Hierophant Knowledge: Dark Nights of The Soul. Thomas Moore

Rainbow lll. Amera Ziganii Rao Photography 

Hierophant Knowledge: Thomas Moore. Dark Nights of the Soul


The View from the Moon

In your dark night of the soul you need not give up your intelligence, but you may have to change your idea of what it means to be wise in the conduct of your life. You may have to adopt a different kind of knowing, one that is suited to the darkness and not in conflict with it. Nicolas of Cusa, the fifteenth century theologian, said you need the night-eyes of an owl.

Hekate embodies both the beauty and the terrors of the night. She was the patroness of psychics and fortune-tellers. Her mood and atmosphere is the one you feel when you see a huge yellow moon on a dark night. She belongs in the dark places - alleys, corners, alcoves - and therefore is a perfect patroness for your dark night of the soul.

Imagine this Hekate spirit as something that lives quietly and deeply in you, a set of sensitivities and abilities. It is especially noticeable at night, when your senses might be keen and your imagination unusually active. It might show itself in ideas that come to you at night that are particularly useful, or frightening and disturbing.

In our house, there is often considerable movement at night. Getting up to write down ideas, dreams or inspirations, the need to work for a while in the quiet hours, or just general sleeplessness.

Children wander in the wake of their dreams and in search of physical closeness. Pets grown and shuffle. I know Hekate quite well.

James Hillman calls her a 'dark angel', a consciousness that works in the darkness because it is at home there. He says that this "part of us is not dragged down but always lives there." This is a point easily overlooked: in your darkness you may discover a part of you that is essential to your being, but unfamiliar. The darkness doesn't exactly come from outside, but is a revelation of something in your nature. In your black moods and dark fears you find an essential part of yourself.

However you present yourself to the world, on some level you are a dark person. You have thoughts you don't usually tell people. You are capable of things that your friends may know nothing about. You are probably more interesting sexually than the world realises. You probably have some anger and fears that you don't tell people about. You may have secrets from your past that make you more intriguing than your persona would suggest. Certainly your potential for darker thoughts and behaviour is rich.

People are often shocked to discover that their spiritual leader has uncontrollable sexual desires or perhaps a gambling habit. In the recent past many people of honour have broken down and revealed a dark side. The very idea of Catholic priests being paedophiles is scandalous and disturbing, but it also shows how naive we have been or how willing to pretend that there is no underworld to human life.

I remember as a young man playing the organ for church services, being surprised and confused when a nun pushed me into the organ pipes and kissed me. It never occurred to me that the virginal nuns would have such ordinary human passions. I'm not pointing the finger at nuns but only expressing my surprise, perhaps my innocence.

We all have qualities that are opposed to the ones we want the world to see. Some are innocuous, some serious. This material we repress holds large quantities of vitality. We suppress it out of anxiety, fearful of what would happen if it ever got out.

We are often afraid of the dark because it is so alive. I knew a man who was extremely quiet and unassuming in public, but I knew at home he was a bull. There he would roar and shout and deal roughly with anybody and anything. Then he would go back to work like a mouse. Like him, many people divide the light and the dark in their lives, allowing the dark to show only where they feel safe.

Socially we usually try to present ourselves in the best light. We may have to pretend that we are brighter and more innocent than we actually are. We may do this so often that we come to believe it and feel cut off from the dark spirits in us we have hidden from the world. But all this dark material is extremely valuable, especially in times of tragedy and conflict, when an unsentimental, lunar attitude would be most helpful.

Again to use myself as an example, I have no doubt that my dark spirits could be named Venus and Mars. My wife is always expressing surprise that I am such an erotic person, so drawn to sensuality. My persona, carefully crafted in a pious Catholic context during the whole of my youth, is quite different. I was taught to appear more innocent than I feel. I admire men I know whose sexuality is right up front, but I could no more be like them than be a pirate at sea or a football quarterback. The other dark element is my anger. My children say that I don't get angry often, but when I do, the thunder rolls.

I know that I am like many people who have a placid exterior but are capable of strong anger. I have no doubt that all of this is in part neurotic, and i do my best to transform the rage into creative expression and effective work. But it would take more than a lifetime to finish this bit of alchemy in which I mix my genuine innocence with my undeniable darkness.

And so I love this night goddess Hekate. I even love writing about her. She redeems many feelings and thoughts that might be undervalued if I didn’t have her image to guide me. She validates many aspects of daily life that go into the garbage - we'll see the appropriateness of that image - because they aren't valued and approved. She sanctions a mysterious, socially challenging way of thinking and living that is ultimately liberating.

Emotional Night

The strange gifts of Hekate are available to all, men and women. I have seen people in therapy begin in innocence, unconsciousness and shallow thinking. They accepted all the superficial ideas of mental health and emotion that the popular culture pressed on them. If they were angry, they tried to overcome or control it. If they had unwanted sexual fantasies, they came looking for purity. If they were depressed, they wanted hope and cheer.

But it didn't take long for them to come to some painful realisations and give up their emotional and intellectual superficiality. They learned to be followers of the night spirit, and in that change of tone they found liberation. Their lives weren't solved, but they were no longer victims of a superficial outlook. One of the rewards of good therapy is to darken your personality and make you a child of Hekate. Even when it takes place during the day, therapy is a night business.

I recall a couple who were both extremely creative and accomplished, one a musician and the other an architect. They were seriously devoted to their careers, but they hardly touched each other emotionally. They made a game out of marriage and came to me because they felt the emptiness between them.

Hearing their story I could almost predict some dark development that might serve as an initiation into deeper life. Sure enough, soon after we started therapy, the woman began an affair with a man of no education, who was a drifter and a minor criminal. Her husband of course, felt profoundly betrayed, not only because of his wife's unfaithfulness but because she chose someone, in his own mind, so far beneath him. He might have felt better if she went off with a movie star or a genius.

Now the conversations began in earnest. Old arguments came to the surface. They began to look at the underworld of their longstanding relationship, and in the process the woman grew darker and stronger. The man preferred to keep what he could of the virtue in being wronged and to play the innocent. I liked them both immensely and thought that the developments could help them individually, though I didn’t know what it would do for the marriage.

The dark months of betrayal were fruitful, and the woman entered a period of remarkable creativity. The man continued to fade into self pity. Eventually they divorced, remarried and divorced again. I remained in contact with the woman, whose career blossomed. I don’t know whatever happened to her former husband. I trust that he found his own path into a much needed darkening of his own attitude.

Rainbow lV. Amera Ziganii Rao Photography 

Tools of the Dark

Hekate's symbols are the key, the whip, the dagger and the torch. You may never have thought of the positive symbolic value of the last three on the list, because contemporary spiritual and religious language is almost all positive. But human life has a bitter side, and you have to be prepared to deal with it. Let's take a quick look at these symbols.

The Key

The key is Hekate's means of entrance to the underworld. She can come and go, a skill worth developing. Psychology sometimes defines psychosis as going down into the depths without coming back. Imagine if you didn't feel a stranger to your dark night and that you had the 'key' to entering it and leaving it. This ability wouldn't be a matter of conquering or solving the mood, but it would allow an easier relationship with it.

