Falling In Love

Enjoy another excerpt from my book-in-progress,   The Spritual Mission of a Princess....

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Much has been written about how Diana Spencer fell in love with an “image” of Prince Charles and not with the man. But she would not be the first person to objectify another, falling in love with a concept, a persona, an impression “instead of discovering who is really there,” as spiritual teacher Patricia Albere shared. In her book, Evolutionary Relationships, Albere wrote about the principles (including engagement, commitment, truth, trust, openness, intimacy, sensitivity, influence, and true autonomy) required to deepen any relationship—whether friend, family member, or lover—into a mutual awakening of beloved souls…into an “evolutionary relationship.” Then, ‘falling in love’ becomes something else altogether. “When you enter into an Evolutionary Relationship with a sexual partner,” explained Albere, “you have the opportunity to discover who your partner really is and what is possible between you…and what is needed to turn your relationship into a sacred marriage, a spiritual union.” 

Perhaps Diana had some intuitive, old-soul knowing of this kind of sacred union, but like most people, she didn’t know what it would take to have it—and especially, how to prepare for it. It takes emotional maturity, the courage to be transparent, a heightened level of spiritual awakening, patience—“a sacred connection cannot be forced,” as Albere wrote. 

I was reminded of what Meghan Markle said about the day she married Diana’s son Prince Harry—her wedding a global spectacle—with millions of people watching, appreciating, judging. “H and I are really, really good at finding each other in the chaos. When we find each other, we reconnect to, like, ‘Oh it’s you. It’s you.’” She added that it wasn’t as though the rest of it didn’t matter—the royal setting, the elegantly appointed trappings of the wedding—but “it feels temporary.” In such a spiritual union as they appear to have, it’s the connection, the love that feels real, feels eternal. (And those of us watching that lovely celebration of marriage could feel it as well.) Meghan’s friend Vicky Tsai, after attending the wedding ceremony, confirmed: “It felt like a moment where the world paused and celebrated love.”

Although Diana might have yearned for this level of intimate connection with a partner, in the pretense-riddled ‘arranged marriage’ framework of her Windsor world, such depth and harmony and spiritual bonding was not possible. Even with her heart-centered sensibility, all Diana had to go on when she married was her teenage romance-novel imagination, a wounded child’s neediness, and society’s outdated notion of the ‘institution’ of marriage. Her frustration and deep disappointment lashed out toward her husband with anger and blame, privately and, stunningly (given the ‘never complain, never explain’ mantra of the royal family), publicly.

        In Diana: The Voice of Change, Stewart Pearce wrote how Princess Diana’s spot-lit marriage to the heir to the British throne put a spotlight on the archaic customs associated with marriage as well as on a woman’s autonomy—or lack of it. “Diana’s feminine force had disowned the negative masculine when she ‘outed’ Charles, calling for a new level of maturity and truth.” Feminist writers believed that when Diana found a way to speak out about the inauthentic aspects of their marriage—her bold actions condemned at the time by some as outrageous, even scandalous—other women were emboldened to find their voice. “This released the voice of millions of women, who felt that Diana had given them the right to speak,” Pearce added. He believed you could follow the thread that got unraveled in her public revelations about ‘men behaving badly’ directly to the Time’s Up and MeToo movements over two decades later.

        As human consciousness was expanding in the last two decades of the twentieth century, parallel to Diana’s time in the spotlight, the nature of relationships and structure of marriage was transforming. In The Seat of Soul, Gary Zukav saw a more enlightened future when intimate relationships would be “spiritual partnerships” where both people thrive and the focus is on each other’s spiritual growth—evolving from the old, less empowering “five-sensory relationships.”  The more consciously aware “multisensory humans,” in Zukav’s words, naturally gravitate toward “spiritual partnerships.” (Maybe Diana sought guidance here since this culture-changing book was published in the late 1980s when her marriage was a gloomy mess.) Zukav explained that “spiritual partners help one another recognize parts of their personalities that come from love—such as gratitude, patience, and caring—and cultivate them by acting on them consciously.” Being conscious, awake to the subtleties of life, and emotionally courageous were key here. Zukav continued: “Spiritual partners also help one another recognize parts of their personalities that come from fear—such as anger, jealousy, and righteousness—and challenge them by acting from loving parts of their personalities (such as patience) when frightened parts (such as impatience) are active.” (Perhaps Diana wasn’t emotionally grounded enough, especially in those early years of marriage, to practice these principles, but this language, I believe, would have resonated with her.)

