The Televisionary Oracle (25 page)

My forehead belonged to me, which gave me the inalienable right to do with it as I saw fit; the Grail did not.

Unless. Unless I really
had
been Mary Magdalen in a previous incarnation. In which case the cup of destiny
was
mine.

So was I or was I not Mary Magdalen? Was I or was I not the long-prophesied avatar of the Pomegranate Grail? As was true of every other aspect of my life, I had always been of two minds about those questions.

My mothers never expressed the slightest doubt that I was the Chosen One. I’d studied all the hoary texts, and indeed it seemed that my story fulfilled every detail of the ancient oracle. And through the years I had found myself, in countless dreams and meditative visions (more than a few in Melted Popsicle Land and the Televisionarium), vividly acting out scenes from the life of a girl and woman I thought of as Mary Magdalen. Some of these scenes, it’s true, I had read or heard about before my mystical extrapolation of them. But many others were unrecorded in the herstories of the Pomegranate Grail. No one, for example, could confirm or deny my assertion that I sometimes wore the foreskin of Jesus as a ring on the middle finger of my left hand.

On the other hand, my mothers had pounded home to me the dangers of hubris with the same relentlessness with which they’d programmed me to believe I was the exalted messenger of Persephone. My ministry would not thrive, they assured me, if I recapitulated the sins of the patriarchy—that is, if as a charismatic leader I felt I was better than everyone and thought I was immune to the laws of karma. They’d trained me, furthermore, to have a healthy (not knee-jerk) skepticism towards all claims of transcendent glory and authority. Mine was not a blind faith. While I loved sacred magic, I always made damn sure it was the real thing before I gave myself to it.

Under the guidance of my mothers—and maybe because that’s the way Goddess made me—I became and still am a raging contradiction: a logical mystic, a faithful doubter, a scientific pragmatist powered by myth and poetry.

Was I Mary Magdalen? Was I the female messiah? The answer was
yes and no
. Not
yes
when I was in an inflated, thaumaturgic mood and
no
when I was in a hard-ass, realistic frame. The answer was always
yes and no
, emphasis on and. In other words, both
yes
and
no
were true at the same time.
Yes
being true didn’t make
no
untrue, and vice versa.

Reincarnation was an objective fact; the exact same “spirit” that inhabited the form of Mary Magdalen was now animating my body; the Pomegranate Grail was an ancient mystery school that had secretly preserved the occult feminine mysteries during the dark ages of patriarchy; I was now preparing to finish the mission that was foiled two thousand years ago …

AND

Reincarnation was an unprovable theory; Mary Magdalen was a great teacher with whom I had tremendous resonance if not shared consciousness; the Pomegranate Grail was a source of healing inspiration even if it suffered from delusions of grandeur; and I was perhaps nothing more than a bright young girl being pumped full of projections by smart but frustrated idealists.

I had no choice but to apply this method to every self-inquiry. Was I a blessed exception with a special gift? Or just another narcissistic nobody in a world full of narcissistic nobodies? Was it my job to spread love and healing to everyone I encountered? Or else to ruthlessly destroy every illusion and prejudice? Should I strive to transcend or avoid every experience that brought me pain? Or should I embrace pain as my teacher and express gratitude for its power to motivate me?
Yes and no
.

As I contemplated the prospect of stealing and selling the Grail, I arrived at an exhilarating new edge. Though I had long felt a sneaky respect for my double-mindedness, this new application of the principle, in a situation that would have dramatic practical consequences, seemed to have ripened it into a new maturity. All these years I had borne the subliminal expectation that one day my contradictions would drop away and I would see with a unified eye and heart. Now I was finally ready to dispense with that infantile delusion.

I considered the probability that my double-mindedness was not a wounded state needing to be healed. It was a profoundly accurate reflection of the blessed nature of life on Earth.

Crucifixion
. I understood that term in a fresh way. To be authentically and fully alive is to be symbolically crucified. No. More than that. To be fully and authentically alive is to be crucified without feeling tortured. Or else to be crucified and feel tortured, but exult that you have fully awakened to and accepted the heroic assignment of every single person who incarnates on this planet, which is to be eternally torn between heaven and earth, between spirit and body, between light and shadow.