At this very moment I'm using mythology as such a key. I also turn to poetry and music as a way to cultivate my relationship with the darkness. Some people enjoy scary movies or books about disasters. In my own career, studying the writings of the Marquis de Sade has helped me feel close to the shadow aspects of whatever I am writing or speaking about. They give me confidence in the dark. In recent years I have taken to reading mystery stories, yet another way to explore the dark.

You need a tool, a key in this case, so you don't succumb to the strange atmosphere and power of the dark night.

I have often seen my role of therapist as standing at the doorway between ordinary life and the darkest emotions and fantasies. Ordinary people go through that door and find themselves confused and threatened by what they find there. My job is to use a whole set of keys that allow us to come and go, to keep a footing in the dayworld, while we explore the nightworld for its secrets.

You, too, could find keys that work for you. Jung found such a key in the imagery of alchemy. I use the tarot cards. Psychoanalysis is still a highly developed key to the underworld, though it doesn't have the popular acceptance it once had.

Most people are drawn to a symbolic system that speaks to their imagination, though in today's rationalistic atmosphere they may be embarrassed by it.

For many artists, dreams are a key to the underworld inspiration they need. Some would say that smoking, coffee, or hard drugs are essential. Some meditate or practise yoga or travel. Some artists and writers have to live in several places to feel ready for their art. I myself have an inordinate attachment to books, which I treat in every way as indispensable keys to the mysteries that surround human life. I also turn to films for an entrance to that otherworld of images and meanings.

An ordinary key that allows you to be both light and dark at the same time is the habit of honouring your darkness. you can speak from it and of it. Without falling into melodrama, you can show others your moods, instead of hiding behind false cheerfulness or emotional emptiness. You can find words for your night journey and, neither glorifying it nor criticising it, you can invite it into your daily routine and even into your personality. As Persephone discovered, you are not a guest in the underworld. You're a citizen there.

Most of the keys I am describing get you into the underworld, but you need to get out too. Jung recommended staying involved with your home and family. I have friends who transit off into the otherworld sometimes, exploring the highly charged realm of spirituality and fantasy. For them, being connected to someone who can ground them and yet allow them their 'travels' is essential. I also encourage them to eat regularly and generally stay connected to ordinary life.

Everyone needs a special key, suited to their temperament, to help them move freely between ordinary life and the depths of their soul. You will find your keys if you come to appreciate the dark periods and at the same time understand the importance of your ordinary daily routine. These too, are the yin and yang of a complete life.

The Whip

A dark night of the soul doesn't merely plunge you into darkness, it also batters you, so that you might well feel emotionally beaten and lacerated. The alchemists described this process as mortification, emotional suffering that leaves you feeling destroyed. As the word implies (mors, mortis means death), mortification entails dying to your will and ego. Ultimately it works in your favour, but during the process you may feel deeply discouraged.

This mortification, the feeling of being so overwhelmed and torn apart, prepares you for new ideas and a fresh start. You can't be renewed unless past behaviour and thinking are shredded and packed away. But this can't happen without torment. The ideas and styles that have become familiar to you are you. To give them up is to have your very identity ripped apart and disposed of. You try to hang on, and that's where the torture focuses. People say they want to change, but when it comes down to the heart of the process, they resist strongly and there is a battle.

In your dark night you may feel as though you are being punished for mistakes you have made, or just for being your imperfect self. Images of whips and beatings found in painting and alchemy imply that the feelings of mortification are natural and play their necessary role. Knowing this doesn't mean you won't feel the sting, but it helps to realise that emotional pain is part of a larger, positive process.

Some people are fated to suffer physically. An outstanding example is the twentieth century Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, who had polio and then was in a serious bus accident, in which her body was pierced by a long shaft of steel. She suffered extraordinary pain, especially in her early years, and managed somehow to transform all that suffering into powerful images on her canvases.

Many of her paintings show her in a hospital bed and several picture her internal organs showing through her body. We see lacerations, blood and plants growing in her body. One grisly painting is called 'Without Hope', and another shows her as a deer with antlers, her body pierced and bloody with arrows. Kahlo has hopeful paintings as well, such as 'The Love Embrace of the Universe' but pain is almost always present.

Some people are emotional masochists. They have a habit of seeking out rejection and suffering. In jealousy, a person might enjoy discovering some sign of betrayal - a letter, a phone message, a hotel key. Some enjoy deprivation and ill health, thinking them signs of spiritual sacrifice. There is considerable masochism in religion. Some, when they have been rejected say, "See, I told you, I'm no good." They enjoy the supposed confirmation that they are inferior.

In each case there is a reward for the pain. The jealous person doesn't have to find it in himself to love without possessing. The spiritual person has found a way to be good and virtuous. The inferior one doesn't have to be somebody and enter the fray of life with strength. There may be other rewards involved, but there are a few possibilities.

We all get involved in minor sadomasochistic scenes every day. Medical people often expect us to submit passively to their authority, and teachers sometimes enjoy making their students suffer. Marriage can be full of control and submission. We sometimes submit too readily and too far. or we use what power we have as a way of dealing with our own insecurities and passivities. All of this behaviour is raw material for finding a more subtle approach to power.

Often it is exceedingly dark, as the film Blue Velvet demonstrates. In this story of graphic sadomasochism a woman character begs to be beaten and a young man, who thinks he is entirely virtuous, in a moment of forgetfulness, unleashes his sadism. Both he and his spirited girlfriend feel compelled to investigate the strange happenings they have accidentally come upon, and as their curiosity deepens, they change. Gradually they slough off their childish innocence and discover the dark side of life.

The Secretary is another disturbing film that depicts two highly neurotic young people who come to love each other through symbolic acts of dominance and submission. The woman gets out of a psychiatric hospital and takes a job working for an equally disturbed lawyer. The boss plays into the woman's need for domination and punishment, and somehow, in the end, they discover that they can love each other.

The Dagger

Even though your dark night has much of positive value to give you, you shouldn't be completely passive in it. You have to be armed and ready for battle. You have to be a spiritual warrior and take on the emotional accoutrements of the knight and hero. You have to be a big person, which is not the same as being full of will and ego.

As I have been writing this book, a Tibetan dagger lies on my desk. It has three demon heads, frightening figures who are there to help deal with adversity. Traditionally and in Tibet, the three sides of the blade represent charity, chastity and patience. These don't sound like dark powers, but from the point of view of the demons of your dark night, they are potent adversaries.

Your dark night may provide you with an opportunity to discover your toughness. This is not a place for sentimentality or squeamishness. You have to be alert and make difficult decisions when they are called for. Many sensitive people disown their capacity to criticise, to speak loudly for the truths they perceive, and to struggle against ignorance and prejudice. Many hide their dark desires and strange appetites. But to be at one with dark is to be a dark fighter, willing to do the difficult thing.

On the surface you may be amiable and flexible, but in your dark night, you may discover the very important ingredient of toughness.

