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FOI Online Liturgy
Booklet: Athena, Arcadian Awakening
By: Olivia Robertson

Printable PDF File

Chapter 10: Zimbabwe

ALCHEMICAL RITE
PART ONE: THE NARRATION
“TWO PEOPLE LEAVE EACH OTHER IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS.
THEY CIRCULATE THE EARTH. THEY MEET. ”

HOSTESS AND HOST IN ZIMBABWE, HENRY MWE AND JANE LEESA. SCENE IN A CIRCLE OF TREES AND STONES. IN A REMOTE VALLEY NEAR RUTENGA BY THE RIVER MWENEZI. VISITANTS:  PATH GUIDE: AIDEN.  HELPER: ELAINE. ORACLE AND VISIONARY: DEIRDRE.

AIDEN: Henry and Jane, you have sent a message for urgent alchemical healing for a disastrous situation.  Yet you are seated here calmly, with African instruments and carved figures.  Henry, you wear European dress, Jane you are in African clothing. 

HENRY: Ah – we long to be like you two, twin souls, in harmony.  We would prefer to tell each our own story as to our desolate situation.  We are poles apart.

DEIRDRE: You’ll only receive one Oracle, I feel guided to tell, from no less than the All Mother, Nana Buluku.
 
ELAINE:  Who will give the narration first?  Henry?

HENRY:  Not as my life is worth!  Jane would immediately say I was putting myself in the dominant role of male supremacy.  Already she resents the name “Jane”.

JANE:  Let me speak for myself.  As the victim role is pushed upon to me as an aggressive feminist, I shall submit.

ELAINE:   This should be most interesting.  What are you if not “Jane”?

JANE:  I am African.  My true African name is Leesa, which I found in one of your African ceremonies.  This is a useful ritual, counteracting what I was brain-washed with when in the mission school I was “charitably” educated.  They called me Jane.  I notice the boy “Mwe’ in your rite fitted in very easily to be called “Henry”.

HENRY:  I aim to win power by learning the white man’s sciences – not just to protest uselessly like Jane.

AIDEN:  This is Jane’s narration.  Leesa, please continue.

JANE LEESA:  This was a typically “natives” educational establishment.  They gave us no powers to make money or love – no powers.  We were blocked in every passion, especially we women.  They put us in long shapeless garments called “Mother Hubbards” to cover bare breasts.

HENRY:  If they had not – you would step out of their classroom and you would have been raped in exactly four minutes.

AIDEN:  Henry, please don’t interrupt.  Your turn will come.

LEESA: I was deprived of all that makes a true woman – our African religion.

HENRY:  We haven’t got one.  Not a valid one.

LEESA:  Our religion is based on nature and lost tribal customs.  I longed to be taught the language of drums – not a stupid catechism.  The only book I liked was Shaw’s “Black Girl in search of God.”  She found Voltaire – that was all.  But I delved into my natural psychic ability – that exists in nearly everyone if it hadn’t been cauterized by mental rules and regulations.

ELAINE:   How on earth did you come to work with Henry?

LEESA:  You can call it a dynamic occultism partnership.

HENRY:  More like a continual sectarian civil war.

AIDEN:   What help do you want and would both accept?

LEESA:  I cannot continue with this perpetual conflict of our beliefs – or rather his lack of any – and my feelings.  I lie awake feeling hatred that has no outlet.  I suppose you call such a relationship “love” – though I cannot communicate with Mwe on any heart level.  He makes silly jokes or clever remarks if I tell him my heart’s longings.

HENRY:  As these consist of day dreaming for some divine man from heaven or UFO, some mysterious stranger of indefinable superiority to human men!  Such a being leads her to wandering by the sea shore, hair down, longing for a man from the stars.  In the old days I suppose it would have been some God or angel.  But what I suspect – this is a danger in our evolution. I read a book by H.G. Wells on the fear of this danger. It’s called “Star Begotten”.  She hopes for a Super-child as in Bethlehem, an Indigo, a star baby who will supersede me.  But this shall not happen.  She has very little practical brains.  We use chemicals to check weird children.

No.  I despise her childish dreams, her talk of psyche and souls, and the like, beyond physical, organic form.  She needn’t think I despise the Goddess.  I respect the Mother of All.

I too have my dreams of the modern woman, very tall with long, long boyish legs, and a sense of humour, which is more than Leesa has, and a Degree in Western science.  It is practical.  Western scientists and financiers rule the world.  And I want to rule the world, preferably in the United States!  You may wonder at our partnership.  However, there is an area I am deficient in – it is Jane who has psychic powers, though I am sure scientists will find an explanation for such phenomena.  There is one reason we stay together, and I cannot explain this.  I love her.

