A Divine Destiny

 

Orchid named for Diana, Princess of Wales

“The people asserted their deep longing to feel at one, if only for today,” Warren Colman wrote about the days following Princess Diana’s death as crowds gathered in London parks and along city streets. “Tomorrow we will assert our differences, tomorrow we will return to the struggle to live together…. For today, just for today, we will take the opportunity to feel what it might be like to be together, to feel at one, to share an experience with everyone else.” It was the final days of summer in 1997, and the world was evolving, moving into a new millennium full of remarkable revelations. A future was emerging that would demand our attention.

For the woman who once declared that she “leads from the heart,” Diana’s death pierced our own. Perhaps this was Diana’s biggest gift to us: To give humanity a taste of feeling related and connected through the heart, to experience something tenderly shared, to have an opportunity “to feel at one” in a divided, divisive world. And to long for more.

Colman told of listening to many interviews during those days between Diana’s death and her funeral service, as people came together in public spaces simply to be together. “I think that the people who have come to be a part of it are part of it,” shared a local, fifties-something man who had congregated with thousands of others outside Westminster Abbey during Diana’s funeral. “Whereas before it always felt as though you were pure spectators to something else — it was what belonged to someone else.” The idea of being a part of something, a sense of belonging, intimately connected, was deeply present here — just as it was for me watching on television from over 4000 miles away. “Royal occasions were royal occasions,” the man in the park continued while balancing a baby on his shoulders, “and we were just subjects to stand by. But this, I think, has been different insofar as people haven’t just been spectators, they’ve been there taking part in it….”

“Diana’s death seemed to offer possibilities for reflection and perhaps even transformation,” Josephine Evetts-Secker wrote, also in When a Princess Dies, with people not feeling a need to be “exceptional or individual” but simply to be together. “‘I just had to be here, to take my place in the crowd,’” Evetts-Secker shared about one young woman interviewed amongst the peaceful, orderly masses of people assembled around central London that week. (“The mobilization of police, in anticipation of serious disturbances, proved unnecessary.”) “Some mystery had taken hold of the nation and beyond, with a palpable but inchoate sense of spiritual need,” Evetts-Secker added.

Something unfamiliar was indeed developing here. What appeared to have “taken hold” of people was the desire to go inwards, perhaps soothe an old ache stuck there and breathe in new life, then move back out into the world more open and available to connect with others. Diana’s death had shaken loose centuries of bottled-up emotions, new awarenesses were emerging.

Continue reading book excerpt on Medium

"Heart Star" - Book Excerpt

In my long-in-progress book,  The Spiritual Mission of a Princess: Diana and the Return of the Heart, I often reference an anthology published months after Princess Diana's death...When A Princess Dies: Reflections from Jungian Analysts. In my chapter, "The Sight of Stars," I quote Renos Papadopoulos about distinctions of stars in the heavens and celebrities who have a 'star quality': 

Stars are self-sufficient and independent entities in so far as they shine from within and do not follow anybody else's orbit. It must have been these attributes of stars, in addition to their distant, mysterious and magic qualities, that have prompted people to describe certain celebrities as 'stars'.

Enjoy an excerpt of "The Sight of Stars" chapter....

.........................

HEART STAR

She was a 'flawed' star and this brought her

closer to the people, who loved the idea 

 that a star could also be so near to them.

-Renos K. Papadopoulos, 

When A Princess Dies: 

Reflections from Jungian Analysts

“The etymology of the English word ‘star’ comes from a very old root with similar words in most ancient languages,” wrote Renos K. Papadopoulos in When a Princess Dies. However, the Greek version of the word, aster, “reveals an interesting twist.” It is related to the word teirea that translates to “‘the heavenly constellations, signs’…and to teras which is ‘a sign, wonder, marvel, of any appearance or event, in which men believed that they could see the finger of God, and read the future,’” Papadopoulos continued; “hence, teras also refers to ‘anything that serves as a divine sign or omen.’” Many viewed such ‘star signs’ and ‘divine omens’ in the life and death of Princess Diana.