Only the
inbetween
is real.

I saw that the doctrine of the crucifixion as transmogrified by the Christian church was half-baked. It lacked Magdalen’s—my?—contribution. As usual, the patriarchy crippled the feminine element of the archetype, then overliteralized what was left, leaving a garish cartoon. “Jesus died for our sins”—what tired old redundant bullshit! Sun gods had already been getting sacrificially slaughtered for eons by the time my consort and I showed up.

You’d never know it by asking Peter or Paul, but Jesus and I actually had the intention of unveiling a fresh, new show. “Get this, friends,” we intimated. “We’re here to abolish the one-dimensional myth of the solo hero and replace it with the template of the divine collaborators.
Two
crafty souls together, male and female as equals, aiding and abetting each other’s gutsy quest to live gracefully in heaven and earth at the same time.”

The further implication of this innovation was that if there was indeed more than one god-inflamed avatar, why couldn’t there be
many
more? We refuted the tradition of there being just one towering messiah who alone, among multitudes of plain old ordinary humans, possessed the key to the kingdom of heaven. Jesus and I were, in other words, the Great Examples, not the Great Exceptions.
Anyone
could master the art of being both god and human. Indeed, that was the divine plan.

I became drunk on this insight. It was by no means the first time I’d generated a unique philosophical eruption that fell outside the dogma
of the Pomegranate Grail. But it felt bigger than any of my previous apostasies. It wasn’t the result, as had usually been the case, of my polemical intellect straining to sharpen its claws. It was a creative distillation and apotheosis of my visceral life experience.

What if? I began to ruminate. What if there’s more where this came from? What if there’s a flood of new wrinkles primed to pour out of me? And what if these novelties, rather than being sour and irrelevant departures from the Pomegranate Grail party line, hail the emergence of a new covenant that will reinvigorate our ancient order? Maybe it was my job not merely to disseminate the neglected teachings, but to shatter the mold: to mutate and expand them.

If that were the case, I could think of no better symbolic act than to lose the Grail. Maybe it really was infused with mojo that could literally charge up anyone who touched it. But might it not also have the dubious power to keep believers locked into outworn ways of linking up to the Goddess?

I headed straight into the ironic hypocrisy at the heart of the Pomegranate Grail. The form of Goddess that its members worshiped above all others was Persephone, She who demands ceaseless change as the price of eternal life. And yet they had clung to the old principles, the old texts, the old prophecies for millennia. It was understandable, utterly forgivable: to be conservative and preservative in the face of the repressive horrors of the patriarchy. The sacred secrets could not have survived any other way.

But now
I
had arrived: the avatar of the Queen of Death; servant of She who lovingly breaks the old containers to make way for the shock of the new. There could be no doubt that I had been Mary Magdalen, because only the reborn Mary Magdalen could understand and articulate Persephone’s latest dispensation: the radical logic of
yes AND no;
the annihilation—no, the transcendence—of the infantile
Us versus Them
.

“For what sort of mind wrestling with what sort of issue is the ideology of oppositionalism so useful?” wrote James Hillman, one of the geniuses I had discovered in my quest for wisdom beyond the canon my mothers had provided. “The heroic ego,” he answered himself, “who divides so he can conquer. Antithetical thinking, found by Albert Adler to be a neurotic habit of mind, belongs to the will to power and the masculine protest.”

I was without a doubt Mary Magdalen because I had mastered the perspective that allowed me to see I was both Mary Magdalen and not Mary Magdalen.

And since I was Mary Magdalen, the holy bowl was my personal prop to do with as I saw fit in order to advance the goals of the Pomegranate Grail.

My last night at the Sanctuary was the fourth day of the fourth month. I was in the fourth day of my fourth menstrual period. Four fours: a propitious omen to launch the new covenant. Numerologically, four means order, system, control, command.