LEESA:  Yes, it’s funny, you madden me, but I am in love with you too!

DEIRDRE:   Using my despised female psychic ability, I can see plainly your aura class.  Leesa’s aura is a sort of fluffy pink, and Henry’s is an orderly indigo.

LEESA:  What do you propose to do about it.  He’s all mind and I know I’m all feeling.  Capricorn versus Pisces.  Earth versus Air.

HENRY:  Astrology is nonsense.  Ask any astronomer . . .

ELAINE:  To answer your question Leesa, as to what we propose to do.  I should like to explain to both of you how spiritual alchemy works. It is a basic spiritual truth to true Alchemists that there is only Divine Energy in the cosmos from star to atom.  The One Eternal Being and Holy Reality to this energy is Deity.  Deity contains both ethics and goodness in time and place, so everything has really happened.  Change comes through time and evolution of consciousness, becoming aware of this reality.  Divine Energy is perfect in each individual snowflake and in each star.  Therefore there is no hierarchy of importance; for God the Divine is all present in time and space.  Nothing is lost.  Evil is transmuted by the Mother’s love and wisdom.

HENRY:   That sounds good but how do people evolve if it is all there?

AIDEN: As this evolution expands, the wider the area that is comprehended, the greater and nobler the extension through many lives and states of a being.  A true alchemist knows what is going to happen by remembering what DID happen.  Only the virtues of Love, Beauty and Truth are eternal.  The rest – evil – vanishes when it is recognised.

LEESA: How about our feelings of individuality – our emotions?

ELAINE:  Without the humblest creature born of the Mother, the Divine Being would be incomplete. Think of it all as a vast Persian carpet, our many life paths.  We only see a tiny part of the carpet - as seen by those in Plato’s Cave in Greek philosophy. “All the world’s a stage” says Shakespeare.  We choose to play in various dramas.  Every folk story or fairy tale has deeper meaning.  Shamans show the starry heavens as a picture book.  We identify with Hercules – Ariadne – these adventures teach us our own lives are projections into the wonderful eternal divine pattern.

LEESA:  I often have the feeling it’s all happened . . . That we are here working through the mystery of the Unseen Lover.  So many myths are telling us our inner longings.

HENRY:  This does explain why people adore epics and operas and paintings and stories.  We are buying into the dramas of our own story.  The Gods are really our teachers who know more than us and are teachers of the Arts.
 
AIDEN:  But we can also help the teachers remember it.  Deities still speak to humans who will listen and always have through Oracles, through the world religions.  Let us invoke such an African Wise One, the Mother Goddess Nana Buluku.

ELAINE:  Let us gather at dawn as the sun rises, here by the Holy River Mwenezi . . .

PART TWO: ALCHEMICAL RITE

DEIRDRE LIES ON A MANY COLOURED SARONG ON GRASS AT DAWN, AROUND HER ARE AIDEN, ELAINE, HENRY AND LEESA.

AIDEN:   On the wide circling earth, on all the myriad earths and shining stars, you preside, the All Mother, Nana Buluku.  Bestow on us your Oracle.

ORACLE OF THE GODDESS NANA BULUKU

We who are Mothers know the secret of every heart.  For this cosmos is not made of only an interlocked grid of far-seeing shamans and thousands of strange creatures in every kind of earth. Wonderful as are coloured stones and richly filled oceans and towering trees, and the brightly patterned sky with planet encircling stars, there is nothing more creative and wonderful than hidden dreams!  Within every heart, whether it is the crawling hairy caterpillar or the flying bats at night – within each is the hidden longing for the Other.

A butterfly seeks the mysterious stranger as do the roaring animals in the African jungles.  The atom seeks its small solar system as keenly as does a sun looking for its dark haven within a galactic black hole.  A black hole leads each sun to Heaven as certainly as a baby longs to be born from within the dark womb.

There is now boredom in the cosmos.  There is all art, music, architecture, that enshrines the omnipresent goal, the ideal – a lovely person in a garden – the avatar – is incomplete each without the Other.  Without the Other the most powerful life is meaningless.

When you find joy, love, vision, truth – share it with the Others.  Then what you love with will increase infinitely, for the Other is the Divinity you lack.  Perfection is your goal – through the Others.  There is your hidden Gold.

ELAINE: We give thanks for this Oracle, given to us through the dedication of our Visionary.

AIDEN: Henry, I will be your Path Guide, if you accept me.  Lie on this couch and enter trance state.

HENRY:  I am well read in occultism.  This is a form of hypnotism.  I expect that’s it.  I feel, rather sleepy. 