Oscar Wilde provides a good example. He was a brilliant man who played the role of society's fool and fop. He dressed as a dandy and had the reputation of being an expert on superficial style. But he was actually nothing of the sort. Wilde was a thoughtful and religious man, a man of principle who spent years in jail, simply on account of his homosexuality. From prison he wrote one of the most remarkable testaments ever written, De Profundis (Out of the Depths), a letter a person suffering the kind of dark night might appreciate.

The letter is apropos of our theme;

I have lain in prison for nearly two years. Out of my nature has come wild despair; an abandonment to grief;.....terrible and impotent rage; bitterness and scorn; anguish that wept aloud; misery that could find no voice; sorrow that was dumb.....Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is humility. Oscar Wilde

You should read the entire passage and the whole letter. You might also consider writing your own 'de profundis' when you are in the depths of a dark night. Take Wilde's letter as your model. Be honest with yourself. Write on a number of themes. Raise your scramble of emotions to a higher level of carefully chosen words. 

This is the alchemy of language, the transformation of life into simple art, the sublimation of experience into thought. If you don't like to write, then paint or sing, or at least talk frankly and openly to your friends.

Note that Wilde's great discovery is something as simple and unheroic as humility. It is one virtue that stands out as Wilde's perfect shadow. In his other writing he never comes across as humble. You might follow him in this, too. What is the opposite quality? What is the last thing on earth you would expect people to see in you? Maybe that thing is your weapon, your dagger for the dark.

Good question. I'll have to think about what my dagger for the dark has been too. What's the thing we see in each other that is the last thing we would expect people to see in us? Is it the same? Or do we have different 'daggers'?

The Torch

Hekate is a lunar spirit, a soft source of strength when life is thick with feeling and there seems to be no way out of confusion.

This patroness of your darkness doesn't shed brilliant light on your problems. Instead her torch gives you hints, intimations, and suggestions. After a while, you may feel comfortable with the wafer-thin intuitions you experience. You may not need explanations and solutions, but only indications that everything is essentially all right and that you can handle whatever comes along.

Hekate's torch illuminates the pervading darkness with a dim lunar light. In ancient classical literature she was known as one of the Daughters of the Night and with her dogs she guards the gates of the underworld.

If she is your angel, you have to learn how to think, speak and act without countering the darkness that has hold of you. Hekate is at one with the dark. Your way of reasoning and understanding likewise has to be enlightening as the moon illuminates - soft, incomplete, obscure, romantic, slightly chilling, beautiful.

Psychology tends to be solar, wanting to bring all things to light, to over come the darkness and make everything manageable. It wants to banish darkness with any means at its disposal. But no one needs such a harsh cleansing and brightening. It would be better to be deepened and darkened by an experience of the night. You would then become more complex, more interesting, less one-dimensional.
You can see that the point of staying in the dark is not to trick it into making you brilliant and germ-free but to make you a more interesting person and to give you a more fascinating life.

In therapeutic times like ours, these goals may seem odd. But they are ultimately more humane. Rather than giving you a spotless, well-adjusted personality, they give you substance. You become a person worth knowing, worth listening to and worth loving in all your dimensions.

Rainbow l. Amera Ziganii Rao Photography 

Psychological Night

The ancient medical book of Hippocrates, Sacred Disease, says that Hekate brings night disturbances. You wake up at night and worry about creaks and bangs in the house. You can't sleep because of some unnamed anxiety. You have a bad dream or even a nightmare.

This is the work of the night-prowling spirit. She is the moon glowing faintly behind drifting clouds, and she can be felt in the haunting sounds of the night. With her spooky torch, she is all the light you can hope for, and so you should pay attention to disturbing dreams and night anxieties.

People sometimes say that a dark night of the soul offers no images, but the night is full of fantasy. It may not contain the imagery you consider valuable, but then, your sense of values may have to change. Night may give you a sense of alert, an unusual insomnia, a nightmare. These are the qualities of an ordinary actual night and they also find their way into the moods and fantasies of a dark night of the soul.

Night, primordial and primitive, can be frightening, but even then it has its charms, as anyone who loves camping and hiking will tell you. Of course, Hekate is also fully present in the city late at night, in the alleyways and deserted streets and in the sounds and lights that evoke the ghosts of the place.

Martin Scorcese's powerful film After Hours tells what happens to a man roaming city streets after his workday is finished. He meets odd and dangerous characters and finds himself in unexplainable straits. It's a time of heightened imagination and uncanny happenings.

You can expect similar unusual occurrences during your dark night of the soul. It is a time of special vulnerability, not only the kind that makes you feel weak, but also the kind that opens you to signals in the world around you.

You may feel deja vu and premonition. You can be unusually sensitive to sounds and sights. You may not know what it all means, but in general it is inviting you to exist in a bigger world, where magic happens and the mysterious is all that counts.

You can adapt to your dark night much the way you would deal with an actual night on dark city streets. You would be watchful and cautious and might expect odd things to happen.

You would be quiet and observant. You would look differently in the dark, noticing movements in the shadows and hearing the slightest sounds. In your soul's dark night you have to be equally observant and discerning. it may be a time to stay still and be prepared for the unexpected.

The Garbage of a Life and Day

In his writings on dreams James Hilllman stresses the ancient association between Hekate and garbage. He equates this garbage with the day-residues Freud said were the stuff of dreams. But Hillman sees this garbage redeemed in dream and Hekate as the Goddess who makes sacred the waste of life, so that it all counts, it all matters.

You may think that the time spent in a dark night is a waste. You accomplish nothing. You feel worse about yourself and your life. In such a state, Thomas Aquinas referred to his life work as 'straw', and Samuel Beckett, speaking through the voice of the title character in Krapp's Last Tape says, "Just been listening that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that."

Moments before he had sung a verse that places his play in the domain of Hekate:
Now the day is over,
Night is drawing nigh-igh,
Shadows -

Such feelings are an important part of the creative life, of simply being a person. They don't undo all the positive thoughts, but they keep it all in perspective.

Every life is full of garbage - wasted time, failed endeavours, broken relationships, bad decisions - to be offered at that strange altar of this night goddess, the place where three roads meet, an uncanny haunt of ghosts and magic. If you don't honour this night spirit, what do you do with all of this trash? You probably just take it literally, associate it with your 'self' and feel guilty. What people today call 'losing self esteem' might be nothing more than the highly visible waste material of a life that needs a home and that shouldn't be attached to the self.

When thoughts come to you deep in your dark night - that your life hasn't amounted to anything, that you've wasted a lot of time, or that you aren't as good as some friend or celebrity, thought of regret, bitterness and self-loathing - you might consider the necessity of these annoying preoccupations.

They don't literally make YOU garbage, they merely allow you to see this all important emptiness in your accomplishments. The fact is, we are all Charlie Chaplin tramps failing to fully realise our expectations. One of the most telling myths for my own life, a truth my family likes to remind me of, is Mr Magoo, a man disastrously oblivious to the world around him.

He climbs unknowingly into a passing bus, with his weak eyes confuses a mannequin for a friend, and constantly forgets what he was just about to do. I know him well. Thoughts like these, which you might well entertain at night, help you rediscover your humanity and give you the great blessing of humility. Where but in the darkness could you find this insight?

