Read The Televisionary Oracle Online
Authors: Rob Brezsny
Amen. A-women. Ommmmmmm. And Hallelujah.
I can already feel Vimala cringing. She’s my adoptive mom—not to mention the midwife who delivered me into the world—and she doesn’t like me to die so much.
Especially when my dying requires me to lovingly rebel against the gorgeous system of secret gnosis preserved and nurtured for thousands of years by the mystery school now known as the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail. A task, by the way, which Vimala knows I was born to do, and which she poured all her love and care into me so that I could do.
Vimala, sweet Mommy, you know you want me to say this: As much as I am devoted to every last menstrual meme, as much as I believe the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail and all of its creations are the best antidote to the phallocratic celebration of soul death, I can’t bring myself to dramatize our precious treasures with unironic literalism, as if they were the the Sole Truth and the Ultimate Way.
For instance, it’s my dharmic duty to announce that when I speak of the phallocratic mentality, I’m not just referring to white men and Republicans. Women and leftwingers and poor people and sexual outlaws, with whom I’m more likely to feel sympatico, are just as likely to be phallocrats.
An example: A certain socialist feminist soul sister whom I’ll call Juneau, a fellow shamanatrix with whom I’ve shared bellylaughs and trance-dancing, would turn off her love light towards me the moment she discovered that not only am I staunchly and passionately pro-abortion, but that I also understand and sympathize with all those people who hate and fight abortion. My socialist feminist soul sister couldn’t comprehend or accept my belief that
both
sides are right—any more than a Catholic priest could.
How does my friend Lamorte put it? “I’m totally opposed to duality.”
Everyone who believes in the devil, in other words, IS the devil. There is no enemy. There can be no enemy. I will fight to the death for the right not to believe in or have enemies. IF there could be such a thing as an enemy—which there can’t—the enemy would be literalism. Fundamentalism. That appalling certainty and arrogant simplicity—whether found in Islamic zealots or the priesthood of the Cult of Science—that fosters the belief that MY story is truer than YOUR story. That the truth of MY story sucks all the truth out of YOUR
story. That YOUR story cannot possibly have even an ounce of truth. OK, maybe an ounce, but I’ll halfheartedly admit that as a debating strategy only so I can disguise the fact that I have utterly dismissed you and renounced forever the possibility of seeing your humanity.
I guess I’ve just implied that as much as I want to hate literalism, I can’t even do that. Which of course leads me to make my next shocking admission about the champion of literalism, phallocracy. Though my passionate commitment to the Drivetime and all it stands for sometimes requires me to act AS IF phallocracy is nothing but an evil poison and AS IF the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail is the safest and most effective antidote, and though my personal temperament resonates intimately with the subtle themes of the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail, I also know with all my heart that the six thousand-year-old experiment known as phallocracy was an inevitable and necessary phase of the evolution of the human race.
Yes, I’m ready for it to be gone now; I want its ugliest creations to die off; I detest its violence and oppression and sickening abuse of the feminine. But I recognize too the beauty of its individuating force, its striving to explore and transcend and expand, its celebration of the rational, analytical mind, and its mysterious struggle to master nature.
I die daily. And saying what I just said about the redemptive features of phallocracy is a decent death for the first part of the day. But it’s just for starters. It comes all too naturally. It’s easy destruction. Hardly mourned. Good riddance. How about if I dare myself to kill even more lethal treasures; force myself even further into the threshold where dear life rots away and smuggles a message of resurrection back through time?
Do you dare me to tell you more of the story of my life, beauty and truth fans, thereby killing my cherished privacy and self-protectiveness? Thereby incinerating the superstitious fear I have that in telling you my story I will diminish its magic and potency?
Do you double-dare me to burn down my childlike cocoon, to slaughter the perfect fantasy about my life story that I and everyone who loves me have been all too eager to nurture?
I do. Dare me. Even if you won’t, I double-dare myself to tell you profound secrets about my life that you might criticize or disbelieve or
satirize, or worst of all, that you might not be particularly interested in. I triple-dare myself to expose to you everything that’s true and holy about my experience, knowing that whether you treat it like treasure or garbage, I will have annihilated forever the sweet protective seal I have built around my life, the bubble of protection that has always preserved my innocent infantile belief that my life is important and righteous and good.
