flying4

This is not to say that men cannot pilot flaming bubbles through the desert of southern New Mexico. How would I know? It is only to say that when a nonagenarian hillbilly in Arkansas offers me � out of the friggin blue � some yap about flying bubbles, I will listen to him much more carefully when he says brown women piloted them.

First ya do your homework. Then ya peer through the telescope.

Robert Briffault, in his book The Mothers, reports of one Celtic goddess: ""Black Anu was represented as a savage woman who ate men; the priestesses of Nantes offered her a human victim." Hmmm. Dark Madonnas are ubiquitous iconic figures in Europe, especially as patronesses of artists, Gnostics, troubadours, alchemists, gypsies, and sundry other seekers after The Stone. Nor are they universally "black," instead tending often towards tan or brown.

These Madonnas are the most authentic surviving tradition of the Great Goddess on the planet today. Czech Hermeticist Lubin Antonin links the Black Madonnas with the male-female conuinctio of the �royal coronation� and with the Big Parade, the grand processional of souls following the coniunctio, when the hearts of all beings are laid open and the true Kings and Queens are revealed. Double hmmm.

In the �Song of Songs� (�Song of Solomon,� or �Canticles� in the Latin Vulgate), the king prophesies and grieves over his estranged lover, the dark Queen of Sheba:

Return, return, O Shulamite; return, return, that we may look
upon Thee. What will ye see in the Shulamite? As it were the company of two armies...

King Solomon, the progenitor of the Western occult tradition, suggests here that if we look into the "Shulamite," i.e., read the inner nature of the Dark Madonna, we would see "as it were, the company of two armies." This means that the Bride of humanity incorporates all warring dualities, and in this context especially, the poles of warring gender. The phrase "as it were" indicates metaphor; "company" suggests merging that involves not only unified intent but camaraderie and companionship -- the opposite of current gender relations. Solomon is informing us that the figure of the Dark Queen is an avatar of the coniunctio -- the reunification of male and female, and of all oppositional principles and elements.

Matter is feminine, spirit masculine. Brown women piloting bubbles around the desert suggests an explicit elevation of matter, with overtones of play, of Tricksterism. It suggests a portion of humanity testing the Divine Middle, tentatively separating from the teat of the opposites, where everything comes in the childish flavors of either/or, good/evil, black/white.

Brown women, after all, are neither black nor white. Like angels, they may be intermediaries, mediators, joiners of the broken, healers of the primal wound. Brown women in bubbles could be emissaries standing beyond dualistic, polarized, rationalistic certainties, beyond the facile �good and evil� that every culture, and individual, twists to power and advantage. They might be intimations, as Graves said, of the Black Goddess who oversees the coming Millennium. Engagement of her comes, according to Graves, after �apprenticeship to the White Goddess.� Perhaps those inhabited �bolides� are suggestions of the human potential, and necessity, to break concretistic, moralistic, dualistic, antagonistic patterns and behaviors.

The bubble surrounding elevated femininity might be a temenos, a sacred enclosure, made of the liquid, living Stone, where consciousness and matter are wed. Inhabited bubbles of fire could be forms of personal and collective unconsciousness made manifest. This may be what one witnessnes when an aspect of the collective unconscious -- like the Queen of Sheba in the innermost bedchamber of King Solomon -- has finished its striptease, and what was once hidden is made visible, what once was unconscious is merged with awareness, made manifest.

Our hyper-logical, post-Cartesian Western cosmology is dominated by science, which makes the fatal error of confusing a method for comprehending the universe with the universe itself. Here�s a Reuter�s wire description of a �bolide� � a flaming fireball, a �meteor� � widely witnessed over the Northeastern United States on July 24, 2001: �A Reuters reporter driving 20 miles west of Philadelphia saw a long trumpet-shaped object descending toward the western horizon at a 30-degree angle while emitting a rainbow of colors from bright yellow at the flared leading edge to pale green and a tapered tail of rusty red.�

There�s nothing tricky here, is there? No, absolutely not. We will mention, merely for statistical purposes, that Philadelphia is the reputed abode of the guiding spirit, the "guardian angel," of this nation. We will also reference the innocuous data point of the object�s �trumpet-shape.� There are many references in the Western spiritual tradition connecting certain celestial entities blowing trumpets at the eschaton. But no, let�s not go there. Similarly, we will refrain from veering off into an extended screed investigating the connections between the rainbow as an image, and the Biblical promise of God to send Children of Redemption to humanity. Nope. We're gonna spare you all that gibberish. You're welcome. Don't mention it.

To what end do I dump this account upon you, poor reader? I�m sure I don�t know. But I do know this: in almost five decades of wandering upon this strange Rock, I have personally witnessed far too many million-to-one-shots ever to return to my original True Belief in science. I have to be braver than that, if I ever hope to learn anything.

Remember, the name of the place is SPINBUSTERS. We don't tell tales for effect.

Now this one has a name: Flying Foozle Femonema. I feel so much more comfy, positively taxonomic.

For now, let�s leave it at that.