Archive for the ‘seven’ Tag

June Heptad

ONE

Solstice season, say the wights and spirits. Not just one day.

Ozoliņi, ozoliņi, sings the Latvian ensemble below. “Oaks, oaks …” A fine summer song, celebrating Jāņi, the Latvian summer solstice, June 23 and 24, and the strength of the oak.

TWO

I weave the cincture of protection, sings Caitlin Matthews in her Celtic Devotional for Wednesdays in the Summer, and for Winter Wednesdays, this:

I kindle my soul at the hearth-fires of Winter,
warmth of welcome,
warmth of working,
warmth of nurture,
be upon my lips, my hands, my being,
this Winter’s day,
till Winter’s night.

THREE

As distributors and sharers of the holy energies of the world, we forget to bless and offer them daily. I know I do. Just the recollection, the recall to do this, can become an essential part of a spiritual practice. Bless this day and those I serve, goes one succinct version. A helpful mantra in the middle of a tense situation, or one where I’m tired, stressed, irritable, and otherwise my tendency might be to snap, be short with another person. Instead — and how many “insteads” I find I need! — this recollection-habit can turn me at my less-than-best into a spiritual vehicle and an opportunity for blessing to happen. A space opens that wasn’t there before.

FOUR

WordPress obliges its bloggers with statistics and charts. Here’s one overview of the 9-year life of this blog as of this morning.

stats6-20

With 540 followers, and over 6000 visitors so far this year, I assume many find value in this blog. But how many of you have taken a few minutes to say it matters to you, in response to my recent request? Three. A lovely triad of supporters. But are there more of you?

This is, after all, a version of the ancient ritual wording whose Latin version runs like this: do ut des; da ut dem. “I give, so that you may give. Give, so that I will give (again)”. And so the exchange we agree to establish can continue.

For an explanation of this in Hellenic culture, as an example of ksenia, sacred hospitality, this article is excellent.

FIVE

Each of the four solar festivals in the ritual year, the solstices and equinoxes, is also a form of initiation. We can forget that planetary initiations come every year, releasing energy, subtly altering our spaces and awareness, whether we participate in them consciously or not. Spend any time out of doors and you can sense the shifts as they flow through us, and we through them, each year.

The same holds true with other initiations, sought and unsought, in the life of the cosmos. It’s through initiation that growth comes. From caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly, one form is not the same as the previous or next one. Changes and movement occur in steps and grades.

Rather than accept such statements as some kind of wisdom for the ages, it’s a good idea to question them. Test them, try them out. If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it? goes the quotation attributed to Einstein. Except a spate of research can neither confirm or reject that attribution. Sometimes we don’t yet know. Turn the words a little, and rather than worrying who said it, what value does it have of itself, for me, today? Time to keep trying out this amazing life for what it might offer next.

SIX

Follow a spiritual path for any length of time, and you’ll pick up pieces of things that may not always “fit” (now, or quite yet, or ever). What you do with those things, how you assess which have value and which you can wisely let go, will change as you move through your life. A friend traveling a theistic path has stationery with a heading that reads “What does this have to do with God-realization?” In a form that fits what we each do, in language that resonates fo us, it’s a good question to ask from time to time. Like the stack of pizza boxes and pyramid of soda cans after a party, it may be time to clear away, just to see that table again.

Here’s the nine-pointed star of Thecu I’m incising on a sheet of metal for one of my altars. It may rest on the north face of an outside altar for at least part of the year — that’s not yet clear.

thecu-star

What does my study of this portion of my path, of a possible goddess from the past, and her symbolism, have to do with the rest of it? Is it a piece of Druidry? Exploring that question is itself part of my experience of it. Or in the slang of the past decade, is the juice worth the squeeze? Creating the star is part of my working with possible answers. A capacity for following through is such a large component of so many things — relationships, jobs, creativity, awareness, self-esteem — that I sometimes think it should be a graduation requirement, and a prerequisite for bringing children into the world.

SEVEN

“Seven”, observes Michael Schneider is his marvelous A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe,

is perhaps the most venerated number of the Dekad, the number par excellence of the ancient world … A group of seven comprises a complete unit, a whole event. But a group of seven is different from other wholes we’ve encountered, particularly the Monad, Triad and Hexad. The Heptad expresses a complete event having a beginning, middle and end through seven stages, which keeps repeating. Seven represents a complete yet ongoing process, a periodic rhythm of internal relationships.

It’s well known that the regular heptagon is the smallest polygon that cannot be constructed using only the three tools of the geometer, the compass, straightedge and pencil, the tools that mirror the methods of the cosmic creating process. In other words, an exact heptagon is not (and cannot be) “born” like the other shapes through the “womb” of the vesica piscis …

Use a calculator to divide each number one through ten by seven. They each yield the same result: the sequence of digits 1-4-2-8-5-7 cycling endlessly, although they each begin with a different digit. Six digits, like the six days of the week, are set in endless motion around the unseen Sabbath.

The common saying “at sixes and sevens with each other” refers to seven’s aloofness … (pgs. 222-226).

As a book of lore, a wise guide to numerological insight, a companion to the Tarot, a counsel for ritual patterning and form, a practice, a set of stories and images, Schneider’s book is a Druidic feast for those attuned to number.

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Posted 24 June 2020 by adruidway in Druidry, initiation, sacred geometry, seven, solstice, spiritual practice, Thecu

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Listening to Inwardness–4

[Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four]

IMG_3378When I began this series of posts on the 21st of November, it wasn’t immediately clear to me that the practice it recounts would run for seven days, ending today, the 27th. But one of the benefits of my year-long work with Wayne London, MD*, in his exploration of the spiritual potential of the labyrinth, has been a deepening understanding of symbolism and ritual.

