Esoterica

No One Knows Why These Medieval Statues Are Pulling Their Vaginas Open

John Harding, an IT director from Shropshire, England, was on a day trip to the quaint English market town of Church Stretton when he encountered his first Sheela-na-Gig carved in stone above the door of its 14th century church. "My first impression was, 'What the hell's that?'" he says. "It was an odd thing to find on a church."

"Odd" is an understatement. Sheela-na-Gigs are medieval stone figures—often found on the walls of churches or castles—of women caught mid-squat, thighs spread, using their hands to yank open their vulva and display their vaginas. Some of them have cheeky grins; others are wizened hags; one is depicted wiggling out of a demon's mouth. What they all have in common is the fact that they are proudly exposing their chiseled vags to anyone walking past.

. . .

The Church Stretton carving is one of hundreds of Sheela-na-Gigs found in England, Ireland, France, and Spain. Some anonymous prude had attempted to censor the image, obscuring her open genitalia with a stone, but Harding could still tell what it was covering up. "I got fascinated, basically. I started recording them, because there are quite a few in the area."

That was in 1998. Harding's database, the Sheela-Na-Gig Project, has been going ever since. Now people send him logs of suspected Sheelas; some come from as far away as Norway and Milan.

In Salem a New Memorial and a Chilling Reminder

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Last week a new memorial was dedicated to victims of the Salem witch trials. Wednesday, July 19 marked the 325th anniversary of the first five hangings, a number that would expand to 19 in a series of public executions.

In 1692, when children often died young, Rebecca Nurse’s lived. During the Salem witch trials, this was one of the reasons locals were convinced that Nurse was a witch, according to Benita Towle, her granddaughter nine generations removed.

“I was told that people were jealous of her,” said Towle, a Milford, Conn., resident.

Exactly 325 years since Nurse’s execution, dozens of people gathered at the spot of her death Wednesday for a dedication of the new Salem Witch Trials Memorial at Proctor’s Ledge, where 19 were executed because of accusations of witchcraft.

Wednesday’s event began at noon, around the same time the first of three mass executions took place on the site on July 19, 1692, when five women accused of witchcraft were hanged: Nurse, Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, and Sarah Wildes. In addition to those executed at Proctor’s Ledge, at least five died in jail, and one was crushed to death.

I started out to write a brief acknowledgment of this new monument. But each time I turned my hand to it, the more the strange tendrils of this story tugged at me. Salem is iconic, not only for its tragic history, but for its enduring lessons about human nature.

Cafe

Around the Web, Around the World

"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Rituals for Personal and Family Healing with Daniel Foor

Your blood lineage ancestors, irrespective of religion, race, or culture, include the thousands of women and men whose lives weave a story back to the first human beings in Africa over 200,000 years ago. For many living today, your ancestors experienced violence, injustice, or oppression, very much like our reality though in the forms of their time. When we bring healing to these unresolved issues in a family line, the dead can finally rest in peace and the living can heal personally, within the family, and in the larger collective. This week author, psychologist, and ceremonialist, Daniel Foor, joins host, Christina Pratt, to discuss his new book, "Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing." Daniel shares how by reconciling with our ancestors "we make repairs in our personal psyches and family histories that, in turn, mend cracks in the larger spirit of humanity."

This week's guest:
Daniel Foor, PhD

Daniel Foor, PhD, is a licensed psychotherapist and a doctor of psychology. He has led ancestral and family healing intensives throughout the United States since 2005. He is an initiate in the Ifa/Orisha tradition of Yoruba-speaking West Africa and has trained with teachers of Mahayana Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and different indigenous paths, including the older ways of his European ancestors. He's the author of Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing and lives in Asheville, NC. http://ancestralmedicine.org/

Tuesday, July 25, 2017 at 11:00 AM Pacific

Log on to Listen
Why Shamanism Now? on Co-Creator Network
Questions? Comments? Call: 1-512-772-1938

All episodes are now available in the iTunes Podcast Library.

