Showing posts with label Hopi prophecy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hopi prophecy. Show all posts

Dance With Destiny Documentary

'The Prophetic Heart explores the true frontiers of consciousness, where past, present and future meld seamlessly into activist art, an inclusive pulsing web of which we are both but a single inextricable strand and one of the crucial conscious weavers. We learn that our work is not only to create a sustainable future, but to develop the presence and judgment necessary to discern what values and ways of being are truly worth sustaining. Even as we face political repression and wars, environmental destruction and a culture of distraction and denial, we are each being given an assignment and opportunity to create holistic alternatives. We see that our personal struggles are part of a shamanic process of falling apart and being remade, much as the tumultuous Earth Changes tell the story of a living planet restoring balance through dramatic transformation. We come away from watching this film not paralyzed with fear but called to attempt the so called “impossible”…to be an active part of the shift and cure.'
-Jesse Wolf Hardin  
 
Today is the Equinox, and my dreams continue to be about Balance, which is also what this sacred day is all about.  Balance of light and dark, conscious mind and shadow, above and below.  Syncronistically I am sending off today a Persephone mask that someone ordered - half light, half dark is her face.  There is a personal synchronicity in that as well concerning a dream I've been mulling over for more than a year now, but I'll have to wait a bit to write on that.  All things are woven..........

I was writing about Kali, the Dark Goddess, and the urgent need to wake up and shatter the "demons of delusion" in my previous post.  While searching for information about a true visionary I met, Jesse Wolf Hardin, I learned of an important new  film he participated in - Dance With Destiny, a documentary by (syncronistically again) Bruce Weaver.   Describing himself, the filmmaker comments that:

"At seventeen, in the U.S. armed forces, he found himself assigned to load nuclear weapons on B-52 bombers. Dressed in full chemical warfare gear on a training exercise, Bruce’s dreamscape images flooded to his mind in vivid detail. It was then the dream became all too real. Bruce left the Air Force, and began a life of earnest study of spirituality, mythology, and of ancient peoples.".
Among his travels, he spent time with Hopi elders exploring their prophecies, and was able to interview the Kogi ("Elder Brother") of the Sierra Nevada mountains of Columbia.   This is an important film, and rather than paraphrase, I copy from the website:

"This film will show that modernity’s problems are rooted in a host of unchecked “isms,” corporatism, statism, militarism, egoism, etc. Solutions will come not from rulers of vested systems, such as politicians or corporate directors. Only radical, heartfelt, internal revolutions of the spirit – which many of the interviewees in this film focus on -- can mend our souls and the web of life.   By combining deft reporting on a range of issues that contextualize the various interviews, Dance With Destiny shows how Mother Nature is paying humanity back for its hubris, excesses and neglects. In the tradition of Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of balance, the classic documentary by Godfrey Reggio, Dance With Destiny will probe the conceptual ties between manmade and natural phenomenon (koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi word meaning "life of moral corruption and turmoil" or "life out of balance"). It will show, for example, how in unprecedented numbers and with unprecedented fervor, the scientific community is warning that the planet’s resources are being stretched to the point of collapse. 

It will explore how media focuses on the political and diplomatic aspects of global warming while ignoring its impact on agriculture, water supplies, plant and animal life, public health, and weather. It will show how the coal and oil industry spend millions of dollars to plant public doubts about global warming’s role in recent natural disasters from tsunamis, hurricanes, abnormally massive rainfall, unprecedented wind storms and severe draughts. 
 
After two world wars left 100 million people dead, a new imperial war machine marches unchecked across the globe.**  As war marches on, new pandemics threaten vast populations..........Information is the currency of the age yet meaning and spiritual intelligence are scarce.  Millions awake daily to spiritual isolation as ubiquitous technology dulls human curiosity and powers of observation.


**I was impressed with this comment, in that, so shortly after the media announced the disaster proceeding in Japan, attention was quickly turned to a new war in Libya, once again creating a distraction from a much, much greater problem that no war can resolve.

***I also have to note that the one thing I see lacking in this film (having not seen it in it's entirety)..........is there are no voices of women.  This was disturbing to me.  I'm not going to negate this important documentary...........but I was saddened that, once again, women somehow aren't included.  I'm tired of this, the omission of women  (unless they are ornamental young women with sexual interest or value).  The unconscious assumption that women are invisible is a very important shadow that needs to be addressed as we speak of Restoring the Balance

Since I am (perhaps unfairly)  feeling that my otherwise brilliant colleagues here have, as usual, ignored women in collecting interviews with  spiritual leaders, I would like to add that recently the Dali Lama made a surprising comment that he felt the world will be saved by women. 

Spider Woman "Crop Circle"....last reflections

West Kennet Long Barrow, April 19, 2009 Photo by Lucy Pringle

“What might we see, how might we act, if we saw the world with a webbed vision? The world seen through a web of relationships…as delicate as spider’s silk, yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.”

Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web


I felt like writing a bit about the "Spider Woman" crop circle I found......I was somewhat amazed to find this obscure symbol in a crop circle site! Mr. Silva believes that it is a man made circle, but reminds me that that does not have to negate its power as a symbol, or for that matter, a beautiful work of earth art.

There was a legend that when the world was going to change, Spider Woman would return again to help her Relations, as she has done in the previous worlds.
I have often thought that the World Wide Web just might be Her latest appearance.

I am grateful to Mr. Mark Fussell and the Crop Circle Connector for feedback, as well as "Crop Circles Reflections of a Season, by Mr. Fussell and colleagues.

Below is the "circle" in black and white, and next to it a detail from a pre-historic Mississippian shell ornament. I believe this one is from Spiro Mound in Missouri, although I will have to check my reference books - the ornament, most probably worn on a cord around the neck, would be anywhere from 400 to 1,000 years old.

I see the Spider Woman image in the crop circle (without all of the legs), the cross, the head and "womb" shapes, and rayed "web" or "strands" emanating from the spider/creatrix figure. (There is often an emphasis upon the "womb" center of the spider, as Spider Woman is associated with the Earth Mother/Creatrix, from whose body all things emanate).

To me, obscure as it may seem, these "crop circles", and the interest, even the controversy surrounding them, are important as contemporary icons manifesting within the collective consciousness, "words" from a timeless language, the iconography of humanity. They are communications worth meditating upon.Spider and Cross Gorget, ca. A.D. 1300, Fulton County, Illinois, Dickson Mounds Museum

Whether created by paranormal forces or through the efforts of contemporary "earth artists" who prefer to further controversy about their work.........these are still sacred symbols that exist on many layers of meaning. Mr. Silva is right; the origins of the "crop circle" are not as important as what its meaning for our time might be.

This symbol, with it's origins in the remains of the "mound builder" sites in south eastern U.S., somehow found it's way to Great Britain last summer. No one knows the exact significance of the spider and cross in the ornaments pictured above, but Spider Woman has an ubiquitous presence throughout the Americas. It's generally thought the "Spider and Cross" represents the Great Weaver (Creatrix)/Earth Mother, the cross on her back representing the union of the 4 directions, thus, balance or completion.

Spider Woman's origins go back as far as the Maya. The Spider Woman/Weaver Woman was a goddess of the Pre-Columbian Teotihuacan Maya in Mexico, discovered on the ancient murals there.* I see that I"m moving into a dissertation here, so I'll cut to the chase.

What meaning could this symbol have for us today?

Spider Woman, the Great Weaver, was also called Thought Woman ("Tse Che Nako" ) among Pueblo peoples. She brought all things into being with what she thought about, the "stories she spun about the world" - like the spider, she "spins the world into being" from her own substance. All things are connected upon the Great Web.....and this power to co-create, to "make the world with the stories we tell" she passed on to her Relations.**

To the Navajo (the Dine`), Grandmother Spider Woman is a wise guide whose teachings can be heard in the wind; but she will only offer instruction to those who have achieved a certain level of maturity or initiation. To the uninitiated or immature, she will appear only as an insignificant insect, her power and words unperceived. Spider Woman was responsible for bringing the people from the previous worlds into the new worlds in Hopi mythology.........in some stories, when the 3rd world ended in flood, she help the people to make boats and stepping stones to cross into the new world in safety and harmony.

It's worth noting that it is the "end" of the Hopi calendar as well as the Mayan (2012); the "4th World" is coming to a close. In each previous world, the breaking of balance, loss of harmony, greed and war brought about destruction and chaos. Here's from Wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_mythology):

"Some contemporary writers tend to posit an absolute importance of the feminine to the Hopi ............In this interpretation, the Hopis traditionally saw the goddess Spider Woman as the creator, "Grandmother of the sun and as the great Medicine Power who sang the people into this fourth world we live in now.”
In other interpretations, Spider Woman is an intermediary between Creator (Tawa) and this plane of being. Generally, it is agreed that in each "previous world" the people fell from harmony, and had come to live contrary to Creator's plan (Tawa)....thus, the people

"were led (usually by Spider Woman) to the next higher world, with physical changes occurring both in the people in the course of their journey, and in the environment of the next world. In some stories, former worlds were then destroyed........whereas in others people were simply led away from the chaos which had been created by their actions." (Wikipedia)
I am trying to understand why I'm so struck by this crop circle, which, like so many others, occurred near old sacred sites of Great Britain, "power centers" of the ancients.**** Perhaps, in this "way of telling, way of praying", Spider Woman is again invoked, to help, to bring us again through the kiva, the "sipapu", the "Birth Channel" of the Mother Earth.....into the "5th World" yet to be.



**Although often referred to as the "Great Goddess" of Teotihuacan, anthropologist Karl Taube was the first to appropriately christen her the "Teotihuacan Spider Woman" in his article in the 1983 edition of The Journal of Latin American Lore after his evaluation of the murals found there.

*** "Tse Che Nako, Thought Woman,
the Spider, is sitting in her room now.
I'm telling you the story
She is thinking". ...........Keresan Pueblo Proverb