"The only way forward is to die"

In my last post, I talked about a conversation I had (if you can call it that) with the goddess Cerridwen speaking through the mouth and body of Wife during a Full Moon ritual.* If you aren't familiar with this kind of experience, it can be easy to wonder whether it's real or a put-on? Maybe Wife was just saying portentous things in a funny voice? There have been religious frauds before now; maybe this was one of them. Or if not, how can I tell?

It's a fair question. I'm convinced that Whoever was speaking, it wasn't Wife—at any rate, not in any sense of the words that I can understand. This is for two or three reasons, at least. 

One is that the whole atmosphere simply felt different. You know how it feels when you are talking with another person, someone you know well. This was different. Before the Aspect and after, it felt like Wife; during, it didn't. I try to explain that a little bit in this post.

A second is that whenever we discussed the ritual afterwards, Wife's memory of what happened was regularly different from mine. Sometimes she remembered nothing at all. Other times she remembered pictures, and when I told her what words she spoke we would put those together with the images to try to make sense of them. (In principle—if I were trying to channel James Randi—I suppose she might have faked this part; but over the years I had a lot of experience with Wife lying to me, and this never felt like that.)

And a third is that the Lady often said things that Wife didn't like. Surely if Wife had been faking, she would have concocted messages that suited her; but very often they didn't.

Let me tell you about one of these times.

We held a combined Full Moon / Spring Equinox service on March 26, 2005. This was just one week after Wife was arrested. I started by asking the Lady what we should be doing: Wife had just been arrested, she had broken the undercarriage of one of our cars, she had been thrown out of her prison ministry (because she now had an arrest record), and just two months earlier her affair with Boyfriend 3 had ended very abruptly. Briefly, she was breaking things or losing things right and left. So what should we do?

Unlike last time, I don't have the notes of a complete conversation. What I wrote down were bullet points. But these were the things that the Lady said back in reply. (In what follows, "I" means Cerridwen, and "she" means Wife.)

• The path of wisdom requires great sacrifice.
• I never said it would be easy.
• The only way forward is to die … every day.
• Death means giving up the past!
• Sometime ago I said she was facing a major change. Well, now it's starting.
• Long ago I promised her that when she really needed another teacher, I would send one. Well, now there is nobody else. She will have to learn from Me.
• It really doesn't matter whether she learns in this body or in her next body or between bodies. That's no more important than what clothes she wears to class.
• She is entering a time when her body will be fighting with her will. Her body has always been weak, her will is strong, and it doesn't matter who wins.
• This will be a matter for the next 10-20 years—for Me, that's the blink of an eye. I don't care what body she is in when she studies with Me.
• I have given her a gift of remembering from one incarnation to the next, so she can continue to study with Me from life to life.
• The reason she finds it so hard to be calm is that her mind is always filled with the thoughts and feelings of many other people, from both the past and the future. By today's standards, this is called madness. In other times it might have been revered, but people with this Gift are always lonely or alone.  

In my notes I say that I wasn't sure if that last quip (about being revered) was the Lady talking, or if it was Wife. When we discussed it later, Wife was sure it was Her.

I said that the Lady would say things Wife didn't like. Let's look at this list:

• Wife really thought things had already been hard enough on her, and wasn't looking for them to get any harder.
• Wife was and is very afraid of dying! It puzzles me sometimes that someone who says she believes in reincarnation can also be so afraid of death; and if you catch her in the right mood, she'll deny it. But when her illness looked likely to kill her, she was terrified.
• Wife cannot let go of the past! My God, where do I begin illustrating this?
• With her compulsion to save everything from her past, during our epic clean-up with D? (See this post for example, but really the whole "Second date" series will make the point.) 
• With her inability to cope when I stopped paying for a storage unit, nearly a year after we sold the house, and she was confronted with so many boxes that she could neither throw away nor keep?
• With my most recent visit, less than a month ago, where I saw that she had exactly recreated (in Son 1's apartment) the same monstrous clutter with which she choked our house?
• I only wish she could have taken Cerridwen's advice here. It was far soberer and more mature than anything she's actually done.
• Wife has always been terrified of being taken for mad, because she is afraid of being confined against her will.  

I must have reported to Wife everything that the Lady said at the time. Clearly none of it stuck. Damned shame.

__________

* At any rate, I think it was Cerridwen. She was Wife's patron deity, the one to whom Wife was dedicated as a priestess, and so she was the goddess who most often spoke through Wife in Aspect. But I didn't actually make a note of Who is was, so I'm left with a likely guess.