In addition to the cultural shifts in relationships and marriage at the time, the hard edge of masculine/feminine identity was also changing as many women were recognizing their “masculine” traits (speaking up for themselves, becoming leaders) and some men were acknowledging their “feminine” nature (being more compassionate and nurturing), shaking up an old societal template for gender. As human beings were evolving, long-accepted yet limiting ways of being and relating were dissolving—new guidelines were required for fully satisfying relationships. “The ‘Till death do us part’ paradigm within marriage,” Pearce wrote, “no longer could remain a meaningful construct for the bonds of deep relationship.”

        Looking back over the more than two decades since Diana’s death, Stewart Pearce was seeing how marriages that had been “sustained by the old ways of co-dependency” were ending and how both women and men were “releasing the obsolete stereotypes” of marriage so they could have relationships of deep connection of the heart. “At core, the patriarchy, which had flourished through a malformation of the masculine, was being transformed on the altar of the newly sacralized feminine,” Pearce continued with his usual passion. “Love, compassion, inclusivity, nurturing, and peaceful co-existence are what we yearn for, are what we seek out in our intimate relationships….” This sounds most ‘natural’ for us now, but at the time and in the environment in which Diana lived, when she declared these loving aspects missing in her marriage—indeed, in most marriages she saw in her aristocratic world—it was revolutionary. ~

[Part Two of this section from the chapter "A Woman's Inheritance" will be posted later....]

A Remembrance of the Heart

photo by Mario Testino

Twenty-five years ago today a princess died and the world was never the same. Diana's heart-centered, deeply feminine sensibility was preparing us for changes to come...changes of the heart. From the Introduction of my still-in-progress book, The Spiritual Mission of a Princess....

DIANA AS MESSENGER

We are in a most remarkable moment in history. Feminine wisdom, suppressed through the ages, is reclaiming her respected place in global culture—and in the human heart. Many have championed its re-emergence—that more compassionate, inclusive, tender side of ourselves—and many have been met with pointed resistance. But the female creative spirit can be denied no longer, the forgotten beloved now has a name, and the power of a woman’s gift is poised to bring the world back into balance.

photo by Mario Testino

Historically, there have been royal archetypes, far from being perfect human beings yet seen as “messengers”—some thought to be divinely guided, their roles designed to help light our paths, even playing a part in shifting consciousness, resetting human potential, and, as with one such messenger, Diana, Princess of Wales, representing the return of a womanly presence, a heart’s vision, or as she called it, simply the need for “a woman’s touch” in a hard-edged world. In this pivotal, between-the-worlds time of universal changes, of feminine wisdom rising, it’s the perfect moment to explore this celebrated life through a different lens, a lens focused on the heart as a way to capture Diana’s true legacy—and how it interweaves with the story of all women—then set alight her spiritual mission in us all. 

photo by Mario Testino

Was Diana Spencer Mountbatten-Windsor’s life, in Shakespeare’s princely words, about “cracking open a noble heart”—and with her death, our own? There are times when someone’s true influence and contributions only become known when we take a step back to see a broader view of what that life awakened in the world. And we’re now living in that awakening. Carried by a bold feminine impulse, we are being transported into a new future, into a higher order of relating, being connected with something precious and intimate within us to share with each other…something we only dared to ever imagine.

Diana Spencer Mountbatten-Windsor

Another film featuring a slice of the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, premieres on November 5^th.  Spencer, starring Kristen Stewart, is called a “psychological drama that follows Diana’s decision to end her marriage to Prince Charles and leave the British royal family.” (The “decision” was a bit more complicated than that for all involved, especially Diana and Charles’ sovereign, Queen Elizabeth.) Nonetheless, using this occasion, I’ll post a short excerpt from my book in progress, The Spiritual Mission of a Princess….

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Chapter 3: Social Changes (excerpt)

           “When the royal family enfolded Diana, they thought they had got a rather dim girl from the landowning Norfolk aristocracy—not exactly the stuff of revolution. They could not have known that she would be transformed into an international superstar who would make their lives hell.” This from an article, “Diana’s Britain,” by the editors at Newsweek magazine published the week after the princess’ funeral. Some feminists of the time were also fooled by “the mouse that roared.” British journalist Beatrix Campbell wondered how more conservative Britain could become when this pretty, inexperienced girl from old landed gentry married into the stale confines of royalty. Calling her wedding gown “a shroud,” she feared Diana would disappear within a dusty patriarchal construct. But Campbell and others began to see it differently.

