Bees Fly Me to the Epopteia

I open an old journal at random and find myself back in an incandescent night in 1992 when bees swarmed around my body. They flew me to the climax of the Mysteries at Eleusis. From my raw journal report:

January 25, 1992

“Had” to lie down at 9:30 p.m. Immediately, I had the sense of being drawn up out of my body, of my whole second body lifting up. I saw a glow around my second body. I felt strong vibrations and heard a humming sound. I realized that a swarm of bees had massed around me, especially around my arms and shoulders, lifting me, helping me to fly.

I flew inside the swarm of bees, over an ocean, towards a temple on a rocky height. Greek words were streaming through my mind. Kyriacos. Epopteia.

Later, I grabbed relevant books from my shelves. Kyriacos means Lord or Ruler. The epopteia is the “full vision” or “full revelation" of the highest stage of the Mysteries, when the initiate is brought face-to-face with the deity. Of course I found many pages about bees as the companions of the Goddess and recalled that "honey bee" (melissa) is an ancient title of the priestess.

I made a quick sketch from this old report.

Unfinished Portrait of the Higher Self & Other Dream Drawings

 

My favorite activity first thing in the morning is to make a drawing from a dream. This delights the small boy and the artist in me, who are pretty much the same. I don't worry about technical execution, and use whatever I pull from my boxes of colored pencils and markers and oil or gel crayons and Neocolors.

Here are three recent productions:

January 17, 2023

Dream

Hermetic Fridge

My mind is still working on Neoplatonist texts I was studying late. I open the fridge and see a screen filling the upper half. It displays texts that appear in Greek and English translation and various symbols. I am able to read quite a lot. Then the screen flickers and living scenes appear. A woman in a flowing garment dances with a radiant being that descends in a shaft of light. I picture myself entering a similar column of light and ascending within it.

On a shelf in the fridge door is a slim rectangular case, like a laptop. This belongs to observers who are monitoring the transmissions.

I walk outside on our street, rehearsing exercises and meditations I have derived from my studies. When I take up the texts again, there is a satisfactory click: I have found a portal that was used by an ancient lineage of theurgists to enter another universe. A Speaker confirms my discovery and shows me how that universe looks from the outside.

Feelings: excited, intrigued

Reality check: I have been reading books by and about the Neoplatonists late into the nights. The fridge and the street in the dream are our new fridge and the scene right outside our building. I'm happy to think that ancient knowledge is right here where I live.

January 18, 2023

Dream

The Ambassadors Get Me to Ride a Kangaroo

I'm at a reception hosted by a Spanish grandee, Muy caballero. Many ambassadors are present. Drinks and canapes are flowing freely. My host tells me his guests would like to see me ride a kangaroo. Is this a joke? No, they actually have one. With great misgivings, I get on the animal's back (riding bareback) and we are flying. If this started as a joke, it is becoming something else.

Feelings: amused

Reality: I am an expat Australian. Aussies really don't ride kangaroos but long ago I knew an Aboriginal spirit man whose animal ally was a kangaroo - Big Red - that gave him the power of fast walking. In movement, kangaroos are in the air 80 percent of the time.

January 20, 2023

Dream

She Finger-Knits Herself Under a Red Blanket

People have gathered because the blonde is putting on quite a show. She is finger knitting a chunky red blanket while sitting inside it. She goes on - and up - until the blanket all but covers her head. Excitement rises because she is being timed. In a minute or so she'll be stopped. Will she finish in time? She adds to the tension by slowing her hands. Now I can barely see her skin and hair below the red strands. A few last loops and pulls and she's Done!

Feelings. Entertained

Reality: I know nothing about knitting. I don't think I know the blonde. Her style is of an earlier generation. I think of the Mad Men era. What's going on feels like a contest or publicity stunt. The last thing I read before bed was a line about an intuitive seeing a woman entirely covered in red

Sometimes I combine this exercise with bibiomancy by opening an old journal at random and seeing what pops us. Here are three drawings I made recently from "old" dreams I recorded more than twenty years ago that still convey terrific energy.

[Date of drawing: January 26, 2023]

Banyan Family

I found this in a much longer inner communication I recorded on May 22, 1999:

"You recall your almost erotic interest in the banyan of Lahaina, that replants itself. The banyan is an excellent model for the relationship between different life experiences – for your personal soul family. "

[Date of drawing: January 28, 2023]

Unfinished Portrait of the Higher Self

Journal report dated May 2, 1999

I am leading a group up a mountain along a spiral path. We pass a statue of a recumbent lion. What might be a saddle on his back is a giant carnelian glowing with deep red fire.

There is a tower at the top of a mountain. Through open doors we see an artist working on a painting, apparently a self portrait. Above and around it is a second, much larger portrait. It is nested inside a still larger picture, suggested rather than executed. And so on, and so up. Looking up I see that the tower has no roof and the walls seem to go up into the sky. Picture within picture, self within higher self. I doubt that the artist's work can ever be done but his passionate engagement is fueling a life of creative exploration charged with that carnelian fire.