An “incandescent star that illuminated both the earth and skies,” wrote Stewart Pearce about Diana, not seeing the Princess’ stardom as simply superficial celebrity, but saw her as a divinely-inspired being following her spiritual mission. Pearce, who spoke about his confidential position as a voice and presence coach during the last two years of Diana’s life, writes ardently about her celestial connections and “world saving” fate which was “set to illuminate the conviction of love, joy and charity….”

Oprah Winfrey wrote eloquently about how we are all precious human beings “given an almighty gift,” destined to live a life we love. And she also acknowledges there are those who shine a bit more brilliantly. “Then along comes an anointed one, who given the chance shines as brightly as the pole star. These are the shining ones who lead the way, and Diana was such a one!” Divinely touched, yet poignantly human.

photo by Mario Testino

The star-lit words used to describe Princess Diana in life and death: luminous, radiant, inner light, shining from within, incandescent—whether used literally or metaphorically—also suggested something of a spiritual nature. Just as such words also point to that person’s life being a guidepost of sorts, a sign, a message to pay attention, changes ahead. And for Diana, her message was through the heart, she was signaling the world that it was time for change. It was time for a return to love…and she was indeed shining a light to guide the way.

But there was another etymological twist Papadopoulos pointed out relating to Diana and her complex persona. Those ancient star-related words, teirea and teras, are related to the verb teiro which he defines as “to rub away: of the effects of pain, sorrow on body and mind…to suffer, to be distressed. This is the root of ‘trauma’, as well.” We see this in Diana and other celebrity stars. In addition to “the glitter and glamour there is often something ominous, even dark about them…likely to have traumatic histories.” Papadopoulos connected Diana’s star quality with her trauma this way: “Her sparkling disposition had a sense of tragedy about it, her splendor was closely associated with disarming simplicity, and her joy was almost visibly linked with her pain.”

Diana greeting and shaking
hands with AIDS patient.

Yet the other side of the meaning of teiro, Papadopoulos explained, is also a reference to “healing and rubbing away the effects of pain and anguish. In other words, in addition to their external twinkling grandeur, stars could be the agents of both distress and healing.” Clearly with Diana, healing was part of her spiritual mission in life and death. In life, she demonstrated the nature of loving touch and attention; when her death cracked open hearts around the world, a deep cleansing began in the soul of humanity. Diana’s “radiating shine,” as Papadopoulos defined it, spread far and wide, “affecting the widest possible variety of people”…no one was left out. And twenty or so years after her death, Diana’s sons, left traumatized and suffering as boys, found their way, through love, especially the loving support of their wives, to healing their own mental and emotional anguish—and courageously shared about their experiences as a healing gesture to help others find their way to wholeness, and to love.

Indeed, being an advocate for mental health has become the main focus of Prince Harry's work, using his 'star' quality to draw attention to the well-being of others. ~

{Wonder Woman}

Here's another bit from my ongoing and long-in-the-making book...tentatively titled The Spiritual Mission of a Princess. Enjoy!

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CHAPTER SIX

Fear and Loathing of Women 

{Part Two:} 
WONDER WOMAN

In her 1998 essay in When a Princess Dies, analytical psychologist and Amazon scholar Elizabeth Gordon wrote that as she watched “that lonely gun carriage carry Princess Diana’s coffin through the silent streets of London,” she was reminded of Penthesilea, the legendary Amazon queen. This warrior queen, whose name means “making men to mourn,” was “so fierce and dangerous on the battlefield that only Achilles, the greatest soldier of them all, could overcome her.” Yet the tale goes that mighty Achilles, broken hearted and full of remorse at Penthesilea’s death (because he, like others before him, fell victim to the Amazon’s charms) honored his slain adversary with “a funeral fit for a queen.” Gordon considered that “Diana, too, had become in her death the fallen heroine, mourned by friend and foe alike.”

In Gordon's study of the Amazon archetype, she believes the Amazons were a source of inspiration for the women’s movement of the twentieth century, “particularly in the way in which the fighting spirit of the feminine has been constellated” and that Diana, in the last years of her life, “clearly demonstrated something of this spirit”—as groups and clusters of supporters formed around her. Gordon drew attention to the “loose cannon” aspect of how both Penthesilia, taking on the power of ancient Greece (or so goes the legend), and Diana, taking on the power grid of the British monarchy, fought the establishment. First, in the BBC Panorama interview where Diana “vowed publicly that she ‘would not go quietly’” and again when she joined the effort against the deployment of land mines with her famous promenade dangereuse in Angola. “In intervening here she was, of course, also entering into a political minefield,” explained Gordon. “She was challenging, as a woman and on feeling terms, the very masculine power complex of the international armaments industry.”

