FOUNTAIN

Fountain: The alchemical fountain of Fountains is a symbol of the Uroboros. Three fountains represent the three principles of Sulfur, Mercury and Salt. The King and Queen sitting in the fountain represent the bath or water operations of Dissolution and Distillation.

“You open doors that you don’t know you open,” says John on the way back from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “You are aware of patterns that you don’t consciously now.” When you had lunch with him a week earlier, he invited you to enact your interpretation of The Passion. So, you set up a chart for high noon today, Thursday. The ritual was to filled the copper vessel from the altar with salt surrounding the Moonstone and create a trail from the Lab Gallery to the steps of the cathedral. Your timing was explicit -- the clock was striking high noon just as you passed Saks Fifth Avenue. But you had no idea the Cardinal was giving a noon Mass. And there was an electrical energy that unnerved you, unsettling to your second chakra despite the tincture of tranquility you ingested for breakfast. One by one, the cameras arrived until three networks -- CBS, CNN and ABC -- were present. Your empowered space of the Iron Maiden granted you complete freedom of timing – John declared that the process must organically unfold and he will shoot whenever you are ready. Yes, but didn’t you know this? Didn’t you realize that you would encounter the news media on the day that La Parca was reanimated? How could you possibly know? Is the alchemist in you that much more aware of patterns and currents than the woman in you? Speaking of the woman in you…the reporter you encountered on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral is Marcia Kramer, a family friend. And speaking of charisma – she flashes that electronic smile at you and you feel yourself beaming. Marcia, you look great, you tell her as you stand there, suddenly removed from reverie. "Are you getting married?" she asks. "No, but my brother is." And, of course she knows this already. Did you break your oath of silence? La Parca means fate and it was your fate to encounter a reporter, a family friend, on the steps of the Cathedral. Oh, the Beloved! Yes, the Beloved! The Cathedral where the Cardinal was speaking about the love of the father (never a mention of the mother who gives birth to the father) was no place for La Parca. She was fated to continue her wandering. In the church. Out of the church. Around the church. What was driving her was the conduits of the Beloved – the electronic media. You tried to give a rose to the news reporter from NBC. He refused. Marcia also refuses it with her kilowat smile. You catch up on personal news. What are you doing these days, she asks. You can’t recall your life at all beyond the Solutio. Funny, how fate happens. It begins as a vision of seizing your destiny and ends up as fate. Just a reminder during this surrender -- your ego is not in control. The Lost Bride of the gospels on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Ravaged by her journey of attempting to penetrate one patriarchal institution after another and there is the news media on the scene and they have no interest in capturing her image at all. They certainly have not arrived to record La Parca! In fact, it isn’t even clear what they are doing here. The cameraman from CBS is taking photos of the steeples, not of you! What is the meaning of this -- a cosmic joke? To prepare for the sacred marriage with the Beloved and…well, yes...it surely is a cosmic joke. Marcia has the Goddess energy; beyond her talents as a reporter, what makes her a star is her charisma, and this reminds you of the encounter on Monday with the author of the book on charisma. The encounter with the media star with La Parca on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral…well this is the union with the Beloved (known as Fame in the Age of Aquarius), isn’t it? Not the encounter you expected but an encounter all the same. You ask Marcia if people frequently come up to her on the street and she says a lot do but not so much around the Cathedral because it is mostly tourists. And you can feel your kundalini penetrating your spine as you write this. People think that fame puts you in the center of the cyclone but that is because people have limited perceptions; they think fame is dynamic because that is all they can see. They don’t see the patterns and currents moving under the surface that impact our lives at the most minute level: fame, the energy of flashbulbs popping, is all they can see. So to be the person that is there first, the person who sets the course of something in motion, that is much more empowering, but this is what people never see. This has been the role of the High Priestesses through history and nothing kills the energy of the High Priestess better than fame. Priestess wear black on account of a history of hiding in the dark; making their presence known could easily result in bodily death. Here you are in the Lab where you performed a ritual with the High Priestess to deliver the Aquarian Age goddess through the alchemical experiment. She advised you to endure the fire. She was right about the fire, but not about you. The flames never even got close to your body when the firestorm arrived. In fact, the story broke on the very night that you failed to show up at the Lab for Yuliya’s collaborative dance performance with butterflies. Butterflies! You spilled your secrets in your Blog novel and no one even noticed but afterwards the Lab Gallery plunges into fire! The protest of the gallery director's intention to show My Sweet Lord, otherwise known as Chocolate Christ, caused such a fervor that the show was cancelled. Matt, in fact, resigned from his job. So much, you thought, for the continuation of the experiment! Destroyed by The Passion, as John refers to the Easter Week fervor launched by firebombs in the