The work of Hekate moves in two directions: it ennobles what is often considered trash, and it reveals the great and virtuous to be not so wonderful. The process redems the drudgery of a life and yet saves you from hubris. For when you identify with your trash, you also feed your egotism. Any material of the soul reduced to ego gets literalised, split, and taken to opposite extremes.

The person who thinks he's humble is probably unconscious of his haughtiness. The person who feels powerless and cheated is probably controlling. You need to see the waste of your life as having a place in the nature of things, in the realm of Hekate.

Honouring Hekate's Negativity

Rituals in honour of Hekate involved unusual dinners given in her honour, where food scraps were given away to beggars and dogs prowled and nibbled. Every deity has its sacred food, its way of uniting spirit and devotee. Somehow in your dark nights you could incorporate, in a dark kind of communion, some of Hekate's negativity.

You could acknowledge that this spirit has an important role in life, even though it is like trash littering the highway and of more interest to dogs than humans.

When you scrape your plate after the evening meal and watch the scraps go into a bucket or garbage grinder, think of its symbolic value. Somehow your life is like that, and it is precious in the eyes of this spirit known for her sharp awareness.

At the dump - the recycling centre - in our town there is a large vat placed high on a cement pedestal where you can throw away food garbage. It isn't a pleasant sight. I often think of it as the lowest region of Dante's Inferno, but it could as well be the altar of Hekate.

It not only displays the truth that we make a lot of actual garbage in our lives, but it is also a strong image for how we feel internally. We need an altar for this stuff; otherwise it weighs upon us and we begin to identify with it, thinking that our lives are a literal waste.

Hekate's Role in Deepening Maternal Feelings

One day a woman may wake up and decide to stop being the nurturing mother. it's a significant realisation, and she will need her anger and darkness to keep her resolve. Jungian psychologists describe this alternative to the nurturing figure as a 'negative mother'. Actual women may feel, when they enter this fantasy, that they have failed their children.

But seeing the truth of Hekate might save them from the pain of judging themselves badly. it also saves men from blaming their own failures on the inadequacies of their mothers. It's part of being a mother to withhold affection and support, consciously or unconsciously as a way of encouraging independence for both mother and child.

Women can honour Hekate in a special way. When a woman's soul is set to blossom, she may feel at first that she needs to be released from the nurturing, sensitive identity she has known for many years. She may fall in love suddenly with a dark man and engage in dark activities - sexual, criminal, or simple mild rebellion. She may give up wifely and motherly duties that she feels have enslaved her long enough. She may become angry and hawkish.

Let's recall the ancient tale of Demeter and Persephone, where the daughter, at first innocent and preoccupied with the beauty of nature, becomes the mistress of the underworld.

Hekate supports both daughter and mother, and in the history of mythology, she is even sometimes identified with each of them. In the story, she tells Demeter that she overheard the daughter's cries.

Later, she offers to assist Persephone in the underworld, because that is a place she knows intimately.

The young woman Persephone, once enjoying her mother's plants and flowers, now takes charge of the dark emptiness of Hades, where nothing grows. What she offers her followers then is nothing - void, lack, absence. This Persephone, this woman of the invisible and of fallow fields and loss and abduction, sometimes goes by the name of Hekate, who in myth and drama became the patroness of Medea, who killed her children.

Although the mothers devoted to Hekate, a woman caught up in the Medea complex, may merely deny their children all the love and care they crave, some of course, actually kill their children or at least abandon them.

It's important not to take care of and be taken care of all the time. But some people can't help themselves. They are always caring, always wanting care. They are stuck, fixated on the nurturing mother-child archetype. But you don't always need to be cared for.

You don't have to justify your existence by caring for others. Instead of making mutual care an absolute principle, you could understand that need, absence and ignorance allow wonder and new life. Children, husbands, wives, students, patients - at times everyone needs someone who will not give themselves in service.

You need to feel your own essence - who you are when you are not acknowledged and supported by someone else. This empty underworld of your identity is an important ingredient in your reality, and when you are learning this lesson you may think you are in a dark night. Hekate is the spirit of this kind of dark night in which you discover your depth.

For many women, the shift from being the bountiful mother to being a person in search of her essence is a difficult period of change.

Naturally, people admire the selflessness of the caring mother, but what's to admire in the search for a self? This effort will look narcissistic and far from virtuous. The dark values explored throughout this book are not the ones generally appreciated by society.

When you make the important move to find your essence, you will probably have to go it alone. You may have to accept that you will be misread and underappreciated. Certainly your family will have to adjust.

Go to any supermarket or department store, and you will see mothers struggling with their children. Some of this struggle is nothing more than the normal difficulty of dealing with children’s strong emotions and plain, vocal complaints. But often you see the struggle turn more vicious and the child comes close to being abused.

This is not Medea, the mother who honours Hekate, who was her priestess, but perhaps a sign of Hekate's absence. Hekate doesn't literally harm children; she saves the mother from one-sided virtue and kindliness.

Paradoxically her spirit ultimately protects children, because much violence comes from the repression of dark mothering.

She makes for a complicated expression of motherhood, in which the light and the dark both have a creative place. Expect to see the Hekate spirit in a subtle coolness and maternal reserve.

A woman may be a strong, positive mother, giving herself happily to her family, when suddenly something shifts in her. She is no longer content with this identity and isn't sure just how to make the appropriate change in her life.

There may be a period when she is uncertain, between the giving mother and some other focus altogether. Jungian analyst Patricia Berry describes this difficult phase, using the Demeter/Persephone myth that we have been tracking: "The upperworld became a Demeter realm of concrete, daily life, devoid of the spiritual values, the sense of essence and the dark (and beneath the dark) carried by her underworld daughter, Persephone."

Mothers can keep a sense of play and beauty in their role, but eventually that satisfaction may go away.

To use Berry's imagery, that part, her Persephone, is now in the underworld, apart from her and inaccessible. Now she has to identify more with the transformed young self, who is now quite different.

She has been drawn into the depths, and there a bigger, more serious kind of life comes into view. Many mothers suddenly want education, more experiences, and friends who are not identified with the beautiful, self-sacrificing mother. They seek a more serious and thoughtful dimension to their lives.

Their husbands and parents may misinterpret this development as being selfish, simply because the old self-sacrificing person is disappearing. The bountiful mother is reuniting with her underworld daughter.

As she develops in this direction, she may feel that her former bountiful self was excessive.
She may realise now that to be a mother means to be both giving and withholding, both altruistic and concerned about living a meaningful life herself.

This crisis in mothering is for many a highly disturbing dark night. A woman's sense of self, her worth, her very meaning are at stake. Sometimes she may feel the call to make the shift to a more complex person, but resist.

At this point her old giving self may return with a vengeance. She may say, or at least think, that her mothering days are over, but she returns to them with increased unconsciousness and fervour. Eventually she will find a route to the deep and dark, but the way down may be difficult.

I speak of this as a woman's passage, but it may play out in a man's life as well, for the archetype of the mother and child is also part of a man's experience. Some men in particular are defined by this myth and go through a similar development, in which the maternal feelings are initially very strong and then find their depth and maturity. The man may then tend his own life, his own child self, so to speak, and withdraw some of his excessive care for others, in whom he tends to see a child in need.