HENRY LIES ON COUCH AND SHUTS HIS EYE, OR RATHER ONE EYE.  THE OTHER IS WATCHING AIDEN.

AIDEN: Both eyes.

HENRY: Oh, all right.  This is a scientific experiment.  I choose to cooperate.

AIDEN: Good. You are sleepy.

TRANCE JOURNEY

AIDEN:  Henry, what can you see with your eyes shut.

HENRY:  OK.  But I just want to say about all this Other business, the Other should be attractive.  Don’t produce various ethical virtues and a plain woman, or people.  I choose my Others.  They must have brains.  Intellectual.

AIDEN:  Ah, we’ve provided them all right.  They are as attractive and intellectual . . . They are in the room in which you find yourself . . . by the way, this is not hypnosis.  It is the most powerful projection known.

HENRY: You’re right there.  Your technique is brilliant.  The room is real.

AIDEN: Give us an accurate report of what you experience.

HENRY:  I’m in what looks like a very up-to-date laboratory.  Just the sort of place we need in Africa.  And surely here at last are the scientific Western Others. There is one rather plain woman who is arguing against some experiment she calls cruel and unnecessary.  Curious.  I like controversy.  Yet not one of them looks at me.  Why?  Then I look down.  I have hairy legs.  Outrageous! What has happened?  Is this a real projection?  I have thin hairy legs with monkey feet.  And I’m imprisoned in a cage.  Remove this projection at once!

ELAINE:  Once the projection is validified – it’s valid.  You must finish it.  You are a primate.  Rather a fine one, doubtless attractive to monkey Others.

HENRY:  I still have my intelligence.  This is one of those occult tests they tell of, to access my intelligence.  Darwinism.  I have to release myself from this humiliating form by proving to these scientists that I am their equal.  I try to get their attention by rattling on the bars in semaphore.  They begin to stare.  Then I begin talking to them.  I say I am a human being, a university graduate, and appear to be undergoing an occult initiation.  Give me some paper and I will prove I know differential calculus.

At least that is what I mean.  But it comes out in monkey chatter.  I try to impress them by meaningful gestures.  I have at last made some impression. . . The woman defends me.

“Isn’t he sweet?  I suppose you will go through with the experiment.”  A young man near her says “I don’t care for experiments on primates.  But I was convinced by the argument that this may benefit thousands of people through the proposed inoculation.  Also he’s cost a huge amount.”

An elderly man says “I’m sick of this bleeding heart business of the anti-vivisection lobby.  They ought to think of dying human-beings.  Let’s begin shortly.”

They wheel my cage into a smaller room filled with terrifying instruments that make me think of the Spanish Inquisition. Suddenly black fear overcomes me.  I am terrified of torture.  One of them asks. “Do we give an anaesthetic?”

Another man says: “They could make the findings inconclusive.  There must be no contamination with chemicals.”

I shake the bars of my cage and begin to scream.  I cannot imagine any human would be as anguished and cry like this.  My hot tears splash my face.
The woman who was against the experiment tries to persuade them again.  “Can’t you see he is absolutely terrified?”  Again they speak of human needs.  She is so repelled that they threaten to make a gagging order on the spot if she “whistle blows” in opposition, reporting them for cruelty to animals.  She will be black-listed in her career, and lose her considerable pension.

It’s strange.  I can look into her mind.  She realises the only way she can stop this torture is to kill me.  She has no care for her career and pension.  She knows what is right.  She says to me: “My poor friend, go to a better world.”  And she plunges her poisonous syringe into my arm.

HENRY RETURNS FROM TRANCE WITH A JERK, AND SITS BOLT UPRIGHT.

From now on, call me Mwe!  Now are you going to get Leesa to project too?

ELAINE (LAUGHS)Leesa has had her trance.  She projected into your drama through her telepathic gift – she has empathy.

LEESA: Mwe, I love you.  What I hope for is that you will bring all your scientific know-how to our joint dream of building the Rainbow Paradise of Nana Buluku, Ile Ise, the House of Light.

REPORTS ARE SHARED AND THANKS GIVEN TO THE DEITIES.  RAYS OF HARMONY ARE SENT FORTH.

End of Rite.

 

SOURCES: “The Sayings of the Ancient One: Wisdom From Ancient Africa,” P.G. Bowen, Theosophical Publishing House. “Teachings of the Great Berber philosopher, Maylo Meya.” “Traditions of the Yuruba Tribe of Zimbabwe.” “The Adventures of the Black girl in her Search for God,” George Bernard Shaw, Constable & Robinson. “The Secret School: Preparation for Contact”, Whitley Strieber.


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