The Dove in the Stone

Finding the Sacred in the Commonplace

By Alice O. Howell

XI

Bringing Home the Dove

We left lona, or did we? The crossing was rough with spray swishing over the sides and swirling over the rusty green paint of the iron deck. It made our lips taste of salt. Heavy chains of water kept falling behind us, and we had to hold on to keep from falling overboard. Most of the crofter women, dressed respectably in coats and hats, sought the diminutive smoke-filled lounge, but the Community people were dressed as we were, in rugged parkas and carrying huge backpacks, and all wuffled up in woolen scarves and hats of every color and de-scription. The Wild Man, as I admiringly dubbed him, collected our tickets. He was a big man and had the handsome look of some Celtic Cuchulainn about him, with his wet locks and great unwashed paws and a jer-sey frayed with wear that hadn't seen a washtub since it was knitted. He strode the deck in his enormous gum-boots, smiling into the teeth of the gale. It was nice to know such a man still existed.

We picked up our rental car at Fionnphort and drove across Mull-one of the most desolate roads I know- and looked through the furious wagging of the windshield wiper at the dark, green-grey and stormy moun-tains brooding and looming around us.We both settled into our thoughts, occasionally squeezing each other's hand in gratitude for having shared the adventure. We were now on our way to "over the sea to Skye."

As we drove, I thought of how many goddesses there are in all the mythologies of the world, and how, like the gods, they seemed to carry projections of various psychic functions. Slowly I began to realize that the god-desses, in many instances, matched the various levels of the chakras, so that the earthy and chthonic ones res-onated to the lower chakras, and the merciful and lov-ing ones, to the heart, and so forth. And yet they were all variations of the feminine, culminating, it would seem, in those goddesses specifically associated with wisdom.

Scathach (pronounced Ski-a), the goddess of Skye, ran a school for heroes, no less, and Cuchulainn was one of her students. He learned so well that, in the end, he overcame her and sired a daughter (perhaps a Hebridean version of the patriarchy overcoming the matriar-chy). In any case, Scathach would have resonated with the power chakra. Kali, the great Mother Goddess, the many-armed black goddess of India, would perhaps unite the highest and the lowest chakras in the circula-tion of energy. These goddesses, like the gods, remain archetypal personifications of universal processes-not meant to be taken literally at a higher level of under-standing-and though the names change from culture to culture, the processes associated with them do not. We are only just beginning to appreciate the fact that one cannot kill an archetype, and that these "gods" and "goddesses" in that understanding are alive and well and living in our own psyches, though we may give them other names. Just comprehending this much might have saved the world from the dreadful iconoclasms of his-tory, in which so much beautiful art was destroyed through sheer ignorance!

Sophia, or Holy Wisdom, is not usually thought of as a goddess, since that would sound far too pagan for Christians, even early ones. Yet she was considered co-creator with God in the Old Testament, and other cultures found it easier to regard her as one. No matter what name we call her, for us she is divine since she is universal, and we personify her with the title Hagia Sophia or "Holy Wisdom" and find her hidden in the symbols of the stone, representing manifest earth, and the serpents of the spinal energy, and the dove pointing to the wings of higher consciousness, a consciousness uniting opposites. Sophia, as Holy Spirit, Holy Breath, or kundalini, becomes the Mother of God, the theotokos, because it is the Sophia in any of us that brings about our inner rebirth. This is the result of her uniting the ha and tha (in Sanskrit, Sun and Moon), as in "Hatha" Yoga, or bringing about the hierosgamos, the sacred marriage of the king and queen, gold and silver, etc., referred to by the alchemists. In the body, according to yoga, she brings about the union of the secretions of the pineal and pituitary glands, the ida and pin gala, and on and on, through all the opposites needing reunion. All of this is the divine task of Sophia, of the Kundalini in the marriage of Shakti and Shiva for the Hindus, or the task of Shekinah for the Kabbalists. That inner marriage was, and is, a holy secret of the "magic wand" of the caduceus, and it is ideally mirrored outwardly by sex, love, and marriage between man and woman. For me it brought to life the biblical verses that read: "And he went in unto her and knew her." So the coniunctiones that abound in all of manifest life point to the same within the psyche, within the soul.