Like the Amazons of Greek mythology, Diana also thought herself an “outsider.” Was this why “she had such tremendous sympathy for the marginal and the marginalized—all those whom her brother so movingly described as ‘her constituency of the rejected’”? The type of royalty and power the Amazons and Princess Diana claimed was “of a different, ‘upside down’ and ultimately subversive kind.” Diana, as Gordon stated, said her “authority came not from the established order but from the feelings people had for her, from her position as queen of peoples’ hearts.” By this time, the powers-that-be had learned never to discount the influence of this “loose cannon.” (Similar to the Amazons, it was this trait that made Diana “dangerous.”)

Olympe de Gouges

Elizabeth Gordon questioned whether Diana stirred up the “same fear and unease” that caused patriarchal unrest in earlier situations. Like when sixteenth-century Protestant theologian John Knox denounced the “monstrous regiment of women”—referring to the two female monarchs of the day (Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth of England), contending that rule by females was contrary to the Bible. Or during the height of the French Revolution, when what were called “Amazon bands” of women protesting in the streets were ordered back to their homes (women were considered “passive citizens” beholden to men); then their leaders, including playwright Olympe de Gouges who wrote the famous “Declaration of the Rights of Women,” were sent to the guillotine. Or the backlash in 1990s America against what was called “bitch power” when several women were advisers to the President of the United States, Bill Clinton: his wife, an outspoken First Lady; the first woman appointed as Secretary of the Air Force; and two strong-willed female cabinet appointees—the Secretary of State and Attorney General. Making the patriarchal forces even crankier, a second woman had been nominated and seated on the Supreme Court. (And a couple years before this, Anita Hill testified about a male nominee who had sexually harassed her in the workplace—there were other women who were not allowed to testify—but he still won his seat on the highest court in the land.) Uppity women were getting in the way of men’s power and privilege!

Is it that the “fear and unease” created when women came/come into power “suggest something unpredictable and unknown”? In the world of Princess Diana “no one knew what she might do next,” shared Gordon. “And no one knew the power of those whose causes she espoused.” Is the narrow-minded fear and loathing of powerful women just as much about women shaking up the seat of power and man’s place in it as it is about fear of “the other”? “We do not know how to cope with those whom we reject,” Elizabeth Gordon continued, “the shadow elements at whom we dare not look too closely.” The “making men to mourn” funerals of both the beautiful Amazon warrior Penthesilia and Princess Diana—ceremonies fit for queens—forced their opponents to look closely until they not only saw their own shadow side, but the light of their own humanity.

The death of both women awakened something in the world—yet the degree of light ignited by such a spark depended on what we did next. How courageous could we dare be? It would take courage to keep living in that open-hearted vulnerability many experienced at Diana’s death.

We could now see that Diana’s life example “may have been inspiring and at the same time both uncomfortable and conscience provoking,” Gordon remarked in 1998. “At the very least it changed, perhaps forever, the way that many of us now feel about so-called charity work”—Diana reached out to touch, embrace and make direct eye contact with those many didn’t want to see. Almost a thousand years before, Saint Francis of Assisi said: “Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance.”

