This week Venus returns to Scorpio, where
she will continue to invite us to probe the lessons learned from her recent
retrograde regarding our relationship values and how we blend resources with
others on our journey. Meanwhile, Mercury transits the Galactic Center
before his upcoming retrograde period once again beginning December 10,
2010. He'll begin moonwalking backwards at 5 degrees Capricorn and will
go direct again on December 30, 2010 at 19 degrees Sagittarius, which means of
course the Holidays and New Year travels should be plenty hectic, with a few
typical retrograde delays and hassles. Give a doublecheck to all
appointments, emails, phone calls, etc., during this cycle. It's also an
ideal time to reflect on the last 3 months' busy activities and strategize the
year ahead. What have you learned and how are you integrating? And
with Sagittarius, is your perception cosmic enough?
In honor of Mercury's movement across the
Galactic Center, and soon Mars and the Sun to follow, I wanted to present an
astromythical perspective of an emergent archetype in the collective
consciousness: The Wounded Healer.
The 13th Constellation
Attending to one's dreams,
waking visions, and synchronicities is the foundation of shamanic
consciousness, and was an integral component of the ancient world, especially
through the dream healing practices related to the Greek god of healing,
Asclepius, known in the heavens as Ophiuchus.
Many of us are aware of the prophecies involving
the December 21, 2012 alignment of the solstice sun, the earth, and the
galactic center. But if we study the astromythology pertaining to the
center of our galaxy, we can understand better the shamanic ramifications of
these prophecies.
At the core of our Milky Way galaxy is a trinity
of constellations: Scorpius, Ophiuchus, and Sagittarius. Between December 1st and December 17th, the
Sun actually travels through the constellation of Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer.
Ophiuchus, often called the 13th constellation for this reason,
is a macrocosmic mirror for the figure of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing
and dreams, whose birth story gives us much instruction on the experience of
transmutation, magic, and medicine so essential in understanding our current
spiritual evolution.
Biography of Asclepius
Asclepius is the son of Apollo and his lover
Coronis ("crow" or "raven"). While Apollo is away, Coronis, who is
pregnant with Asclepius, falls in love with Ischys. Apollo sends his
sister, Artemis the huntress, to kill Coronis because he can not bring
himself to do it. Only once Coronis' body is atop the flame of the
funeral pyre, does Apollo regain his senses. He orders the messenger god
Hermes to cut the unborn child out of Coronis' womb, and give the child to the
wise centaur Chiron, to raise.
In one tradition, Asclepius becomes a widely
respected healer, only to have a catalytic episode with his own fears, which
propels him into the status of Divine Healer. Shut up in the house of Glaucus,
whom he was meant to cure, a serpent enters as Asclepius is absorbed in
thought. The serpent entwines itself around Asclepius's staff, and Asclepius kills the
snake. But then, another serpent appears with an herb in his mouth and
resurrects the dead serpent with this herb. Asclepius, bewildered, begins
to use this same herb in his healings with his patients, eventually gaining the
skills of raising the dead back to life. Hades-Pluto, as god of the
underworld, will have none of this, afraid that Asclepius' powers will prevent
any souls from entering Hades' domain. He beseeches his brother Zeus to
strike Asclepius down, which Zeus does with a lightning bolt. But
Asclepius' father Apollo pleads with Zeus to immortalize Asclepius in the
stars, and thus is born the 13th constellation of Ophiuchus, the
Serpent-Bearer.
Asclepius and the Serpent-Shaman Within
By being ripped from the womb, Asclepius is torn from the
fluid dream-consciousness of the womb-state. This is highly instructive
for us, because Asclepius becomes the god of dream-healing. He takes his
birth trauma wound and turns it into his magical offerings, educating us
in how to invoke the archetype of the Wounded Healer.
He also must deal with a very heavy genetic
inheritance and family constellation. First, his mother has an affair,
betraying his father, a god, during her
pregnancy. Then his father, the god of Light, kills his mother,
before she gives birth. Asclepius is torn from the womb in one of the
earliest myths of a C-Section (his name means "to cut open," Asclepius,
god of healing, thereby set the template for the future surgeons of the
world).
This is fairly heavy stuff. Yet
Asclepius, fatherless and motherless, is educated by the wise centaur Chiron,
who teaches him how to transmute his pains and trauma from personal suffering
into the golden gift of sacred service.
Like Asclepius, we feel ourselves gifted, but
orphaned at the same time. We recognize our divine status, as demi-gods,
yet we struggle with our wounds and the limits of a single body in the
constraints of space and time.
Celestial Snake Symbolism
"Be ye as wise as serpents…" –Jesus to his disciples.
As we can see above, the serpent of Asclepius'
fear, which he kills, becomes his serpent teacher, the one who guides him into
accessing his divine gifts.
In the sky, Ophiuchus, who was also called
Serpentarius in the ancient world, wrestles with a gigantic snake.
Serpents consistently symbolized wisdom, regeneration, and prudence, and were
believed to be guardians of wells with salutory powers. Some tame
serpents were kept in the temples dedicated to Asclepius, and the god would
often appear in the form of a serpent.
Because they shed their skin to grow, serpents
have always been associated with death and rebirth. They instruct us how
to discard what is no longer our essence. In this process of shedding
away the refuse, new pathways of perception open before us, which were
previously blocked by the baggage of our former identity attachment.
Thus, the Pythia of Delphi (pythia from
"python") were associated with a great snake at the oracle of Delphi.
