a couple of days but keep on drinking and then they’d come back completely crocked and stand outside the cage and shoot the trapped boars with bows and arrows—big, compound-hunting bows that could kill a horse.
“But killing boars wasn’t as easy as killing a horse. Sometimes the boars would still be banging against the cage after 7, 8, 9 arrows. My brothers would be screaming and shooting but the boars just wouldn’t die. That’s when my brothers would pull out the shotgun. I think it was too scary for them to see something so strong. That’s why they got so drunk.
“Anyway, you can see why the Celts would take the boar as a warrior symbol. Its constant rooting with its snout also caused it to be seen as a guardian of the underworld. So ISLAUGGH’s snout has a potent message: ‘I am a warrior.
I am from the underworld. Through me others pass.’”
“What do you mean, ‘Through me others pass’?”
“ISLAUGGH is a gateway. That’s one of the reasons she has no mouth, why she can’t speak, why she’s almost not there. There are other spirits, stronger presences working through her.”
“Which ones?”
“Spirits very close to Creation.”
“What do you mean ‘close to Creation’?”
“They’re like the Spirit that speaks through me. Sometimes I call them primal spirits. Remember when I drew you a two-line diagram showing the Other World as a kind of buffer world between us and GOD, the utterly unknowable?”
“Of course I remember it.”
“Well, when I say a spirit is ‘close to Creation’ I mean the spirit is right on the line separating the Other World from GOD.”
“What kind of answer is that? That line is imaginary. The whole thing is imaginary. You said so yourself.”
“Since when are you against imagination; you’re a poet, remember?”
“That’s not the problem.”
“Oh, you want some facts, do you? Well, here’s one for you: there are no factual explanations for what I’m talking about. Get used to it.”
“Jesus Alice, cut me some slack will you?”
“Let me give you a different metaphor; maybe that will help. You know the line we were jus