Tibetan Buddhism.
The mares which carry me, as far as ever my heart may desire,
Were escorting me, when they brought and placed me on the resounding road
Of the goddess, which carries through all places the man who knows.
On it I was carried; for on it the well-discerning horses
Were straining the chariot and the maidens were leading the way.
Parmenides wrote of a journey to the gates of Night and Day
The border world
Where the Unknown Goddess instructs him on the nature of mind and truth.
Despite Parmenides respect for philosophy acquired through making an imaginary journey; dream-truth, acquired by ecstatic means, is frowned upon and portrayed as the path of the lost and moral degenerate. The use of the imagination and experiential apprehensions of reality (as personified by the Bacchai) are not respected methods of inquiry into the nature of reality in our post-Plato, Western culture. In which...singing, dancing, drumming and drugs present an obvious danger, obfuscating the mind from the beauty of magnolia walls and Shakespearean recitations.
And perhaps becoming gateways to the greatest danger of all...
The erotic.
Well clearly I don't worry about 'Weaponized audio'
Fear of the Bacchanalia....
Goes on and on and on...
Will always go on and on.
I have, on the other hand, suffered from other people's fear of the erotic.
Therefore, my grievance about this subject is personal.
In my three years as consort, my task was to burn without being consumed.
Thereby to convert the impure to pure....
And I was struck then by what seemed to be the universality of these rules which were in opposition to rules derived from my experience of my animal-humanity; my place in the grand scheme of things as one woman in a lineage of femaleness stretching back and back to the first birth. I understood the fundamental theories of magic as derived by Mirandola and Ficino, from translations of Plato and The Kabbalah and Hermetica...But I did not understand how these same theories came to be fundamental to 'esoteric Buddhism'.
Nor did I believe in them.
Tibetan Buddhism begins with Guru Rinpoche (Precious teacher), Padmasambava (Lotus born) who came from Pakistan, The Swat Valley. This site had been inhabited by the families who traveled with Alexander the Great...and latter by families who had originally lived beyond the Sulaiman mountains. Looking at the colours used in the shrine room, the meanings associated with shapes and even the words sometimes..
Elements from 'Babylonian' Persian, and Greek theory appear grafted over Shamanic Bon, providing me with a more complete image of religion circa 300 BC than the church version of Persian / Babylonian / Greek I'd grown up with, a religion pruned down into Christianity around 300 AD....
Well anyway
I burnt without burning
I lived by the rules of Renaissance magic for three years
Even while being dedicated to Older Gods...
And though it was a brilliant education
It was also a battle I couldn't win.
Something I'm still trying to come to terms with.