Diana emerged into the world’s consciousness during the second year of Margaret Thatcher’s landmark run as Prime Minister and Great Britain, entrenched in a recession, was in turmoil with the country’s traditional industries in crisis and race riots destroying neighborhoods in the cities. “Into this unrelieved gloom the royal wedding injected a welcome splash of color and glamour,” the Newsweek article continued. “For that reason alone, Diana always carried a fund of good will with her. Yet at the time, few appreciated the central significance of the new princess; she was young and unformed, with enormous potential for growth.” And indeed, from that summer in 1981, Diana’s growth into a striking, outspoken woman paralleled Britain’s own growth into the modern era. Diana may have spent her childhood in the country, but as a young woman she needed the bustle and stimulation of the city and like much of the country’s youth, Diana loved “London’s glitzy rebellious values.” And for better or worse, she brought “an American style of emotionalism,” as feminist writer Naomi Wolf expressed, “to the rigid skin of British formality.”  

The Labor Party picked up this youthful call to modernize with forty-three-year-old Tony Blair’s campaign for prime minister in 1997. Since his “agenda echoed Diana’s,” according to Catherine Mayer’s Time magazine article, “How Diana Transformed Britain,” Diana met in secret with him and his election team in support of Blair’s “mandate to build a more inclusive, caring Britain.”  By the time of her death, only months after Blair’s election, she seemed to embody “how new Britons wanted their country to be.” After centuries of practiced reserve and mystery, it took the Royal Family a little longer to realize how much the country was changing even though they had clues inside their own family which had been moving, as Newsweek reported, “from archaic rule to modern dysfunctionality.” Then the shock of the princess’ death left them unprepared for the rising new era of more open public self-expression—the unbuttoning of England’s stiff-upper-lip sensibility. “The People’s Princess,” Mayer wrote, summing up Diana’s impact, “had unlocked hearts, reordered values, presided at the triumph of emotional intelligence over cold intellect, of compassion over tradition.”

{Education of the Heart} Book Excerpt

July 1, 2021. Princes William and Harry unveiling memorial stature of their mother,
Diana, Princess of Wales, in the Kensington Palace Gardens.

Excerpt from 

Education of the Heart 

final chapter

The Spiritual Mission of a Princess

{my still-in-the-works book}

With the enlightening gift of hindsight, hazy fragments of life can fall into place: “Oh, that’s what he was trying to tell us.” “Oh, that was the real message of her life.” Millions of words have been written about Diana Spencer Mountbatten-Windsor’s life and death. Some focused on the superficial and sentimental, the fashionably theatrical storyboard of her life; others focused on glorifying the virtuous humanitarian, even romanticizing her ‘saintly’ nature. (So it goes with a beautiful and tragic charismatic figure.) It’s a more mindful version of the latter that interested me. A flawed yet deeply empathetic princess, under the brightest spotlight on the planet, stands up to the short-sighted patriarchal powers-that-be, puts heart over head, kindness over duty, love over fear. That’s not only courageous, but in a cynical and discordant world, it’s downright subversive! And looking back, this was Diana’s spiritual mission, a mission that ties directly to this present moment as women’s voices are leading the conversation. This is the reason many of us are here during this tumultuous consciousness shift: to anchor the receptive, mystical, powerful, primal energies of the feminine and the reflective, grounded, gentle warrior energies of the masculine—to anchor old soul values, compassionate impulses, and the Earth’s promise of paradise.  

“When he turned 18,” reported royal correspondent Katie Nicholl, “Harry vowed to continue Diana’s charity work, making a public pledge ‘to carry on the things that she didn’t quite finish.’” When Prince Harry turned 36, the same age as his mother when she died, he had some of the same concerns that she had about royal life—its advantages and its limitations. “This is a man who said he wanted to continue his mother’s work,” added biographer Omid Scobie. “We’ve long mourned Diana’s place on the humanitarian landscape, and here we have Harry, who embodies her values and is willing to dedicate his life to them.” Inspired by Diana’s love and experience, and his own deep commitment and empathetic nature, Harry put his wife and son first. He chose his heart.