form of hate mail and death threats. The Alchemy of Love was to be no more! Destroyed by fire! These Sacred Places cannot be simply happened upon in the modern world. They have to be cultivated. On Palm Sunday you were in funk even before receiving the phone call about the controversy from a friend who transmits the ridiculous notion that the public would be participants in the performance of the Chocolate Jesus by licking it! Oh, how tasteless, you declare, a kneejerk reaction because you knew better: Matt never allows anyone in the gallery during a performance. Your first instinct was to protect Matt. You leave him a message and focused on sending him light. When he calls, you repeat the journalist’s adage: “As long as they spell your name right.” This makes him laugh. He says he doesn't know if he should keep working. Afterwards, you take the time on Palm Sunday to reflect on how important Easter Week has been in your fated, fated life. Your father having a psychotic breakdown on Easter, declaring he was Jesus and locked up in the very same mental ward where he treated his patients. And your friend Iyaba, a painter and spoken word poet, who got arrested on Good Friday and thrown in jail after inhabiting the persona of Jesus during a performance of the Loft Artists, so inflated that he couldn’t get off the stage. So this death and resurrection of My Sweet Lord is just an extension of the journey, isn’t it? The Leo’s innocence when he describes how he was attracted to the work. It is a gesture from the heart. Why on Easter Week? He so innocently replies: when else? In the gallery he tells me that he got 700 e-mails and many that he read thanked him for prompting an awareness of what Easter is really about; not chocolate bunnies and dyed eggs but death and resurrection. And of course, the Christians appropriated the holiday from the pagans who worshipped Oestara as the goddess of renewal. Isn’t it time for the return of the Goddess? Is that why you encountered Marcia Kramer, the CBS reporter in front of the Cathedral? Marcia is asking what else you are doing, besides standing in front of St. Patrick’s in a ragged champagne satin wedding gown, that is! The spell is broken. You are no longer La Parca animated -- you were identified with a personal history. So, what is this fated encounter about? A memory? Or perhaps a mirror? Running right smack up against fame in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral jolting you out of your reverie and suddenly remember you have a pang of self-consciousness and realize you are not the lost bride but an artist giving a performance. You aren’t even Christian. You grew up believing that Christ was a very special man, but not the Son of God! That would take away his humanity! So, whom do you meet when you return from taking La Parca through Mexico during the change in millennium but Andres Serrano, the very artist who created an American icon in his struggle to make Jesus real. Being around Andres taught you something about fame – the power of holding energy, particularly in the face of controversy. So you transmitted that information from one Leo to another; you reminded Matt not to capitulate. You reminded him of the power of holding energy. And so, you cheered that everything at the Lab was back to normal when you got the notice for the next show. You went to view it at night and it inspired you to do a video installation. Matt put statements in the window and people are truly reading and responding. What a thrill to put this notion to the public, the lost bride of the gospels resurrected in a hotel in midtown Manhattan! Not just any hotel but a sacred space infused with ancient goddess symbols and figures! What you feel great about right now is that the performance ritual is coming to an end. This is Day Four of your fast. Day Four of sitting in the chaos of the relics of the journey. A dream come true it is, but you will be happy to put them in order again. You have drunk your tranquility tea this morning and now you must take stock. Time to recount the definition of the Solutio (definitions that follow are direct quotations from www.alchemylab.com). Chemically, it is the dissolving of the ashes from Calcination in water. In the Arcanum Experiment, Dissolution is represented by iron oxide or rust, which is illustrated by the potentially corrosive powers of water on even the hardest of metals. Psychologically, this represents a further breakdown of the artificial structures of the psyche by total immersion in the unconscious, non-rational, or feminine or rejected part of our minds. It is, for the most part, an unconscious process in which our conscious mind lets go of control in order to allow the surfacing of buried material. It is the opening of the floodgates and generating new energy from waters held back. Dissolution can be experienced as “the flow”, the bliss of being well used and actively engaged in creative acts without traditional prejudices, personal hang-ups or established hierarchy getting in the way. Psychologically: Dissolution is the continuation of the kundalini experience, the opening up of energy channels in the body to recharge and elevate every cell. Dissolutio takes place in the genitals (tin chakra) and involves the lungs and spleen. Aha! The surfacing of buried material. La Parca had been buried for nearly seven years. Solutio brought her out. The bliss of being “well used” and "actively engaged in creative acts" without the ego getting in the way! Once again, she steers you into the unconscious. What more could you possibly find there? Every time you hit bottom, you realize how much further there is to go. The darkness of empty space has no limits! Even after you penetrate the energies of this galaxy, there are other worlds to explore. This morning you took a ritual bath in salt and the essence of Persephone and prayed that the Goddess be with you. There was no time for the