The key to this process on the physical level was dis-covered of old to be breathing. "Cleanse me by the in-spiration of thy Holy Spirit," we pray, perhaps not realizing that hidden in the word is the root of spirare, "to breathe," and perhaps not remembering that our left and right nostrils conduct the air, the pneuma, to the opposite hemispheres of our brain. So, while for the anatomist it is oxygen that keeps our systems alive, for the esotericist it is prana, the invisible spirit in life that nourishes the reborn Self in the womb of our souls. And it is this energy that is symbolized by the glyph of Aquarius, the waves of the Holy Spirit being poured out of the Holy Grail as a gift to the new aeon, the Aquarian Age.

I was certain, as we drove closer and closer on the wet, shining, serpentine road to Craignure that rainy day, that this might be an area where science and the-ology could also come together, but it would take a translating and experiencing of many symbols, and an understanding of the ongoing meaning that they point to. As the Sufis say, a symbol is a theophany of the Ab-solute in the relative. Such truths can only be hidden really in "types and images," because this is a code which lasts; while languages change in meaning, images and geometry do not. Actually, all we need to know is locked up securely within our own bodies, but we need a key that can translate the algebra of the archetypal or universal processes (verbs!) that exist within our own body and the extended one of the goddess, our wise Mother Earth.

That key is to be found in the symbolic language of astrology and within the mystery of our own psyches, as I have tried to point out in my work, Jungian Sym-bolism in Astrology. In the Western world, finding it and using it was the great opus or the Great Work of the alchemist, and to a large extent today it is the focus of certain psychologies and of all the esoteric under-standings of religions. To medieval thinking, that such a quest could be undertaken outside of the Mother Church was dangerous and heretical because it gave too much power to individuals and not enough power and social control to the Church. Even today it is a dangerous pursuit if it is undertaken without love and humility on the part of the ego. But Sophia is a loving and cheerful and kind presence. She blossoms only at a level beyond the heart chakra and thus is unattainable for power plays, yet she can neither bloom nor give fruit if she is not rooted in the depths of earth. This is her consum-mate gift, the revelation to us of a "spirituous earth."

I heaved a great sigh. The opus seems so out of reach! And then I heard good old Mercy Muchmore laughing and saying, "Keep with the little things, one day at a time. Sufficient unto the day is the wisdom thereof."

We followed a bend in the road and came to a very sudden halt. In seconds we found ourselves literally in a sea of sheep, their black and white heads bobbing around us. We rolled down our windows and listened to the baa-ing, the wooly shuffling, and the high clat-tering of their little hooves on the road. The shepherd grinned and waved his cromag, and his two border cob lies went to work. In a matter of minutes, the dogs had them off the road, making the way clear. We watched a stray being rounded up. The dog would bound ahead, then turn and lie down facing the sheep, which would then think twice about going in that direction! Little by little the stray was forced back to where she belong-ed. With a congratulatory wave we drove on, and short-ly took our place in the line of cars waiting for the ferry-and for fish and chips to come.

The next ten days teemed with the beauty of the isles and the Highlands. Nowhere are there more beautiful colors. Now we were where the bracken grows. The fern was turning orange, the rowan trees hung with red ber-ries, and the last of the foxgloves lined the roadways.

In no time, though, we were back home, just in time to catch the full glory of a New England autumn. And before long, I remembered my promise to seek out So-phia's other names. Actually, I have been gathering them for over forty years, but I had not appreciated that that indeed was what I had been doing. So out came my com-monplace books, and soon the library was strewn with open volumes. I had to laugh when, in one of Jung's works, I came across this quotation from one of the al-chemists, "One book opens another." And as I worked, the synchronicities (always a sign of Sophia) began to manifest. Here are some of them:

-I returned to answering a volume of letters from readers of my first book. To catch up, I had the kin

assistance of a young woman and neighbor, Nicky Hearon. Two letters, in particular, dealt with the symbolism of the dove. When dictation was over, I offered to take Nicky home. While we were driving along, she said how helpful it would be for women to know that there was a feminine archetype, to which they could relate, that was loving rather than resentful, that could give women a sense of dignity by restoring the feminine to its rightful place in the Godhead. And as she was speaking, we turned a bend in the road and right in front of the car, walking with a firm and unalarmed tread, was a pure white dove with pink legs. It strode ahead, up a small incline, turned and walked right back at us. I rolled down the window and she walked past the car while Nicky and I gripped each other, grateful that there were two of us, because nobody would have believed the tale had we been alone! Since then the doves (there are two) have been sighted three times, once on the roof of our house. We must presume that somebody is breed-ing them in the area, but that the dove appeared at that particular moment was a perfect example of the coinci-dence of an outer event with inner meaning, which is Jung's definition of the word "synchronicity."