I have felt this particular pattern mainly late in life. I became a father at fifty one. I can see traits of both my mother and father in me, and like my mother, I feel the suffering of a child acutely.

Once, while in New York for a business trip, I made an appointment to see the head of the United States UNICEF committee. I had hoped I might be able to do something for the organisation, since i couldn't make a significant financial contribution.

Nothing came of the meeting, but it represented for me an effort to express my maternal feelings more effectively.

On another occasion I joined former UN ambassador Andrew Young on a programme to raise money to help children caught in wars. It meant a great deal to me to participate in that event, though it was a small contribution. I keep trying to deepen the mother-child emotional pattern and give it more reality, but I don't feel as though I have made much progress.

As a therapist I found it a challenge to speak for the underworld mother. People expect therapists to be nurturing and supportive, and interested in their growth. But to represent the underworld mother faithfully, you have to honour the emptiness and the loss.

The nature mother becomes underworld queen. You gain your depth at a price: specifically, you lose some of your obvious maternal attitudes and become more complex. You give yourself both to others and to the quest for meaning and identity.

Professional men and women have their own parallel dark night. They may spend their days and hours making a living, keeping the needs of their family in mind.

Then they too, find that this is simply not enough to make their lives worth living. They too, have to discover a deeper dimension, their own underworld.

Unfortunately they may collapse into alcohol, affairs or excessive work - underworlds that are too literal and concrete. Instead of completing the myth by finding first the void and then some purpose in themselves, they fall into various symptomatic states that disrupt their lives.

Eventually they have to make their descent, like Persephone, into a deeper, more complex way of supporting their families, one in which their own needs and the needs of others overlap, or where they help their children find their own way in life.

Rainbow Vll. Amera Ziganii Rao Photography 

Deep and Dark Spirituality

Hekate is a moon goddess, a witch and a shrew. She terrifies and deprives. She is at home in the dark and the empty. It isn't comfortable to discover her place and her necessity. And yet what she has to offer is nothing less than the entire deep spiritual realm of the soul, the invisible, unchanging core.

She is a teacher of the invisible depths and her tasks in that role are quite different from the ordinary concerns of the nurturing parent. Her job is to keep the way to your depth clear of debris and to inspire you to renew yourself eternally in the emptiness of your very being.

In other words, the dark night has an unusual guiding function in the soul's life. Berry says that when we arrive in the dark realm of the underworld - I am calling it Hekate - "One is, so to speak, deeper than one's emotion. One is beneath the depression, the black mood, by having gone down through it to the point where it no longer is."

Sometimes you know the very minute you have passed beyond or beneath the emotion you have felt for a long time, now to focus on the matter of meaning. What does your experience imply? How can you look at yourself differently now?

In therapy we look for signs of this descent. At first there may be many complaints about the loss of meaning and the fear of being disconnected from life. But then we see stages in the descent.

Fear turns to emptiness. There is nothing to talk about, nothing to understand. Silence becomes more familiar. Even dreams lose their liveliness. We discover that there is a place deeper than depression.
It can be helpful to distinguish between the feeling of depression and the sense of existential emptying. Here you are beyond emotion. You are sensing your reality and your personhood. The emptiness you sense may not be yours, not even personal. It may be the vacuum of your life.

You may be standing at the edge of your atmosphere, looking out on the empty space of your unknown world, as though you were in a space station looking out into the universe. This absolute, deep, highly personal religiousness is a gift of Hekate, the nocturnal spirit, a gift of your dark night.

Bardo: Preparation for a new Life

The dark night of the soul may have a 'bardo' quality. This is the state mentioned in the old Tibetan Book of the Dead that is a liminal period between the old life and rebirth.

One of the many instructions in the book for preparing for your new life reads: "Meditate for a long time on your special guiding spirit, as if it were a vision without any real inherent substance, an illusion. This is called pure illusory body. Then let this spirit disappear, from its edges inward, and rest for a while in the inconceivable state of emptiness-luminosity, which is nothing whatsoever."

Admittedly this is a strange instruction, but in light of our discussion of the emptiness of a dark night, it makes sense. It adds the intriguing idea of 'empty luminosity', which is how I imagine the moonlike Hekate spirit to be.

You arrive at the point where your sadness or sense of loss no longer dominate. They don't have the reality they used to have. You have finally fallen lower.

You are now beneath all the emotion that has disturbed you for so long.

Things are not better, but you are in a different state.

Perhaps you are now where the dark night has been trying to take you. Now you are almost ready for new life, and that is the purpose of 'bardo'.

Slowly a different kind of light begins to glow from inside you. your friends at first worry about it; it isn't sentimental, it isn't entirely rational, and it isn't always inspiring.

It's easy to talk about renewal and change, but profound shifts in the condition of your soul don't happen easily. they are always mysterious and happen in spite of your efforts.

The dark night diminishes those efforts and in that way prepares you for the kind of change that is of the essence.

That is why religious initiations are so strong emotionally and filled with such powerful images and ritual acts: they touch the very structures of your existence, the very vision you have of yourself and your world.

As we have seen in another context, in some primitive communities, the one being initiated will have his eyes covered with paste to signify the darkness of pre-birth. He may be naked, like a baby or embryo.
He may be led into the forest blindfolded and then left disorientated and lost. All of these conditions mimic the child about to enter the world, because we humans are always entering new worlds of meaning.

When you have lost someone close to you, and friends try to comfort you in your grief, you know, but they don't, that what you are experiencing is beyond grief.

You sense in your body and in the fullness of your emotion a great rupture in the world you have known, an irrevocable emptiness that is not just to be felt but completely absorbed if you are to go on.

A genuine dark night of the soul takes you to this crossroad, this 'bardo' place, where you have an opportunity, extremely hard won, to live in a different world.

Lunar Consciousness

The dark underworld intelligence I am trying to describe is profound, but it begins in less dramatic ways. A man sits with me and says, "I really want to do therapy with you because I know you will take my spirituality into account." In the first few minutes of our conversation, I discover how much he wants to control what we do and say, even though his words say he wants to put himself in my hands. It's not unusual for words to contradict the message that is given in every other way.

I say to him, "You don't look very comfortable."
"I don't know what I'm supposed to do here", he says, another comment I hear often.

I wonder where this notion of having to do something in particular or well comes from. I am sitting here with an open mind, content to let almost anything happen. I wouldn't want violence, but I feel I could handle almost anything else.

The thought occurs to me that he is not going to stay with me long enough to get through his anxiety, and, sure enough, at the next session he tells me this is not what he expected. He wanted spiritual guidance, and he doesn't think that he's getting anything. I feel as though I have never glimpsed his soul, never got a hint of his dark night other than his defence against revealing it.

I feel the let-down and disappointment. I would like to be with this good man as he explores his soul. I wonder if I have made mistakes, but in the end I don't blame myself for the failure. I try to be with the unhappy ending just as I would be with insight and the feeling of getting somewhere. The memory of this failure will stay with me for many years. I'll write about it, as I'm doing now. My door is still open to him, if he should ever want to continue. We have had no closure, because life's endings are more like cadences in music - endings that gracefully allow new beginnings.