As a woman passionate about her study of the Amazons, author Elizabeth Gordon revealed that in the image of Princess Diana “something of the Amazon archetype stirred us to consciousness, the harbinger of change and of a new value system.” It is within this new awakening consciousness we are living today.

~~~

After the Amazons marched in victory with Dionysus, they were nearly annihilated (not in battle, but by Dionysus’ own men when the women “demanded their share in the spoils of battle”), the story of the Amazons takes a different turn. The story goes that those who survived Dionysus’ bloody fury took refuge at the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus. (Goddess Artemis to the Greeks, Diana to the Romans.) Gordon tells of their transformation after a wild, exhaustive holy rite of a “war-dance” circled around the image of the goddess. “It enabled them to turn their swords into ploughshares, to sacrifice their power in service of the sacred”—and they never fought another war.

“Transformation is a word that has been used also about Diana,” Elizabeth Gordon wrote, seeing Diana transform her personal suffering into devoted service to others—and bringing those “loose cannon energies” of the Amazon to rest, “channeled into some kind of service to the sacred.” When human beings wake into a higher consciousness, do they naturally put down their swords and pick up “ploughshares”—tools of a peaceful society?

In her mythical art exhibition of The Dinner Party, created in the 1970s, feminist artist Judy Chicago depicted a symbolic Amazon representing the “mother cults” rather than a particular woman (although the names of many warrior queens were known, mostly through stories from the ancient Greeks.) Not unlike Mary Beard and other historians, Judy Chicago questions this history and the “evidence of warrior queendoms.” Perhaps “matriarchal societies fought in battles only when their power was being challenged in a vain effort to turn the tide.” Perhaps it’s all part of the patriarchy’s long attempt at controlling the narrative, therefore controlling women, and pitching women as “the other”—along with any group they considered inferior to them.

This isn’t to say that there were no women trained as warriors throughout history. We have proof of “nomadic women who trained, hunted and battled alongside their male counterparts on the Eurasian steppes,” reported Derek Hawkins for the Washington Post in late 2019. “In a landmark discovery, archeologists unearthed the remains of four female warriors buried with a cache of arrowheads, spears and horseback-riding equipment in a tomb in western Russia—right where Ancient Greek stories placed the Amazons.” There have been other excavations, but this was magnificent for its detail. The burial site is dated some 2500 years ago; the women were identified as Scythian nomads; one in her early teens, two in their 20s, and one aged 40 to 50—she was “found wearing a golden ceremonial headdress, a calathus, engraved with floral ornaments—an indication of stature.” Hawkins cited Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World, who felt that the find not only proved they existed, but “‘the lives of those women warriors really did influence the Ancient Greek ideas and visions of what they said about the Amazons.’”

Real, imagined, mythological—whatever the truth of the Amazons and warrior queens, there is a “wonder woman” spirit brewing in the world today. ~

MORE TO COME

{Goddess Journey} Part Two

Sharing another section from the “Goddess Journey” chapter of my book-in-progress, A Memory of Love: The Spiritual Mission of a Princess.

 The Reappearing Goddess

“In the middle of the 1970s,” a decade before most of the world became aware of Lady Diana Spencer—and before she added her own ‘goddess’ essence to modern culture—“a paradigm shift took place, partly inspired by the rapid development of the women’s movement,” wrote Lanier Graham. The author of Goddesses told of various books of the time that “revolutionized how people looked at the roots of their spiritual heritage.”

Before books like The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe by archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and When God Was a Woman by art historian Merlin Stone, then later in 1987, a heralded game-changer, The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler, “history textbooks had been stating or implying that the male had always been dominant in Western theology.” The consciousness-shifting winds of the more open-minded Aquarian Age were blowing through—energies we saw in the social upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s—and a truer history of women was being revealed. “Western culture had been dominated by the male-oriented values of Indo-European culture for so long that it took a social revolution—the women’s movement—to start to bring it into balance,” explained Graham.

Discoveries in archaeology, studies in mythology, scholars of social history and linguistics were finding that “goddess cultures tended to be egalitarian, earth-centered, and nonviolent,” and these findings were then being taught in colleges and universities. “The image of the earth as sacred and society as balanced between male and female,” Graham wrote in 1997, “has become a powerful inspiration to people in the women’s movement, the ecology movement, and many other new ways of thinking.”

