The true Bride of God

In revisiting and untangling the bizarre concept of the “bride of the Church”, which nuns have been told, for the past thousand years, is their role, I’ve only begun to realise recently how that deadly snare has been bait ‘n switched to hook those in the women’s movement who are often, in effect, “brides of the State”.

Since the death of religion in the West, and the dependence of an increasing number of single mothers on the largesse of government handouts, becoming a Bride of the State is just the latest way of channelling the female power along the Road to Perdition, where the soul dies from suffocation and starvation, leaving the males on the outside to feel, and become, totally redundant.

None of those ‘brides’ are following a Way that will take them to where they need to go. They are light years away from the real bride of God that the mythic Mary of Virgo was. For those who have the eyes to see through the metaphorical coding in the gospel stories, Mary was a Middle Eastern womb shaman who made love with the Most High to bring down the fertility of the Heavens to Earth. Then she would shamanically ascend to take that pure love back up again – in a toroidal circuit – as told in the story of her Assumption.

Who among us – woman or man – hasn’t experienced the Assumption, although we might not call it that. But we have been spun up into the Upper Worlds through the shamanic trance, or through meditating on the Merkaba, our own stairway to heaven. The story of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary is about the potential Assumption of all of us, through known meditation and shamanic techniques.

So Mary wasn’t, and isn’t, the only divine co-creatrix. There were, and still are, many womb shamans helping to co-create the creation.

And so the true Bride for many of us might be found closer to home in myths and legends about the young Bridie, who we celebrate at Imbolc, and Brigit in her mother form, who this country of Britain was named after.

Faced with the unbeatable popularity of the true Bride found in the myths of pagan Ireland, the Roman Christian church tried to adopt her as Saint Brigit of Kildare, one of Ireland’s patron saints, and they also called her Mary of the Gael. But her magical roots can be found in the Celtic myths about the true Bride, the original Queen of the May, whose story was written long before in the stars.

The Queen of the May

The Queen of the May, who stars in carnivals and fairs up and down the land during the Maytime festivities of Beltane, is derived from this Bridie. Her brother is Gwyn ap Nudd, the Lord of the Underworld and the King of the Faeries, and so as her protector, he has to fight a duel each Beltane over her honour with the Lord of Summer, Gwythyr ap Greidawl.

This is how the drama plays out in the night skies on the full moon after Beltane over the Summerlands of Avalon. You can see the heavenly lovers as they arise over the Mendip Hills in the darkness before the dawn, at the climax of the night of the Honey Moon.

These starring actors of the firmament are performing the story of the romantic tryst between Gwythyr (Ophiuchus) and his bride, Bridie, who is waiting for him in the honeymoon bed at Virgo to give him his reward, after he has successfully dispatched his rival Gwyn (Orion) back to the Underworlds.

The dual in the skies between Gwythyr, the serpent-belted Lord of Summer and Gwyn ap Nudd, the Lord of the Underworld, is a metaphor for the sexual tension of the love magic that blooms between twin souls through their engagement with the Higher and Lower Self of their Beloved. (You can read more about how that works in Twin Souls and Dream Lovers.)

These lover tryst myths are about the Alchemical Marriage, or the Fairy Marriage, otherwise known as the Marriage of the Sun and the Moon, which takes place when the Sun is in the constellation of Taurus and a full lunar eclipse in the constellation of Scorpio. I explain this ancient star story in much more granular detail in my book Stories in the Summerlands.

The Marriage of the Sun and the Moon is represented in the Summerlands of Avalon in Somerset at Beltane by the red and white dragons, whose alchemical melding produces the birth of the Philosopher’s Child, which is what Beltane is ultimately about. It is the Alchemical Marriage, or the Fairy Marriage which takes place between the Lord of Summer and the Queen of the May under a Scorpio full moon.

The sex alchemy of the maypole

We celebrate the honeymoon of the Queen of the May and the Lord of Summer by dancing around the maypole, which in itself a fertility symbol, because the patterning of the red and white ribbons symbolises how the alchemical marriage takes place in the body, with the resulting drops of red and white heavenly dew dropping on to the pineal gland at the base of the Holy Grail or hypothalamus.

This is how the intertwining serpentine energies course up the Central Pillar during shamanic sex practices, as described in Dove and Serpent Sex Alchemy.

The two energetic serpents are known in the Indian culture as Ida and Pingala. One is gold and the other is black. They both have their ‘nests’ just below the root chakra and are excited into rising by the nectars that are released throughout the whole body during true, magical love-making. The love creates a special musical frequency that is the Word of God of John’s gospel, that co-creates the creation, and so this is also the metaphor being enacted by the flute-playing Indian snake charmer.

After awaking, the black and gold serpents then travel up the Central Pillar, which is in the spine, and criss-cross several times at key major chakras, until they reach the chalice-shaped cup of the hypothalamus. Another ancient name for the chalice was ‘grail’.

Then the two serpents’ heads hang over the edge of the grail as they excrete their red and white drops of heavenly dew which fall on to the pineal gland, in the base of the grail of the hypothalamus.

This sparks the pineal gland or third eye into life and thus the person receives the Holy Grail; he becomes enlightened to his true nature, and the nature of reality.

Shamanic sex rites confer such wisdom that it used to be that pharaohs and kings would lie with a ‘hierodule’ or sacred prostitute on the nights of their coronations. She would in fact have been a shaman whose energies were aligned with the spirits of the land, and thus she was able to initiate the country’s leader into the wisdom he would need to rule his domain.

That’s why they say that behind every great man, there’s always a woman! Ladies, we were always much more powerful when we were in the shadows. The women’s movement has done us no favours in pulling us out into the spotlight. The magical co-creatrix powers of the Divine Feminine are much more potent in the dark.

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