My way is lunar. I want to sit in the dark and listen to the sounds of the night. I don't want to be a solar hero battling monsters and racking up mighty accomplishments. I don't even want to convince you that my way is best. I don't think it is. I doubt that many would want to adopt my style. But I think it has value and may offer you an alternative for dealing with your dark nights.

For years I have studied the ancient and profound schools of magic. From the young and gifted Pico della Mirandola, who is known for his 'Oration on the Dignity of the Human Being,' I learned that the first principle in magic is to be in sympathy with nature. The magus doesn't try to overcome nature but to remain deeply in tune with it. To deal with the soul magically rather than heroically requires extreme sympathy with all that is taking place.

One couple who came to me for therapy argued loudly and fiercely during the sessions. I didn't try to tame them, though I personally prefer a quieter approach. Others have asked me: Could I go to sleep? Could I lie on the floor? Could I sing a song? Could I play the piano? Could I stand in your closet? Could I hide behind the furniture?

I went along with all these things and many more. I wasn't trying to be clever and I tried not to over-interpret their actions. I didn't celebrate them or make much of them. I simply thought a magus should move with nature the way a tree bends when a strong wind blows.

I want to enter the darkness, because that is where the soul is. I feel at home when a client brings a dream, but I don't interpret it to death and turn to it for explanations about what is happening in life. I let the dream evoke the darkness. There is a kind of light in dreams, but it is moonlight. The dream glows but rarely shines.

You can bring a lunar consciousness to your own dark nights. You can look for hints of meaning and pieces of insight. You can allow yourself to be taken further into the dark and over time develop a lunar intelligence. You may learn to be patient in the darkness and see things not visible to heroic eyes. You may become less perfectionistic and judgmental. You may even discover ways to respond magically rather than rationally.

You may also become more adept at dealing with memories. The lunar way is to keep your significant memories in the dark. Give them the secrecy they require. But also give them your time and attention, because they are often the key to insight in the present situation.

Lately a certain group of memories keeps pressing on me. I'm remembering the situation twenty - two years ago when I was denied tenure at the university where I was teaching. Even now I feel the sadness of losing a way of life I loved. I wonder about people I thought were my friends and what they could have been thinking when, as colleagues, they voted against me. I wonder if they really judged my teaching as bad. I wonder if they objected to my close relationships with my students. I wonder if they thought I wasn't religious in the ways they expected.

I suppose I could make enquiries and get some answers, but that isn't my desire. I hold the memories and let my disillusionment eat away at me. I'm finding out about myself as I consider them, and I see connections between them and my current situation. I have just been let go again. The publishing company I wanted all my life to work with has let me know that they have no more confidence in my work. They have forced a separation. I have been denied tenure once again. The losses pile up.

A psychic and an astrologer told me a year ago that losses would come. I'm watching things fall apart. I have a perspective on all that's happening, but it doesn't diminish the anxiety and other emotions. I'm as much in the dark as ever, and I'm trying to live my philosophy of staying cool, not looking for solutions and understanding, but being affected by each passing development.

Regularly I consult my well-worn Tarot cards, and I listen to the tapes of the psychics. I pray and meditate and go back to some old superstitious practices I learned from my family. I have faith that things will work out, but I have no certainties. After ten years of brilliant sunshine, night is arriving once again. It's a good time to write this book, which is a kind of sympathetic magic. I hope the words that come to me will give me some insight and heal me.

I play the piano every morning. These days i play some sombre pieces. I improvise my emotions on the keyboard. I also turn to a poem or two about the dark. I'm drawn to one from Seamus Heaney's collection, aptly titled, Door into the Dark. the poem is called 'The Forge' and makes me think of alchemy and the great smith of the Greek gods, Hephaistos. Both put the idea of forging metal in the realm of making soul. I have to quote it in full to get the entire image and because it expresses so well what often happens in periods of disillusionment.

"All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil's short-pitched ring.
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water:
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end square,
Set there immovable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
Sometimes, leather - aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on a jamb, recalls a clatter
of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows."

In the dark interior space of the forge, life is heated and beaten into soul. the anvil is its altar, because the sweaty work going on is a spiritual one, an alchemy by which the raw materials of life are shaped. The unicorn is a spiritual beast, an amalgam of the high and low, just as the forge is a dark place where a tough smithy does his grimy work, hairs in his nose, a grunt in his throat. It's all very sensuous and very spiritual, and it all takes place in the dark, where the only light is made by sparks and fire.

This is the magic and creativity of the dark place. Here an Alchemy of the elements transforms the raw stuff of a life into a thing of usefulness and beauty. The ring of hammer and anvil is music and the iron anvil is an altar and a musical instrument. The work looks tough and basic, and yet it is full of beauty.
Some things are best done in the dark, including the transformation of raw material into tools and pieces of art. There is a smith in our soul who works the failures and successes of everyday life into eternal shapes that make us who we are.

It's not extraordinary, this dark place of heat and hammering, but rather an unspectacular scene of hard work. You might think of your dark night as such a place and realise the importance of keeping it stocked and fired and dim. Your job is to provide the setting and let the divine smith do his work.

This night work is closely akin to the magic of Hekate. Both, hard work and enchantment, are proper to the dark night. In mythology, Hekate and the divine smith Hephaistos were lovers and had a son who was a smith as well. This bit of myth tells us that sheer emotional darkness and the forging of the soul, Hekate and Hephaistos, are connected and even overlap.

There is much to be done during your dark night, which is full of mysteries. Your job is to take care not to interfere with the work being done, by bringing your dayworld biases to it. Let night be night. It has its proper spirits, its tools, and it’s tough workers. It can do more for you than all your day work could ever accomplish.

A dark night can toughen you and steel you, helping you to be a real presence in your world. In the realm of your soul, most of us are wimps at first. We have to deepen and strengthen our outlook and style.

Notice that the people I employ as models in this book felt the sting of their fate, but each also dared to live out the life that was given to them.

They were defined by their willingness to be themselves and make something of their fate. The most precious gift of your dark night might be the sheer edge and heft of your soul, your presence as a person of real substance.

THOMAS MOORE

Rainbow V. Amera Ziganii Rao Photography 



Amera Ziganii Rao

FEMINIST. METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHER. WRITER. MENTALIST. ARTIST 

AMERA ZIGANII RAO ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™

The Super Sacred Brother Lover™ 

The Return To The Source. Ascension.

Amera Ziganii Rao; 

Neo Feminist™, Post Tribe Social Reformer™ and Sacred Sexualist™. Human Rights Healer. Metaphysical Philosopher, Writer, Spiritual Intelligence Teacher, Hierophant (Interpreter of The Universe) and Mentalist Self Actualiser. 

I can help you grow power, from nothing. 

Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Hierophant™ and Sacred Pimp Warrior Protector, Brother Lover™ Society. The kings and queens of old. Angels and Sorcerers together in each of themselves and in the other. The Wizard life. Forever. Living and loving from The Source. Sourcery, Carlos Castaneda first said. I'll say it again. Sourcerers together. Living a life worth living. At last. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

Witches are healers. Witches are the Love Healers and SOURCErers of The Lost World, when we were the giant warriors. We were good and so were were you. 'The World of Men'. The Tribe of Misogyny and Bourgeois™. 

Gives us all a bad name. And poisons all hearts. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

Feminist Lolita Intellectuals™. You lucky man. A place at the table, a place at the Executive Table. That's all. The rest is easy. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS: APPLIED CONSCIOUSNESS™, NEO FEMINISM™, METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHY & SACRED SEXUALISM™. POST TRIBE SOCIAL REFORM™. POWER IS THE NEW LOVE. FREEDOM + HOPELESSNESS + SEX. NIHILISM FOR A SUCCESSFUL LIFE™ THE LOST KNOWLEDGE™ THE WIZARDRY OF BEING™ POLITICAL SPIRITUALITY™ TRUE NEW LOVE. BEYOND THE REVOLUTION™

SOCIAL REFORM. THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM AND LOVE. SHAMANISM. PHILOSOPHY. TRUE (UNIVERSAL) LOVE. NEO FEMINISM™. ANTI MISOGYNY. THE ARTIST'S WAY. WIZARDRY. TRUE INTELLECTUALISM™. WISDOM. GONZO SPIRITUALITY. NIHILISM. SEX. SOUL. GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE™. SPIRITUAL EXISTENTIALISM™. THE VOID OF CREATION™. ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™. HELL. SUFFERING. GROWTH. ASCENSION. LOVE. LIFE. DEATH. WARLORDS OF LIGHT™ TRUE LOVE & TRUE SEX. THE POST TRIBE SOCIETY™

The Company. 

Writer, Speaker and Enlightener, Amera Ziganii Rao, is now putting together a comprehensive and unique programme of Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™. A programme of learning that is specifically about one particular kind of woman. And one particular kind of man. The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the true society that they come from and the one they, in particular, she can and has to return to and that anyone can join her and him in. This is about Paradise on Earth.

This is about The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity that is for all as a result of their healing and in particular, hers. This is about the kind of woman who is at the bottom of the pile in a Patriarchal Toilet Tribe from Hell Society™, the norm, the conventional world and the world of the Tribe. This is about the kind of man who is next in line from the bottom. The sensitive man and the female chattel. The High Priestess and High Priest of a profane society, that has long forgotten who they are.

This is about being at the bottom of the pile, for the forgotten and strangled shamans, and for her, the story of escape. Abused by her family, her friends, her men, her whole society, by the very nature of who she is and who they are and what has happened on this Earth. It is about women of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about men of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about the Cinderellas of this world. It is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™. Who she is and how, loving her is the secret to Paradise on Earth and how we have been living a lie for 8000+ years. A lie of male (non High Priest) religion with a male ‘God’ and with Patriarchs and Patriarchal types and Matriarchs and Matriarchal types ruling over us and making our lives hell, all in the name of family, the tribe and the way things are and should remain. Hate, fascism and profanity. A sick society that vilifies, more than anyone else, the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, just because it was told to. A sick society that calls her Eve. A sick society that has forgotten who we all are, let alone the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™. This is about us remembering and knowing who WE are.

This is a programme of healing for the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, to take them and particularly, her, from monstrous levels of low self esteem and lack of self knowledge, back to herself and it is a programme for all those who truly want to love her, and indeed, him. This is a programme for the greatest carers on Earth, who are vilified, destroyed, ridiculed, ignored, abused, used, misused and hated for being everything that those who would steal from us are not. This is a programme to turn Cinderellas into The Sacred Whore High Priestesses and for anyone who wants to love her or live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™. And this is a programme to turn sensitive men into Sacred Whore High Priests™ and for anyone who wants to love him and live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and High Priest Society. Love, humanity, Spirit and sex. This is a programme to reverse 8000+ years of witch burning, women hating and healer ridicule. This is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and all those who would love her and live by her values.

This is about the chance for Paradise on Earth. This is a programme for the most beautiful, kind hearted, wounded women and men on this planet. A programme of how to implement a system of how to beat life, how to survive life and how to resurrect from the grief that is a true life. Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity of the lower mind into the higher mind, the soul and the inner heart and therefore one's true, confident, ‘happy’, successful, creative, sexual, sensual, individual, intelligent, emotionally healed, capable of loving and being loved self. How to turn grief into creation and survive and thrive, despite all the shit, all the pain and all the hurt. How to live in a world of madness, hollowness and cruelty and how to be a winner. How to stand up for oneself and to take back the power that has been stolen from anyone with heart, Spirit and sex. The art and science of Alchemy.

This is a programme, based on my scholarly and non scholarly work over 15 years (so far), if not for my whole life, and my extensive and intense, visceral experiences of self transformation from resignation, cynicism and despair to a state of relative bliss, and above all, the right to be. The programme and the courses and my speaking and indeed my forthcoming book, will cover the method of change. The psychological, sociological, spiritual, cultural, political, emotional and physical and even anthropological methods of change. Why we are here. Who the Sacred Whore High Priestess™ is and why she is here. And who the Sacred Whore High Priest™ is. Why we are here. Who we are and what we are and why we are. The beauty and glory of the truth. The meaning of life, no less. This will be on offer in the future.

My first book of consciousness, my first book of the spiritual politics of humanity, of authentic power and of self love and strength. A comprehensive series of online courses, live events and audio and visual material. Books, live events, CDs and DVDs. And one on one personal empowerment consultations. The Amera Ziganii Rao Method of Change™. The right to be and the way to have the right to be. And indeed, how to maintain the will to live without love. How to BE unconditional, self sufficient, self caring, self love. The right to be and the will to be and the unparalleled success that comes with that. The Lost Knowledge™. HOW to live. And how to heal others, the profane and the sick and the soulless. The others. My Business and that of any Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and Sacred Whore High Priest™, is Human Rights, The Right to a Sexual Society, Self Actualisation and Freedom.

My Business is To Overthrow Fascism, in the Home and in the Country. My business is also mastering destiny. Overthrowing the ultimate 'fascism'. Our journey on Earth and The Return To The Source. Our healing, our ascension and our redemption. Fate. The daily crucifixions of a true life, the challenges and the fury of being healers and people of love on a planet like Earth.

Submitting to the journey to liberate and evolve oneself, through following one's heart, however much heartbreak and devastation it leads to on the long long long journey to freedom and then the longer journey to happiness. 'Long Road to Freedom', as Nelson Mandela says. My business is always taking risks, never giving up and making the endless sacrifices it takes to become whole. Enlightenment, Nirvana and then Parinirvana and beyond. My business is pain. My business is bliss.

My business is seeing the truly glory of Spirit on Earth. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™ and all that it is. Spirit, humanity, sex and love again at last. And the end of our legacy as either servants or witches or unpaid carers or indeed, ignored mistresses, other women, other men even, and the weirdos that are at the bottom of society. This is our world and it is time to take it back and I can show you how. And that makes my life, truly, worth living. 