When we make that kind of choice, a new world opens up, our path becomes clearer, our wings lighter, and the once improbable becomes destined. We find the courage to love, then love again; to let go, then let go again; to let go of the past that no longer serves our evolution in being human. “Human evolution” is the game at hand, claims spiritual visionary Gary Zukav, and it’s also what’s at stake. In this decisive time of the transformation of human consciousness, it’s no longer viable to postpone the sometimes-painful interior work—whether it’s our rage or jealousy or grief—it’s time to face it. And Prince Harry has established a platform with a worldwide audience to courageously lead the way. It’s a hero’s journey, a heroine’s quest, an intimate rite of passage we’re all to take. It’s a journey of a lifetime and it’s the journey each of us chose.  

We may be in a time where it feels like everything precious is at risk. But it’s important to remember that in “between times” like these our perceptions change, things may not be what they seem, miracles happen. This is the era of reconciliation. As we explore this feminine heartbeat pulsing through the world—getting stronger, more powerful, more focused—we reach out to the masculine energies to join in, to make a quantum leap together in creating this new era of harmony. So it’s fitting that we revisit Diana’s life-gift that broke open this “head to heart” revolution as a reminder that love is the only way in and the only way out. ~

{Goddess Journey} Part Three

The third and final part of the "Goddess Journey" chapter of my book-in-slow-progress, A Memory of Love: The Spiritual Mission of a Princess.

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Glorious Inanna

The Sumerians were one of the world’s first known civilizations, taking form in the fourth millennium BCE, and, according to Joseph Campbell, its mythology was the source of Babylonian, Assyrian, Phoenician, and Biblical traditions. The glorious Inanna, Sumer’s primary deity, was the goddess of love, sensuality, fertility, procreation, war, and rebirth. Throughout the centuries, as the world’s centers of power changed, she was worshiped in ancient Babylon as Ishtar, then identified with the Greek Goddess Aphrodite and, because she was seen as the morning and evening’s bright star Venus, Inanna also later became associated with the celebrated Roman Goddess.

Inanna has a rich, multi-dimensional legacy, celebrated as the Queen of Heaven and Earth. “She embodies the Divine Feminine in all its splendor: a sensuous courtesan and a timid virgin, a life-giving mother and an eternal child, merciful and wicked, wild, passionate, untamed,” wrote Lana Adler in “7 Goddess Archetypes of Empowerment.” “In other words, everything (with the exception of the mother, perhaps) patriarchy aimed to demonize and destroy.” (You only have to look as far as the Bible to see evidence of this.)

Inanna is synonymous with transformation. In The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell wrote that “the oldest recorded account of the passage through the gates of metamorphosis is the Sumerian myth of the goddess Inanna’s descent to the nether world.” Abandoning heaven and earth, she “abandoned lordship, abandoned ladyship,” this goddess “from the ‘great above’ she set her mind toward the ‘great below’”—the hero’s journey. Her courageous descent and transformative return, the ultimate rite of passage, is legendary, her story told for thousands of years—with many faces and in many incarnations. “As we are told by the Vedas: ‘Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names.’”

The legend of Inanna, encompassing a mythological journey, intersected with Diana’s life, even beyond its end. Well-known British astrologer and author Nicholas Campion made some profound royal observations following Diana’s death. But first, a little background: “After the second world war,” Campion explained, “Carl Jung [founder of analytical psychology] wrote that the phenomenon of Nazism could be partly explained by the eruption of the archetype Wotan, the Teutonic god, into the German collective unconscious.” After watching the funeral service for Princess Diana, Campion made this declaration: “I would say that what we have just witnessed was the eruption of the archetype of Inanna, the archaic Venus, into the contemporary collective unconscious.”

Campion, also a historian of cultural astronomy, believed there were people who would doubt him and found it “astonishing” that it had not been realized before, but it was his “contention that monarchy has never lost its magical, mystical functions, merely that the steady creation of a constitutional monarchy with a determinedly ordinary royal family, has concealed it.” During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Campion saw that “from the moment Diana appeared she constellated the archetype of Inanna. She was connected far less to the contemporary royal family of good works and middle class values than to the ancient magical monarchy of ancient cosmology of life and fertility; sacrifice and resurrection. Her life and death were unique in our lifetime, though perhaps not in British history.”