-Around that time a dove-like form appeared in the frost on our windowpane. It was about eighteen inches long. We photographed it.

-I received a phone call, and a subsequent letter from a delightful Hungarian woman, Helen Pellathy, who attended some classes I gave on Jung years ago. She had had a dream.

It was a flat meadow, covered with stones, rocks, rounds and squares, in different sizes and many colors. You had a twig in your hand and planted it among the stones-it started to grow-became a tree-a large trunk-and in the middle a green bough started to grow and grow towards the sky, lovely green color, covering the sky. Full of wonder I asked you-how did you do it? "Simple, I watered it with warm water," you said.

-The next day a Unicef catalog arrived. On the front was the stylized picture of a flower whose petals are

turning to little doves.

-A tiny dove appears in a crystal we have in our med-itation room. Also discovered by Nicky.

-I reach for a book called The Flaming Door by Eleanor C. Merry, a book I have not yet read, and find the following quotation. I am so excited about it I call the home of Chris Bamford. His friend, Tadea Dufault, who traveled with him and us to lona last summer, says they have the book. She goes to fetch it. A bookmark is placed in that very page. Here is what is written:

... let me tell of one other legend whose origin is un-known to me... it is a relic of some heart's deep brood-ing, born of the sea-foam and far horizons of the Western Isles-intangible and beautiful, it is the vision of a vision:

"A certain solitary, whose dwelling-place was on a hill-side of the mainland, not very far from lona, sat one day in meditation gazing over the calm sea. Presently he saw, rising up majestically in the airy clouds, the glorified golden-hued form of St. Columba. The Saint, too, was in meditation and created in his thoughts a picture which, by reason of the holy power in him that sent it forth, became endowed with immortality and purpose. It was a picture of the Virgin with the Christ-child in her arms. It floated away from the islands, came towards the mainland, and spread in lovely colours far and wide over the world. Yet it was more than a picture for it seemed to utter its meaning: 'I am Mary-So phia, sent forth in this image over all the Earth to bring healing to men who will lose the power to see me as I really am. I will live in their Art till their thoughts raise me again to the Kingdom of the Heavens which are within them on Earth.' "[Italics mine]

A month later yet another book falls into my hands, a book written in 1910 called lona by Fiona Macleod (William Sharp). In it I find the following words:

From one man only, on lona itself, I have heard any allusion to the prophecy as to the Saviour yet to come... with a descending of the Divine Womanhood upon the human heart as a universal spirit descending upon wait-ing souls. ...

One of those to whom I allude was a young Hebrid-ean priest, who died in Venice... he told me once how as our forefathers and elders believed and still believe, that Holy Spirit shall come again which was once mor-tally born among us as the Son of God, but then shall be the Daughter of Cod. "The Divine Spirit shall come again as a Woman. Then for the first time the world will know peace." And when I asked him if it were not proph-esied that the Woman is to be born on lona, he said that if this prophecy had been made it was doubtless of an lona that was symbolic, but that this was a matter of no moment, for She would rise suddenly in many hearts, and have her habitation among dreams and hopes.

As I perused the reprint of this book, I noticed it was made by "Floris" Books, a Scottish firm, whose logo is a dove! Named for Joachim, no doubt.

These synchronicities are the little winks that fairy godmothers are apt to give along the way for any of us. They are what can make any old day a magical one. They seem to say, at least to me, that we must learn to smile and acknowledge the fact that the unus mun-dus is around all the time, but we have to look through this one to perceive it. "There is another world, but it is hidden in this one!" Then, somehow, one gets the im-pression that Sophia is indeed involved with delight.