One more, from a night vision I recorded more than thirty years ago:

[Date of drawing: January 24, 2023]

Bees Fly Me to the Epopteia

Journal report dated January 25, 1992

“Had” to lie down at 9:30 p.m. Immediately, I had the sense of being drawn up out of my body, of my whole second body lifting up. I saw a glow around my second body. I felt strong vibrations and heard a humming sound. I realized that a swarm of bees had massed around me, especially around my arms and shoulders, lifting me, helping me to fly.

I flew inside the swarm of bees, over an ocean, towards a temple on a rocky height. Greek words were streaming through my mind. Kyriacos. Epopteia.

Later, I grabbed relevant books from my shelves. Kyriacos means Lord or Ruler. The epopteia is the “full vision” or “full revelation" of the highest stage of the Mysteries, when the initiate is brought face-to-face with the deity. Of course I found many pages about bees as the companions of the Goddess and recalled that "honey bee" (melissa) is an ancient title of the priestess.

Joseph, Aseneth and Divine Doubles

 

Jewish midrash, Hellenistic romance, and the coded manual of a Mystery school?

The divine double, or heavenly twin, one of my favorite themes in the history of religion. In a recent study, The Greatest Mirror: Heavenly Counterparts in the Jewish Pseudepigrapha (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018) Andrei A. Orlov tracks it through the Pseudepigrapha ("False Writings") the name given to a mostly Jewish body of texts from late antiquity whose authorship and provenance is disguised or concealed.

Most interesting is the story of Aseneth, the high-born daughter of the chief priest of Heliopolis who is married to Joseph, the dreamer and patriarch. Her tale grows and grows from a few lines in Genesis through midrash and imagination until it becomes a popular Greek romance novel - and maybe also a coded manual for a Mystery school. In the two Greek-language versions of her story Aseneth receives a visitation from an angelic being who looks exactly like Joseph except that he flashes with fire and lightning. He feeds her mysterious honeycomb from his mouth and she is infused with divine essence and wisdom. When she looks in the mirror of water and sees the face of another radiant being, apparently her own divine double, who is named as Metanoia. 

 In its shorter and longer versions, Aseneth (as the scholar Ross Kraemer suggests we call it) is distinguished by the prominence it gives to the life and spiritual transformation of a woman, and to the appearance (very rare in Jewish texts) of a female angel who also happens to be her divine double.

In the Book of Genesis, Aseneth is the daughter of a powerful Egyptian priest. Pharaoh gives her to Joseph as a wife and she bears him two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim.

In Greek texts written somewhere between 100 and 350 ce, with versions in several other languages – the story was clearly popular – her tale expands into an ancient romance novel.

Though amazingly beautiful herself, she is awed by Joseph’s glorious appearance when he arrives at her father’s house (the priest is called Petiphres in Greek) in a gold chariot drawn by four white horses. Her father calls her down and wants her to marry him. She holds back and Joseph says he can’t marry someone wedded to idols. Aseneth is infatuated, she throws her magical statues and power objects out the window of her tower (yes, she has a tower) and dresses herself in sackcloth and ashes.

Now a mystical being appears to her. She is terrified. He blazes with fire and lightning. He also  looks just like Joseph except for the light show. We learn that he is Joseph’s heavenly twin and an angel who can look at the Face of God. Joseph’s divine double tells the Egyptian girl to take off her veil and her black garment, to wash her face with “living water” and to dress in fresh linen.  She exposes herself to him in a way she has never done with a man. There is an erotic charge in the scene.

The visitor then instructs her to bring a honeycomb she did not know was in her storehouse. When she finds it, he eats some and she asks him to feed her from his mouth. A transfer of spiritual power takes place when Aseneth receives the honeycomb from the mouth of that heavenly being - who of course has a heavenly voice and is identified as the Angel of the Name. Then beautiful golden and purple bees fly upwards, impossibly, from the honeycomb. Next the bees fall dead but immediately rise again.

The whole scene has an erotic charge but we discover it is about initiation and spiritual marriage. Aseneth is going to find her own heavenly double whose name is Metanoia (literally, Change of Mind), translated as Repentance in Christian-influenced texts but better translated, I think, as Transformation. At the end of his visit – before her physical marriage to Joseph – the heavenly victor tells her to put on her wedding dress.

When her father sees her, he says “your face is fallen”. Dismayed, she looks in a mirror of water. She sees that her beauty is greater than before, Her lips are “roses of life”, Her breasts are “mountains of God.” When she turns from the mirror, her father sees the change too and falls at her feet in reverence.

Later we get required elements in a bodice ripper. Attempted rape by Pharaoh’s son, abetted by two of Joseph’s bad brothers, foiled by Joseph’s good brothers (breaking with gene, Joseph isn’t in the scene). 

 

The image

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's painting of "Joseph, Overseer of Pharaoh’s Granaries" shows an Egyptian lady of power who may be Aseneth.