I want to direct your attention now, beauty and truth fans, to the archaeological evidence remaining from a death I created some years ago. It’s one of my favorite deaths, one of the bravest.
Look at the center of my forehead. Do you see the beauty mark I was born with—the icon-like bull skull with one horn slightly smaller than the other? Of course you don’t. Because it’s not there. Or is it? Better make sure. Deaths can be faked, after all. Zoom in and examine the area in question very closely. Maybe my treasure is simply buried beneath a slab of special-effects make-up. I’m rubbing. I’m scraping. Any pancake coming off? No. Because there isn’t any.
The grotesque yet beautiful glyph, the signature the Goddess imprinted on me in the womb, is gone. The birthmark that the ancient prophecies of our mystical order said would be the single most irrefutable sign of the female messiah. Disappeared. Erased. All that remains is what for all you know is a couple of worry lines.
My body has been re-engineered. I’m not the organism I was born to be. How? Why? Divine intervention? Miracle hands-on healing?
No. My gift is gone because I had it scoured away. At the tender age of sixteen-going-on-seventeen. Without parental consent. In a distant city, where I’d run away. With the help of a mere dermatologist who had never heard and will never hear of the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail.
But wait. Not so fast. My personal story makes no sense unless I embed it in a bigger, older story. And the victorious death I want to pull off for your entertainment pleasure won’t have the finality it deserves unless I prove to you the profundity of its ignominy.
Let me then show you how my sublimated suicide depends for its authority on evolutionary trends that are thousands of years old. They feature an organization whose money and wisdom are making
it possible for me to be talking to you right now. This organization, the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail, is so old and vast—yet so precise and slippery—that only a fool would try to describe it. It’s a hundred organizations in one. A mystery school that’s more ancient than the sphinx. A think tank that’s so young most of its research is in the future. A media coven. A dream hospital. A gymnasium where mystical athletes hone their physical skills.
Picture a dating service for single mothers, or a secret society of occult astronomers that knew of the planets Uranus and Neptune and Pluto thousands of years before modern astronomers “discovered” them. Imagine a lobbyist for the rights of menstruators, or a ritual theater group that fed ideas to French playwright Antonin Artaud in his dreams. Visualize a gang of sacred janitors, or the world’s oldest manufacturer of sacred dolls.
Most of all, beauty and truth fans, picture a hidden sacred city of the imagination—temples, dream sanctuaries, gymnasiums, theaters, healing spas, love chambers—kept so secret that it’s invisible to all but a very few in every generation. Call this place a thousand names. Call it the College-Whose-Name-Keeps Changing-and-Whose-Location-Keeps-Expanding, or call it the Sanctuary-Where-the-Thirteen-Perfect-Secrets-from-Before-the-Beginning-of-Time-Are-Kept. Its official name as of today is “Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail,” and it has headquarters on all seven continents. Five thousand years ago, it was housed solely on two continents as “Inanna Nannaru,” derived from Akkadian words, translated roughly as “Inanna’s Nuptial Couch in Heaven.” Six thousand years ago: “Tu-ia Gurus,” from the Sumerian, loosely meaning “Creation-Juice, Bringer of Good Tidings to the Womb.”
Two thousand years ago—so this story goes—our mystery school that is always both outside of time and yet entering time at every moment was called Pistis Sophia—in English “Faithful Wisdom.” Its most famous member—its
only
famous member—was Mary Magdalen, visionary consort of Jesus Christ. Not a penitent prostitute, as the Christian church later distorted her in an attempt to undermine the radical implications of their divine marriage. Not an obeisant groupie who mindlessly surrendered her will to the man-god.
On the contrary, beauty and truth fans. Magdalen was Christ’s partner,
his equal. More than that, she was his joker, his wild card: his secret weapon. They worshiped the divine in each other. So say the ancient texts of our mystery school.