ritual you planned, creating a snake with the dresses in the order that they appeared on your journey. The stone faced NBC reporter asked if you were doing a performance and you said you were performing the Lost Bride of the gospels. He smiled. Perhaps he got the cosmic joke. More likely, he didn’t think that the return of the Lost Bride is news. Perhaps he is right. The return of the Lost Bride is old news -- the Da Vinci Code phenomenon that reached a. peak last summer with the release of the film. And to think La Parca was an outgrowth of your passionate dialogue with the woman, Margaret Starbird, who inspired Dan Brown to write his blockbuster book. But you are always ahead of the collective – you are an avant-garde leader. This long time project that you have been holding in secret, visually it fit right into the Solutio. The timing had to have been right for you. There were too many synchronicities – like the gift of your great grandmother’s lace the night before you resurrected La Parca. This recent addition to the gown imbues your task with personal significance – the injection of The Passion into the Aquarian line of Germanic women in your family, the line of icy independent women that ends with your birth. You have made peace with these women through La Parca. La Parca was the receptacle of your passions. She is your icon of The Passion, the mourning she suffers for her departed consort. Heide appeared at the window last night just as you finished writing your blog entry. I have never seen anything like this, she said of the installation. You walked down the street to a cafe. You chose a table outdoors and she shows you her new work. Flowers, how lovely, you are growing things in your garden! You are very happy she has found grounding in earth. No, she says. These flowers are made with duck tongues. Duck tongues! This is very disturbing. You cannot figure out the symbolism of the duck but can only think about how many ducks gave their lives so she could make a representation of a flower! No, she says, these are tongues that no one wants, tongues to be thrown away. You count the petals. This is also unsettling. There are seven petals, not six for the hieros gamos, the rosette at the center of the labyrinth, or eight for Inanna, but seven. And then she shows you another picture that makes your stomach churn. It is a female figure in a red shirt with huge bulging eyes and a hideous mask that could only be made with pigskin, for that is her medium. You quickly turn it over. You tell her it is hideous and assure her that it doesn’t mean it is bad art but you haven’t eaten three days and you are very sensitive to such ugliness. She tells me that it makes her extremely happy to make these creatures; she will have a dozen to be interpreted by 12 writers. What about your interpretation? You launch into a discussion about the difficulties of making art infused with personal meaning. Most of what is out there is just junk, but you assure her that her art is a personal journey. You are concerned she is putting it out too soon -- the pitfall in the market driven art world, particularly for a woman on an authentic journey. You persuade her to develop a conscious interpretation of her work; otherwise she will be vulnerable to falling into unconscious projections, as is the fate of women who dare to go public with the personal. The water flows. The opening releases a voice of conviction that says her series is reaching completion and she must take the time to reflect before releasing the work into the world. She has reanimated the sacred companions of the Goddess, the pigs that her father, the pig farmer, raised for meat, pigs that were sent over a cliff for the mystery rites. She is resurrecting dead pigs as female icons. Now, as Sulfur is cleansed by Salt and transmuted by Mercury in the Iron Maiden, you realize that she is a mirror of your own work of reanimation of your personal history of The Passion with La Parca. A healing has taken place in the cafe. Then the darkness emerges. He is standing right before you, a scoundrel yelling for attention, hurling insults at no one in particular. You tell Heide this is a sign of the edge you are traveling on, the edge of consciousness where the archetypal forces reign over human capacity for judgement. In the cafe you don't know what this means -- a visit to the Iron Maiden will surely reveal the truth -- only that the meeting has ended. The scoundrel won’t budge and you angrily tell him to move away and he shoots the energy right back at you and tells you to leave. So, you heed the warning. You exchange a hurried hug with your companion in the street and you returned to the gallery to process what had taken place. You stand in the middle of two dresses – the black linen Claude Montana and the girly pink chiffon party dress. And with this juxtaposition of innocence and sex, you pick up a page from the dictionary on the floor and your eye immediately fixes on a single word: divine. And now, sitting in the Iron Maiden, you realize that you were imparting your wisdom of the sacred marriage to an artist's personal process; the joining of King (consciousness) and Queen (unconscious) in the alchemical bath. Solutio has embodied this revelation in your genitals, your second chakra; dissolution and distillation is an integral part of your process. This public Solutio, coming on top of many private Solutios, is a confirmation of your journey through the labyrinth, the cannabilizing of self to arrive at the rosette in the center of the labyrinth, the symbolic representation of the hieros gamos. And with this revelation you are prepared to bring the Solutio to conclusion, to order the chaos on the floor and place the contents of your dark closet into the alchemical fountain for purifying bath and then you will create a spiral that will take you out of the Iron Maiden and through the door of the gallery for a good night’s sleep.