Joseph Campbell reminded us: “The goddess represents nature. The god represents society. And when you have a mythology that accents a god over a goddess you have a religion that accents society over nature. Then with the Fall, nature itself is cursed.” As we felt these goddess nudges in the first years of the twenty-first century, it was only natural that women and family issues of health and well-being and concerns about the environment were in the headlines. (Our Mother Earth, after all, is metaphorically represented by women’s bodies.) “There is something coming up in our own consciousness now, with the ecology movement,” Campbell wrote over fifty years ago, “recognizing that by violating the environment in which we are living, we are really cutting off the energy and the source of our own living.” It is this “sense of accord” that is so disrupted today. No wonder humans are so out-of-sorts; they have not been in accord with themselves, their very nature, since this break in consciousness. No wonder with the power of this reappearing goddess energy that so much fear-based, women-bashing backlash has been stirred up!

I had a real-life experience of this years ago, and a reflection of the hateful conflicts now on the rise today. In the late 1990s, a friend and I went on a day-long road trip from Atlanta to Huntsville, Alabama, to see an exhibit at the Space Center, where neither of us had ever visited. We turned off the expressway and while driving through the rural countryside, I saw a sign with huge, hand-painted letters; it was like a punch in the gut similar to what I felt on November 9, 2016. The message read: “FATHER CHURCH, YES. MOTHER NATURE, NO.”

That seems to sum up this violent backlash coming at us today, as I sit here writing in 2018—with the toxic masculine and the dark feminine trying to destroy the “mother” in all of us, the nurturing spirit of humanity, the health and well-being of our life-sustaining home, our sacred mother, our “Mother Earth.”

Lanier Graham gives us this history, writing at the end of the twentieth century:

...a few thousand years ago many goddess-oriented civilizations were destroyed by extremely aggressive Indo-European tribes. They demolished the old cities and then reconfigured civilization throughout most of the settled world from Greece to India. These barbarians worshipped aggressive sky gods and had scant room in their theology for goddesses; to them, women were little more than property and sexual objects. Not only did male gods become supreme, but females lost their sacredness, in a dramatic turning-around in human history that my friend Joseph Campbell called the ‘patriarchal inversion.’ It was even argued by some fathers of the early Christian Church in Rome that women had no souls. Twentieth-century men have at last started to realize that when males lost their reverence for that which is female, they also lost something within themselves.

The grasping, last-gasp obscenities of this “patriarchal inversion” were on display in the dignified halls of the United States Senate Building in Washington D.C. in the autumn of 2018 when leering, screeching white men defended their outdated network of cruelty and cronyism—no matter the cost or number of souls squandered—against one lone, brave woman speaking her truth. (And whether anyone was aware or not, she was representing the goddess spirit in us all.) This cowardly mischief was cheered on by a president whose motto seems to come directly from Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s patched-together monster, as written by Mary Shelley two-hundred years ago: “If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.”

This is what happens when humanity is disconnected from the “spiritual feminine,” Jim Fitzgerald wrote in “The Death of the Heart,” his essay for When a Princess Dies. “Since Reformation times, there has been a dearth of religious imagery, particularly of women, through which both men and women might maintain a connection to the spiritual feminine.” What imagery that remained left “a divine King but no Queen” in both the consciousness and unconsciousness of men and women. This created a split, according to Fitzgerald, as the feminine spirit became an object of “the rational mind”—and its profane opinions and deprived thoughts. “This split—of mind from matter, of spirit from nature—has continued to the present.” However, when he wrote this at the time of Diana’s death, near the end of a millennium, Fitzgerald was among many who sensed things were changing. “The values of the heart, not those of the mind, have begun to be sought after and appreciated. A new relationship to the Earth and Nature is growing. We are witnessing a change of heart.” 

The rise of Trumpery—and the hate it stands for and the “loss of soul” it reveals—is a desperate strike against this new heart energy. “I think it was this that Diana, as a woman of the times, equally a sufferer from the ills and neuroses of modern life, it was this new heart that she represented,” Fitzgerald added. And it is this “new heart”—a sacred calling of the “spiritual feminine”—that Diana and Charles’ sons inherited and now speak its message, as well as live its values, from their spot-lit world stage. These are aware, awakening men—who attracted and married aware, awake women—and they are rallying the “new heart” troops, encouraged along by the reemerging goddess consciousness their mother helped crack open!