“As an archetype,” Lana Adler added, “Inanna symbolizes the powerful seductress who uses her considerable female persuasion to her advantage.” However, we’re reminded that “sensuality is a gift; but it can also be a powerful weapon. When we trade on it or use it to control others, we give away a part of ourselves.” Women don’t have to look to history to know how easy it is to give away our power, whether we’re being manipulated or we are the manipulator. And when it’s through our sensuality, through sex, Adler believes that it can be seen as a “symptom of deep self esteem issues and subconscious fears.” I sensed that Diana was waking up to this awareness at the very end of her life, perhaps in the last hours. Frustrated with being in the throes of a superficial affair, she was unhappy and ready to be home with her children, to get back to her newfound passion for her work in service to others; to restore her inner power and, with divine guidance, find love within. But her bigger mission took over, and her life moved into legend. ~ 

{Against Feminine Nature} Book Excerpt

Excerpts from the "Against Feminine Nature" chapter of my book-in-progress, tentatively titled, A Memory of Love: The Spiritual Mission of a Princess. Enjoy....

Sarah Jennings Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough

“‘Remember, you’re a Spencer!’” biographers claimed Diana would say to herself to strengthen her resolve during stressful times. Spencers had been established in England for 500 years, amassing great wealth and political power through the centuries (and therefore much more “British” than her husband’s Windsor family). Sarah Jennings, born in 1660, wife of the 1^st Duke of Marlborough and grandmother of the first Diana Spencer, was “one of the most remarkable and difficult women of her day,” wrote biographer Sarah Bradford. “The Spencer tendency for falling out with members of the family—it is said Sarah changed her will fifty times—may well have been passed down from her.” Sarah Jennings’ pride, Bradford remarked, “led her to snub even her sovereign and former friend, Queen Anne.”