I waited until the last entranced drummer retired from her shamanic quest in the music room (Sibyl was visiting her own death, guided by her astral vulture ally, Cronos) and until the questers in the sweat lodge shuffled off to the dream incubation chamber (Burgundy was hoping to receive a “medicine vision” that would relieve some of the paralyzing panic that had gripped her during her mother’s battle with pancreatic cancer).

Shortly after 2:30
A.M
., I tucked the Pomegranate Grail under my red silk-clad arm and left the menstrual hut via the outdoor stairs. With a flashlight I made my way to the place in the nearby woods where I’d stashed plastic garbage bags containing two leather tote bags full of essentials. I jammed my red silk robe and gown inside one of the plastic bags and stuffed it under a holly bush, then changed into black pants, black blouse, and black leather jacket.

It was here where my master plan almost got derailed. With a twinge of fear, my heart yearned and stretched in the direction of the burned-out redwood tree, a couple hundred yards away, which had hosted my ritual escape to Melted Popsicle Land and the Televisionarium for more than ten years. How long would it be before I could return to it? Would I be able to open the doors to the Televisionarium with the same ease from a new location in Marin County? Most pressingly, what would happen to my life with Rumbler? I had no doubt that we would continue to meet regularly in dreams; I was sure I would feel his comforting and arousing but elusive presence from time to time during my daily rhythms; but I felt less sanguine about the rendezvous we invoked with the aid of my ritual popsicle sticks.

As if in answer to an unformulated prayer, Rumbler surged into me right then. He didn’t “speak.” I got no specific message from him. But I felt enormously comforted. It was like getting a hug on the inside; like my heart filling up with “I’ll Fly Away,” a favorite old gospel song from childhood. Automatically, without willing it, I relaxed. My natural confidence returned. I felt united with my decision. Leaving the woods, I headed to the parking area at the other end of the compound.

I probably could have fired up the Honda without waking anyone. But just to be safe, I put it in neutral and rolled it silently maybe a hundred yards down our long driveway-road. Only when I was far out of earshot of even the guest cottages at the Sanctuary did I turn the ignition.

Forty minutes later I was enjoying coffee, scrambled eggs, and tapioca pudding at the Golden West in Santa Cruz—the same all-night restaurant where my biological mom and dad used to love to hang out. I wondered where they were at that exact moment. Magda was probably asleep in her little shack in Live Oak, a few miles from here. As for Jerome, nobody had heard from him for a few years, but I liked to think that wherever he was on the physical plane, his astral self was engaged in some righteous work with Joan of Arc or Anne Hutchinson or Jesus.

At 6:30
A.M
. I left, drove downtown, and parked the car on Cedar Street. Then I hoofed it to the Greyhound bus station, where I caught a bus to San Francisco. I slept on the way, thank Goddess. My dreams were invigorating. In one I was planting lightning bolts in black loamy dirt near my redwood husk temple. In another I was inside a silver bathtub balanced on the crest of a tidal wave that was also a fountain.

The bus arrived in the big city around 9:30. Two hours later I was in a room at the Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill, showing Mr. Anthony Barso the relic he’d only seen photos of up till now. Elsa, my friend from Caffé Pergolesi, was also there to offer moral support. The tentative deal we’d arranged in the previous weeks was that Barso would pay me seven thousand five hundred dollars for the bowl: one thousand five hundred dollars up front as a deposit, and the remainder within three weeks, after he had a chance to run tests on it to confirm its age and authenticity.

Barso was not a demonstrative person, but I could tell he was pleased when he first touched my precious. On the other hand, he either didn’t
care that the bowl was the Grail, or pretended that he didn’t. The age, the quality of the silver, and the unusual artwork seemed to be his main concerns. He indicated in a detached tone that he had seen this same group of symbols only once, and that was on an eighteen-hundred-year-old chalice.

By the time room service brought up our sandwiches, Barso was counting out seventy-five twenty-dollar bills.

The transaction was shady by necessity. We had a written document, but I knew there was no way I could enforce it if he really wanted to flimflam me. One favorable sign was the assurances I’d gotten from Elsa, who had known Barso for years and sincerely believed he wouldn’t cheat me. Elsa was half in love with me; I could sense the same awed protectiveness coming from her as I’d felt so often from my mothers.