Somehow it’s been a year since I signed up for the course.

Just wanted to ecstatically share…

That I’m light years away from where I was when I started. In the good sense

And nowadays (and in retrospect), everything seems to happen… right. on. time.

Goddess really does have it handled. I’ve quoted that before, but it’s one of those things that means more to you over time, with experience

The year wasn’t always a bed of roses, pleasure cruise. But when you remember to take pleasure in pain, every cruise can be a pleasure cruise. All part of one big Love Boat

And to think, that during this whole year,

Amidst all the change…

Throughout the whole (ongoing) process…

I’ve been guided on this magical mystery tour,

By the most beautiful Canadian spiritual teacher…

You’ve got to be kidding me!

What are the odds on that? Pure luck. What a privilege. Heart joy.

I told myself I would keep this short and sweet (I never can).

I wanted to share some quotes from two sources (Karen Armstrong, Jane Goodall). Pertaining to the Mystery school experience, which Mystress has graciously and very generously re-created for us in modern times with Fire Serpent Tantra (and a whole world besides, with Mystic Isle on Second Life):

“No mystes could fail to be stunned by a ceremony so ‘overwhelming in its beauty and size,’ wrote the Greek rhetorician Dio of Prusa (50-117 CE). … It was impossible that [a student] would ‘experience just nothing in his soul, and that he should not come to surmise that there is some wiser insight or plan in all that is going on.’ …

[By the end, students] had achieved an ekstasis, a ‘stepping out’ of their workaday selves, and, for a short time, had felt something akin to the beatitude of the gods. … A sympatheia, an affinity that made them one with the ritual, so that they lost themselves in it ‘in a way that is unintelligible to us and divine.’ Their ekstasis was a kenosis, a self-forgetfulness that enabled them to ‘assimilate themselves to the holy symbols, leave their own identity, become at home with the gods, and experience divine posession.’”

And from Goodall:

“The heart of the mystery lay not in any immaterial secret but in corporeality itself, with its capacity to encompass the divine and the magical. So it was that the most potently esoteric moment of the Eleusinian rituals was the showing of the grain of corn.

In this were contained all the elements of the cycle, culminating in a renewed experience of being alive to the corporeal world. Human life was situated at the intersection of the natural and the divine. Natural and astrological lines of force converged in the figure of the hierophant holding the emblem of the grain … resonant of the expanded life cycle which moves through the realms of the dead, links up with ghosts and immortals, then returns to the natural world with renewed vital force.

In one of the surviving accounts, it is stated: ‘I came out of the mystery hall feeling like a stranger to myself.’ Plutarch associated the mysteries with the experience of death itself:

‘Wanderings astray in the beginning, tiresome walkings in circles, some frightening paths in darkness that lead nowhere; then immediately before the end all the terrible things, panic and shivering and sweat, and amazement. And then some wonderful light comes to meet you, pure regions and meadows are there to greet you, with sounds and dances and solemn, sacred words and holy views.’

The fact that people who had been through an experience like death and returned to the realms of the living marked them out from other mortals, who would only make the journey one way. To complete the cycle was a privilege originally reserved for the gods. …

Eliphas Levi … interpreted the experience of the mysteries as a dramatic journey:

‘The candidate descended through dark subterranean regions, wherein he traversed successively among flaming pyres, passed through deep and rapid floods, over bridges thrown across abysses, holding in his hand a lamp which must not be extinguished. He who trembled, he whom fear overcame, never returned to the light; but he who surmounted every obstacle intrepidly was received among the mystae.”

Halloween again. There are a lot of good analogies for me and this course, but maybe the most fitting is the classic SNL sketch where Wayne and Garth meet Madonna. “We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!”

With love for our leader (it’s a team game!) and Queen Bee,

the Party Animal of the Spiritual World,

the beautiful and charismatic,

lovely, charming, and talented…

enchanting...

bewitching...

sultry and sweet...

Mystress Angelique Serpent!

Happy Easter, all! And Happy April Fool’s Day, too! Wishing everyone well

Off to write my graduation essay!

Mazel tov, halloween.  Glad to hear of your successes. 

Thank you, Sigmund!

I don't know if you ever saw this, maybe you did. But I feel like, half the time in life people never get to hear the nice things that people say about them.

But anyway, this was something I had saved from daobums (which I can no longer seem to find on their site) before signing up for FST:

"Here is what someone described about Sigmund:

If you want all the dirt in your energy body cleared, which may have physical symptoms, and want a system to do on your own get the serpent fire tummo initiation. I had a shield over my third eye and blockages at a lot of places. And Sigmund was able to get rid of them for me."

How about that? Pretty stellar review!

Well, how about that?  Thanks for sending along that testimonial, halloween. 

The wording of the tummo initiation is pristine and focused. 

I must say that all I did was to follow the sequence and ask Goddess to take care of things.