I think of Diana and her sons when I read lines from a Sharon Olds’ poem about feeling less raw after experiencing such heartache, “as if some goddess of humanness within us caressed us with a gush of tenderness.”

[“Glorious Inanna,” third and final section of this goddess-focused chapter, posted soon.]

{Goddess Journey} - Part One

This is the first of three excerpts from the “Goddess Journey” chapter of my book-in-progress (tentatively titled) A Memory of Love: The Spiritual Journey of a Princess. Enjoy....xo 

GODDESS JOURNEY 

{Part One}

“Diana was an ascendant female,” explained Jungian scholar Josephine Evetts-Secker, “who could flout both the patriarchy and matriarchal order, fulfilling and negating feminist ideals; lauded as independent woman by some and by others castigated as a Barbie-doll princess.” Naturally charismatic with “star quality,” Diana attracted a variety of stars from the entertainment world—Elton John, Pavarotti and Freddie Mercury (there’s a story of Diana going clubbing, in disguise, with Queen's lead singer and his pals)—just as she befriended well-known people who were “aspirants to justice” like Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa. Writing in her essay “The People’s Princess,” Evett-Secker continued: “She bridged the glittery world of fashion and the seat of Establishment power. She was as much the female trickster as goddess; so seen, so mysterious, hiding quixotically behind apparent transparency; unconsciously manipulating concealment and revelations, echoing archaic mystery conventions.” 

Like many scholars from the Jungian school of thought, Evetts-Secker compared Diana to various goddess archetypes. To Aphrodite, who “dissolved resistance” and inspired a dynamic of “an ancient strategy, through love to power.” To “girlish Persephone” because of Diana’s playfulness while tiptoeing around danger, and to Demeter as “the raging mother protecting her sons from public assault by those who wanted to peddle their images.”

As a daughter, sister, friend, bride, princess, wife, mother, divorcée, lover, fashion-plate, healer and ambassador, Diana’s life stages, her womanly rites of passages, were lived out in a world arena for all to see. And since her life was and still is examined like few others, its complexity offers an intriguing milieu, connecting the spirit of all women. “Diana was a divided, unhappy and bewildered Princess,” Evett-Secker added, “as well as an ebullient beauty, graceful, opulent and full of vivid, if vulnerable and threatened, life.”

Or as counselor Steffan Vanel stated in his book, Charles and Diana, An Inside Story: An Astrological-Karmic View: “Diana embodied a complexity of contradictions which would enable virtually everyone to see and hear their own story or agenda in her life.” Diana’s contradictions were indeed our own. 

Ann Shearer, writing through a Jungian lens about her observances of Diana’s memorial service, noted the paradoxical images used about the late princess, from powerful goddess to helpless victim. “And here is a central paradox: the forces of unity that ‘Diana’ became grew the stronger for the very complexity of contradictions she contained. As we learned more of her real and fictitious selves,” Shearer continued in her “Tales of the Unfolding Feminine” essay, “and the legends around her grew, she carried for us an incontestable truth: that we humans must struggle with a mass of inconsistencies within ourselves and somehow learn to honour them.”

Another Jungian analyst, Ian Alister, shared this take in his essay “Your Cheating Heart” from When A Princess Dies: 

An extraordinary feature of Diana’s life, from her engagement to her death, was the extent of public exposure, providing many personal details and characteristics which could act as pegs for our own individual projections. It had all the qualities of a soap opera except that this was real. We could watch this drama which involved the suffering and sacrifice of a person who carries a symbolic charge for most of us, whether consciously or not. We can feel it, think about it, and try to relate it to continuous psychological processes within us. To make sense of it in this way, to give it meaning, is part of our struggle to make body and mind whole. 

Perhaps that was a gift of Diana’s life, in support of both women and men, then and now, to “make sense of” and to honor our “whole”—body, mind and spirit. And, in turn, a deepening of soul. It’s an inner journey calling forth our wise intuitive intelligence and a depth of feminine-grounded compassion, tapping into mythological longings and long-ago legends that can reveal a magnificent peeling-away-of-layers kind of journey. A journey where we all can hear the call of the goddess.

In the words of Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic: “There’s a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen to it, as the personal self breaks open.” Such a break open of self holds the possibility of an extraordinary rite of passage into an intimate journey, measured only by the level of our courage, where we just might discover the authentic spirit of, for men, the empathetic side of masculinity, and for women, the authentic spirit of our womanliness, indeed, our own goddess nature. Not unlike one princess-swirled exploration in all its archetypal glory once upon a time.

[Part Two next time, “The Reappearing Goddess”...then Part Three, “Glorious Inanna”]