But you need not believe the secret texts to guess the truth. Even the manual of the Christian church itself, as scoured of the truth as it is, strongly hints at Magdalen’s majesty. While all the male disciples disappeared during the crucifixion, she was there with Christ. While the twelve male disciples were cowering in defeated chaos, she was the first to find the empty tomb. Jesus appeared to her first after his resurrection; she was the first to be called by him to the mission of apostle.
The Gnostic texts from Nag Hammadi, discovered in 1947, reveal even more of their relationship, which violated all the social norms of their time. She was a confidante, a lover, an Apostle above all the other Apostles. Jesus called her the “Woman Who Knew the All,” and said she would rule in the coming Kingdom of Light. Even an early Christian father, Origen, helped propagate these truths, calling her immortal, and maintaining that she had lived since the beginning of time.
The traditions of our ancient order say all this and more: that Mary Magdalen’s performance on history’s stage was an experiment—Pistis Sophia’s gamble that the phallocracy was ripe for mutation.
That the risk failed is testimony not to Magdalen’s inadequacies, but to the virulence of out-of-control masculinity. Magdalen, alas, was too far ahead of her time to succeed in being seen for who she really was. Her archetype was not permitted to imprint itself deeply enough on the collective unconscious. Sadly, the divine feminine barely managed to survive in the dreams of the race through the defanged, depotentized image of the Virgin Mary—Christ’s harmless mommy, not his savvy consort.
From her cave in Provence, twenty years after the death of Christ, Magdalen foresaw that the future Church would suppress her role in the joint revelation. She predicted the Council of Nicaea, which in the year 325 excised from the Bible all texts that told of her complete role. She even prophesied that the spiritual descendants of Peter, the Apostle who had hated and feared her most, would trump up the absurd story of her whoredom, conflating her with Mary of Bethany and three other unnamed women described as sinners and adulterers in various books of the freshly canonical New Testament.
In the last years of her life, Magdalen, knowing that her work with Christ would be foiled and distorted, prepared for a renewal of the experiment at a later time. The records of Pistis Sophia tell us that she wrote of the signs by which future members of our order would know she had reincarnated. These signs were as follows.
1. Her return would come in the last half-century of the second millennium, and she would be born in the astrological sign of the Bull.
2. She would be born “in the place called Holy Cross, in a land blessed by Persephone.”
3. She would endure “a living crucifixion that would save her life.”
4. She would “be conceived double but be born single.” In recording this prophecy, Magdalen added the following words, which are attributed to Jesus in the Gnostic
Second Gospel of Mary Magdalen
:
When you make the two one, and when you make
the inside like the outside and the outside
like the inside, and the above like the below
and the below like the above, and when you make
the male like the female and the female like the
male, then you will enter the Kingdom.
5. She would have a signature of the bucrania (or bull skull) in three places on her body: behind the left knee, in the right fold of the labia majora, and in the middle of the forehead.
In 1948, the Pomegranate Grail, which is what the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail was called at that time, began its preparations for the return of the avatar. Members all over the world were put on alert. Much attention was focused on all those places that were literally called “Holy Cross”—or in Spanish, “Santa Cruz.” Pomegranate Grail members congregated around Holy Cross College in Maryland, as well as in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and Santa Cruz, California. Of these three, the Californian city aroused greatest excitement because according to one interpretation California
was “Kali’s land.” Kali, in the canon of the Pomegranate Grail, was the Hindu equivalent of Persephone.
In anticipation of her search for the reincarnation of Mary Magdalen, Vimala Nostradamus, one of the thirteen chiefs of the Pomegranate Grail, settled north of Santa Cruz, California, in October of 1949, where she began to build the community that was to serve as the nest for the coming again of Mary Magdalen. Vimala had spent the previous ten years in Pondicherry, India, which at the time was the world headquarters for our order.
I faithfully report these facts to you, beauty and truth fans, because I can say without much exaggeration that my body is made of them. They were fed to me with my childhood meals, sung to me as I fell asleep, repeated to me as I was bathed, by the people who’ve loved me most and treated me best in life: Vimala and my six other mothers, Artemisia, Dagmar, Cecily, Sibyl, Burgundy, and Indigo. How could I doubt the veracity of these stories, when they come from the same nurturers who’ve helped make me so strong and healthy and confident?