Cafe

Around the Web, Around the World

"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Rituals for Personal and Family Healing with Daniel Foor

Your blood lineage ancestors, irrespective of religion, race, or culture, include the thousands of women and men whose lives weave a story back to the first human beings in Africa over 200,000 years ago. For many living today, your ancestors experienced violence, injustice, or oppression, very much like our reality though in the forms of their time. When we bring healing to these unresolved issues in a family line, the dead can finally rest in peace and the living can heal personally, within the family, and in the larger collective. This week author, psychologist, and ceremonialist, Daniel Foor, joins host, Christina Pratt, to discuss his new book, "Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing." Daniel shares how by reconciling with our ancestors "we make repairs in our personal psyches and family histories that, in turn, mend cracks in the larger spirit of humanity."

This week's guest:
Daniel Foor, PhD

Daniel Foor, PhD, is a licensed psychotherapist and a doctor of psychology. He has led ancestral and family healing intensives throughout the United States since 2005. He is an initiate in the Ifa/Orisha tradition of Yoruba-speaking West Africa and has trained with teachers of Mahayana Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and different indigenous paths, including the older ways of his European ancestors. He's the author of Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing and lives in Asheville, NC. http://ancestralmedicine.org/

Tuesday, July 18, 2017 at 11:00 AM Pacific

Log on to Listen
Why Shamanism Now? on Co-Creator Network
Questions? Comments? Call: 1-512-772-1938

All episodes are now available in the iTunes Podcast Library.

Esoterica

Meet the Makers of Motherpeace Tarot, the Feminist Deck That Inspired Dior’s Resort Collection

A skeleton, huddled in a fetal position, encircled by a molting snake decorates the opening look of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Dior Resort collection. Picked out in colorful threads at Dior’s Paris ateliers, the original image was drawn almost 40 years ago—it’s the Death card in the Motherpeace feminist tarot deck. An unlikely, inauspicious image for a fashion show, even one set in the wilds of the Santa Monica Mountains? Not according to Karen Vogel, who cocreated Motherpeace Tarot with Vicki Noble in the late ’70s. In fact, Chiuri’s choice of the Death card is downright uncanny. “It’s not necessarily about physical death,” says Vogel. “[It’s about] the beauty of the shedding of the skin that a snake does, that we can transform our lives. It’s about transformation and renewal that’s really beneficial.” An apter visual metaphor for Chiuri, who has set off on her own at Dior after working alongside Pierpaolo Piccioli for nearly three decades, is hard to conjure.

. . .

Christian Dior himself knew from magic. He was a devotee of the tarot and is said to have had his cards read before each of his fashion shows. But the decks he used would have been distinctly different from Motherpeace with its strong female archetypes, more than half of whom are of color. Noble and Vogel researched the goddess-based cultures of indigenous peoples around the world to make their illustrations. “We put women back into history,” says Noble. They also made their deck round, changing not so much the structure of the tarot, but the form. Since they self-published in 1981 and hand-collated the first 5,000 decks, they’ve sold upwards of 300,000, but Motherpeace has remained fairly esoteric. Noble chalks that up to the usual resistance to feminist work, especially matriarchal feminism (which posits a pre-patriarchal gynocratic age marked by peace, not war). “We knew lots of women at Ms. Magazine who had cards in their desks, but the cards were never featured in the magazine because they’re offbeat.”

Nearly four decades later, the culture just might be catching up to Motherpeace. Beyond Chiuri and Dior, Vogel says she’s noticed a renewed interest in the deck. “Separately but related, I’ve been hearing people using the word patriarchy, when it used to be fringe terminology,” she says. “And there’s a renewed sense that it’s okay to be a feminist, for sure.” We just might be able to chalk that up to President Trump.

Cafe

Around the Web, Around the World

"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Healing the Ancestral Lines

When people call out to their ancestors, they call out to a diversity of energies. Some people call out by name to the men and women of their bloodline all the way back to the first man and first woman. Others call out to all of their relations; their request reaching out to all life through the interconnectedness of all living things. While others call out to their ancestors and visualize that request reaching from humankind to nature and on through their cosmology until they reach Grandfather Fire, Grandmother Water, and the Void from which the dream of life unfolds. Though we call out in different ways and mean slightly different things, traditionally “the ancestors” is a universally good thing. So what does it mean when we diagnose “the ancestors” as the cause of chronic disease, family patterns of addiction, or lose of hope and passion for life? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores why the dead aren’t becoming traditional helping spirits and why they remain stuck here hijacking the lives of the living. And more importantly she will share her non-traditional shamanic healing practices that effectively heal the energy stuck in the ancestral lines, which frees the living from the unresolved issues of the past and the dead take their place as helping spirits who offer us the rich legacy of all those who have gone before us.

