Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming by Catherine Shainberg

Author:Catherine Shainberg [Catherine Shainberg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2012-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

Practicing Life’s Quickening Exercises

“A depth of beginning, a depth of end; a depth of good, a depth of evil; a depth of above, a depth of below; a depth of east, a depth of west; a depth of north, a depth of south. The singular Master, God faithful King, dominates them all from His holy dwelling until eternity of eternities.”

SEFER YETSIRA, 1:5

If we approach the world of myth objectively, we encounter a huge mass of contradictory, far-fetched stories that severely tax our credulity. Take, for instance, the Greek gods. The mildest thing a rational person can make of them is that they are capricious.

With all the playful irresponsibility of children, one moment they incarnate as all-powerful, beautiful, noble, fair-minded immortals, the next as lying, scheming, jealous, spiteful, revengeful individuals. With dizzying swiftness they appear and disappear, change identities as easily as they would masks, perform in wildly discordant tales, and never excuse or explain themselves, expecting us mere mortals to accept their capering with equanimity.

Take Hecate, the moon goddess. To the ancients, she was known as the hidden one, but she appears also as “Demeter,” the radiant goddess of the harvest and mother of all living things (the waxing moon), and as Demeter’s golden daughter, the maiden-goddess “Persephone” (the new moon).

When the maiden Persephone is raped and carried away by her Uncle Hades, god of the Underworld and the Dead, (just as Demeter was raped by his brother Zeus, god of the Upper World) Hecate then also becomes “Persephone’s shadow,” a fitting companion to the Queen of the Dead (the waning moon).

But to the ancients, Hecate was “Artemis” as well, the glowing full moon, a fiercely free, undefiled virgin, and “Medusa” too, one of the three Gorgon sisters. She is the lady whose beautiful face, like the silvery surface of the moon, reflects back to men their unmitigated truth, the vision of which petrifies them. As we have said in chapter 5, one must take precautions with the truth, and Perseus certainly did when he used the mirror of his shield to cut off Medusa’s head, making sure not to look at her directly. (When Perseus killed Medusa he was probably Hades, for he wore the cap of invisibility, but it is the name “Perseus” that Hecate incorporates when she is Persephone, “she who was killed by Perseus.”)

And perhaps due to the fact that, in vengeance for the loss of Persephone, Hecate, in her attribute as Demeter, goddess of the harvest, causes the whole earth to be barren, she is also known as “Nemesis,” goddess of retribution! Moon, mother, daughter, wife? Mother of all living things and goddess of the dead? Radiant, bountiful, grim, implacable, vindictive immortal and also victimized child? Which is she? Who is Hecate really?

As emotionally charged as these stories can be, they also have the power to subvert rationality. We will suffer only frustration if we resort to cool reasonableness and employ only cool reasonableness in dealing with them. Having come so far, will you suspend

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