Many other goddesses of prophecy, visions, and divination, from Medusa to
Lillith, were often associated with serpents.
Ophiuchus wrestles the serpent in the sky, while
Asclepius is portrayed in Greek art with the serpent-entwined staff. Here
we find the familiar shamanic symbolism: the serpent DNA spiraling up the Tree
of Life, just as the kundalini rides the chakra system. The staff, like
the witch's broom, or the magician/wizards wand, as we've learned in Harry
Potter and Lord of the Rings, represents the Tree of Life which the
shaman-wizard uses to access his hidden powers while traveling the Lower,
Middle, and Upper Worlds.
In Ophiuchus, we must learn to charm the serpents
of the unconscious, to open our mouths and our hearts to Snake medicine as we
contact-dance with those shadow forces we encounter in the previous sign of
Scorpio, the domain of mystery, the dungeon of the hidden psyche — the forces of
the Lower World.
If we gain the Ophiuchus perspective and
recognize the medicine in the shadow,
the lesson in the darkness, only then we will be able to truly retrieve the
fragmented elements of our soul. As we encounter the many faces of our
own multidimensional self, then we embark on our return home, soaring to the
Upper Worlds, to our point of origin at the galactic center. We follow
the Archer's arrow to the core of all consciousness, the black-hole source we navigate
as gypsy pilgrims on the Sagittarian quest for expanded consciousness.
Here, we seek truth and meaning as we sail into the spirit world. We are the
hero encountering beings, ideas, and philosophies whose alien presence and
profound significance transcends linguistics, but whose presence helps us to
build a cosmology of meaning and purpose.
On one level, the Ophiuchus serpent symbolizes
the medicine we use in order to navigate this Middle World, while accessing
both the Lower and Upper worlds: breathwork, regression therapy, pyschedelics,
shamanic journeying, transcedence, etc.
Even as we study our astrology charts, we
wrestle with a new level of self-awareness. Simultaneously humbled and
empowered, we must learn to accept and activate the highest expressions of our
birthscript, while embodying the most evolved potential of our transits.
The scorpion, like the serpent, lurks beneath the
rocks, in the shadows. As soon as we sip of the Scorpionic snake medicine
and consummate our healing journey, we must battle with the serpent, where
there can be no return to "profane" consciousness. This reminds us of the
lessons in the tale of Adam and Eve: the serpent is the keeper of the Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Evil, in which
we lose innocence and awaken from ignorance into consciousness. If we try
to escape from what we find, we project outside of us our inner demons, while
also neglecting the angels trying to communicate through us our gifts of
healing, art, and service.
At this time of year, the majority of us return
to parents and family, to that which initially defined us. Just as in our
shamanic healing work, we are once again exposed to the "wounds of our
inheritance," both karmic and genetic.
We see then how the solar hero within each one
of us must at last be stung by the Scorpion's tail in order to become the
bodhisattva servant to all, the Wounded Healer, born in the embrace of
Scorpious, Ophiuchus and Sagittarius at the Galactic Center, at last reunited
with our Source, guiding others on their journey to wholeness.
Pilgrimage to the Dream Chamber
To attain to these Sagittarian heights, we must
first learn that to integrate Ophiuchus is to remember Asclepius, and to
remember Asclepius is to honor our dreams. We should put into perspective
the potential of dream healing. For nearly 2000 years, between roughly
1600 b.c.e and 400 C.E, Greeks and Romans, commoners and nobles alike were
healed through dream incubation at over three hundred Asklepian sanctuaries.
Pilgrims who visited the asklepion, the temples of Asclepius, had to usually spend multiple
nights in the sanctuary, purifying themselves through fasting and ritual
bathing. The sick would incubate the
dream, asking for advice on curing their particular condition. Either
Asclepius would visit the patient in the dream world or the patient would have
a dream that would be tended and interpreted by special priests who lived at
the pilgrimage sites. The disease and remedy were recorded, etched into
stelae still present at the pilgrimage sites today.
Most likely, the sites themselves played a
supportive role in the healing of pilgrims as the sanctuaries were often near
sacred caves, springs, and in beautiful country settings. These Asclepian
sanctuaries resonate with the modern movement towards fully sustainable,
eco-healing retreat centers. It seems that almost every other person I
talk to has had a vision of and is working towards creating retreat centers in
more natural environments, such as Costa Rica. Many have visioned this
holistic sanctuary functioning as both a conscious birthing and conscious dying
center, where the spectrum of life experience can be appreciated for its
medicine. In addition, regular dream sharing and dream incubation
chambers would be built near malocas for ceremonies involving plant medicines
and other shamanic journeys.
With Jupiter and Uranus finishing their journey
in Pisces this winter, and with Neptune just about to begin his 14-year journey
through Pisces as well — the mystic, the artist, the poet, and the dreamer in
each of us is awakening to their unique offerings in the fulfillment of this
vision: the remembering and implementation of our modern Asklepian.
I leave with a list of resources to aid your
work in dream-healing:
Carlos Castaneda's Art of Dreaming; The Practice
of Dream Healing by Edward Tick; Robert Moss's many books including Conscious Dreaming, Dreaming True, and
his podcast; The Tibetan Yoga of Dream and Sleep by Tenzin Rinpoche; and the
visionary fiction masterpiece The Kin of
Ata are Waiting for You by
Dorothy Bryant.
Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