I want you to feel the way I do. Alive, with the right to be and the belligerence to exist in this profane and male ‘God’ led world of male supremacy, female supremacy, domestic, casual fascism, tribe rules from hell, with beautiful and kind, love intelligence laden, female and male Cinderella warriors at the bottom, caring for everyone else and getting nothing but hatred, ridicule and isolation for it. The meek are already inheriting the Earth and I can show you how.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012 

I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They told you I and my kind were dictators and that you were slaves, when all we had done was love you, honour you as companions and above all, we had let you just live. 

We were the holy communers, the ones who gave birth to human beings, the leaders of society, the creators of society, the vehicles of Divinity on Earth and the channels of wisdom. The ones who looked after everything and the ones who built everything and ran everything, because we could. And because we loved it. We are and were the force of creation. And you loved us and you lived. 

But they told you that you ‘deserved’ power too and that we were the ones standing in your way. And you believed them. The oldest ‘divide and rule’ strategy of hate in history and it worked. They used it and you bought it, hook, line and sinker. You had to give up sex, love, magic and your own spiritual gifts and you burnt, destroyed and violated me for 8000 years. 

The world calls that male supremacy. And indeed, family supremacy, Matriarchal supremacy and supremacy of the material world and all who believe in it. Men and women like you. When all that you are are slaves to a reptile force to generate hate energy for them to live and thrive and vampire the human race. The puppets of a hate force, that chose to destroy women and men like me, for hate to grow, so they could live. You bought it and it worked. The greatest fraud in the history of the world. 

I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They taught you that my mind was evil. My mind, my sex, my body and my ways of life. 

The humanity, the glory of sexuality and the glory of creation and creativity and the glory of Divinity in each and every one of us. Our souls. They taught you that human beings are separate from Divinity, that sex was wrong and that women who have minds of their own are uppity slaves. They vilified us but much much worse than that, they destroyed your relationship with all that is unseen, all that we honour and love. 

They taught you to hate what is really God. By teaching you to hate us, you hated all that is good in yourselves. They taught you to hate the light. They taught you to kill us. The daughters of The Universe. The High Priestesses of God. The Spiritual Mothers. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Avatars of The Universe™. The Sacred Army of Love on Earth. 

The Shamans, the Mystics and the Communers. The Hierophants. 

They called me Eve and blamed me for the downfall of the human race and created the awesome profanity that is religion. Of men, by men and from men. Of reptiles, by reptiles and from reptiles. Christianity, Islam and Judaism and every other philosophy around the world was poisoned. There are no female spiritual leaders left. It is all profanity. They chose you to represent them because they wanted to divide us and they did. They told you to hate me. And you believed them. Now I am back and I forgive you. 

I forgive you because I can. Because I came here to save your soul. And because I finally know who I am. I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past. I came here to return your soul to The Source. God, The Mother, The Universe. To return you to what is really God. Because I love you. And because She loves you and your kind, whatever you have done. 

Whatever you have done to me and whatever you have done to Her. And most of all, whatever you have done to yourself. We forgive you. This is your redemption. Your freedom and your ascension. We are here to save your soul. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012 

You bought the Sacred Whore like a piece of meat and you called that a wife. Your trophy wives. Your dancing girls. Your chattel and serving girls. Your piece of beauty. You bought us like you would cattle. Then you called it wives. Now you call it prostitution. The High Priestesses of the real God. You bought us to buy God, The Mother, The Universe and you caged us, separated us from our Divine gifts and skills in the Temple and drove us mad and then lost interest in us, because we had no gifts left, no excitement, no hunter in ourselves and no hope or joy left. Then you just called us mad and discarded us. You called us evil and you call love obedience, even though it had already killed us. You moved into our Temples and you played with the divination tools and thought you communed. The destruction of Atlantis was your gift. 

You stole us from God, The Mother, The Universe and you tried to usurp us. You vilified us, enslaved us and you still envy us today. You call it intuition. You might want to think about this when you hate us out of your jealousy. The mystic gene means physical tortuous pain and taking on the empathy of the human race. All their pains, evils and dark thoughts. We see and feel everything. We make crucial sacrifices to be near Spirit and the unseen and we go without for years. To be shaman is not glamour. I make it glamour. To be shaman is a specific Samurai existence, ascetic and harsh. We commune to be guides. And you take that and you shame yourselves because you just want the meat. You didn’t just want the meat. You wanted our beauty of spirit, our personalities and our love and kindness. And you destroyed them, because you caged us and called us wife. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012 

The High Priestess Sacred Whores, the High Priests and the true protectors. Those who do not have the gift like either the High Priests or especially like the highest of all, the High Priestess Sacred Whores but who honour, protect and facilitate them to the world. Who honour the Shaman Sacred Whores of this world most of all, and who know who they are and who they are not. Who know the difference, who do not envy and who protect and love the representatives of Spirit, GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE, on Earth. Who honour their wisdom and who honour the latent Shaman in themselves too and who honour the communing ability of the High Priestess Sacred Whores. The non violators. Our only friends. The New Society exists. It is called Enlightenment. It is called Love. It is The Holy Grail.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012 

The master race. It's all a lie. You are brought up to be a despot king and it is only your sister who ever tells you that you have become a pratt. The master race is all a lie. There are no kings in an equal world. Your father was misinformed. What he brought you up to be was a killer. Pure and simple. A misogynist. A modern misogynist. A polite killer.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

I enter the magical hours of pure feeling, pure thought, pure imagination and I think and I write and I 'mysticise' the Universe. I escape at will, the truth of my humanless, Samurai solitude, and I pursue the truth of love in myself and in everyone else. I am philosopher. I am shaman. I am alone. I frontier the Soul to be spirit on Earth.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Amera Ziganii Rao is a former hard news journalist who is now turning professional with her art forms and indeed, her healing forms, after a long journey of inner searching, self teaching and exploring many layers and areas of both craft and wisdom. She is now working on her first book of philosophy and esoteric thought, and social, cultural and spiritual commentary. She is also showing her first photography collections. And last but most definitely not least, she is building a business to share her Sacred Whore High Priestess Society consciousness and empowering explorations to reach as many people as possible across the world. She is in her forties and lives in London.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

In the meantime, please enjoy this website. I have included many of the subjects I am covering, areas of experience and insight that I will be exploring to the fullest in my book, the courses and all the other work that is to come as a dramatist, novelist and essayist. I also of course, include many of the wise people on this planet, who have come long before me; authors, screen dramatists, playwrights, film makers, artists, and other enlighteners and grand carriers of the wisdom I have found the most helpful on my journey, to find peace and become enlightened. The seemingly impossible journey, in the face of oneself and one’s circumstances. People who have contributed massively to my healing on this mad journey called life, in this insane existence called The Universe. People who have helped to make me as good a carrier of wisdom as I in turn, can be. Thank you.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Copyright and intellectual property rights are serious issues. And legally protected. Please do not reproduce my work anywhere without due credit and obviously, never for financial gain. 'Big Sister' is watching you! Other than that, please continue to enjoy my original work and the work of (credited) others, for free, while I work on using my material in further professional formats. Thank you for your interest and support.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012