Over 250 years later, when another Diana Spencer was on the scene, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, told a friend that the Spencer women are “‘extremely unusual and difficult!’” According to Bradford, the Queen Mother’s friend, who happened to be a Spencer relation, agreed and also noted “‘an unforgiving side’” that seemed to run in the family; she was of the opinion that Princess Diana’s “‘inability to sustain friendships and relationships’” was also a family characteristic. She saw similar traits in her own Spencer mother with those of Diana, especially what she called Diana’s “‘manipulation of reality’” which took on a repetitious pattern of creating conflict, then calling for a dramatic reunion, only to stir things up once again. Whether it was an “inherited” family trait or not, this emotional roller coaster must have been exhausting for all involved.

~~~

From many accounts, the psychologically needy and acutely insecure Diana was full of unresolved anger from childhood; and as an adult, her volatile temper occasionally surfaced. Sometimes there was even a warning before the crash: “‘Stand by for a mood swing, boys,’” she’d say to her private secretary, explained biographer Tina Brown. Various conditions have been cited as possible reasons for Diana’s extremes: the frustrations of not being heard, much less not being allowed a voice; chemical imbalances brought on by her bulimia; misunderstood postpartum depression; living under the stress of so much suppressed emotion for so many years; perhaps some sort of personality disorder; even complications of her complex astrological chart. Or, as I read somewhere, “anger is nothing more than an outward expression of hurt, fear and frustration.” Whatever the causes, Diana could create a disconcerting battlefield-like, walking-on-eggshells environment for everyone around—including her “desperately unhappy” husband and his reserved family with their strict code-of-behavior.

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Historically, many women had difficulty in expressing anger and if they did get angry, men found it difficult to deal with the volatility. Such emotional outbursts would not only have been discouraged, it could get the disruptive woman diagnosed with “hysteria” and locked up! No wonder a woman might express her anger silently by abusing her body and health, as Diana did. “How can she manifest her anger or her grief?” asked British writer Beatrix Campbell. “If the discovery of her own disappointment could not be revealed, because it could not be tolerated, then it made sense to keep screaming….” Or worse. 

Diana’s time in the spotlight, the 1980s and ‘90s, was a period of major change for women. What many considered the second wave of feminism was ending and the “grrls” of a post-modern generation were stirring a third wave—just as the long-anticipated “great shift in consciousness” was stirring the world. Looking back, Diana was a representative of eons of women’s rising collective anger. When the young princess began speaking up about feeling abandoned by mother, husband and monarchy, women were the first to lean in and really listen. What's more, when Diana spoke out, a whole kingdom of women revealed their discontent. “It was Diana’s treatment as a woman, and her sense that she was sustained by the sympathy and strength of women, that made her dangerous” to the patriarchal establishment, Campbell added. ~

[Sarah Jennings Churchill is the character in the 2018 awarding winning film "The Favourite" played by Rachel Weiss.] 
More book excerpts soon.....

{Diana As Messenger} Book-in-Progress Excerpt {1}

There are times when someone’s influence and contributions are less in how they lived their life and more in what that life revealed about ourselves. Was Diana Spencer Mountbatten-Windsor’s life, in Shakespeare’s princely words, about “cracking open a noble heart”—and with her death, our own?

Diana—charismatic, photogenic and clever—came onto the scene in the explosion of celebrity-focused mainstream media (celebrity gossip was not just for the tabloids anymore) and began breaking rules immediately. Perhaps it was her easy beauty and princess glow that first drew us in, yet there was something deeper, even mythological, that had us linger.

Looking back at Princess Diana’s complex life and impact of her early death, to really see her true mission, I looked to “the poet’s way.” This is how documentarian Phil Cousineau explained the remarkable Joseph Campbell’s way of reading and understanding the inner depths of the ancient myths: “symbolically, metaphorically, soulfully.” And this set my course.

Following this thread, I was reminded of an On Being radio interview with author, pastor and biblical interpreter Eugene Peterson. He considered it important to know that the old prophets of the Bible were poets, so you would read scripture with your imagination, listening in the storytelling rhythm of how they communicated in their day, and in turn, learning the nature and meaning of metaphor. In other words, so you wouldn’t “try to literalize everything.” The beloved teacher considered the metaphor “a remarkable kind of formation because it both means what it says and what it doesn’t say. Those two things come together, and it creates an imagination which is active. You’re not trying to figure things out; you’re trying to enter into what’s there.”

If we use this poetic framework and view Diana’s life and death as a metaphor, a mythical allegory that played out on a world stage—with it meaning what we saw and what we didn’t see, what we heard and didn’t hear—then her unique contribution to the world is not about figuring out her life story, but entering into the now unlocked heart-space her death opened in us. And it is only then that we can see the world with the imagination of the heart. ~

[Excerpt from the Introduction, "Diana As Messenger," of my book-in-progress, tentatively titled, A Memory of Beauty: The Spiritual Mission of a Princess...more excerpts to come.]

{20th Anniversary - Excerpt No. 5}

To complete our 20th anniversary Princess Diana memorial, I'll share another book excerpt noting a moment from her wedding day...perhaps, from our perceptive as we look back, it was a moment that looked into the future, and illuminated her spiritual mission. (From my upcoming book, From Princess to Goddess & the Rebirth of Love...the second book in The End of the Fairy-Tale Bride series.)

{continuing excerpt from}

Chapter One: Princess Mission

Did this young woman, who became a princess on her wedding day and after a long, winding road, the ‘queen of hearts’ upon her death, ignite a pathway for a consciousness shift of the heart? Was this a signal for the return of a nurturing goddess spirit intended to nudge along the occurring paradigm shift where we see a flowering of feminine strength and influence? 