Often we tend to think of symbols as arbitrary, confusing them with signs like +, %, !, etc. But symbols run deeper, and often cross cultures (though they may change in some of their associations). Even more confusing are objective things, like the sun, that can also function as symbols. So while we can begin to list what the sun “means” — light, growth, warmth, illumination, a god, Jesus, the center of a solar system, and so on, that doesn’t exhaust its symbolic power. Experience the sun vividly, like at sunrise or sunset, watch it pierce the clouds and clear the sky, see it in a dream, and you begin to know its symbolic power in other ways.

The opposite tendency, of course, is to assume that a symbol, because it lies deeper than a sign, and often operates at more subtle levels, is therefore universally “true” or always appropriate, apt or fitting. Encounter the imagery and symbolism of a radically different culture, though, and you can see how symbols depend on lived experience. Water for a desert people can mean something much different from what it does for an ocean-side tribe whose lives revolve around fish and boats, storms and tides. Rain as a symbol in a song or a dream carries a different power.

One of the ways that Dr. London has worked with the seven-path labyrinth is to link it to the Hindu system of chakras (and also to the human sleep cycle). In this case, the number seven has a particular symbolic power, as it does in both Christianity and Druidry, of course, as well as in numerous other cultures — obviously including Hindu culture.

schneiderIn part, this symbolism of seven comes from a quartering of the moon’s cycle of 28 days, so that like many cross-cultural symbols, it augments its force by linkages to an objective reality. The largely planet-wide acceptance of a seven-day week points to a kind of symbolic “fit” with human experience.

Did the original builders of labyrinths perceive something of this symbolic fit or aptness? Is that why the seven-path labyrinth is by far the most common form of this pattern on the planet? (Investigate the 11-path Chartres labyrinth!) Who knows! But what remains to us is a set of associations that organize themselves around seven in a multitude of ways. Examine the evidence in such popularizations as Michael Schneider’s A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art and Science (Harper Collins, 2014), and you begin to see how number symbolism is a particularly deep-lying symbolic sequence in our human experience and perceptions of the physical (and non-physical) world. Fear not, if you’re not mathematically inclined — Schneider’s book relies on images and diagrams, art and hands-on exercises, to bring home his several points.

Like any map, a symbol cannot include everything that it represents. It’s a selection, a set of choices and decisions about priorities. No map can “contain the universe”, nor can any symbol recall to consciousness the entirety of what it symbolizes. This is less a “limitation” of the symbol than it is a given parameter of consciousness in a world of space and time. To insist it be otherwise — to demand that one truth represent the cosmos — is like insisting that the ocean wash over everything. While that might sound at first like an ideal, in practical terms it means we all would drown.

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3-2-1-Seq-crp

In his work, Dr. London therefore begins where the seven-path labyrinth begins, at path 3. If we follow the path sequence, as the labyrinth itself suggests — 3-2-1-4-7-6-5 (see previous post for the path numbering) — we find that the extremes of 2-1 and 7-6 are always bounded by returns to the center. (We reach the center of the labyrinth not by path 7 which is “the closest”, but by path 5). To make this clearer, Dr. London notes, we can rewrite the labyrinth path sequence like this: 3-(2-1)-4-(7-6)-5. Our departure, like our arrival, emerges at or near a center: 3, 4, or 5. This fits at least with my sense of a return to the world of lived experience.

Rather than a linear journey ascending the chakras to the full flowering of realization at the 7th chakra as an endpoint, then, Dr. London’s work with the labyrinth suggests a different and more spiraling journey.

Walking the labyrinth, then, is a ritual vision quest (is there any other kind?), following a sequence we cannot miss. This isn’t a maze, but a labyrinth, with a pathway in, and also out. We begin with enough consciousness to enter at path 3 — the manipura chakra, the solar plexus, the gut instinct, the self-assertion to choose to “perform the ritual” — to begin a quest, though we may not know where it will take us. What hero or heroine does, when they set out? Setting out on path 3, as Dr. London observes, “we leave the world of time and space”.

Without that choice, we do not walk with enough awareness to benefit directly from the quest. We are merely swept along by circumstance. (Here, Dr. London’s work on the connection of the sleep cycle to the labyrinth enters the picture in a fascinating way — if we’re not conscious enough to do spiritual work with intention, the sleep cycle nevertheless reconnects us to the cosmos and divinity at a minimal “survival-maintenance level” each night. We are never wholly abandoned to the limitations of life lived in time and space. In theistic terms, the presence of God always reaches out to us. In non-theistic terms, our connection to the cosmos endures — nothing can sever it. “Sleep on it” remains good advice. Again, “we leave the world of time and space” as we enter the realm of sleep).

If we’ve gotten this far — again, we’re starting at the middle, as with Dante’s opening lines to the Inferno, “in the middle of the journey of our life” — we’ve already been walking these paths, knowing they are not entire ends in themselves, but important elements along the way. We simply cannot walk a whole path without them.

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As a symbol, and as a map of the spiritual quest, I find Dr. London’s work useful in my own life, as a spiritual yardstick along the way. We’re still editing a forthcoming publication enlarging substantially on these ideas, tentatively titled “Spiritual and Healing Aspects of the Classic Seven-Path Labyrinth”. His work on what he calls the Grid at the second link below is also ongoing.

Image: Chartres Labyrinth

Link to 2015 iBrattleboro article on Wayne London, MD. Additional links may have expired in the interim.

Posted 27 November 2019 by adruidway in chakra, Druidry, labyrinth, seven, sleep cycle, symbolism, Wayne London, MD

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