**This show originally aired May 8, 2012**

Tuesday, July 11, 2017 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Why Shamanism Now? on Co-Creator Network
Questions? Comments? Call: 1-512-772-1938

All episodes are now available in the iTunes Podcast Library.

Hobby Lobby Goes to the Black Market for Jesus

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Note to Hobby Lobby: Please stick to arts and crafts and leave archaeology to the professionals.

Hobby Lobby purchased thousands of ancient artifacts smuggled out of modern-day Iraq via the United Arab Emirates and Israel in 2010 and 2011, attorneys for the Eastern District of New York announced on Wednesday. As part of a settlement, the American craft-supply mega-chain will pay $3 million and the U.S. government will seize the illicit artifacts. Technically, the defendants in the civil-forfeiture action are the objects themselves, yielding an incredible case name: The United States of America v. Approximately Four Hundred Fifty (450) Ancient Cuneiform Tablets; and Approximately Three Thousand (3,000) Ancient-Clay Bullae.

Under any circumstances, this case would be wild: It involves thousands of ancient artifacts that seem to have been stolen from Iraq, where the pillaging of antiquities has been rampant. The longstanding trade in antiquities of dubious provenance has become an especially sensitive topic in recent years, and a target of increased law-enforcement scrutiny: ISIS has made some untold millions—or billions—by selling ancient goods. While nothing in the case indicates that these objects were associated with any terrorist group, the very nature of smuggled goods means their provenance is muddy.

But the case really matters because of who’s involved. The members of the Green family, which owns the Hobby Lobby chain, are committed evangelical Christians who are probably most famous for their participation in a 2014 Supreme Court case, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which helped dismantle certain birth-control-coverage requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The Greens are big collectors of ancient antiquities; they’re also the primary visionaries and contributors behind the Museum of the Bible opening in Washington, D.C., this fall. Steve Green is the chairman of the board. The family’s famous name, now tied to a story of dealer intrigue and black markets, is likely to bring even further scrutiny and attention as they prepare to open their museum.

Esoterica

Inside the 1950s LSD Therapy That Changed Cary Grant’s Life

In 1958, Grant had just filmed Houseboat with Sophia Loren (whom he had inconveniently fallen in love with), when his then-wife, Betsy Drake, introduced him to Mortimer Hartman, a Beverly Hills doctor with whom she’d been taking LSD in a therapeutic setting. Drake had started seeing Hartman to deal with her picture-perfect but troubled marriage, and thought he could help Grant, too. Hartman described LSD as “a psychic energizer which empties the subconscious and intensifies emotion and memory a hundred times.”

Grant would go on to take acid 100 times under the care of Hartman, whom he referred to as “my wise Mahatma.” At the end of his sessions, he felt healed and whole.

“After weeks of treatment came a day when I saw the light,” he says in the film. “When I broke through, I felt an immeasurably beneficial cleansing of so many needless fears and guilts. I lost all the tension that I’d been crippling myself with. First I thought of all those wasted years. Second, I said, ‘Oh my God, the humanity. Please come in.’”

Grant wasn’t the only one whose life changed during those psychedelic hours in Hartman’s office. The doctor is known to have treated roughly 100 patients, including Esther Williams, talent agent Jay Kanter, and a slew of lesser-known Hollywood players. Roberta Haynes, an actress whose biggest role was 1952’s Return to Paradise with Gary Cooper, was also one of Hartman’s patients. Now 89, in good health, and living in Delray Beach, Florida, Haynes is likely one of a very small group still living who took LSD with Hartman in the late ’50s and early ’60s. She remembers seeing Grant in the waiting room on more than one occasion. Haynes describes the 18 LSD sessions she had with Hartman, beginning in 1959, as life changing. “I was not happy with my life before the LSD,” she says. “Afterward I was able to be happy. I really think I came out of it knowing what was important in life.”