During a life fluctuating between tedious soap opera and compassionate healing, how could we imagine then that Diana would be showing a way to, in the words of spiritual thinker Xavier Le Pinon, “educate the heart” on how to be tender, open and immaculately loving? In all the pomp and glamour and personal drama, it was easy to overlook her spiritual mission.

There was an exquisite bridal moment that summer-lit wedding morning on the red-carpeted steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, captured in a memorable zoom-lens photograph, where Diana—veiled in what seemed to be the ancient mystery of womanhood—paused to look back. Perhaps it was simply to check the fluffing of her impossibly long train, stretching down the staircase; but then you see her eyes, piercing through the veil as if with an inner knowing, glancing toward some distant past in support of encouraging her forward. Was Diana standing in for all future brides at a time when they, too, pause at their nuptial doorway to embody, no longer a woman’s loss of power and self-expression, but the female essence of beauty, strength, forgiveness and love? ~

[Scroll down for earlier {20th Anniversary} posts excerpted from

 The End of the Fairy-Tale Bride]

{20th Anniversary - Excerpt No. 4}

During this 20th anniversary summer of Princess Diana's death, we continue to honor her contribution to the world of wedding celebrations, but this time with a deeper philosophic twist...by sharing an excerpt from my future book, From Princess to Goddess & the Rebirth of Love (the second book in The End of the Fairy-Tale Bride series.)

{excerpt from}

Chapter One: Princess Mission

Lady Diana Spencer’s glorious emergence from the glass, horse-drawn carriage on her wedding morning in the summer of 1981 set in motion mythological musings: “a fairy-tale bride,” “a heavenly vision,” “the return of the goddess.” Dressed in voluminous yards of custom-dyed ivory silk taffeta, lace and tulle; standing in hand-crafted satin slippers and crowned with old family diamonds, this was beyond any superficial longing of “princess dreams”—although dreams of being a princess certainly fueled our imaginations. 

Diana’s appeal went deeper than our fascination with feminine beauty or brides and weddings, or with royalty and pageantry or mysterious ancient rituals. For many watching the brilliant wedding pomp that day, the experience stirred something deep within. Historically, the vision of a bride often brings a sense of hope and renewal, but for a culture in turmoil, here was a spark that relit what once thought lost. There seemed a light about this young bride. Even if we were unaware of being affected, legends were brewing.

Or did the anti-monarchists and second-wave feminists and other skeptics—not taken in by romance or grandeur or even possible divine intervention—have it right? That this was simply another wan young woman, “shrouded” beyond recognition. From feminist writer Beatrix Campbell: “Her ivory silk wedding dress was a shroud…a crinoline, a meringue…a symbol of sexuality and grandiosity….” She was being led to an altar “propping up the aged patriarch who had got her into all of this” to stand with a man much beyond her years and experience who represented an outdated institution where young women disappeared into desperate disappointment. “Neither her father nor her mother had taken care of her, enlightened her or warned her. They married her off to someone else’s prince….” ~

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[Scroll down for earlier {20th Anniversary} posts excerpted from The End of the Fairy-Tale Bride]

{Magick Bridal Slippers}

My article, "Magick Bridal Slippers" about the lineage of shoes in wedding folklore, is published in the Summer issue of SEASON magazine...(page 64)...and I've reprinted it for you below. Enjoy!

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MAGICK BRIDAL SLIPPERS

After the vows, hymns and presentations, the princess bride—in handcrafted silk duchess satin slippers with 542 hand-knotted mother-of-pearl sequins, low fluted heels, decoratively hand-carved suede soles, and a lace- and pearl-trimmed heart at the toe—stepped out into a sun-lit, adoring world.

   

Lady Diana Spencer’s bridal gown designers, Elizabeth and David Emanuel, chose London shoe designer Clive Shilton to create her fairy-tale wedding slippers—completely handmade in the English tradition of royal brides with silks custom dyed to match the dress.

Indeed, shoes and feet have an ancient and mystical lineage in the history of weddings. Shoe historian Cameron Kippen writes: “Mythology and folklore of many cultures link the foot and sex together.” Consequently, since numerous wedding rituals are based on symbols of fertility, shoes appear often! “Throwing shoes after someone setting out on a journey was long thought to bring good fortune, so throwing a shoe at the bridal couple—with procreation such an important part of that union—was taken to wish them a fulfilling life together,” the historian continued.  The later custom of tying old shoes to the bridal carriage or car may be a variation on this onetime good-luck practice.

“In accounts of wedding customs throughout ancient times,” Kippen declares, “it was widely considered lucky to wear something borrowed. A common belief was that the bride would enjoy the same luck as the previous owner if the shoes of another happy bride were worn.” (And the good-luck superstitions extended to the groom by wearing old boots loaned to him for his wedding.)

There’s a heritage of shoe rituals found in cultures around the world: “The ancient Inca Indians of Peru were not considered married until they exchanged sandals. In Northern Italy, the old custom was to have everyone try on the bride’s shoe, just like Cinderella. In Hungary, the groom drank to his bride out of her wedding slipper. In Finland, the married couple was accompanied to the bridal suite by the whole family; the mother would not let the groom go to his bride until he had given her a pair of shoes. In China, the bride tossed her red shoes from the rooftop to ensure happiness for the couple.”

Many of today’s stylish brides put as much attention on the selection of their shoes as they do on finding the perfect gown. Perhaps it’s not simply to satisfy their fashionable palate, but also to follow some divination of ancient rituals promising good fortune—including dreams of being a princess! ~  

[This summer marks the 20^th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death. My book, The End of the Fairy-Tale Bride: For Betteror Worse, How Princess Diana Rescued the Great White Wedding, is quoted in various worldwide commemorative publications honoring the princess.]

Princess Diana's wedding slippers preserved at Kensington Palace