Vatican's Ticking Gay Bomb Goes Off

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

The Catholic Church has a gay problem. I'm not talking about its regressive, homophobic doctrine, but about the sheer hypocrisy. Openly gay, former friar Mark Dowd called it a "ticking gay bomb." By his estimation, about half of the men drawn to Catholic seminaries and monastic orders are gay. Leave say there have long been rumors of an underground gay scene for some time, even of a gay "lobby" at the highest levels. Now the implicit has become explicit with a widely publicized bust.

Vatican police raided a drug-fueled gay-sex party at an apartment belonging to an aide of one of Pope Francis’ key advisers, according to a new report.

The Holy Father is “enraged,” since the home, inhabited by Francesco Cardinal Coccopalmerio’s secretary, belongs to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith — the arm charged with tackling clerical sex abuse, the Italian paper Il Fatto Quotidiano reported.

Cops raided the apartment in late June after neighbors voiced concern about multiple people acting strangely while streaming in and out of the residence, the newspaper reported Wednesday.

Once police were inside the apartment, they said they found multiple men engaged in rampant drug use and homosexual activity.

Teal Swan

Crossposted from The Gohst

I was once close friends with Teal Swan. This was us. I met her in the summer of 2011. We became close instantly. I had never met anyone like her before. She was different, and I like different. One of the first things Teal told me was that she was an alien and that there was a reason why I had come back to her, all in a very detailed fashion. That we were colleagues. Okay,cool- I can handle this, I’ve had strange experiences all my life this was something I could entertain. It wasn’t weird. Simply intriguing. And for a bonus, I fit in here.

In the fall of 2011, just after Thanksgiving, I had gotten in contact with the creator of Spirit Science. I introduced Teal to the website and thought it would be cool for her to upload this question and answer type video series that she was talking about doing, a little like the Abraham Hicks styleforum that we all knew and loved. She had held her first Synchronization workshop in Salt Lake and published her first book “Sculptor in the Sky” just before we had met. When she began to work with Spirit Science, I had moved to the Virgin Islands, and from afar I watched her views soar. It was amazing and exciting, we skyped often. She told me that she’d come and visit me in the astral plane. Comforting and strange at the same time. But I had had weird out of body travels before so I wasn’t going to doubt her experience.

We had this inside joke, when I would stay over at her house at night we’d say to each other “goodnight! I’ll see you in 5.” Because of our strange and vivid dreams. Life with Teal was great. I loved her very much. Each morning we would wake up, she’d cook an awesome breakfast for her family, we’d watch this boxed set of Abraham Hicks dvd’s that she had and then she’d get to work typing up a script for an Ask Teal episode. Each night she would sing her son to sleep.

She had bookshelves full to the brim with esoteric, self-help as well as parapsychology and occult type books. They were all annotated and dog-eared. She would write down my name eventually next to an aura color and personality type. She and I both had a fascination with Human Psychology and philosophy so we got along great. It wasn’t soon after that she began to tell me about her dark past. It was detailed. It was calculated. It would have made an amazing novel, and I let her tell it with my mind open to it. Even though a lot didn’t add up. After all you never question the victim… right? Right?

Cafe

Around the Web, Around the World

Why You Need to Heal Your Ancestral Lines

What does it really mean to heal our ancestral lines? To truly heal what lies unresolved in the ancestral lines, we must go to the source of the problem. We must go to the first person by journeying back who knows how far in time, explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, to that first person who made that one bad decision that changed his or her life and then all of the lives of all of the descendants who followed. These decisions become the unresolved energies of the ancestors. If left unresolved they continue to limit, manipulate, and overshadow our lives today. Why do we need to heal the ancestral lines? It is the only way that we-the living-will ever be truly free to make new decisions. The only way we will ever be able to engage our wisdom, innovation, and co-operation and make the high quality decisions needed today is to clear this unresolved ancestral energy. If we want a different answer for healthcare, war, economics, how we treat the environment, education, homelessness, joblessness, and child poverty we must stop living the answers of our ancestors. Join us this week as we explore what it could mean for our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual heath to heal the ancestral lines?

**This show originally aired May 3rd, 2011**

Tuesday, July 4, 2017 at 11:00 AM Pacific

Log on to Listen
Why Shamanism Now? on Co-Creator Network
Questions? Comments? Call: 1-512-772-1938

All episodes are now available in the iTunes Podcast Library.